See also payday loans, overage bank fees, credit card APRs, etc.

Are you really saying that the former is a crime against humanity and the latter isn't?

Source? According to the HHS via Washington Post[1], many doses of monoclonal antibodies have already been made, but only 20% of those distributed have been used, with 80% sitting on a shelf. The article suggests a few reasons for the lack of use, but it does not mention cost to make them.

[1]https://archive.fo/IHK4J

Pfizer/Booz Allen waste of billions of tax dollars do come with resulting indirect damage to people health and lives who could have been helped otherwise. And for direct damage - I think jury is still out on that one. For example, in UK according to the link they already count 0.3M of heart issues which they officially pinned on pandemic stress

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/post-pandemic-stress-...

with more expected to come:

"Mark Rayner, a former senior NHS psychological therapist and founder of EASE Wellbeing CIC, said that as many as three million people in Britain are already suffering from PPSD, thanks to stress and anxiety caused by the effects of Covid-19.

He fears this could result in a dramatic rise in physical health issues, such as coronary heart failure, if cases are not detected or treated early."

Pinning on pandemic stress means they couldn't pin it on covid - either it is non-infected people or timing isn't correlated enough. Now, simple politically correct choice - stress or mRNA vaccines known for causing heart issues?

Fuck the thieving snakes claiming it is "their" work when an entirely different 3rd party with no prior contract with the pharma snakes uses their own reagents and chemicals and published or reverse engineered synthetic pathway to produce a substance.

"You are free to make your own drugs." I suppose you are, if you're willing to violate the CSA and FDA/DEA regulations, as my comment pertained to being able to buy drugs _someone else_ made in their basement (although I'd also like to include making your own as well).

And for medical conditions that don't yet have drugs developed: "Why can't I make a profit by investing some reasonable amount of money to develop a drug?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_drug_development puts the average cost in the billions of dollars. How much of that is due to intrinsic difficulty, and how much is artificially imposed?

If it were me I'd just make it all in one go, hopefully enough to be set for life, huge pile of it whatever drug I need to stay alive. Create a homogeneous mixture, GC/MS the mixture for purity and then package it for long term storage.

DIY versions are normally more expensive than mass-produced equivalents. So either this DIY version has atrocious quality, or $600 is far too expensive. (Judging by the prices in normal countries, $600 is far too expensive!)

Academia gets to keep rewards; universities patent discoveries and license the technology to industry. This made $$$ for Stanford and UC (billions of dollars).

I am sympathetic to the idea that regular joe of US doesn't get enough benefit for their tax payments but actually I think if you look at all the benefits americans get indirectly from living here, it's hard to say for certain that individuals aren't recompensed properly. And, I suppose, if they wanted, many people can buy stock in pharma and enjoy the profits themselves.

You think academia know how to optimize structure? Bulk manufacturer? Organize clinical trials across the globe? Check all the regulatory boxes?

You are mistaken. But, that's okay, even many Americans get confused about attributes of the Declaration of Independence vs. the Articles of Confederation vs. the Constitution, and tend to misattribute things from the first two to the last one.

The solution isn't to destroy capitalism or exclude industrial companies from participation. We tried that a century ago. It went badly, because, as it turns out, capitalism is better at limiting the damage done by ambitious psychopaths than the alternative systems are; if Beria had been born in Ohio maybe he would have ended up running a soap company or a division of GE instead of mass-murdering dissidents.

Similarly, the GPL (and, to a lesser extent, non-copyleft open-source licensing) reduces the damage selfish companies can do to software projects and the people and companies that depend on them.

We need to figure out how to do the same thing to drug companies and the FDA, because they are just killing far too many people and causing far too much needless suffering today.

People don't have to be evilly plotting when their incentives are set up to empower only people who do evil things. Don't forget that, in the US, we're talking about the same regulatory regime that rejected magainin, hasn't brought a new class of antibiotics to market in half a century, has outlawed the flavored vape liquids that help people quit smoking, won't allow you to buy a blood sugar meter until after you have diabetes, prohibited covid testing at the beginning of the pandemic, delayed covid vaccination until five or six months after China was doing mass vaccination, and routinely cuts off opiate addicts cold turkey. It's a Kafkaesque farce, as you know very well, and quite possibly the primary cause of death in the US today.

Feudalism is a system of rule by networks of oaths and obligations, with military service as the top links. Its practicioners also historically depised merchants and traders from the top and bottom of the hierarchy. It aims for lifetime oaths.

And it is capitalism which cannot accept its ideological death, not communism? The one who proclaimed its inevitability loudly only to die in a single human lifetime, and is preoccupied with 19th century writings and works from unquestioned imperatives rather than experimentation? I think there is some major projection going on here.

