I don't understand why this is worth your commenting on but you're silent on the airing of somebody's dirty laundry between their death and their funeral.
What this signals to the Hacker News community is disturbing to the extent that I'm not sure I want to spend any more time here.
It's off topic, unsubstantive, and inflammatory. It takes the thread in an extraneous flamebait direction, just what the site guidelines ask people not to. This seems obvious. Am I missing something?
The question of airing dirty laundry immediately on someone's death is more complex. I agree that accusations against Bloom should not dominate discussion over the significant things he did. But they're not off topic, and the social injunction against speaking ill of the dead isn't shared by the whole community. We can argue reasonably about how to handle all of that. From my perspective, there aren't guidelines violations in those comments, but the various other things moderators do to encourage substantive discussion are applicable.
But I see no such nuance in "I feel like coming on strongly to women is something desirable now". That doesn't mean the GP was posting in bad faith, but it's the sort of post we have to moderate if we don't want the thread to burst into flames.
Simply assuming that the proper allocation of resources is easy in this or any other industry is wishful thinking. If drugs have any substitutes the demand side already goes from easy to hard.
When drug treatments can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars we have more demand for medical treatments than we have supply. Even the concept of providing drugs "at cost" is complicated because costs vary not only with the price of inputs but with amount supplied.
On the supply side the inputs for the pharmaceutical industry aren't infinite.
Whether it's chemists, chemicals, warehouse space, machinery, or time all of these things are rivalrous. When you put a chemist on one project you take them away from another. If you put a chemical in one drug you take it away from another. If you make a factory produce one drug it stops producing another.
In order to solve the problem of maximizing the benefit of the resources being used we can use a market that uses prices and profits to coordinate itself, or we can have a group of really smart people trying to reason out what is needed where. Markets are historically good at solving this type of problem, bureaucrats are historically bad at it.
Governmental regulations (safety, etc.) make the cost of developing a new drug extraordinary. Without exclusive patents on the back end companies won't have a reason to foot the bill on the front end.
Even without regulations developing and testing a new drug wouldn't be economical if somebody else could steal your formula the moment you figure out that it works.
It turns out that most of these new drugs have done more harm than good. See Purdue, for example. With very few exceptions, new drugs != better health. Our healthcare industry is a disaster and intellectual monopoly laws are a big reason why. We need to ditch those and focus on good outcomes, which does not mean focusing on giving vast rewards to some novelty regardless of efficacy.
If a new drug isn't useful it doesn't matter if the manufacturer has exclusive rights to it.
If people are buying/being prescribed drugs that don't improve their health that's a different problem that won't be solved by changing intellectual property law.
The problem is it does in practice. Almost all of the profitable drugs turn out to be useless (often harmful actually). I agree there is another problem here: medical science is laughable bad (and that’s a problem of tooling and poor data science tools, which I work on), as the combinatorics are much larger than our tools are currently capable of handling. But in the meantime, while people are still allowed to pitch junk science as fact, and medical decisions are based on junk science, the least we can do is stop rewarding monopoly profits to drugs with scant real evidence of support.
Purdue's new delivery mechanisms were actually a huge benefit to the right patients. The problem is they abused it and actively sold the drug to the wrong patients repeatedly and worked hard to push back oversight.
The problem was you could make unnatural "lottery-winnings" money selling OxyContin, and people respond to incentives. Ditch the incentives for selling novelties and the boring businesses focused on the actual health outcomes of the patient will thrive.
This dynamic already exists in diagnostics. There's a huge second mover advantage in diagnostics because it's relatively hard to patent a diagnostic effectively. I know a few people in diagnostic companies that have very much soured on the industry as a result.
> ...we need businesses and executives to value purpose alongside profit.
Profit is purpose. Profit means the value of the outputs of your business exceeds the value of its inputs. It means you've added something to society, it means you've provided a service to the public. It means when people actually have to choose what's important to them they value what your business has done for them.[0]
> ...where businesses...don’t just take from society but truly give back and have a positive impact.
