If we can assign victimhood to the shareholders then surely we can assign blame as well? Seems like you’re just slightly moving the pointers with no actual consequence here.
People got shot and HN commenters are using it as a platform to criticize content policies of the company they work for. That is the pertinent thing here. Semantic quibbles about which specific entities count as the “victims” are not terribly relevant.
So, what? You'd prefer no enforcement of basic drug safety testing?
There are reasons why we have the controls we do in medical trials, other than just to provide busy work to career bureaucrats and generally make trouble for sick people. There is a process for getting patients access to investigational drugs, but you still typically need to do some paperwork in order to provide the drug to the patient.
Given this is a new use of an existing, approved drug, this should go fairly quickly.
A lot of people assume that making all research that included federal grant money free to the public would be unilaterally good. I like the idea in general because I actually like to read scientific papers sometimes, but my primary interest is to maximize the amount of research that happens. Or more precisely to maximize the speed at which we acquire knowledge/technology.
Are there any existing examples of places where this has been put into practice that we can compare to see which state of affairs is better? I'm unsure it would be beneficial because most of the public wouldn't read/understand the actual journal articles anyway, and I expect most of the scientists who do work in the field already have subscriptions. I'm worried there might be harm because government mandates of all kinds very often have negative unintended consequences and I'm curious what those might be for this area.
>Or more precisely to maximize the speed at which we acquire knowledge/technology.
Who do you mean by "we"? Because you certainly can not be referring to "we" as in
mankind. Locking away knowledge behind walls of bureaucracy and artificial monopolies
will certainly not speed up progress, but instead slowly grind it to a halt.
Just look at the state of the patent wars. Everyone is suing each other, or claiming
to just collect patents to be able to counter-sue. Microsoft, Google, Apple, and all
the other big players probably each have patents on all technologies all of them use,
a good amount of those more than once and worded as ridiculously over-general claims.
So if by "we" you are referring to the few dozen mega-corps that pretty much control
our shared heritage of knowledge, then yes, you are quite likely correct.
If, on the other hand, you want to maximize the rate of technological advancement for
the "we" as in all of humanity, then embrace Open Access, get rid of patents and
all that other nonsense, and realize that incremental, cooperative development
will speed up progress by magnitudes.
orbenn, please take a look at the Who Needs Access? website at http://whoneedsaccess.org/ -- it contains many case-studies of many different classes of people who need access to published research for reasons to do with health, education, commerce, third-world development and more. We definitely do need open access, and for many more reasons than just to improve the speed of basic research.
The US police/government/courts are less corrupt and have more resources to crack down on the more visible violence.
There is more violence in America than most people realize. It's considered mundane so you don't see it in the news as much.
The US is selling arms to the cartels in Mexico, so their violence is escalated there.
Mexican cartels aren't larger in the US than in Mexico because their supply sources are in Mexico, they lose momentum over distance and face domestic competition as they move across the US.
I didn't mean Mexican cartels in the US, just cartels in the US in general. I don't buy that it just doesn't show up in the news, if people appeared decapitated or hanging from overpasses in the US I think you would see it mentioned in the news. The corruption and incompetence of Mexican police makes the problem more obvious since the government has to put the army and federal police on the streets to keep some control.
I think maybe in the US the cartels have reached some equilibrium that allows them to operate without so much violence and be discrete enough that they don't get bothered so much by the police.
a mom and kids gets caught in the crossfire. this was an accident, and how much news coverage does it get? had you heard about this story before?
the war is outside your house right now and you don't even know, because the casualties are almost universally poor people (okay maybe not outside your house because you might not be in the USA)...
They'd have the capacity for a moment, but they'd have lost their primary source of income. Human trafficking and extortion don't come anywhere near the risk/reward ratio or volume of drugs.
Some of the cartels would go legit to become drug companies. The ones who wanted to remain criminals would have to downsize their organizations to fit the remaining markets.