Answering with the "tax payer" does not now imply that capitalism is evil, and corporations are awful, etc. etc. Rather, it should sober businesses, and remind them that they are part of a system. They need consumers, and consumers need them. Hurting consumers by maintaining unfair prices ultimately comes full circle, and will hurt them, in the long run, even if they profit in the short term.

Of course, our businesses tend not to think about the long term too much, but again, this has nothing to do with "eating the rich", but everything to do with pondering human hubris.

That doesn't appear to be on the cards; neither vaccines nor actual infection confers immunity, in either case you only get resistance. And if you can't get individual immunity, talk of herd immunity is silly.

COVID is going to be endemic.

My hope is that omicron confers cross-resistance to other variants. From what I've heard, an omicron infection is nastier than a bad dose of 'flu, but much less nasty than infection with delta. With omicron's extreme success at transmission, perhaps omicron will give the whole world a degree of resistance to all COVID variants, and endemic COVID will eventually become no more scary than endemic adenovirus.

> If any company could enter that market with being sued into the ground, you'd get top notch a quality product for a fraction of the price before you could finish spelling epinephrine.

I doubt it. IIRC, EpiPens are off-patent, and the only thing holding back competition is the need to demonstrate the competing product is safe, reliable, and equivalent. I even believe a competitor product was withdrawn from the market because it was delivering an unreliable dosage.

So if you remove the regulations, you'll probably get a flood of corner-cutting crap that's dangerous. That's likely especially true for an emergency use item like an EpiPen, which literally sits on a shelf unused unless there's an emergency (leaving a big opportunity to sell defective items undetected by consumers).

• less regulation, to reduce barriers-to-entry

• more regulation, to allow competition

Normally, I'd be concerned about reduced regulations having safety implications, but the existing situation is already unsafe.

I think that's the main reason that most sane leftists* are some flavour of anarchist these days.

* not including social democrats/other liberals in the "leftist" bracket.

You need a delivery mechanism that can be used quickly and reasonably safely, ideally by someone in the early stages of anaphylaxis. Taking out a vial and a syringe, and carefully extracting the epinephrine from the vial with the syringe, are not things you'd want to be doing under those circumstances. Hence the invention of better approaches.

But epipens were originally "brought to market in 1983". How are there still active patents for it? "Kaplan continued to improve his designs over the years, filing for example US Patent 6,767,336 in 2003." I wonder if the new patents cover the 1983 devices. If so, that seems like an obvious abuse of the system: keep filing a new patent for different aspects of or variations on the device, and you can multiply the duration of your monopoly grant.

Marx called this sort of thing "the internal contradictions of capitalism"; he argued that capitalism was an inherently unstable structure, just as many writers have argued that democracy was inherently unstable. They might be right. But in either case, the possible fact that one system inevitably gives rise to its opposite doesn't make it the same as its opposite.

Some kinds of analysis machinery, like GC, ICP, and DSC or DTA, are probably inherently fairly large; other kinds, like FT-IR, other kinds of spectrometry, TLC, HPLC, other kinds of liquid chromatography, XRF, XRD, and NMR, can be miniaturized and mass-produced. There hasn't been much pressure to do this because bio and chem labs don't care if their spectrophotometer costs US$0.12 or US$12000 or whether it weighs 100 mg or 100 kg; they need one to get their work done, they don't need it to be portable, and they aren't going to lose it because it stays in the lab. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. Even Victorian-era-style reagent testing can be made quantitative in some cases!

That said, if a patent is pending and no one knows when it'll be granted, is that not enough? Would competitors really introduce their own patent-violating version, knowing they may have to suddenly cut production if the patent goes through? Do they do that today?

At any rate, those delays seem absurd; presumably they're due to having a backlog, due to the USPTO not employing enough people, due presumably to them not having enough of a budget. Not that I'm in favor of giving money to patent-granters, though. I wonder if a fee paid by the patent-holders—say, a small percentage of the revenue from selling patented products—would be a reasonable way to fund it.

(my phd in nmr is from 20 years ago... even then it was hard to justify the expense of nmr machines in structural biology...)

That sounds compatible with mere free trade amongst men without any sort of socialism. Seems like leftism wants some involuntary reallocation of capital, but maybe I'm mistaken. If they don't I'd say they're just charitable capitalists.

Why? You haven't really answered anything with regards to the incentive structure of Capitalism to manipulate the market ASAP. What good "free markets" segments of society even exists today? Restaurants? No, the big chains lobby intensely there as well - less profits if employees earn a living wage.

> I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market.

