RadioShack Gone

Drugs don't cost nearly as much to develop as the pharmaceutical industry would have you believe, between tax breaks and the amount of basic research that is done by both public and private universities; often funded by taxpayers. They'd have no trouble making the R&D costs back if they sold at African prices everywhere - they just wouldn't make beaucoup bucks doing it.

If they're so concerned about recovering R&D costs, maybe they could cut back on direct to consumer advertising and let the doctor decide what drug to prescribe. Like, you know, do his job? Those 1 minute spots for toenail fungus eliminator and quit smoking pills on the nightly news can't be cheap and they're on all the time.

If you can't recognize the difference between some exotic electronic widget and the medications people need to survive as products, and cannot concieve of any system that would allow the effective distribution of the latter that doesn't involve profit maximization, then you are a sociopath.

I paid $35 to $75 each for Laser Disc titles, I can now get tens times the resolution and quality for $22 a title.

A juke box song WOULD be worth it, IF the actual artist saw any of the money.

They all have hard drives in them too, and a DL'd $1 song is PERMITTED to be stored and become a 0.50cent song, but the goddamned greedy bastard "vending machine operators" are too greedy or too goddamned stupid to set them correctly. And it is THEY who ALSO rip off the bar owners, because they got greedy on their "take" as well.

They are stupid, and shoot themselves in the foot, as the songs would get MORE play than the current method yields.

DOH!

Whaddaya mean 'used to'? I've seen physics folk with small suitcases of tapes from CERN, fairly recently. More intercontinental than transcontinental on the distance, though.

A briefcase full of HARD DRIVES I would believe. CERN still using (or ever using) DAT media, I have a hard time believing. It is to frought with problems, and the data access is linear, long wait baby bullshit.

I'd bet money that it would be actual hard drives, not tapes.

Those were great. I'd always get a 9 volt battery as they cost the most if you had to pay for it.

So you prove my point.

They do.

The bar owner doesn't have to give them space.

I don't pretend to know their business better than they do.

Yes. I have a friend that would try to us that as ID, sorta like the Ralph's card in "The Big Lebowski". This thirty years before the movie.

Even worse, we had a battery *charger*. Dad never took chemistry. Wonder it didn't start a fire.

Last time I was home, I stumbled on to Dad's "Micronta" VOM in the Cabinet of Things in the garage. The receipt is still in the box; February 1968. Kinda creepy. Had crappy leads; made in Japan, Nice Bakelite-ish outer case, but the meter and backing are still pristine. It's a cool little meter.

He just uses one of those red Mao Meters from Harbor Freight like everybody else who doesn't have a Fluke these days.

Also: Supertape. Half my personal GDP went to Supertape for a year or two.

I think the right answer would be "vibrator." Especially if you were twelve.

Indeed. It's the Code of Schumpeter, and the economy's way of saying "you can't take it with you".

Because you spend more than 80 bucks at a decent restaurant with your wife/girlfriend.

But they do go out of business. Other than perhaps Britain, no country alive 300 years ago still is. 1200? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Why would you want "competitive" government anyway? Competition is about marshaling resources. It's a non-sequitur.

Wasn't morse code about 30 WPM if you were fast? The standard word was PARIS which had 50 time elements, so that would be 1500 time elements per minute or 25 bits per second, or 25 baud?

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

Yeah, the guy is nuts even the 56k jobs were not QAM.

Did the telephone lines have some kind of strange loading coil arrangements or some nasty notch filters within audio passband that prevented the use of 1200 Baud DPSK modems ?

Normal analog long distance FDM multicarrier telephone systems should not have any more problems carrying either 300 Baud FSK or 1200 Baud DPSK modem signals.

For more than 30 years ago I wrote a terminal emulator that allowed the use of a dialup 1200 Baud modem from any dumb terminal attached to a PDP11, of course only one modem user at a time. Here the long distance rate dropped at 17:00 a clock and there was always a competition who would be able to first use that modem.

One or two years later we had 4800/9600 bit/s Nokia dialup modems that run so hot that you could not stack them above each other :-).

• Never saw any problems either at 300 or 1200 baud; naturally, muffs were not used at 1200 baud.

• Somewhere around 1982 IBM claimed that (their) BASIC would not support speeds above 300 baud (using their PC/XT). I wrote a program in BASIC that supported 1200 baud full duplex keyboard/screen and had optional (real time) printer capability. It was almost fast enough to run at 2400 baud FDX keyboard/screen only. That was interpreted mode, as the compiler was not available then.

You complain, but you didn't answer my question. How should pricing and more importantly, profits, be set?

Anyone can complain that something is not right, so how would you set pricing?

BTW, there is nothing in the current structure that precludes those who can't afford drugs from receiving them. So your starting premise is false. Drugs are handled largely the same as other healthcare. There are ways for those without money to obtain what they need... to an extent. A friend just found out that his social security of slightly over $1000 a month precludes him from receiving medicaid. So it looks like he will have to pay some hundreds of dollars per month for medicare. Not much left for copays and... food.

Like this:

They could try to price it to maximize the public good, after all they have a market where they are protected (by the government) from a lot of competition - patents, lab accreditations, FDA approvals etc. BTW that 'public good' includes recouping R and D and returning profit to the share holders - the difference is not making profit the only goal (for the company and investors).

That would get them sued by the shareholders. BTW, how does anyone determine "public good"? Sounds a bit idealistic. I'm not sure anyone can say they *aren't* maximizing the public good really. Those in this country have access at the higher price because largely we can afford it. In the parts of the world where high prices are impossible to collect, they charge lower prices.

I know very well how drug pricing works. Once I was getting a prescription at Walmart because it was cheaper by half than the rest of the drug stores. They abruptly doubled their price to match everyone else's. I worked my way through the Walmart system to find out why and was told, in so many words, that they did a market survey and found the new price was "competitive". There was no need to raise the price since they were clearly making profit at the lower price. But more profit is more profit. I do the same thing. I consider the "public good", but very heavily weighted to the part of the public I know best...