Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Fifty thousand preventable deaths, in reply to Stephen R,
it does rather take some of my sympathy away for their expensive research requirements
I know some of that stuff goes on. And I'm not saying I believe big pharma is ideal way to create drugs, it is certainly corrupted to varying degrees by arseholes in suits.
But whichever way you look at it getting a drug through clinical trials is hugely expensive and somehow someone has to pay for it, personally I'd prefer it was the taxpayer.
BTW that cost is one reason why so much effort goes into making "variants". While it's true that part of the motivation is to extend the profit from patent exclusivity it is also true that it is vastly cheaper to get a variant of an existing drug through approval than to start from scratch.
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Polity: Refugees and aid - we’re laggards, in reply to Steve Barnes,
that a large proportion of Syrian refugees are fluent in English
I can confirm from our trip there a decade ago, fluent in English and usually several other languages as well.
VERY friendly, VERY hospitable, incredibly diverse society and VERY accepting of that diversity.
But we were tourists and treated like honoured guests everywhere we went.Syria was not a 3rd world country then.
The dissonance with what we see now is jarring to say the least.
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Hard News: Fifty thousand preventable deaths, in reply to Russell Brown,
I don’t envy Pharmac – every dollar committed here is one they don’t have to put elsewhere.
Agreed. I would not be able to sit on that panel and make those choices.
But we can help. If Pharmac had more money the job would be less hard, we can talk to our local MPs and tell them we want to pay for Pharmac's budget to be increased even if it means more taxes.
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It's easy to write off the big pharmas as fleecing people for their own gain and there is certainly a profit motive. In no small part dictated by the legal responsibilities to the shareholders. But that said the executives of those big pharmas live quite well.
But it really does cost a fortune to develop any new drug, US$billions now. If they don't make a profit then they can't make any new drugs.
There is almost certainly a better way but it likely involves a huge increase in public funded research and hence increased taxes. I'd prefer that path but I am not in the majority.
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Polity: Refugees and aid - we’re laggards, in reply to Daman Saini,
my opinion
Your opinion ... Steve's data. Your opinion ... Steve's data.
So hard to choose
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Polity: Refugees and aid - we’re laggards, in reply to TracyMac,
The Dutch immigrants after WWII were white and Christian.
Going by all the straw man arguments and “Winston sez” up thread, despite our supposed commitment to multiculturalism, if you’re non-white and non-Christian, you can fuck right off, according to many. Still.
Yeah that is clearly a factor and probably more of a factor 65 years ago. But the sheer scale of what happened back then makes the hand wringing going on now about 600 people absurd ... or it would be absurd if we weren't talking about real human beings.
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Not sure if this is the right place but recent events brought this to mind.
I'm the son of Dutch parents. My parents came to New Zealand in the early 1950s along with rough 50 000 other people from The Netherlands. Essentially, they were refugees. After the second world war The Netherlands was buggered, the combination of five years of hostile occupation, a scorched earth policy by the German army as they left The Netherlands and a sudden influx of Dutch back into The Netherlands as Indonesia moved to independence combined to make life in their country pretty awful.
New Zealand took 50 000 of them! Today we are talking about 600 as if it is an insurmountable challenge.
What happened in the last 65 years to take the compassion and generosity out of this country's leadership.
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to simon g,
66 – 28 against change
... to the four proposed.
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
there’d be no need to change things in a rush
True, but a lot of things really would need to change quickly, passports, official documents bearing a seal, flags at embassys etc
The point is not that it might be billions but rather that the $26 million number is just the starting cost and it is real money that we need for other things.
So we better be bloody sure that the change is one that we really want.
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Just to note, as much as folks have been bitching about the waste of $26 million for this process ...
Consider the cost of actually changing the flag
Anyone want to guess how much it will cost to change every iteration of the flag in every government agency?