Treaty with Iraq...?Follow

That's copyright stuff. Totally different from patents.

Look. I know that this is a big issue with you. And on many aspects of this issue, I agree with you. But that has *nothing* to do with patents. When Dem politicians talk about changing patent law, what they're really aiming at is the pharmaceutical industry patents. Think of it like a code. When they say they want to change patent durations, what they really mean is that they want to ensure that the medicines that pharmaceutical companies spend years and billions of dollars to invent can be handed out cheaply to the public via a socialized medical system as cheaply as possible and without actually enriching the companies at all.

It's a shortsighted position, but that's what they want to do.




They don't hit the market because private industry isn't going to bring something to market that isn't competitive with what's already there.

This is really the big "secret" behind alternative fuels that almost no one talks about. The simple fact is that it's still vastly cheaper to simply burn fossil fuels for power then it is to use any of the alternatives. And that will continue to be the case until we see actual shortages of those fossil fuels.

Which is one of the reasons it makes much more sense to focus on making our existing fuels more environmentally and politically "friendly", then it is to chase after alternative fuels. Certainly, we need to invest in those alternatives because they will one day be competitive with oil and coal, but it's absolutely silly to insist that we adopt them large scale when it's so much more expensive to do so and buys us very little.



You're doing what I talked about earlier, where you point to single specific situations without observing the whole. Prices go up. They go down. While you're correct that some event may result in prices at the pump increases out of proportion to the event itself, the same happens in reverse. Sometimes prices drop for no apparent reason at all.

The point is that over the long term, the price of gas tends to reflect the costs involved with getting that gas to the pump. This is reflected in the net profit ratio I talked about earlier, which isn't super high for oil companies as compared to other types of businesses.

They aren't ripping you off. They really aren't.



No. It's not. While the gas they're selling was indeed in the ground at the gas station when whatever event occurred, the next X gallons of gas *will* cost more to buy. And they'll have to buy that with the profits on the gas thats in the ground right now. That's why prices at the pump increase. The gas stations have to buy the next delivery of gas. If they know it'll be higher, they'll raise their prices today to pay for it.

And before you say it. Yes, when oil prices drop the gas stations don't immediately drop their prices to match, however those prices do tend to go down over time due to competition. If you've ever worked somewhere that sells gas, you may have noticed that when prices go up, they tend to jump up 10c or more at a time. When they go down, they go down a penny at a time, but do so much more often. That's because they drop due to competition. The guy across the street realizes that he's not actually going to have to pay as much for gas and figures he'll undercut you by a penny to attract more business (both stations want to maximize profits, right?). You see that and raise him a penny. This goes on for a couple weeks until the cost at the pump normalizes back to a level reflective of the actual cost they pay for a delivery of gas, which is normalized to the price at the refinery, which is normalized to the cost of a gallon of crude.


You notice the increases because they're big jumps. You don't notice the almost daily decreases that might be a penny, or a half penny or even less sometimes.



We've discussed this before. The "secret" here is that the cost of gas that you pump into your car is subsidizing many other things that are also made out of a barrel of crude but that are far more flexible. The simple fact is that when gas prices go up people tend to continue buying it at about the same rate that they did before. Not so for other products. So when crude prices rise, even though gasoline may only represent 25% or so of the total refined material from a barrel of crude, it'll account for nearly 100% of the cost increase.

That's why gas prices rise out of proportion to crude prices. Always have. Heck. That's why jet passenger liners are competitive. Because jet fuels were a byproduct of petrol production. After WW2 (during really) the world supply of this stuff, which had no real application at all was *huge*. Given all the internal combustion engines in the world and no jets, they could effectively fuel jet engines "for free".

That concept has never really changed. Petrol sales subsidizes pretty much the entirety of the products produced by refining crude oil. That's why plastic stuff is so cheap...



Then ask him this question. He'll tell you the same thing I just did. That gasoline costs are higher then their "share" of what's refined exactly because people will pay that much for gas, but not that much for plastics (or whatever else you make).

