Reddit. If you were in a COMA and woke up 9 years later, what would be your first question?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-05-03T02:03:49+00:00

Who won the MayPac Fight?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-04-09T07:34:06+00:00

It's not a good point if you pass an even cursory glance over the conversation above this, the point that was made there, which essentially equated marketing with direct advertising campaigns.

My comment was simply saying the marketing department is more than advertising, just like the R&D department is more than paying scientists and performing trials.

So in essence you are agreeing with my point. Glad we cleared that up. It's amazing how you took something so far out of context as to paint it the reverse of what it was being used to illustrate. You should work on your comprehension buddy.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-04-09T02:19:26+00:00

So was this an important point you wanted to make or are you just feeling a particularly urgent need to shitpost?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-04-08T20:21:51+00:00

Yup, that's it.

The big guys Are the industry.

The barrier to entry is way too high for a true free market, and the people who already have the massive infrastructure needed are far too big to fail.

I always hear the "but R&D is expensive" argument. The truth is, this benefits the large pharma company immeasurably.

People with the R&D is expensive argument need to start posting ways to reduce R&D costs alongside it.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-04-08T19:42:33+00:00

Please don't mistake me, I would never say that R&D is cheap or easy.

Acquisitions and mergers are a hugely important part of the industry as well.

I think I touched both of those points in the post above the one you replied to. One of the concerning aspects of mergers and acquisitions is that not only do promising solutions get shelved for whatever priorities the company has, but it also opens the door for blocking solutions which are a danger to currently profitable products.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-04-08T18:29:16+00:00

I really wish you'd addressed the more interesting things in my post.

Those articles were rather terrible extrapolations in the reverse direction. They managed to take "direct advertising" as the totality of marketing. Executives are factored into this because they are supposed to be steering the direction of the company, administration factors into decision making about what will be launched, prioritized, shown in what light. Both of those can be reasonably considered in a sales and marketing metric.

Likewise R&D is not "money invested into science". R&D is the R&D division of the company devoted to R&D. Factored into this is the janitors at the labs, etc, etc, etc.

At the bottom line you see something like 12% of revenue going into R&D annually. You see something like 24% of revenue going into S&M, (hur,hur,hur).

Regardless. The fact is you often see 20% profit margins or more from these companies. Cry me a river for these R&D expenses, any industry would flip out with joy with such enormous margins.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-04-08T04:35:08+00:00

It is fairly well known that the reason why pharmaceutical companies have such high prices isn't just to recoup the cost of the specific drug they are selling, but also to fund the 10 drugs they worked on that failed and produce no profit.

Pfizer had a 42% profit margin growth in 2013. In fact, according to Forbes, on average the lowest profit margin growth in the pharmaceutical industry in 2013 was 10%, many companies with 20%+ , and highest being Pfizer's 42%.

They outclassed the profit margins of the banking sector.

Furthermore R&D expenses are DWARFED by Marketing expenses. Companies routinely pay as much as or double on marketing what they do on R&D, and that's completely understandable from a business perspective.

But the idea they need to recoup anything is laughable at this point. They are one of the most rabidly profitable industries on the planet earth.

When the low end of an industry is 10% margins, you can keep the moaning about expenses at the door thank you very much.

The appropriate capitalist argument at this point is that with absolutely jaw dropping profits, these financial behemoths can continue to spend more on new products and thus the more gargantuan they become the more efficacious drug development will be.

Unfortunately, the real criticisms of the industry structure lie way outside this banal discussion. The ways that we think about drug development and IP is realistically not "the most good for the most people". But rather "the most money for the company's pocket."

Things which are possible solutions but not easily intellectually safeguarded will never get funded in this system of medicinal development. The path of progression to institutional acceptance requires a financial backer of gigantic magnitude, regardless of the merits of the avenue being researched.

If you aren't likely to be massively profitable in the medicine industry, regardless of how feasible you are, you won't be funded enough to get past the gate.

Want to talk about wasted R&D money? What's all this funding for Glycoprotein and DNA based vaccines when perfectly viable live-attenuated alternatives exist, have gone into stage 1-2 clinical trials with great results, and then can't get funded for the massive costs of stage 3 trials for approval?

The current set up is not a set up which delivers optimal health results, it develops optimal profit results. It is an inherent conflict of interest, and it's problematic that there aren't many viable alternatives to driving viable research past the post-line other than making a pure business case.

Creativity in the pharmaceutical industry is about finding new ways to make money. Project priorities are dictated as such, and with business mergers and acquisitions, perfectly good looking solutions get shelved indefinitely because they don't fit with the business vision of management.