You're missing the point entirely. The comparison if ofc with what would happen if e.g. a Nordic government would do the same thing under a system of universal healthcare.

From the language you use, I suspect you are a USAian; the term "leftist" seems to be used mainly as a term USAians use to express their contempt for socialism. In most of the world, "socialism" is not a bad word. But the term "leftist" is often used by authoritarians to describe the "terrorists" they're using the army to suppress.

Which Oxford definition? You've cited "The Oxford Dictionary" up-thread. There's a bunch of online lexicographical resources that are unrelated to the OED, but trade on its name and reputation.

At any rate, a brief definition from a concise lexicon is no substitute for doing some proper reading on the subject. And even reading will leave you pretty confused about how it can possibly work; participation in an anarchist collective might blow your mind.

Not really. It's more like a system to selectively remove intellectual property rights without destroying the financial incentive to develop drugs.

But the standard definition I'm using has evolved a bit and is somewhat richer. Quoting the Wikipedia definition:

> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.

I think that is a very good and uncontroversial definition of "capitalism", and that is the one I am using. It sounds like you have some non-mainstream definition in mind?

... yes and they're doing so because in part regulatory capture, lobbying, and corruption have lead to unaffordable drugs. So that is, partially, what this is actually about. But sure there are other reasons for people to manufacture their own drugs outside of formal channels.

>I am not convinced that accurately reflects the reality of running a pharmaceutical business, even if incentives/competition is somewhat warped in healthcare. There are a lot of penny-stock pharma companies whose only mission is to generate valuable IP. They're notorious for being volatile (since their outcome is basically binary on the results of research), but not for being great investments. If what you are asserting was actually true, those sorts of firms would generate ~5x higher returns, on average.

That's actually my point. Generating the IP looks to be low value compared to wading through all the insane regulatory barriers, developing sales channels in-bred with medical board licensed doctors and FDA regulators that examine sales materials, lobbying for regulatory capture and all the other expensive pursuits that arguably may not add much value to the ill person consuming the drug. Another words, I'm not sure removing IP from the equation really changes the cost of drugs that much.

The two examples are temporal inverses of one another. In the situation of capitalism collapsing into government-granted monopolies, free-market capitalism is the first stage, and state central planning is the second stage. In the situation in China, the first stage was a vanguard-party-led society governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat that carries out state central planning, and the second stage is mostly free-market capitalism.

I don't think that anyone ever tried to use "Leninist system" to mean "a system where the government is not corrupt", but maybe I just haven't read enough of Lenin?

The "room temperature" superconductors are not used at room temperature in these cases, they're still cooled down. And so far the only spectrometer I know of where they are used is the still extremely new 1.2 GHz Bruker. And that one is almost certainly somewhere between 10 and 20 million USD. The new superconductors are low temperature superconductors, not room temperature. And even then they still work better at lower temperatures. At best you can remove the liquid helium from the system and use liquid nitrogen only, which is an advantage but still really far from room temperature.

If you had improvements to NMR they would actually go first to other things than doing chemical analysis of anarchist drug batches. IE there are other industries that will buy all your machines if they existed.

The real question is why would you EVER use NMR for just about anything? It's really high cost and the total value of the data is lower than just about any other technique. It really only makes sense in research situations.

The only way in which you "own" something while you're not directly using it is by the implicit threat of the police and the military. Its kind of ironic that you accuse anarchists of violence while simultaneously withholding resources with threats of direct violence.

You have to understand, we're talking about an alternative economic system here, not an immediate action. Anarchism in practice within capitalism is things like this article, or mutual aid - people helping out others in need,and cooperating on mutual benefit. Anarchists also squat unused properties to feed and house the homeless, or come together to form cooperative societies in a few places like Oaxaca and Rojava.

> When you take my means of production, you deny ME access to what I gained without coercion, by using coercion.

That's not true - under anarchism, you would have access to use the lab, but so would other people. It would be available in common.

All of the time I spent in Rojava was as a member of YPG. It was a few months. Most of the time was on border or self-defense tabor for defense against ISIS. My contributions were not particularly note worthy, mostly just helping them maintain their positions.

Naturally my view was not the best view of civilian. But I did travel through much of the territory and witness the people. There is definitely class and considerable disparity in quality of life, as their are nicer condos in the city cores and people in slums in the perimeters. Capitalist vendors are in the cities selling anything from cell phones to nuts. Most of the vendors were your garden variety 3rd world stalls kind of like how the storage facilities look with the metal sliding gates in front that they open up when ready for business.