It's also why gas prices tend to go up during the spring/summer, and down during the fall/winter. Because during the winter, some of that load can be placed onto heating oils. Demand increases in the colder months, meaning that they can drop the cost of gasoline and make the same profit on a barrel of oil.



Really? Cause a bottle of Tylenol (for example) is pretty much exactly as much today as it was back then. I'd argue that at least over the counter stuff has gotten *cheaper* when you account for inflation. Just like most consumer products have.

I'm not sure what kind of prescription meds you're talking about and would love to hear some specific apples to apples comparisons. My entire experience with prescription medicines are from a bottle of Vicodin when I got my wisdom teeth pulled about 10 years ago, and another Vicodin plus some antibiotic from an ear infection I got about 2 years ago. The antibiotic was pretty expensive (Amoxcillian or some other such thing, and about 100 bucks for the bottle), but the Vicodin was about the same cost as far as I could tell (ie: dirt cheap, less then 20 bucks).

It was so cheap I didn't bother with the paper work to get my insurance to pay for it (trust me, massive ear infection that I'd ignored for 5 days and paperwork just don't go hand in hand, it was worth just tossing them money to get home and take them). Honestly. Not a big deal though. Pocket change kind of cheap.

Again. Give me specifics. Find me a prescription and cost for the medicine from say 15 years ago and the same medicine from today. Show me it's more expensive. See. Cause I hear a lot of people say that medicine is more expensive, but when asked for specifics they can't. It's like if people just keep saying it, everyone assumes it's true and no one checks to see if it actually is.


Check. Don't assume.



And shortening patent lifespan will help how? That just means that the corporations will have to charge *more* for the newest medicines so that they can make their money back on the R&D process in the shorter time they have. It's not like people get sick faster if you decrease the lifespan of a patent. The only way to react is to increase the cost of the end product.


Sure. The generics will end up being available faster, but those who are in the most need (ie: those who can only be helped with the newest medicines) are the ones saddled with the extra cost.

Honestly, I'd much rather we spread that out. Allow joe average guy to pay an extra buck or two on some standard medicines and soften the cost increase on the most "new" ones at the same time. As I pointed out already with the oil companies and alternative fuels. No one's going to bring a product to market if they can't profit on it. Attacking those companies by attempting to make it harder for them to profit only results in one of two things. Either the costs for the products go up dramatically to offset the profit losses applied by the government, or the products simply never come to market at all.


Neither of those are positive outcomes. Yes. Companies want to make money. But instead of railing against that and complaining, what we ought to be doing is constructing our system so that the desire for profit is channeled into productive output. Allow companies to make a profit if they come up with something that makes people's lives better. I just don't see why we label that "greed" and try to squelch it out. Because what we're really doing is squelching our own future.

Yup. ;)

Copyright applies to "creative works". Patents apply to "useful works". Seems a bit arbitrary, but it's not. If I write a story, it's covered under copyright. If you want to use a character from my story, or you write something with the same names, places (assuming they're fictional), and plot (which would have to be significantly unique to apply), then I can sue you. I own those creative ideas.

If I build something new and useful, I can patent that. So a new process for distilling liquor (for example) could be patented. Everyone is free to continue doing things the old way, but if they want to use the new process, they've got to pay me something.

Music is copyrighted. Films are copyrighted. Some software is copyrighted. If it's a creative work that is. So games are obviously copyrighted. Business software is a bit tricky since there are aspects of both present. It's "useful", and adds value to someone else's labors (which is usually what's required for something to be a patent). It's also a unique set of characters (code). that usually doesn't meet the criteria for a copyright though.

So yeah. There can be some spillover, but in the area you're talking about (music and video, right), there isn't. That's all copyright stuff. If you're talking about MS software, those are typically patented. It's usually the distinction between "useful" versus "creative" that defines whether something is a patent or copyright, but that's not the only distinction (and the courts can be "interesting" in their interpretation of law as well).





