Is that supposed to mean "China won't hurt the US economy?"  If so, that's completely unrelated to this issue, because Flint is saying that's just happened.

End it and make the next round a first person shooter!

I'm going to be very blunt:

You posted a thread with a conclusion, yet without substantiation within this thread (which we can find ourselves).

What kind of discussion did you think would happen here?

This might be more persuading if you were to provide more explanation/examples regarding the one argument meant to prove your thesis, i.e. Godel's incompleteness theorem.

> twosidedeath wrote:

> this really does sound like just about every market out there, a newer product is costly to cover new production costs plus thier research costs, then once they are outdated or challenged by a competitor thier prices will drop to try and keep income comingin ect.

and just like other markets,evenin the food market,people who are capable of producing the product cheaper are often paid to not produce in order to keep prices high and the money flowing in the same dirrection. this is commonplace in i think all markets.

it is understandalbe that people want to recover thier research costs, but they dont stop there, they plan to make profits. this is somewhat a flaw of the free market and can slow growth overall. the companies want to generate profit sooner rather then later at the cost of the buyer.

You're right that most markets do have elements of this problem.  That being said...

1: The proportion between R&D costs for any one drug and manufacturing costs for that drug aren't nearly as proportional in other industries as they are for the pharmaceutical industry.  We're talking about tens of millions of dollars just to produce one pill... which is then used to produce millions of pills.

2: R&D is a unique problem in that, unlike other start-up costs you mention such as manufacturing, the organization which incurs the loss (and actually provided the greatest benefit to society) is the organization that gets punished, outside some sort of protection.  The moment a drug is produced, it's generally relatively easy to reverse engineer the drug to determine how it was produced, then reproduce the drug.  As a result, without patent protection, if business A researches a drug and business B reverse engineers A's drug, A will start off with a mild head start of maybe a couple months production, and $50 million in debt.  Company B will have a few thousand in debt, without doing any sort of scientific advancement.

3: That means the producer of a drug only has a short window of opportunity to actually make profits off their drug.  Once that patent runs out... the company is left to competing with every generic drug company on the planet... which makes it extremely difficult for them to recoup the losses from the R&D.

> it is understandalbe that people want to recover thier research costs, but they dont stop there, they plan to make profits. this is somewhat a flaw of the free market and can slow growth overall.

First of all... seriously, Republicans... what are you all doing on this forum?  This is the land of Flint, The Yell, Avo, LP... and the job of defending the profit motive goes to me? 

If it's bad for a company to obtain profits for their multi-million dollar investment under your interpretation... then why should that company even bother to research new drugs?  For that matter, why would they be producing drugs at all?  Why should a company produce anything if all they can do, at best, is break even, according to those ethical standards?

That's what your equation is forgetting.  Pharmaceutical businesses have incentives for producing what they are producing.  Profits are a way by which society rewards people who do good things for that society.  Without that profit motive, why should a business take the effort to step forward and research new drugs?

Do you go to work 40 hours a week, expecting to be given nothing more than a high five?  Or do you expect payment for your services?  If you believe you should get pay for your service, yet don't like the idea of a pharmaceutical company getting profits, you're a hypocrite.  Pure and simple.

@Aro

Copycat!

Remember, in Iran, we actually did see a microcosm of what xeno is speaking of, in 2008.  I think I posted about this earlier.

When the financial crisis started, Iran made a big deal about how its economy would weather the storm.  One month later, oil prices dropped from $80 a barrel to as low as $60 per barrel, and continued to decline.  As was mentioned before, Iran was put in a financial crisis, and was forced to cut subsidies and raise taxes.

The result?  The following year, the Iranian election was largely focused on the economic issues mentioned previously.  The protests didn't succeed in exacting political change, but they serve as a case study.

And the emails once the angry family starts taking my planets! 

