Drugs and money - patents or patients

Eric Merola is about to release his sequel to his 2010 Burzynski, the Movie entitled Burzynski: Cancer is Serious Business, Part II. I blogged about the issues raised by the first film longer ago than I care to check.

I sometimes think that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most worrying components of our current economic system. I am not cynical enough to suggest that everyone in the business is simply out to make money and doesn't really care about the public and its diseases, but how does one reconcile the issues?

• Ideally, drugs / treatments should cure or relieve the symptoms of as many people as possible per unit of physical resources consumed.
• In our current system, a return on investment (of £/$) is required.
• In our current system, people need jobs

If a pharma company has spent £/$ millions developing a drug, it has to be bought so that they get their RoI. If not, the £ is wasted, and people will be out of a job. So, if some cheap and cheerful alternative comes along, it would hardly be surprising if those in big pharma who stand to lose their livelihoods went out of their way to undermine, play down, or discredit it. One subtle way they (allegedly) do this is to say that a rival treatment is untested (true at least by the methods they accept) whilst going out if their way to stop it being tested. Commercial rivalry.

I don't claim that Burzynski is excluded from this problem. He wants to (or needs to) benefit from patents on his treatment and with the current system who can blame him?

Only a purely objective, scientific study of the effectiveness of a treatment per unit of physical resource is saisfactory.With £/$ in the equation, even if this is possible, how can we ever be sure that £/$ is not distorting the science?

Yet more collaborative consumption aka the sharing economy

There was a brief item on the subject on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Saturday 12 October, headed "Ownership in 2013". There's a podcast at  http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/today/today_20131012-1046a.mp3.

Amongst the online resources mentioned were http://www.thepeoplewhoshare.com - "making sharing mainstream. We're on a mission to build a Sharing Economy and we love to help you discover that sharing is... fun, affordable, easy, accessible, mobile and of course social. We bring it all together on-line, on land and on-the-go."

They seem to be closely related to http://www.compareandshare.com/ - "the world’s one-stop comparison marketplace of the Sharing Economy."

Then there was Find, Invest, Grow which "works with young entrepreneurs, typically undergraduates and graduates of the past five years, to see them crystallise their ideas, support them through the development of their business plans and introduce them to suitable investors".

Googling around for more information, I found an article entitled Sharing is caring  in The (London) Evening Standard. This site mentions to me very well-known resources such as airbnb, but also several currently USA only schemes, the most interesting of which - to me - was Postmate,  a crowd-sourced bicycle courier service.

Sorted - www.sortedlocal.com - was more UK relevant. It offers up people in your area who are willing to do gardening and chores for an hourly rate.

https://sortedlocal.com

https://sortedlocal.com

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https://sortedlocal.com

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https://sortedlocal.com

E-books; owning books

Prompted by buying a second hand book that will have to be transported from the USA to reach me, taking maybe several weeks, and another instance of a conversation with my anti e-book friend, I thought I would explore the attraction of owning physical books (p-books as I shall call them for brevity) alongside alternative views.

My friend spoke of how impressive a study full of p-books looks. It does, but the association of having shelves of p-books with being cultured, refined, educated, clever, was first made in a time when there were no e-books.The erudite of the future won't be identifiable by their shelves of p-books. If they want to display their eclat they will have to somehow graphically represent what texts are on their e-book reader. The fact that a person has  books doesn't mean they have read all or part of any of them. In fact we can safely say that everyone has books that they intend to read all of but have not. With e-books, of course, this is less of an issue, as they take up so little space.

The point of owning books on a more practical level was that you wanted them to hand. Exhortations to borrow them from the library were pointless when you wanted 24-7 access to the information. This has obviously diminished with the www where you can look "anything" up at any time. You can borrow an e-book from the library. You will have access to it for a limited time (like a p-book from the library), but I don't know if there's a limit on the number of copies available. It's not a technical limit, but the author's income stream will disappear if the e-book can be borrowed by everybody at any time, rendering "owning" it fairly pointless.

I'm sure you can see the train of thought into an RBE here. In the current system, the author of a book has to withold its text from you because he has to eat, meaning he must sell his labour, but you must also sell your labour to get money to buy the book. The logical thing to do is to share the text oif the book as widely as possible (step forward e-book) whilst ensuring that everyone is adequately nutrified as a birthright and not because they coerced to sell their labour.

