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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 2 June 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

two from the same esteemed poster:

That sounds very "leftist" in circular-logic where more money means you are axiomatically automatically the most guilty regardless of level of harm caused. Which means that if you were to become the first trillionare by curing 95% of all forms of cancer then you are clearly history's greatest monster.

Alright then so when do we go from it being tax deductible to outright banning private charity as "undemocratic"?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

so true, there's nothing conceivably wrong with making... a trillion dollars... ? on the backs of cancer patients ......?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I wonder how many dollars that is per cancer patient.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

taking all people with cancer in the world right now it's at least a couple thousands of pure profits, but if you account for all future humans it's basically giving it away for free!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but this doesn't make you immortal so for the person to become a trillionaire in a reasonable timeframe (lets say two decades) that is a lot of dollars per treatment which goes to this inventor. Which compared to the payouts other inventors get would make him an asshole in their own class in exploiting sick people.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The hypothetical here is interesting in that it shows this commenter basically being a money maximiser. Say you're the inventor of this cure - you're the only one who understands it, basically it's magic. You have 2 choices:

squeeze every patient and healthcare system for as much as they can bear. After all, this is a cure for cancer, there's an upper limit to how much people and governments are prepared to spend, just put the price $1 below that. Profit!

or you can

offer the invention for free, still live a good life as a consultant or employee of a drug company, or just spend your time handling speaking engagements at $200,000 a pop, and get remembered throughout history as one of the saviors of humankind.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

But you see it’s your moral responsibility to earn to give™️. This means that in order to do good in the world you have to keep milking every last maximized penny out of your cancer cure. To save people. Altruism, y’see.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

the problem is that trials are pretty expensive, we're talking something about billion dollars per compound range for the entire thing from phase 1 to market, and even then some 85%+ fail. (of course phase 1 failure is cheaper than phase 3 failure) at this point all IP is owned by bean counters backed by VCs or one of few mammoth biopharma gigacorporations

i understand that a lots of new drugs is developed this way: an sfba startup gets funded, does a thing, sucks VCs off for few tens of millions of dollars, tries to push something to phase 1 and then either doesn't that and collapses or does that, sells IP to someone bigger, and also collapses (because they fired biologists to hire compliance), or if they don't collapse, they repeat until they do, accumulating half-baked IP along the way

btw this is part of the reason why antibodies are such a big thing, small changes can keep these things patented basically indefinitely and at the same time these are hard enough to make that generics will be pretty hard to impossible. one sane solution would be to try some state-funded research in this area

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Yeah I'm kinda familiar with the realities of drug development and testing, which is why I prefaced my comments with the solution being essentially magic. If we find hte magic bullet for cancer I expect it will be a slow grind and a lot of trial and error, so the wealth will be diluted across many entities. Not to mention the current business of cancer care might try hard to stop it...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

in american context specifically, from what i understand, the biggest financial black hole are the intermediaries, all these motherfuckers whose job is to say that no, you won't get it paid out of insurance