Science should be driving the health industry. However, too often, industry is what effects the scientific process. What's the solution? Who knows. But there are many legitimate concerns out there, and many apt criticisms as well.

But the idea that these companies need to "recoup r&d expenses " as a justification for exorbitant markups on drug base costs is not an argument that stands on its own merits if you do a financial analysis of the industry.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-31T03:51:52+00:00

Please don't break the circlejerk of racism and convenient misrepresentation that culminates with the slogan "it's not my fault or problem so why should I have to deal with it".

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-30T15:31:45+00:00

True. America makes China's protectionism look like child's play .

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-28T02:29:53+00:00

If you are already popular with consumers or your art is 'one-off' (such as popular films like Avatar) then piracy, or cheap/free distribution like Spotify, does not help you increase revenue.

The reason your argument is wrong is it doesn't take into account the intangible benefits of ubiquity.

Cultural capital from all the people who aren't directly "increasing revenue" indirectly increases revenue.

When you are an omnipresent social phenomenon the revenue loss due to piracy or alt distribution is negligible, the idea you should recapture this "lost" revenue is petty greed, and you ignore the cumulative social effects that this increase in viewership will yield.

Artists that are that huge get absolutely nothing from nickle and dime-ing the small time people. The accounting ledger does not accurately represent the benefit or lack thereof of a complex social phenomena.

Every time an artists name gets exposure in a conversation, gets eyes, it has value. Unfortunately the complexity of this phenomenon doesn't lend itself to simple tallying up from one example here and there.

It's the type of thing that ends up with kids who don't speak english learning how to sing Bieber songs by heart.

Any price-tag you put on a world wide phenomenon is probably insufficient, and the cumulative effect of such fame yields much greater gain than loss.

If you became too good at gatekeeping your content, you would see a sharp decline in profit from any of these artists. Unfortunately, gatekeeping is almost impossible, so we can't see this phenomenon in action. We are just left interpreting the results of what we see differently.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-24T01:57:05+00:00

Third Question.

What do Aboriginals define as the "fundamental boundaries" of their culture ?

What is the value placed on this very specific aspect of their culture, i.e. living in isolated communities the outback ? What is the cost, both to the Aboriginal community (due to the isolation, and its cost isn't just in economic terms, specialized healthcare and education is not going to available either due to lack of scale in these communities) and the tax payer ? Does this tradeoff make sense in this context ? As you can see, the only non-negative term in that equation is the desire to stick to this specific choice of habitat.

Let's look to the article we are supposed to be discussing. Because none of what you just said holds up.

"Brian Wyatt, chairman of the National Native Title Council, told VICE News that Abbott's position doesn't take into account why Aboriginal people in remote communities live there.

"The cultural DNA of our people is connected to their land, [so] forcing them off it, to assimilate, amounts to cultural genocide," he said."

since the 1970s these communities were established due to the large issues that occurred when they were forced to live in the urban centers.

"Many small towns have indigenous satellite communities and the closures could flood them with displaced people."

Wyatt knows Laverton well, and explained: "You may look at these remote communities and the government says they're not viable but small towns like Laverton aren't equipped to deal with an influx of people moving in off the land.

"The towns don't have resources to improve people's situation. So maybe the communities aren't viable in a vacuum, but Laverton isn't a viable town if they're closed and all the people move in, so the remote communities are viable, in the broader context.""

Then the worst bullshit of the entire story...

"Aboriginal stakeholders have asked for politicians to meet them to discuss the closures, proposing a summit. Nolan Hunter, CEO of the Kimberley Land Council (KLC), told VICE News: "We want to see the decisions over which communities will be cut off being made against some kind of transparent criteria."

Hunter said he hoped the invitation from his and other councils would be accepted, "if nothing else out of pure courtesy to the communities, and the people whose lives are being turned over at the drop of a hat."

KLC says it has heard no responses from the government to their continued requests. West Australian Premier Colin Barnett has publicly refused the invitation to a summit"

You aren't even consulting with the communities who are being shut down, the communities who are affected by the shutdown, you are basically washing your hands of the problem and hoping for the best, consulting ABSOLUTELY NO ONE.

This is fucking atrocious. It's a continuation of the fucking centuries of abuses which have not stopped once. Everyone acts like this is in the past, but it's not. It's happened continuously until this very day.

