danielweber

They're a law firm that specializes in _patents_.

What the fuck. Oh, you got that when you googled them, and you think the fucking top-tier national IP law firm had no other ideas at all because the patent hadn't issued yet.

NOTE: IANAL

No shit.

HN is such a fucking clown show.

They blamed it on a rogue employee, and then claimed that they had removed all our typos and that we would need to sue them if there was anything more we needed to demand. It wasn't until the patent came out, two years later, that we could finally get them to stop shipping their crap.

If we had been offered something that lasted half as long but issued twice as fast, we would have taken that in a heartbeat.

We are being asked to make the same hard decisions that each generation before us has made. And we are doing it while being far richer and having a greater repository of knowledge than them. Something's wrong with us if we quit where they preserved in worse conditions.

And if you can't afford it? Does society pay? Do we let them die? I'm interested in your answer.

The same thing that happens with the people whose lives could be saved right now if we stopped funding roads, or basic research, or investing in the city's water system, or educating first-graders, or researching drugs, or enforcing the property rights of rich people, or a bunch of other things that aren't going to pay off for years and are not associated with one's political party. It's not that the parties being funded are all completely honest and trustworthy, but that the money still needs to be spent. Drug research is one of the small number of things society does that actually add to the public good forever. Every year amazing drugs that do amazing things go off-patent. It's an amazing system and our children should be awed by how much stuff they will have. "Hepatitis C" will be like "polio" for them.

There is no reason to think the years 2010-2025 are some magic perfect ground where the drugs from pre-2010 are completely unsuitable and all the drugs that will be invented in year 2025 and beyond are unimportant or will still be found if a bunch of people who understand neither biochemistry nor economics rebuilt the economic system around it.

Every generation has the option to quit investing in the future. There are always people who want to stop all the painful sacrifices that are required right now, and just live off of yesterday's accumulated sacrifices and then go to sleep.

There will always be some procedure that keeps people alive but that costs Too Much Money. It's how most countries have kept their health care costs under control without noticeably impacting QALYs. There should be no doubt that there are people who died sooner because of these decisions, but the system works and doesn't bankrupt them. If "but we can't let someone die for a reason as stupid as money" is your terminal argument, be thankful you weren't in charge, or else society would have gone bankrupt a long time ago. These are hard decisions but adults need to make them, and generally adults do make them and things work out.

When I see someone on HN talk about how "oh, it will probably be okay if we leave the market alone

I think there's a lot that can be improved about the market. I have a lot to say about that, but you are trying so hard to be cute and using children's arguments that goodwill can no longer be assumed. Good night and good luck.

Perhaps they should be different, but people get most upset about the awesome drugs that cure things completely being under patent for so long. They don't care about that antacid drug so much. You would find yourself very short on allies with your proposal.

All the money going towards marketing would instead go towards lobbying, towards getting the government agency in charge of deciding "what really counts" for deciding that this drug should be one of them. When the US government was looking at how to create incentives for invention, they did look at rewards systems, and this was the common problem. Using the market system, for all its faults and ways it could be improved, at least sends proper price signals to producers and consumers.

In medicine, you often can't just wait it out. Healthcare is not a normal market

Then you pay.

I have family members who are only functional because of prescription drugs. When I see someone on HN talk about how "oh, it will probably be okay if we mess with this market, I read this really cool article online that said so," I see them no different than someone who decided on their own to start tinkering with grandpa's iron lung, because "oh, it will probably be okay." You don't know what you are messing with. Stop it.

And for most new drugs, patents expire approximately 12 years after market introduction.

I don't know what the HBR's source is because they don't tell me. I am telling you to find any drug you see newly on the market, particularly one you see on tv since you worry about marketing budgets, and look up when its patent expires.

There were multiple paths we pursued in consultation with our lawyers. If you want me to take your advice over Fish & Richardson, okay.

You are getting close to advocating for "cost plus" which sounds really good to outsiders who are concerned about "too much profit" but have stunted every industry into which they have been deployed, and end up driving prices as suppliers look for ways to increase how much they spend. (The more they spend, the more profit they can make.) Look at the aerospace industry.

We just need shorter patents.

This is nuts. By the time a major drug is ready for market, out of a 20 year patent there are usually only 5 years left. How much shorter do you think it should be? When they are operating under that kind of deadline, they don't have time for word-of-mouth marketing.

For software, sure, I'm really willing to hear arguments that 20 years is too long. But drug patents lifetimes are already very small. If something is too expensive, wait a few years.

The strategy people should be following is to buy the printer based on the cost of consumables. It's what I do. But most people do the strategy of

1. find the model where the company subsidizes the printer to sell the ink

2. Then try to work around the lockouts the company has on the ink market.

Both sides are trying to screw each other over. I see no reason to care. If the people trying to use third-party ink really succeed, all that will happen is that the market strategy will disappear, and so the third-party ink market will vanish. (I really wonder how you run a business where if you really win you go out of business. You need to hope the other side keeps on fighting just enough that you can attract all the people who enjoy fighting over pennies.)