No. It doesn't. You're using some pretty questionable numbers there. Trust me. If the entire process of using bio fuel was actually more efficient and cost effective it would be being used. Capitalism is like that. No force on earth would prevent the same "greedy" companies from bringing the bio-fuel alternatives online and blowing away the competition.

In free markets what you're describing doesn't work. It's only when you have significant government interference that we see less efficient options being chosen the forced upon the populace. Which is why using the government to force the issue on us and the industry is the wrong solution.

You've basically got the entire thing backwards IMO. What's going on with the push to replace oil *now* with bio-fuels and other alternatives is the "evil government" pushing a more costly and less efficient product on the population by fiat. Let the industry do it's own thing, and it will always bring the most effective solution to market. Always.




They don't go up afterwards either. The cost of the bottle portion of a bottle of water or soda hasn't changed at all in the last 10 years. The cost for the injected plastics used in your car, your cell phone, your Wii, and virtually ever other thing you use today hasn't really increased in cost either.

It's not that plastics are protected from short term dips and increases. They're protected *period*. Because if you raise the cost of plastic, then companies will go elsewhere to buy it. The refining companies that raise gasoline prices, but not plastics and other petroleum products will sell both. The companies that raise them all equally will sell only the gasoline. Those companies will go out of business and be bought up by the companies that subsidize most petroleum products costs by raising gas prices.

Go read up on the effects of having a single source product that generates different end products, some with flexible demand and some with inflexible demand, and then re-assess this issue.



It's not greed. Your example is flawed. You're using a clothing example (flexible good) against gasoline (an inflexible good). You really do need to study the difference between those to understand this.




Yup. That's why it's an inflexible demand item. What you're not getting is that it's not "wrong" for the price of that item to increase out of proportion to other goods. It's not greed either. No more then any other market force is "greedy". Everyone wants to buy low and sell high. That's how the market works. I could just as easily say it's greedy of you to want to buy gas for less then the other guy wants to sell it. That's meaningless.

The word that matters is "unfair". And there's no unfair market practices going on here. Just the natural and normal market forces at work. Now, artificially punishing those companies *would* be unfair. That's what I think you're not quite seeing.



Eh? I didn't mention anything about mass transit.



I think that's missing the point though.

Ultimately, what matters is the profit ratio and R&D expenditures. The company is going to attempt to make their profit off the product they came up with. They've got a small window of time in which to do it. Shortening that time period will only increase the amount they'll have to charge while the patent is still active.

We can go round and round with specific examples, but that doesn't change that equation one bit. The cost is going to be the function of the cost to produce the good and the cost needed to invent the good. If you only allow companies to sell stuff for the cost to produce a good, then no new goods will ever be made.

That's just obvious logic. Why would you spend billions of dollars researching some new medicine if the government will only allow you the same profit margin on that drug as you get today on existing generically available drugs (and allow everyone else to make the same margin)? The answer is simple. You wouldn't.

I don't think we want to pursue a course that will result in ending future drug research, right? You want the cures and new medicines, right? Part of that process is allowing the companies that make them to profit. I don't see that as unfair at all.



Are they the same birth control pills though? Are they as effective? Are they as safe? I'm betting not. The ones your wife is buying today are more effective and have fewer side effects. And yeah. They cost more.

See. This is the flaw with the argument you're using. While the new birth control pills cost more, she could presumably choose to buy the same ones she bought back in 1992 (unless they've been banned for being too unsafe, which is not entirely impossible). However, because the companies involved had an incentive to continue their research and come up with newer, better, and safer BC pills, your wife isn't nearly as likely to develop ovarian cysts as she would have otherwise (one common side effect of 80s era birth control btw).

It costs more, but if it didn't, she'd be using the same stuff she was using back then. Yeah. Progress. It does cost money you know...

