This article appeared in my feed just above another article about how China has the world’s first operational thorium reactor. Meanwhile, the US is about to fight a civil war over whether vaccination causes measles and stripping away the last of our social programs in order to get our wealthiest people another 2% subsidy.

Well, it’s only constitutional this one time. Every other time, it isn’t.

This is a great point. I know that some pharmas actually do internally funded research, it’s a thing, it happens, but it’s completely dwarfed by shareholder giveaways and government subsidies ofc.

You’re right.

Yes, 100%.

I agree, though I will note that I have often found that there is a non-trivial gap between what is and what ought to be.

That last sentence is it. IP laws are outrageous monstrosities these days, with folks like Disney getting 100-year long exclusive IP rights to characters and stuff like the DMCA.

This is why it’s a mixed bag for me. IP law is kinda important in a capitalist system, which, for better or worse, that’s what we have. If someone comes up with a wonder drug that outright cures addiction or something, you’d want that person to be able to recoup their costs before a bigger organization with more capital swoops in and undercuts them on production costs until they’re the sole supplier of the drug. The hepatitis C cure drug selling for $70,000 is a great example of this quandary; there’s millions of dollars worth of research and clinical trials that went into developing the drug, you’d want the company to be able to recuperate the costs of developing it or else there’s less incentive to do something similar for other diseases down the line. Also, though, $70,000 or go fucking die is an outrageous statement.

Of course, what we have for IP law in practice is a bastardized monster, where corporations exploit the fuck out of it to have monopoly control over important products like insulins and life-saving medications that cost cents to produce and allow them to sell for hundreds a dose. That’s not the intent of IP law, IMO, and that doesn’t really serve anyone.

Tbh this is really frustrating. As many car crashes I ran in my 15 years in EMS, NHTSA has probably saved more lives in the last twenty years than the Dept of Public Health, especially once you consider how for much of America, there really is no alternative to driving.

social losses, private profits

Llama4 don’t say the N word challenge: impossible