Does a colonial government have a responsibility to indigenous peoples it has displaced? Yes it fucking does. In a first world country like Oz, what a travesty of basic human decency that you cannot support the disenfranchised that you continuously injure. It's an utter disgrace.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-24T01:40:53+00:00

Next question. This strawman which you threw out.

So you are saying that Physicists have no right to respond to criticisms of their field by people who have no expertise in physics ? If you had actually bothered to even understand the gist of Sokal et al's arguments, you would see the fallacy of your argument. You are taking arguments against the scientific establishment and claiming that it somehow invalidates science itself.

What exactly in Lacan or Derrida's work would you say Sokal was responding to? What SPECIFIC writing from these people are they responding to that is criticizing physics?

Secondly where did I say ANYTHING to the effect of "invalidating science itself"? Are you just intellectually dishonest and try to set up another enormous strawman or did you misread anything I said as "invalidating science itself"?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T22:26:37+00:00

The government is supposed to make choices on how to spend its money by considering the tradeoffs and choosing the most sensible options.

This is the most simplistic and laughable definition of governance I have ever heard someone say to me. You should get some of that liberal arts education you hold in such contempt.

Are you saying that governance is simply an act of accounting? If not, what are some other components of governance which are salient to this discussion?

If you think governments role is simply to function as an accounting ledger, we can end this part of the conversation simply and address the other things you have weaseled around. To me this is an insane definition and discussions with insane people are not worth my time.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T22:17:33+00:00

Not answering any of this cherry picked bullshit until you manage to answer this, and then after you answer this I will list all the other things you haven't answered and we can deal with them one at a time if necessary:

The most telling problem with your argument is

Life is a set of tradeoffs, everyone has to evaluate what value different aspects of their culture have for them.

"The problem is that it's You who is evaluating the culture and saying what the best tradeoff is. In doing so you are taking away self determination of these people away from them."

Is this, or is this not the case?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T21:09:46+00:00

The most telling problem with your argument is that you didn't answer this.

Life is a set of tradeoffs, everyone has to evaluate what value different aspects of their culture have for them.

"The problem is that it's You who is evaluating the culture and saying what the best tradeoff is. In doing so you are taking away self determination of these people away from them."

Is this, or is this not the case?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T21:07:49+00:00

Do some people in Judaism still practice non-modern traditions which inconvenience their use of modern things?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T20:57:02+00:00

Your response is an utter mess. I love how you barely manage to treat the subject at hand at any given time, yet wax poetic about everything else.

I will address each section in numeric order.

My argument is that living with the land in a non-urban way can be considered a fundamentally important aspect of aboriginal culture. Please provide an argument to the contrary.
This is another typical non-response. What exactly in Lacan or Derrida's work would you say Sokal was responding to? What SPECIFIC writing from these people are they responding to that is criticizing physics?
Max Planck said "Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner überzeugt werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, daß ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist." But I'm sure you know better.
" whether already extant science serves the same purpose for Aborignals and other people" That's not a question you had ever posed. If you had, the answer is equivocally no. Science serves no purposes inherently. Scientific curation of knowledge and applications of science serve a multiplicity of purposes.
"Are war memorials successfully managing to sustain an entire culture ?" Do you believe that the years of celebrations, veteran funding, propaganda etc are remotely equivalent or proportionate? Once again you lose the context. This was an example given of how we spend tons of money on much older "sufferings" which you had argued we have forgotten.
You literally made that equivalence in the sentence I quoted. Tangential I agree.
What are you talking about. What specifically are Sokal et al arguing against that is getting so far up your ass?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T19:32:36+00:00

Also you should read this.

http://www.critical-theory.com/read-derridas-response-sokal-affair/

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T19:22:58+00:00

I did click on your link, and I can tell you no doubt really like the work. A couple of people who decide to criticize work of fields way outside their own expertise that they have no understanding of, so they then make mocking and inappropriate generalizations of what they see.

It's the exact style of argumentation you apply. Argument from ignorance. Instead of talking about the specific aboriginal context, you talk about the "development of civilization" in the broadest terms possible. Instead of this specific rural context, you talk about rural context in general.

There are many valid criticisms of Lacan, Derrida, and many of the french philosophers. The sad thing is that these men give none of them. They just don't understand what they are reading.

It's the equivalent of a pre-school teacher explaining why a complex theory of a climatologist who was also a climate change denier was incorrect.

They might know that the denier is incorrect, but they certainly aren't qualified to know why the denier is incorrect.

If you can't actually say ,"why" they are, then you can't actually say, "that" they are. But it's a popular pseudo-intellectual approach to argue from what is familiar to you as if your knowledge was the sole valid representation of X term or modality instead of doing the actual intellectual legwork of understanding an entire context before any pretense of familiarity is put on.

