The Sun's not yellow it's chicken

Here’s the problem:

Places like India & China won’t respect “Intellectual Property Rights,” and this goes double for things like life-saving drugs where the need is great and the cost is high.

Example:  Gleevec, a treatment for Leukemia , sells for as much as $70,000 here in the west, but the pirated Indian version costs only around $2,500.

Now here’s why this is a problem:

Think of a Hollywood movie.  Some cost more than $100 million dollars.  A single A-list movie star can cost tens of millions of dollars, a big name director isn’t cheap either… big crews… sets… costumes… special effects… a big budget Hollywood blockbuster can easily cost more than $100 million dollars, but all of that cost is in production.  It costs almost nothing to reproduce.

Get it?

A major Hollywood film is extremely difficult & expensive to make, but it’s really easy & cheap to copy.  And so many people pirate them. 

All the cost goes into making the film.  The investment is in the development.  All the talent, all the skill and all the hard work goes into producing a new film.  Any idiot can copy a film print or burn a DVD, but it takes a great deal of skill, talent, hard work and money to film that movie in the first place.

If we don’t protect the “Intellectual Property” of those who make the film then they have to stop making films.  They have no choice. 

Film making is risky.  It requires a large investment with absolutely no guarantee of ever making any of the money back.  And it’s hard.  There’s a lot of work.  Some projects take years to get off the ground, most never do.  And nobody is going to do all that work, and risk all that money if everyone else is going to just copy it. 

Film making is a huge risk — most film lose all the money invested in them — and that’s WITH copyright laws, that’s with theaters who fork over as much as 60% of ticket sales to the studios.  If and when anyone can just copy the film prints and show the movies in theaters for free then all the risk stops.  There is no risk.  It a sure-thing:  They will always lose every last penny they invest in a movie.

Without “Intellectual Property Rights” there are no more Hollywood blockbusters.  There’s no more film industry, no more “Entertainment” — books, magazines, music, TV (etc).

The exact same situation exists for drugs, pharmaceuticals.

It costs a great deal of money to develop new drugs, new pharmaceuticals.  They are very expensive to develop — most never make it, never succeed — but they are fairly inexpensive to reproduce once they have been developed. 

Just like in the case of Hollywood movies, nobody is going to invest huge sums of money into something as risky of drug research when they know for a fact that they will lose every dime they invest.

Yes, the drug companies are criminals.  All of them.  But this includes the Chinese and Indian pharmaceutical companies.  And EXACTLY like the greedy western firms that charge too much, these Indian & Chinese criminals are hurting you.  Because they are pirating drugs, because they steal the intellectual property of others there will be fewer new drugs in the future, fewer cures. 

This is a fact. 

Everything you do and everything you don’t do has consequences.  You can see & measure the consequences to greedy western pharmaceutical companies (high prices), so you somehow think that’s more real than the damage being caused by places like India & China.  But the cheap pirating may actually be hurting you even more.  

the-netocrat:

Barnes & Noble is abandoning the Nook. All they have left is their stores, and very few people buy physical books at full price anymore.

You’re watching the death of books. Be grateful for every tree saved.

It’s something like “Poetic Justice” though, as Barnes & Noble put so many local bookstores — so many Ma & Pa shops — out of business.

Barnes & Noble wasn’t just a huge retailer with the power to buy in bulk & undersell the family bookstore, but they are also one of the nation’s largest book distributors.  They owned the wholesale end of the business as well.  They could retail books “At Cost” — the same price the family owned bookstore paid for them — and still make a profit, because they owned the distributor and the distributor also has a profit margin.

For items with really large profit margins — like calendars — Barnes & Noble didn’t even want to consider any private publishing companies.  They wanted to market their own line. 

Anyhow, huge corporations like Barnes & Noble struggled for years to push everyone else out of business, so good riddance to them.  It couldn’t have happened to nicer guys.

The Google “Play” laptop is not only $199.  I’m not interested myself, but if all someone needs is something for playing online you can’t go wrong.

DISCLAIMER:  I am in no way/shape/form associated with Google, Acer or anyone else.  I’m just noting what I thought was a good deal.  That’s all.

ObamaCare/RomneyCare isn’t cheap, it’s just a shitload cheaper than the alternative.

The absolute cheapest alternative, the one which would put lots of money into the pockets of everyone who has coverage now, is a national Single Payer plan that automatically provides coverage for everyone. The savings in overhead alone would be enormous — the Medium private sector Healthcare CEO rakes in $10 million each year — and every country that has such a plan spends much less on healthcare than the U.S., much less even per capita.

Alternative, if you don’t want any of your money back, if you’ve got so much extra money you feel you might as well throw it away on the overpriced private system we have now, you’d still be better off switching to Single Payer.  But, instead of returning the savings to you (as you don’t want it), we can re-invest it into our healthcare system, expanding it further, giving us the biggest, most comprehensive system on the planet.

(Source: kimpriestap)