Posts Made By: Dave Snope

Yes it is a no-brainer. Because there is competition. There always is as long as there are other drug companies and right now there are PLENTY. You release it as soon as you can while you have the patent, setting the price appropriately as the patent holder, and maximize your life-time profits before it is replaced by generics. In the meantime your existing drug is being taken over by generics and it's price is going down. By holding the new drug back you are losing money on your huge investment in the drug. You may have spent a billion dollars on development and testing because of FDA regulations and you need to recoup that as fast a possible. And even if you "release" it today, how long until it reaches shelves and gets insurance approval? Years...

A more realistic scenario is if your new drug could only ever make $100M in sales because it is cheap and/or price-controlled or there are cheaper but less effective drugs that Medicare only approves for payment. Yet it would cost $500B to finish developing and testing. As soon as possible you stop development. Then the conspiracy theory nuts crawl out of the woodwork claiming you are intentionally performing eugenics on Group X.

If your logic was true than nothing would ever get cheaper. Pentiums get cheaper all the time and they only have one competitor. Drug companies have many more.

That's a beautiful image, Floyd. One of the best Iris' shots that I have ever seen.

Here in CA the uptick is just a dead cat bounce. A 'W' recovery, as they say in the stock market. The stimulus money that gives an $8K credit to homebuyers has lifted the lower end of the market and bumped the prices up a bit (an economist would predict and $8K price rise), and half the sales are foreclosures that stimulated the sales quantities. But that is not a real recovery. Only real-estate agents, the NAR, and newspapers will tell you it's a recovery. Filling homes with people that couldn't afford them without assistance is one of the three stool legs that caused the housing bubble in the first place. Secondly, sales of low and mid-priced homes that are foreclosures, short sales, distressed sales, REO's, have 'stimulated' sales numbers and made a slight rise in prices. The higher end houses are just beginning to foreclose. Everybody is holding on to underwater houses as long as they can, until they cannot, which will be soon. Underwater by $300,000, and worse if they were among the many who took out huge HELOCs to buy Range Rovers and RVs. The banks are holding 80,000 homes in SoCal that would crash the market if they put them up for sale all at once, so they just put a few out for sale at a time then take them off when they don't sell. Gigantic lender losses are inevitable.

Here's an article on the Vegas underwater problems:

Las Vegas, which leads the nation in foreclosures, is vulnerable. The recently released study shows that 17 percent of households would default even if they could afford to pay their mortgage if the equity shortfall reaches 50 percent of the value of their house.

The median price of homes sold in Las Vegas has fallen more than 50 percent since June 2006, and in its most recent study zillow.com said 67 percent of Las Vegas homeowners are underwater — when the amount owed exceeds the home’s current value — and more than 80 percent of the homes bought from 2005 to 2007 are underwater.

As the foreclosure capital of the nation, Las Vegas is vulnerable because the study shows that the willingness to default increases with the proportion of foreclosures in a ZIP code. People who know someone who defaulted are 82 percent more likely to declare their intention to do so.

Although the first wave of foreclosures was triggered by subprime loans resetting monthly payments beyond what people could afford, job losses and frustration among underwater homeowners will contribute to the next wave.

“I think Las Vegas is one of the worst markets from the point that a lot of people are underwater,” said Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago who conducted the study with two other professors. “If the forecast is correct, the situation is not good.”

What will determine the number of Las Vegans who will walk away is how they see the future, Zingales said. If they see the market rebounding, they will stay in their homes for now.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/aug/07/underwater-lv-homeowners-more-likely-walk-away-stu/

Arctic temperatures in Eureka, CA. Where is Kaufman's meteoric temperature rise?

I agree, it was a superbly smooth delivery of falsehoods, obfuscations, statistic abuse, and strawman arguments.

My favorite of his small obfuscations was when he introduced the lady with breast cancer who he said had her insurance canceled because of acne. It's worth quoting from his speech:

"...More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won't pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.... [A] woman from Texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne. By the time she had her insurance reinstated, her breast cancer more than doubled in size. That is heart-breaking, it is wrong, and no one should be treated that way in the United States of America."