The unfortunate aspect of this is that often as our medicines improve, the older versions are seen as too unsafe. So yeah, this can result in what appears to be a constantly increasing cost for the same good. Eventually, that cost will stabilize and come down though.



Again though. ADD/ADDHD drugs are incredibly new. Heck, they didn't have any medicine for those things just 15 years ago. So yeah, you're paying through the nose. I might suggest though that much of that is being pushed by the medical care system and isn't the fault of the inventors themselves. Amazingly enough, 15 years ago we didn't diagnose kids with those illnesses and they didn't have to take pills, we didn't have to pay for them, and they managed to mostly grow up just fine.

Maybe there's a social aspect to this that's the problem and not the guys making the pills themselves...



Ok. Do you know that they are? Or do you just assume so because other people said so. You're doing the equivalent of political telephone game.



Several million on R&D is tiny. Try billions. Yeah. There has to be an extreme markup between the cost to produce and the sale price in order to make up for that.

Remember. The drugs you're buying have to pay not just for the cost of the R&D for that drug, but for the R&D costs for all the drugs that didn't become successful and/or pass the FDA trial process. Most criticisms of the cost of drugs don't take this into account.

Again. Do you know that they're charging excessive amounts? Or do you just assume they are?

I'll make the same argument I made about the oil companies. Look at their net profit ratios. Don't just assume they're overcharging.



And if the cure is never invented because it wasn't worth the company's time to invent it? How will the patient do then? Oh yeah. He'll die.

Again. Are you sure those medicines are overpriced? Cause if you don't absolutely know that, then you're running the risk of supporting a policy that will reduce the rate at which new medicines will be invented. Is that a good thing?

At the end of the day, the patent process we've been using for quite some time has worked, right? All those cures that have appeared are available. You have the luxury of complaining about them being "overpriced". But if we could just as easily not have them at all. So be *very* careful about what kinds of policies you support here. I think it's better to have new medicines that cost a lot when they come out, but then over time become more broadly available and less expensive, then to have a system that requires that they come out on the market in the less expensive form from day one, and end out with no new medicines at all.




No. Just normal greed. I think you need to be much more certain before using words like "excessive" and "overpriced". You don't know if they are, but label them that way anyway. Do you do that based on facts? Or because someone else said the same words to you? Did you check? Don't look at dollar amounts. Look at relative amounts. How much does a company spend in operating costs. How much does it make in profit as a percentage of that? Those are the numbers you need to look at. Otherwise, you're just tossing out numbers. A bottle of tylenol would be expensive at $20k right? But a new car wouldn't, right? So just listing the cost of something to the consumer isn't relevant unless we know how much it cost to bring to market...

Huh? If the story was about how corn wasn't viable, then how come you're quoting that they get 12 units of energy for every one unit expended, and are in turn using that as an argument that it's *more* efficient then drilling and refining oil? I'm not going to do your research for you, but my eyeball tells me you got the numbers screwed up somehow. You sure it wasn't more like 12/13 or something (ie: you get 1 unit of "additional" energy for every 12 spent)?



Lol. Um... That's the funniest thing I've read today. Yeah. The government didn't interfere, it just passed a law mandating that every gas station in the country carry "All types of fuel". Um... They were all carrying gasoline and diesel before, right? So this means that the government forced every station in the country to also carry bio-fuel. That's pretty significant government interference, right?

I'll also point out that it wasn't "All" fuels. I don't see any hydrogen stations in Brazil, do you? It's "all the ones you're selling plus the ethonol we're growing on our state controlled cane farms". Oh thats right! The government also spent a couple decades devastating the world supply of rain forest and displacing native populations in order to clear land so they could grown sugar cane, then pass a law mandating that all stations sell the ethanol produced.

What part of that isn't massive government intervention?

Not going to debate over the plastic thing. It was just an example. We could also talk about all the other stuff as well. Aviation fuel, kerosene, and heating oils, in addition to being used in a bunch of minor stuff that does add up over time. Asphalt, tires, industrial lubricants, and yeah... plastics.