This is 'structural violence' work or die - it's that simple. Would people still work if not threatened with this structural violence? Well there's only one way to find out for certain, though evidence from volunteering and charitable donations suggests people do want to help each other

Collaborative Consumption - some example enterprises

These were, I think, published in Metro (free newspaper). I am noting them here for reference. I have no knowledge of them other than their reported existence.

For a more comprehensive list of collaborative consumption enterprises, see http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/directory/. There are lots if collcon enterprises about, many of them overlapping in the service they are sharing. I think a shakedown is needed.

I don't want to be naive or offensive, but it strikes me that some of these may be helpful to those facing "bedroom tax".

www.storenextdoor.com - rent out loft/garage space to someone looking for storage space.
www.spareroom.co.uk - rooms to rent Monday - Friday for commuters
www.rentmyitems.com - rent out tools and DIY items
www.parkatmyhouse.com - rent out a private parking space
www.gocarshare.com - matches passengers with car drivers for journey cost sharing
www.taskhub.co.uk - search for odd jobs tradespeople.

Population - again

The issue has come again in my conversation, and I'd like to expatiate again.

The planet has a carrying capacity that cannot be exceeded. This is an undisputable point. The biosphere is a finite system, whether we like / ignore the fact or not.

We can only find out what that carrying capacity is, I suggest, empirically, by increasing the population. But we still have the problem of quantifying that carrying capacity. It has to be sustainable over time; if we sustained x billion for a month but then people started to die, would that have achieved our target?

Given that we know there is an upper limit, even if we can't quantify it, do we put the brakes on now? My opponent says it is better never to exist than to be born into starvation and curable disease, and that living on another planet is purely fantasy. But this involves speculation that the human population can't be sustained by technology as yet undiscovered and uncovers profound questions about the unborn which are perhaps the epitome of speculation.

If we should put the brakes on now, the problem I still have is with targetting those social groups that currently have the most children per woman. The idea that they can't afford them, or that someone else shouldn't have to bear the expense of them is really abhorrent to me. Is there another species that goes in for this kind of social engineering? Survival of the fittest may seem cruel intellectually, but it is unavoidable in practice.

Social engineering is aan abstraction. It is us imposing our will/morals on others when there are other options.

Population

On the TV news (BBC I expect) recently, an economist was wheeled out to comment on whether the increase in population in the UK and especially London is good for the economy.

Yes, of course there is a need to match resource locations to population locations - a planning and logistical challenge, but what does being 'good for the economy' entail, exactly? How do we know if our ecnomy is doing what we want from it.

"The economy" is an abstract thing, yet it is so oftem mentioned it seems real. Something  good for the economy, is something good full-stop.

A good economy is a growing economy, you might say. Usually, economic growth is used to mean an increase in GDP. I have challenged this approach on this blog and elsewhere, as have others far more qualified and able than me to do so. GDP is - very roughly - how much money is spent on things. But money must be spent on things for a reason. What is that reason? What are we trying to get our economy to do?

Have people live longer? That increases  population, everything else being equal, yet it does seem to be what we are trying to do. Why do we want more people alive? I would say every species tries to increase its population, so why shouldn't we?

Quantifying the population that the planet can sustain can only really be done for definite by increasing population towards that limit. Te big questin for me is do we aim to have a sustainable population over time, or at any one time.

Will you take a punt?

I was conversing with a climate change sceptic today. His thesis was that the whole global warming thing is just another attempt to make money.

I can understand his cynicism. Unless we verify scientific research ourselves, how can we ever absolutely know to what extent it is purely objective, and how much of it arises from the fact that scientists have to eat and to eat the have to make money.

Yes - the oil companies may be on board with the climate change consensus to make money, but making money is what our current system idolises. It makes it very diffiicult to judge whether someone is being objective, given the temptation.

If man made climate change is really happening, and if it is catastrophic, and it is not too late to do something, then, logically, we have no choice but to act if we want to save humanity and the consquences of inaction are dire.

The consequences of action are not dire, At best we will be wasting time/effort in a misguided attempt save ourselves for something that it is not in fact a threat.

In a simple truth  table it looks like this:

	TRUE	FALSE
ACT	OK	OK
DON'T ACT	!!!!!!	OK

Four possibilities. We cannot change whether man made climate change is true or false. We can only change whether we act on it or not. If we act on it, we save ourseles from it. If we don't, we gamble on whther it is true or not.