When I was at a start-up and had someone literally rip-off our product (including typos), we would have really liked some faster protection than the patent, which took around 2 years to issue.

As a business matter, we would have happily accepted a shorter lifespan in return for a quicker decision.

You got me, developer2. I've been commenting with my real name on HN for 5 years just waiting for this moment, to get the $35 that Intuit will mail me for my comment.

I wasn't arguing against that. Rather against the conceit that my tax situation must be the result of people conspiring to keep things complicated, when the big thing (that got me thousands of dollars) was probably something that cannot really be simplified much further. Yet TT found it for me when lots of CPAs just didn't understand it.

I pay less than $1000 for a lawyer and get 10x the value I get out of an agent for which I'd pay several thousands of dollars.

Have they stopped beating their spouses yet?

How do you think carryover losses of subchapter S corporations should be handled to make them easier?

I've always been taken seriously when raising issues with contracts.

Sometimes "taken seriously" means they scratch something out.

Sometimes "taken seriously" means they spend 3 days talking at me about why I should sign it, because everyone else has.

If you get a lawyer for your house transactions, you will pay a flat fee of less than $1000 and still get the advice to always have it inspected.

TurboTax found several thousand dollars for me in a fairly complicated tax situation that I was completely not expecting and would never have realized on my own. Even some CPAs I've talked to have said "oh, really?" They've bought some tremendous goodwill from me with that. I'm probably sticking with them forever.

Have there been clinical studies of doing this to correct eyesight? A few years ago I would hear radio ads, which struck several of my snake-oil buttons, and they've totally disappeared from the radio, which presses a few more.

(Because I'm feeling kind I won't even make you groan by asking if the studies were double-blind.)

Sometimes I enjoy exercising, sometimes I do not.

I always enjoy having exercised.

Put your tablet in a ziploc bag and it's easy to spend an hour in the tub.

Every generation has to create its effort-free alternative to exercise, whether it's electrodes you attach to your abs or standing there while a vibrating belt shakes your body.

Even George Jetson would sit around while the computer exercised for him, so I guess we know what's coming in the future.

When you hold up your hand, you have no information on the person pulling over to pick you up. You don't know the rate, you don't know the safety records, you don't know anything about the driver. At the airport, I have even been ordered into cabs by police officers. The consumer has very little choice.

With a car-for-hire service, I can investigate the car service ahead of time. I can get an exact rate quote and say "yes" or "no." I can decide whether or not they are worth my trust, and if I don't like them I can hang up, open the Yellow Pages, and shop around to find another one/

The fact that you think "press a button on my phone" is just the same as "put my hand in the air" is the same misunderstanding as the guy who can't understand why the robots aren't paid minimum wage. "Could my mental model of what's going on be incorrect? Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong."

Try this: taxi companies and car-for-hire services have been regulated differently for 100 years. Were they wrong to have been regulated differently all along?

The "get into a car with a total stranger with whom I have no commercial relationship" market is vanishing along with its regulations. There is no law of nature or regulation that says we need to find a new industry to be regulated the same way.

No, seriously, it isn't a taxi service.

A taxi service can pick you up from the side of the road when you hold up your hand and whistle.

A car-for-hire service is where you call a company and ask for them to give you a ride from place A to place B.

It should be obvious from those two sentences why taxis are more regulated.

Now, with increasing technology (primarily universal smartphones), the need for taxis cruising the streets at random looking for hails has dwindled significantly. This still doesn't mean car-for-hire services are taxi companies.

It might be how you understand "taxi" but that's not relevant, any more than if a robotic factory was doing work with a lot fewer people and a critic can't understand why minimum wage laws don't apply to the assembly machines. In his mind "factory" is something that uses labor to produce goods so there must be some scam going on. But he just doesn't understand.

That doesn't show they are losing money by subsidizing rides.

From your source:

Net revenue—the amount of money Uber generates after it pays its drivers—was $1.7 billion in the third quarter,

That's what it takes to be a real business. If you are a grocery store that buys bread for $1 and sells it for $2, you potentially have a real business even if you only move 20K loaves a month and need 30K to cover all expenses.

People keep on alleging that Uber is somehow buying bread for $1 and selling it for less than $1. There was stupidness like this in the first dot-com bubble. You aren't a business if you are doing this.

This distinction really matters. Since Uber is making money on each ride, there is a real business here.

It's a lot different if Uber is found, as is alleged, to have induced the employee to take the secrets and bring them to Uber.

They're not a taxi service. This might seem like splitting hairs, but it's important. The car-for-hire industry just got good enough that it ate the taxi companies' lunch.

That's not what private leaks show. For example, in the first half of 2015, they got $3.6 Billion from customers and paid $3 Billion to drivers.

Assuming self-driving cars are just about to work, why is Uber significantly better positioned to profit off of them than other people?