Point is that gasoline isn't the only thing produced from a barrel of crude. However, it's the one thing that has by far the most price fluxuation when crude prices change.




Does it? Or not? (a grove affecting overall orange prices that is) If it doesn't, then that defeats your argument that there's no difference between different types of products. If it does, then it just means that when it happens with oil, it's not unusual. Which is it? You don't get to have it both ways...

You tried to compare clothing sales to gasoline sales. They're totally different products and market forces act very differently. I'm also willing to bet that the markup at the retail for clothes is massively higher then that for gasoline. For exactly the reason that you'll likely not sell all of the clothes you order, but you will likely sell all the gasoline.

In industries that have low markup factors (but either high volume or high value), changes in the cost of the next wholesale purchase most certainly affects the sale cost of the goods already in the store. I have a friend who owns and operates a jewelry store. Guess what? If the price of gold goes up, he raises the price of his gold jewelry. Has to. Because his profit margin on any given item is incredibly slim (something like 1%). Of course the value per sale is large enough to keep a small shop running, but a tiny increase in precious metals cost that isn't reflected in an increase in his sell price will put him out of business. He literally wont be able to replace the items he sells.


Typical markup for a clothing store is something like 30-40% (depending on the specific type of outlet). Typical markup for a gas station is less then 5%. Most gas stations don't actually make money selling the gas. They break even on the costs to operate. They make their profit selling cigarettes, soda, and oil. Seriously. Go ask someone who ones one. You're comparing apples and oranges here...



No. It's not. The formulation has changed repeatedly, with the most recent change being approved by the FDA in 2004. That means that they're still making changes to it, and still spending money and time on the FDA trial process to improve it.

Also, that's a horrible example. I said that medical "care" costs have gone up. Depo Provera is a shot administered by a doctor. You're paying more for the shot and visit, not the medicine in the shot (perhaps a little of both too).

Apples to oranges again. The cost to purchase a prescription of birth controls pills (oral and administered at home) is not significantly higher today after inflation then it was back in the 1970s. You're just using a bad example.



Sorry. You're correct. I guess people just didn't buy into the "my kid needs to be medicated" bit as much back in the day, so I never noticed.

Again though, the drugs are not the same. While the base ingredient may be identical, the operation is different. Odds are you're using a timed release formula today, while 15-20 years ago you'd have been taking a direct dose. The difference is that you take maybe two pills a day instead of one every few hours. Maybe that's not significant to you, but it cost money to do that, and that's what you're paying for.

You're welcome to buy the same direct dose pills that were available back in the 60s though. I'm betting they're cheap.

The point is that in this case, the patent is not for the base medicine (which you can still buy normally), but for the new formulation of that base medicine. Again, you may not think that's worth the cost, but presumably there is some value to timed release pills, right?





That's like saying that the TV I own today and the one I had 25 years ago are "doing the same basic thing". Um... Technology improves. The product improves. People need to be able to make their money off the improvements.



Yes. And that cost gets passed on to the customer. This isn't a new concept. The cost for any item you buy in a store includes the total operating expenses of the store. That includes waste. Stores assume a specific rate of theft or loss. That's factored into their costs.

The difference is that it might cost 10x more in development costs, pursuing failure after failure before a company hits on a combination that will both pass trials *and* be marketable to the public. The have to make the total operating costs back on that. The fact that your local store may only need to increase their costs by 2-3% in order to cover loss, while the pharma companies have to increase by 200-300% doesn't change the fact that it's the exact same thing in both cases.

That's a necessary cost. You're argument reminds me of a show I watched about the film industry. A guy was talking about when a Japanese company bought up a film studio and they were explaining how things worked to them. They explained that in a typical year, they'd make 2 or 3 blockbusters, a half dozen good films that would make modest money, about 10 that would break even, and another 3 or 4 that would fail completely and cost them money. After hearing the spiel, the Japanese execs asked them: "Can you just make the Blockbusters?".