Middle East culture is in general very hospitable and once taken as a guest you are taken care of until you decide to leave. But If you just entered the country as a civil citizen I'm not sure you'd find your lot any better off than in the traditional capitalist government in KRG. Qamislo and Erbil for instance are worlds apart in what they offer, although the wars are no doubt a large part of that.

It's my understanding there is collective union for some of the farming, oil extraction, and maybe some other natural resource extraction. Traditionally the kurds have also gotten a lot of income from smuggling due to their unique position in the mountains but I do not know how that is interconnected with governance.

Yes precisely, this to me is the essence of anarchism. To have the free will to opt-out or opt-in to any voluntary exchange without coercion. To keep my factory floor if I like, and if people voluntarily want to buy enough widgets from me that I can build a space ship, that is great for everyone because I've given the world lots of value and they've voluntarily given it back to me in exchange for that value.

It's really strange to me that leftist anarchists and capitalist anarchist are such bitter enemies. I think both can survive under the banner of a system without coercion. Anarchist socialism is merely what happen when some group of people consent to each other to share their resources. Those that don't consent and want to use free trade instead look more like capitalists can continue to do so. Personally I pick the latter because I think it will bring me more prosperity, but I'm very live and let live and can see both ideologies living peacefully side by side so long as no one coercively tries to take the property of another.

If you can find some other way to allocate payment to workers that's fine if everyone is agreement. Me, I like commodities and currencies. If not dollars a gold bar will work fine, you needn't pay me in fractions of a factory floor or whatever. I ought to be able to negotiate with a factory owner to be paid that way.

>Again, under an anarchist system you wouldn't need to pay to feed your family

Perhaps, but what if no one wishes to feed me for free voluntarily. Won't I be forced to either engage in trade, do everything myself, or take it by force? What if I want to spin up my PnP machine, make some boards, and trade it with somebody who's not down with the whole make stuff without money and hope it all works out. I'm not going to let you stop me, are you going to come kill me or what's going to happen?

My personal view of what ends up happening to leftist communities is their either become dystopian to ensure your property is now the public's property, slide into democracies, or go into limited-government libertarian type scenarios. The latter is basically what Rojava is in practice and kind of my experience with the Kurds in general who I would describe as basically very generous capitalists who just want to chill in the fucking mountains away from the 4 nasty governments surrounding them.

If you can keep it small like a family unit some communist like organization may stay together, although even families can have a hard time with it. You need the consent of everyone for that sort of thing to be non-coercive, and you may not be able to get it.

To a significant extent you can detect arbitrarily weak signals with coding gain and longer averaging times, although if your benchtop machine already takes ten minutes to give you a result, you probably can't afford to wait more than about 36 dB longer, give you another 18 dB of SNR).

So, I'm not worried about the electronics or the signal processing; there's no such thing as an "amount of electronics". Precision analog equipment is not easy to design, calibrate, and build, but you only need a very small "amount" of it, and it can be mass-produced.

Take resistors. When I was a kid back in the 01980s normal resistors were ±20% carbon composition, which would drift by more than 20% over time or if overvolted, with fiendish temperature coefficients. Now you can't buy a ±20% resistor; most resistors are ±1%, ±0.1% resistors are commonplace, and ±0.01% resistors are easily available for a dollar or two. Precision resistors are now made with an extremum of resistance around room temperature, so the temperature coefficient there is literally zero.

No, what I'm worried about is the physics. I'm not surprised YBCO spectrometers turned out to be a pain in the ass; YBCO is a huge pain in the ass in every possible way. What do you think the physical obstacles are?

Goodness, what a weird thing to say. It is Britian's most-loved institution.

I've never met anyone in Britain that disapproves of the NHS. We were all born in the NHS, doctors visited us as children when we got chicken pox, and the whole thing was organised so as to provide the best response they could to the public's needs. Village hospitals, visiting midwives, comprehensive GP service.

We were never asked to pay.

So are you seriously advocating a "system" where all services are provided by private businesses that are free to withdraw services at any time? Where different services (IC, CT scan, MRI, ENT, surgery) are all provided by different companies in different locations? Where unprofitable locations get zero service?

Even bosses love the NHS - it means they don't have to include insurance in the comp.

Thatcher privatised nearly every government-run business operation, but she balked at privatising the NHS. It was too popular.

Of course it's funded coercively; it's funded from general taxation. But "violence"? What can you possibly mean?

What are the companies, or at least the industries, that would buy all the machines if you could make them much cheaper and/or better?

I think you're wasting your time trying to improve NMR. The value of the technique isn't worth it.

Do not expect me to censor myself going forward, however. I understand that could result in being banned. I'm OK with that, as I'm not really interested in communicating in a place with censorship.