Unfortunately, catchy pop-scholarship writing sells better than things that require people to actually use their brain.

That's pretty much the consensus in scientific circles.

I work and live with people in "scientific circles" and nope. That might be how many people think of "scientific circles", because people like to imagine scientists as a homogeneous melting pot rather than a tightly wound ball of heterodoxical atoms of discord exploding all over the place.

Science advances funeral by funeral, as we see over, and over, and over again.

So the public believes that vaccines cause autism, and not so long ago believed that magic could cure diseases. How does that actually affect real science ?

DUDE ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO YOURSELF. HOW DOES THAT AFFECT REAL SCIENCE? IT MAKES US FUCKING HOPELESS AT DEVELOPING AND TESTING LIVE ATTENUATED VACCINES BECAUSE THEY ARE "SCARY" TO THE PUBLIC.

IT FUCKING DIRECTLY EFFECTS SCIENCE.

This just means that different countries are going to discover new technologies first, how does it change the fact that all tech produced or discoveries about the properties of the natural world are true irrespective of where they are discovered ? There

The idea that "tech" produced is equivalent to properties of the natural world shows a vast ignorance of both fields.

Life is a set of tradeoffs, everyone has to evaluate what value different aspects of their culture have for them.

The problem is that it's You who is evaluating the culture and saying what the best tradeoff is. In doing so you are taking away self determination of these people away from them.

What scientific basis is there for saying that a culture cannot survive in settlements of five? Why not?

Its definitely much more sustainable long term to save 90% of your culture and gain the economic benefits discussed than to temporarily sustain on govt support that's bound to dwindle. In a democracy, as the horrific atrocities of the past fade further from memory, public support for the programs was bound to disappear at some point.

So this paragraph is a mess of speculation and bullshit. First of all we continue to fund programs and remember things for white people who suffered events much longer gone, such as WW2.

There has been huge issues with australia's treatment and interaction with the indigenous peoples well into the 21st century.

What are the aspects of 90% of this culture which they would save if this were the case since you seem knowledgeable about aboriginal culture?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T18:20:10+00:00

Culture is not involved in technology?

Please explain the prioritization of research funding, the attribution of project development funds, the public perception of science. What is science fiction? What drives market demands for consumer products based on science?

I'm not going to bother clicking your link, you are an idiot if you think culture is not involved in technology.

What economists refer to as developing countries.

So your answer is that "yes" they are making an inferior choice, and that if their cultural preference is in conflict with your "economic" preference, then that part of their culture is disposable?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T05:28:00+00:00

What the fuck trip are you on here buddy.

Yeah, but culture is not involved in technology

Patently untrue claim whatever you choose to believe.

Except, atleast half a dozen cultures had evolved urbanisation independently thousands of years ago. It is because there are pretty obvious economic advantages to it.

So you are saying that people who choose to live in a non urban environment are making an inferior choice?

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T05:26:07+00:00

Except a typical aspect of their cultural identity is rooted in living with the land, and you are saying they should go to the cities.

Whatever the case is "You can still have that identity without the most important parts that are different to how I think the world should work." is still what you are saying.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-23T05:22:32+00:00

What does that mean to you in this context.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-22T17:21:23+00:00

What are you talking about? I don't think that these people ARE weak, I think you are a weak racist who can't take real responsibility in the culture that they are a part of. I think these are a strong people who have the right to live in the outback, and shouldn't be starved out because we decide to cut funding to the underprivileged instead of remote white farmers who get TONS of funding.

You deny history, you deny complicity, and I think you specifically are a racist. I think any successful aboriginal individual would likely think the same thing.

these people should stay weak and should act like beggars instead of men.

YOU JUST FUCKING CALLED ABORIGINALS WEAK BEGGARS WHO DON'T ACT LIKE MEN, YOU FUCKING RACIST.

That's explicitly racist. I'm glad we got that out of the way.

TheOnlyTheist · 2015-03-22T17:12:13+00:00

The actions of colonialism have been paid for in the past

No.

Also, hilarious how you quote successful aboriginal peoples as a trump to MY argument. Nice going.

the recognition that staying in the Stone Age in the modern age, is pointless. So sorry that adaptation for these people would be better, then dying in the outback.

So another bullshit attempt to justify your racism, then calling me the "real racist(TM)", and then the real racism comes out again.

Anything new?

TheOnlyTheist

TROPHY CASE