Um... No. You can't. Just as you can't just make successful medicines without having a lot of failures along the way. If the industry can't make the cost of those failures back on their successes, then the can't make the successes anymore either and we're back to no advancements in the field at all.





Funny. The same argument was made about cell phones (and their associated patents) about 15 years ago. They were "toys for the rich". No one could possibly afford them on a working class salary. And all the improvements that were driving the patents were just going to improve things for those who could afford them. Same thing was said about home computers back in the 80s as well.


Thing is that things that start out experimental and expensive get cheaper and more available over time. But just as you can't only make the blockbuster films, you can't skip past the "expensive and new" stage. 10 years ago, it cost 10 grand to buy a flat panel TV. Now, you can buy one that's better then those were for less then 1k.

We could have insisted that these technologies not be allowed to be sold unless they could be afforded by poor people as well as rich from day one. But then they'd never have appeared...

Ok. Sorry. I missed that you were making the distinction between corn and sugar based ethanol production. That makes more sense now...

There are several problems with that, not the least of which is that sugar(cane) does not grow well in the continental US due to climate (and the corn lobby's do their part as well of course!). But that still does not address the larger issue in terms of the cost for oil based versus sugar based fuels. And beyond the direct production issues, the other issue is the exact thing I've been talking about all along. A barrel of oil produces more then just gasoline. The price and availability of all the other stuff we make from petroleum products is effectively subsidized by the purchase of gasoline. If you replace gasoline with ethanol, even if the cost per-mile is the same or marginally cheaper using ethanol, you'd still have to refine almost the same amount of total barrels of oil (globally) in order to provide for all those other things.

Any gains made would be lost via increases in cost on all those other things. And it would be a *huge* increase. A relatively small country like Brazil can get away with it because their needs for all those other products can be absorbed by the larger global demand for gasoline (meaning that there'll be lots of the "extras" available for them to buy). If the US were to switch to ethanol, it would have a massive impact on the global demand for gasoline, which in turn would generate a massive increase in the cost for the other products since the total amount of barrels of oil that would need to be refined for gas would end up being less then the total needed to be refined into other products.

Right now, gasoline is the largest "demand" product from a barrel of oil. Thus, it leads the production scale, and results in a glut of the other weights and therefore reduced prices on the goods made from those other weights. Significantly reduce global gas demand, and you shift that cost onto those other things. One of the odd side effects is that many of the products that are dramatically improving lives in developing nations (where personal vehicles aren't very common) would become much more expensive. Those cute sub-100 dollar laptops that we hand out to school kids in Africa? They might suddenly cost 200 bucks instead. Cheap wireless cell and computer networks in nations were they can't lay copper because it'll get stolen for it's value? Lots more expensive.

There are huge changes going on right now in the third world as the price of goods that seem like "luxury" items to some have become so cheap that we can provide them to pretty much anyone even in parts of the world where no one has air conditioning or heat, or a car, and they're living in mud huts. Sounds crazy, but this is true and is one of the more interesting results of the technological advances we've seen over the last couple decades. And as much as we may think that the US is a glutton for our cars and gas guzzling, the reality is that we're also subsidizing those improvements worldwide every time we pump a gallon of gas into our cars.

I'm not saying that gasoline use is great. What I am saying is that it's not enough to simply replace the gasoline with an alternative fuel to run our cars. We have to find ways of replacing all the things that we refine out of a barrel of oil. Until we do that, we can't really end dependence on drilling. Not on a large scale at least...



Well, we disagree then. To me, anytime the government mandates what a private vendor must sell in his store, that's massive government intervention. Non-massive would be the government working to make the alternatives economically viable enough that the private vendors would want to switch to them just for the increased profits. See. Cause that's how you make change without breaking the market.