See above.
I don't know why people think this thought process is new. Read The Road To Serfdom by Hayek. It was written in the 1940's about why these ideas don't work.
The free market is the best invention we know of for a society to express what it actually wants and to achieve those goals. Without it you have a small group of enlightened elites deciding what it is that people want.
> Americans overwhelmingly say C.E.O.s should take the lead on economic and social challenges, and employees, investors and customers increasingly seek out companies that share their values....When government is unable or unwilling to act, business should not wait.
No. We don't want businesses to become political entities. If the problem is businesses aren't using their power for good, the solution isn't to give them even more power. That's too close to Fascism.
This whole essay is an argument that businesses need more social power and governments need more financial power. The trade-off is an increase in power inequality (because we're giving the powerful even more power) to decrease financial inequality. At the same time we'd probably take on massive dead-weight losses from abandoning the profit motive which is essential for our economy to function. That looks like a bad deal to me.
> Fracking involves drilling an oil or gas well vertically and then horizontally into a shale formation.
No, that's a horizontal well. Vertical wells get fracked all the time. Non-shale wells get fracked all the time. Fracking is any time you intentionally fracture rock formations with pressurized fluids.
> ...studies that show fracking operations leak, vent, or flare between 2 and 6 percent of the gas produced, Howarth said.
That's not fracking. That's leaking, venting and flaring. Those things may happen on wells that have been fracked but that doesn't mean they're caused by fracking.
If you're opposed to methane entering the atmosphere trying to stop the breaking of rocks a mile beneath the earth's surface is a bizarre way to solve that problem. At that point you're not trying to stop leaking, you're trying to stop production and for some reason are trying to do it under the guise of stopping fracking.
Perhaps they made a mistake and just used "fracking" to refer to this whole category of extraction techniques? If they did, does it make much of a difference? These techniques have got to end because they're not sustainable practices.
It absolutely makes a difference. There's no way to properly regulate an industry without understanding it.
But like I said above, people don't care about fracking because they don't even understand what it is. It's just a buzzword people use when what they really want is to stop the entire industry. Or maybe they hate how our society runs. Or they hate rich people. They're angry about something but it's almost never the practice of using water pressure to break rocks thousands of feet beneath the earth's surface.
That has to be the worst x-axis on a graph I've seen in a long time. The grid lines measure 0-10th, 20-30th, 40-50th, 60-70th, 80-90th, 95-99th, 99.99th, Top 400? That's atrocious, not only is it non-linear, not only does it have a line with regularly spaced dots giving the impression of continuity, but it skips from percent groups to absolute numbers?
If we're talking about historical taxes why are we looking at tax rates and not taxes paid? Taxes paid by percentage income would be a huge improvement, and absolute taxes seems like an essential number for this conversation.
I'm stunned when I see things like this associated with major universities and newspapers.
edit: The y-axis also goes from 10-70% instead of 0-100%. So both axes are suspicious and the numbers being presented are known for their inaccuracy.
This is missing what the graph is trying to convey.
Playing with the y-axis in this case, doesn't change the shape of the data. It only makes the graph more readable. For example, would you start the y-axis on a graph of global temperature at –273.15°C (absolute zero)?
Second, why should the graph use evenly sized groups? The whole point is to show an outlier in tax data among a small group of people. Using evenly sized groups obscures this point. If a graph of global temperature only displayed in increments of 1000 years, it would likewise obscure the recent impact of human industry on temperature.
Finally, as the article notes, the graph is of actual taxes paid not historical taxes.
If there is any legitimate criticism, it's that the graph probably should have been a bar graph instead so the "top 400" (likely for ergonomics) is less jarring. Also, just saying that the numbers are known for inaccuracy? This is a lazy statement that needs to be backed up.
> For example, would you start the y-axis on a graph of global temperature at –273.15°C (absolute zero)
> This is a lazy statement
Yes it is.
> This is missing what the graph is trying to convey.....It only makes the graph more readable.
