HN user
I understand why you don't like this comment.
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.
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.
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.
My argument only requires that people own their own property/labor and have the freedom to trade those things with others.
Without those freedoms we're in some dystopian/totalitarian state.
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.
...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.
There is historical precedent for societies accepting power inequality to the extent of dictatorship in the name of ending the ills of capitalism. It hasn't worked well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...
[0] - Yes, you can also steal. That's why capitalism exists within a legal framework.
Clueless movements elect clueless representatives who mirror their clueless beliefs.
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.
Stop leaks in what process? Fracking or oil and natural gas production?
Do you have some evidence that more methane is being released into the atmosphere during the weeks of fracking than during the years of production?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could you elaborate?
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.
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.
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.
That's really cool, even if I never find a place to use it.
Anyway you can still sort strings.
You're demonstrating why friendships are ending over politics.
Sometimes I feel weird coding zip codes as strings but this is a great example why. If my program ever treats a zip code like a number I would like it to throw an error. At least in this case the error looks like an accident.
On topic, from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067764
It's another social sciences paper but in this case a co-author has requested a retraction over his strong belief that the paper includes fabricated data. The retraction request has been denied. It differs from this paper in that the data anomalies look intentional.
I'm not sure if I'm understanding the map correctly:
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (literally the top of the list alphabetized by first name) spent $1.5 million on 9,576 ads, garnering 60 million impressions, mostly for fundraising, and it all started after she assumed office? And the ads are spread out across the country with California edging out her home state of New York?
What a weird coincidence - both Ocasio Cortez and Cory Booker placed more ads in California than their home states (New York and New Jersey), but Kamala Harris put more ads in New York than her home state California.
I don't know what this data means, I'm uncomfortable with Facebook getting heat when other tech companies aren't (because people think Facebook helped Trump), but this is a really interesting data set if you start to play around with it.
I think the field has a cultural problem that's causing their data problem: impact is valued over empiricism.
If you look at the author's published papers[0] just about every one involves highly sensitive political and social topics. That means they're likely to be quoted outside of the field where people will say things like "Look, it's scientific it was published in a peer-reviewed journal!"
Young adults have this guy as a professor and they believe that surely their professor knows what he's talking about.
This story is a few months old, the retraction request looks serious[1], and I'm left thinking that either Picket has gone off the rails or this entire field looks awful.
The paper in question has 78 citations and Stewart (the one accused of fabricating data) has 5,712 citations according to Google Scholar.
[0] http://criminology.fsu.edu/research/type/eric-stewart/ [1] - https://cj.fiu.edu/student-resources/resources-for-graduate-...
edit: this thread of some sociologists discussing this issue is interesting - https://www.socjobrumors.com/topic/co-author-requests-retrac...
Maybe I wasn't clear enough because I'm seeing a lot of the same comment here.
At some point anybody who's producing statistics and projections has to decide what's more important between accurately predicting the future and changing the future. Is being truthful more or less important than being revolutionary? It's fine and noble to want a better future but it introduces a bias into projections and how they're reported.
Carl Sagan was more than smart enough to know that society was likely to learn the dangers of smoking and to act accordingly. I'm guessing he had his public prediction which he put in his book that deaths due to smoking will rise to ten million but if you asked him over coffee when he wasn't driving home a socio-political rant about Big Tobacco he would probably produce a lower number more in line with what has actually happened.
If this sort of convenient number selection happens in a lecture about baloney detection we should probably expect it to happen in other places, too.
According to the World Health Organization, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide. This will rise to ten million annual deaths by 2020
We're up to 7 million according to the CDC, not 10:
Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year[0].
Sagan predicted 7 million in growth and we only saw 4 million. That's a ~40% overstatement. And in the very next sentence from the CDC:
If the pattern of smoking all over the globe doesn’t change, more than 8 million people a year will die from diseases related to tobacco use by 2030.
While we're on the subject of skepticism and 'baloney detection' whenever somebody says X will happen in Y years there's usually a bit of baloney in there. It's a well-meaning practice to present bad scenarios to create social change but it happens so often that when somebody says "The oceans will rise X feet in Y years!" I get skeptical. Then I get in trouble for being skeptical which just makes me more skeptical...
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...
I apologize, I took your comment personally when I shouldn't have.
Interesting. I'm not sure I understand why one type of charlatan is more important than the other.
If you want WeWork/SoftBank to be regulated, which a lot of people do, it's kind of important that the people doing the regulating understand what they're doing.
(edit: If you think a comment is off-topic then just say so. There's no need to be so insulting.)
[Company] then used this cash to underprice competitors in [market], hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in [market].
This template appears to be one of the author's deepest understandings of capitalism. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't look at his resume and realize he was Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst on the Senate Budget Committee from Dec 2014 – Dec 2016.
edit: also 2 years as a Senior Policy Advisor for a congressman
You realize that a billionaire has almost nothing to do with their money but invest it in better equipment or people? That's what investing is and that's what billionaires do with their money.
So on the front end the billionaire had to give more than a billion dollars of value to society in order to get people to voluntarily do business with them. Then on the back end they have to turn around and invest most of that money back into society. In doing so they're shouldering the burdens of market research, diligence, and risk.
Society wins twice from this and in return the billionaire gets to spend a lot of money. Society wins there, too, because the economy benefits from their ridiculous spending.
Does this work perfectly? Absolutely not, but nobody has a better system that I've seen.