The problem, which I've been talking about this entire thread, is that the agenda seems to be trying to do this backwards. They seem to want to push alternative fuels while making them as non-competitive as possible. Hence, why I said that it really seems as though the real objective here is not to get the alternatives going, but to punish people who dare to make money while in the business of providing fuel/energy/whatever to the people. As long as the folks pushing for alternatives keep doing this, they're going to end up pushing back the timeline for adoption of the new technologies.

Make the alternatives profitable and private industry will fall over themselves to adopt it.



No. It's not. At the retail level, the markup is virtually nil. You may be correct in terms of total markup between delivery of a barrel of oil and sale of the end product (although I'd suspect it's higher then that), but I can tell you for an absolute fact that the guy actually operating the gas station itself doesn't make much at all on a gallon of gas he sells.

Seriously. Go talk to anyone who owns a gas station. Most will tell you the same thing. They usually just break even on the gas. There's a reason why many gas stations have grown to include convenience type stores. Cause the gas gets them in the door, and the jacked up prices on the convenience goods is what keeps them in business.




Yes. In 2004, Depo-subQ provera 104 was approved by the FDA for prescription use.

It does have a "different name", and is injected differently. In fact, it's likely *why* you're allowed to inject yourself today since it's subcutaneous rather then intermuscular.

Your doctor probably just calls it "Depo", but it's most definitely not the same shot your wife took even just 5 years ago.



See above. The name did change. You probably just didn't notice.



But that's only a difference because you seem to think it should be. The market forces involved are still more or less the same. The market doesn't know that one product "saves lives", while another is just "for enjoyment". All it knows is supply and demand, cost of production, cost of development, etc. The rules don't magically change because we're making a new medicine from what they are when we're making a new television.

And you're right. It may suck that the guy who needs it now can't afford it, and can't wait 15 years until it's cheap enough. But if we make the kind of changes that the Dems want, that guy will be able to afford todays medicine, but the new stuff that would have been available 15 years from now, wont ever be invented. So, you're saving a small number of people who are suffering today, at the cost of condemning every single person in the future who'll be saved by new as-yet-not-invented medicines that never will because of this change.


And yeah. That's harsh. But that's simply the way things have to be. It's hard to think of this when you're looking forward, but it might help to look backwards in time. Let's pretend your hypothetical patient has an illness that can only be cured by some new medicine that a company just came up with. But he can't afford it, so he dies. Now. Let's go back in time 30 years and change the patent laws as the Dems want. As a result, the company never invests the money into the new medicine at all. It never gets developed. The same guy dies today anyway. The only difference is that today he knows that there's a drug available that he can't afford, while in our alternate timeline the drug simply never existed at all.

Oh. And the other difference is that in the alternate timeline, that drug will *never* exist at any price. So 15 years later, when it would have been available much cheaper in some generic form for example, it wont be either. So all the poor people there die too. Expand this out over time, and a hell of a lot more people die doing it the Dems way.


This is why I say that Dem policies on many of these sorts of things are shortsighted. They're looking at what provides the most benefit today, but ignoring the long term impact on tomorrow.





/shrug. You may even be correct. But the question is: Who decides what is "enough profit"? Because while the free market isn't perfect, it does tend to at least ensure that we're in the ballpark. Once you start setting prices and capping profits, your market decisions are no longer based on what things really cost or what they are really worth, but upon what a group of interested parties *think* they should cost or should be worth.


And I have far less faith in that mechanism. And I suspect that most people do as well...

Wrong. Heavier weight petroleum fractions are "cracked" into lighter level petroleum to produce extra gasoline from a barrel of oil because there is great demand for gasoline and less demand for the heavier petroleums and little demand for the heaviest fractions (which are used to produce plastics, etc). If the demand for gasoline was to drop, there would be no need to crack the heavier petroleum fractions into diesel, kerosene & gasoline but we wouldn't be at a loss for that heavy petroleum. In fact, the value of heavy petroleum would likely go down because it wouldn't be valuable for cracking into lighter fractions. Right now, the value of heavy petroleum is artifically inflated because the value of gasoline is great enough to absorb the cracking cost.