The problem is that so many decisions are made trying to tell the right story that eventually the underlying data barely matters at all. If top 400 doesn't work maybe top 100 will, or top 10, or top 1000. If going back to 1950 doesn't work then maybe 1960 or 1940.
If you don't care about things like best practices you can simply choose the shape of the graph you want and go from there. Maybe this time they did it with effective tax rates. It doesn't matter.
The graph does a good job at giving a visual for the data and the point of how much the tax rate has gone down for the super wealthy.
Showing a percentage for that very top value would be less informative than saying the top 400.
I think OP's point is that due to the complexity of tax laws, especially for the wealthy who have more non-wage income, the tax rate doesn't capture as useful a picture as actual dollars of taxes paid.
There's your tax bracket and then there's what you actually pay after deductions, loopholes, etc.
The common argument is that the 70% rate of the 1950's was never actually paid by anybody and the effective tax rate was much lower. By looking at actual taxes paid that entire argument can be skipped.
Anybody who studies historical taxes professionally should know this, so when they use a worse measure it looks like they're doing so because it fits their narrative.
There are a couple of good graphs of the U.S. budget on wikipedia as well.
Take a guess at what you think we spend (dollars and percent of budget) on major categories (defense, Social Security, transportation, education, Medicare/Medicaid, SNAP, interest) and see how close you get.
If it's in an academic's employment contract that they don't get to keep the rights to their academic papers it means 1) they already got paid and 2) they can't give away work that they already sold.
> - Academics (most often publicly funded via grants and university salaries) do the work for free.
This means the public is paying the academic to do the work, they're not doing it for free. Grants do come with the expectation of results.
> - Finally finally, none of the Authors are ever paid for their work.
> The most frustrating part is that Academics themselves are locked into this system by the career prospects conferred by prestigious journals/conferences.
Just to be clear this doesn't mean scientists are unpaid, it means they're being paid in career prospects. (Edit: they're also paid in their salaries which include the expectation of work.) (And part of the journals' service is helping academia determine who the best scientists are. That's an important service if done correctly and deserves payment just like any other work.)
As with many scientific problems a good problem statement can make all the difference. It sounds like what you want is a different form of payment?
It's unclear how much of your problem with the academic system stems from its already nationalized aspects, how much comes from its non-nationalized aspects, and how much comes from it being partially nationalized. Until you can answer that question you might hold off on the "more nationalization" drum.
OP's point stands: the results of publicly funded work should be publicly available.
> part of the journals' service is helping academia determine who the best scientists are
Could you elaborate? If you're referring to the revered and important process of peer review, isn't that explicitly and exclusively performed by other scientists, paid mostly in public funding?
The idea is that a good publishing record gives one better career prospects. By accepting and rejecting papers journals are giving a signal used by academia in their hiring and promotion decisions.
If you're an administrator overseeing a scientific department your skills are probably in administration, not chemistry or physics or what have you. What you would really like is for a team of top chemists to tell you who the best chemists among your staff or hiring prospects are. That level of consulting would be cost prohibitive but the journals are providing a similar service that is apparently being exchanged for exclusive publishing rights.
That "8 forms of capital" is kind of intersting, I'm not sure I agree with the overall analysis but it's close to a good model of economics.
Take the Capital Pools & Flows chart and put the corresponding 8 forms of demand (social demand, material demand,...) on the right side. Then ask how to use the 8 forms of capital on the left to satisfy the 8 demands on the right, especially when each form of capital can be used to satisfy multiple forms of demand.
Then expand the list of types of capital into the thousands, expand the types of demands into the thousands, and realize we're living in a society with hundreds of millions of people. How do you use the many forms of capital, which each have finite supply alternative uses, to satisfy the many forms of demand?
That's a big problem to solve and it's exactly the problem that the field of economics studies.
I don't understand why this is worth your commenting on but you're silent on the airing of somebody's dirty laundry between their death and their funeral.
What this signals to the Hacker News community is disturbing to the extent that I'm not sure I want to spend any more time here.