Of course not

Post #345,760 by crazy 8/5/11 12:12:45 PM Reply	Of course not But you can't have it both ways. Somebody needs to PUSH new drugs through the system. It takes a certain level of crazyness. I don't TRUST these people. That would be stupid. But I TRUST there is an incentive to push the science forward and turn pure discoveries into usable drugs. I TRUST that some of them will kill me, and others might save me. And that is the only way to move forward. Well? What do you want? A protective government that controls all R&D and production and has NO incentive to do anything, or a bunch of crazies, some of which will discover and peddle the cure for cancer, others who will try to sell you snake oil. Remember this saying: You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work? There was a reason the Soviets stagnated, no matter how wonderful the ideal is.
Post #345,771 by mmoffitt 8/5/11 1:12:49 PM Reply	And how many would have died of polio? If it hadn't been for Salk refusing personal profit? Bidness doesn't do anything it can't make money on. It always cracks me up to hear the euphemisms in "Vision Statements" and the like. The only reason any business exists is to make money for the shareholders. Think the government doesn't already fund the majority of drug research? Think again. Google "university drug discoveries" some time. Lilly spends roughly 17 dollars on advertising for every dollar it spends on research. Take government grants to universities out of drug research and see what happens. There are some things the government does that it is uniquely qualified to do. Pure research is one of them. In bidness, you better be damned sure you're going to discover something the shareholders are going to be able to make money on in 10 months. Or you can forget the company paying for your research. We're about to learn a painful lesson about that now that the Big O has decided to "privatize" NASA. Sit back and watch how well that works. Most big discoveries come serendipitously. Bidness won't stand for that, but researchers at universities - with government grants - do it every day. Making a buck is not the only motivation for most people. And personally, I don't want anyone who is driven exclusively by the pursuit of profit making decisions about my healthcare. It should be obvious why, but I'll elaborate: for such a person given the choice between greater profit for them or better health for me, I will lose 100% of the time.
Post #345,773 by Another Scott 8/5/11 1:51:24 PM Reply	Some good points. But NASA does a lot more than LEO. LEO == low earth orbit. http://www.nasa.gov/.../sites/index.html Even if some companies throw stuff up to the ISS instead of NASA doing it itself, that doesn't mean that all of NASA is going away. There's too much cutting edge stuff that companies still aren't going to do (hypersonics, deep space, earth sensing, etc., etc.). Cheers, Scott.
Post #345,946 by mhuber 8/8/11 12:32:18 PM Reply	Vision statements When I was a corporate drone, I used to catch a lot of attitude about the vision statements I wrote. Because they always started (at least the first draft, before I got "corrected") with some variation on "make money by..." Because that is really what it is all about. And a lot of people seem to forget it, both inside and outside the company. Forgetting it outside the company leads to unwarranted trust. Forgetting it inside leads to waste and failed efforts. It is not a fault of corporations that they are there to make money any more than it is a fault of a lion that its function is to kill. It is a fault of the population when it decides lions are cute and cuddly and ought to be kept in the house - i.e. votes Republican. --------------------------------------- Badass! (and delicious)

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