Edited, Feb 1st 2008 8:16pm by Jophiel

Not necessarily. Cracking petroleum is more or less a fixed cost (for the process, not the feedstock). Raw products cost less than refined products and cracked gasoils into lighter fractions are a refined product. What makes it valuable now is the artifically capped amount of raw product available.

It's possible that OPEC would keep oil quantities so low as keep cracking always profitable but that's not a given. In fact, it's unlikely that they'd drop production so low as to make feedstock a rarity since they need that money to run their own countries. Basically, you're working mainly on conjecture here. If you have some reputable sources backing up the assertion that biofuels will drive up the price of plastics to a significant degree, I'd be willing to read them. In contrast, my research shows that the price of petrochemicals is being driven up because of the demand for oil in gasoline production. It's not being kept low due to gasoline production as you suggest.

Edited, Feb 1st 2008 9:26pm by Jophiel

Except that those two articles were written in 2003 and 2004 respectively. They are speculative in nature. In both they talk about how the increasing cost of oil has impacted the cost of petrochemical products and predict that the trend will have to change because their industries can't handle that much sustained cost increase. One of them even speculates that the price of oil needs to drop to $30/barrel to reverse the trend.

Um... The price of oil is still high. That trend has *not* reversed as both articles predicted. Yet, despite one article mentioning that 60-70% of costs were based on the price of those feedstocks (bare refined weights of oil in this case), and the fact that oil prices haven't dropped in the intervening 4-5 years, the cost for consumer good using those products hasn't gone up by an amount you'd expect.

Which means that either the predictions in those articles and the impact of oil on their business wasn't nearly as great as they suggested or, the impact of sustained higher oil prices has been lessened on them somewhat. Like, say by shifting the burden of that cost onto a more inflexible product like gasoline?


Sure. I'm speculating, but my speculation fits what's happened so far. According to the two articles you linked, we should have seen a noticeable increase in the cost of a whole range of goods if oil prices stayed as high as they were in 2003-2004 ($60/barrel at that time). Um... They have, so what happened? Oddly, exactly what I predicted. Gas prices increased out of proportion to the increase in crude oil prices (the very thing Sing was complaining about), while the prices for goods made from the other components of oil have remained relatively constant.

So either some magical force has prevented an increased cost of injected plastics, and industrial chemicals from increasing the cost of the goods produced from those things, or the market made an adjustment in order to lessen the burden of higher crude oil costs on those products.

Personally, I'll go with the second answer. It makes far more sense and fits every single bit of data we have.

keep it up. good info both ways.

No links, I'm afraid, because I'm pulling stuff up via LexisNexis.

I'll be damned. It would seem that either (A) Rising fuel demand is driving up the price of plastics (and other petrochemical products) or else (B) Gbaji knows more than these industry publications.

Edited, Feb 1st 2008 10:43pm by Jophiel

That's nice. I've already listed multiple sources stating that fuel demand -- especially the value of crackable feedstocks -- is driving up the prices of plastics. You have listed (let me count)... zero sources stating that fuel demand is keeping down the cost of plastics. Unless you count your own imagination as a source.

Edited, Feb 1st 2008 10:50pm by Jophiel

I see. Gbaji has zero sources for his crack-pot theories but will dismiss the leading industry publications in the petrochemical fields because they're "speculative". Strangely, I didn't find a single "speculative" article stating that lowered demand for gasoline would drive the cost of feedstock up but, hey, I guess they don't know what Gbaji knows about their industry.That's a fact? Really? Care to cite it?

Well, I think you've proven my point far better than I ever will. Thanks!


Edited, Feb 1st 2008 11:04pm by Jophiel

Better pack a lunch.

I always felt that Gbaji was the adulterating wife that tried to justify her actions because she was high or drunk.


Either way, it's obvious Gbaji has a problem.



On that note:

Gbaji, Annabella is a productive, self-proclaimed, psychiatrist, she can help you through your retardation.