He failed to mention the rest of the story: That the lady had a heart condition and didn't put it on her insurance app. She lied to get a lower rate, and Obama lied about it to get people to support his policies.

Of course there were bigger lies on major issues such as cost and Medicaid erosion and the uninsured.

If his health care proposal had merit and was good for the people of American, then why does it require a pack of lies to get us to support it?

The point of the article is that larger hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico spawn more tornadoes. That there are bigger hurricanes making landfall in the Gulf lately. Landfall hurricanes spawn tornadoes, therefore more tornadoes.

Nothing about AGW in the article. I guess that part is your own spin.

Since you brought it up, however, and you referred to "Global Warming" rather than specifically to the Gulf of Mexico landfall hurricane intensity that the article referred to, let us take a more global perspective by looking at the larger picture of northern hemisphere Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) from FSU COAPS.


http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/may_june_july.jpg

If as you say that global warming = more hurricanes, then either there is no global warming, or you are wrong if one were to interpret your equality literally. Our nation's top hurricane expert has publicly stated many times over many years that you are wrong. In fact a recent theory says that a warmer climate produces fewer hurricanes because it is land/ocean temperature differences that spawn more storms, not just more or less average temperature. But I haven't seen any correlation to hurricane activity and temperature when the charts are overlayed. There is much more for us to learn about storms.

Since the original topic is specifically about tornadoes, let us look at the NOAA data on the number of strong tornadoes from 1950 - 2006. It is important to look at the strong tornado counts, because the mild tornado counts have gone up in recent decades because of the hundreds of doppler radar stations that measure and record small, brief tornadoes that no one would otherwise have seen or reported. Additionally, there are those politicians who continue to proclaim loudly that GW is causing more destructive tornadoes, more property damage and deaths, so we should have a look at the trends for strong tornado activity. What is the trend in this chart? Look at the peak year of this chart. If you follow temperature trends, you may remember that the mid-70's were on the cooler side.


http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/tornado/tornadotrend.jpg

If you figure out that fluoridation thing, please share.

That is insane. It's no wonder that Britain is suffering from a brain drain.

On a similar topic in a similarly absurd vein:

The Prince of Wales is urging people to give up their cars in favour of walking and public transport to try to reduce carbon emissions.

The Prince, who has two Jaguars, two Audis, a Range Rover and still drives an Aston Martin given to him by the Queen on his 21st birthday, said developers had a duty to put public transport and the pedestrian at the heart of their housing schemes.

Speaking about the “domination of the car over the pedestrian”, the future King said: “We must surely be able to organise ourselves... in ways in which we are not dependent on it to such a great extent for our daily needs."



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/theroyalfamily/6216049/Prince-Charles-urges-people-to-abandon-car-in-favour-of-walking-and-public-transport.html

He and Al Gore should fly their jets to Mauritius, take Land Rovers to the oceanfront resort and have a shallow discussion at high tide about the latest techniques for coercing peasants to lower their living standards while providing more taxes, errrrr, I mean credits, to the royalty of their respective countries.

Wild.

How about those ladies in the video doing their kangaerobics in the dust storm. I can imagine their foolish instructor yelling "Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!", because Fitness is First.

Near the end they acknowledge that the cause is what people have been saying it was for a while, warm water circulation patterns, not air temperature.

I think the news organization is relatively irrelevant when it comes to scientific issues. Reporters and journalists know nothing about science, statistics, medicine, or economics. And everything has economics. They report the news given to them by the public relations departments of these research organizations. They don't know if it's right or wrong, only whether it sounds sensational enough. Add a bit of flavor. That's journalism. Except when there is a building on fire. The research organizations benefit from free publicity, and the reporters get a free story. The public gets free BS. If it shows up on AP, they all report the same thing, all over the world.