Is the text equivalent of the kid who spends days testing thousands of different characters and fighting strategies, only to be beaten by the kid who only uses Raiden's flying shove combo

I know it's rare, but I think xeno may be right.  (Just joking around, xeno... nothing personal)

The issue isn't one of Chinese monopolization of rare earth metal supplies.  It's an issue of rare earth metal mining and export.  Australia, India, and the US all have significant supplies, but simply are not utilizing them.

This is actually a good thing.  Compare this to the oil market.

The United States has a significant reserve of oil in regions such as Alaska.  Now, if these Alaskan reserves were in a desert in Texas or in a complete wasteland, the well would have been drilled long ago.  Because, quite frankly, barring environmental issues, there really are no short term incentives against drilling for oil when one knows the oil is there... it's an instant moneymaker.

However, its presence in ANWAR creates an additional strain on politicians.

Here's the trick, though: I don't believe ANWAR is untouchable, except by its most ardent supporters.  For example, assume OPEC did cut off oil shipments, and the US had not yet transitioned to an alternative energy source.  Even if the US can purchase oil, the price per barrel would run through the roof.  Or consider a WW2-esque military situation, in which the United States needed to supply a huge war machine (I'm talking total war mobilization, not that Iraq War-level mobilization).  Under those circumstances, I don't believe anyone except the strongest environmental advocates would put the ANWAR environmental preservation over such a prevalent national security threat (remember, I'm talking most extreme circumstance).

So why is this important?  Untapped supplies create mobilization reserves of scarce resources.  Before World War 2, the United States and Japan were able to create a bitter economic war with one another, making the war itself inevitable.  Before Pearl Harbor, the United States reprimanded Japanese expansion by embargoing exports of oil.  At the time, with the US being their primary supplier, the Japanese were forced to take drastic measures to combat this problem, forcing them to speed up expansion in the hopes of either acquiring their own oil reserves or forcing the US to lift its own embargo.

Meanwhile, the US had its own resource shortage.  Of particular note, Japan was able to conquer Malaya from the UK early in the war.  That gave Japan control of 97% of the world's supply of rubber, which was necessary in pretty much every piece of mechanized military hardware.  In recognition of this strategic difficulty, the US had to actually build up a strategic stockpile of rubber, similar to the strategic reserve of oil today.  Meanwhile, the US would be funding development of synthetic rubbers, until the country could obtain independence from foreign imports of rubber (sound familiar?).  In time, synthetic rubbers became more commonplace in the US, and although the rubbers at the time didn't match up to natural rubber, it became adequate enough for the military.

If you look, every country involved in the war inevitably had these resource issues of one type or another.  For example, on the Eastern Front, Germany was within inches of knocking the Soviets out of the war by taking their #1 oil reserve in the Caucus region, which would have taken the Soviet tank and aerial forces out of commission (Hitler botched this up by ordering a redeployment of tanks and manpower for a simultaneous offensive in Stalingrad... and we all know what happened there).  Economics wins wars. 

Anyway, those resources in ANWAR that we're talking about act in a very similar fashion.  When oil prices are sitting at $20 a barrel, it's really difficult to make the case that a country needs to drill in the region.  However, as the price steadily rises to $30, $40, and more, advocates can make a much better case in favor of drilling, to the point where it becomes prohibitively more expensive to maintain the environmental refuge.  At some threshold (which could easily never actually manifest), the political opposition to drilling becomes so insurmountable that even its original opponents will be faced with too much opposition to resist a switch of opinions.

It's the same with rare earth metals.  Currently, China is maxing out their reserve to supply to the world.  I am 100% fine with that.  Why?  Because the US has its own strategic reserve of rare earth metals in case China ever decides to use that control to their political advantage.  Meanwhile, China will be using up their reserves during the peacetime period.  They'll make money, yes.  However, for the time being, it's not a strategic resource.  It's kind of the same as complaining that Japan monopolized the video game industry in the 1990's.  Once it actually becomes a political issue, however, production can be kicked up in non-Chinese areas.

But this is definitely an interesting scenario nonetheless.

In part, it depends on your itinerary.  Have any idea of the places you plan on going, or is the idea to just... go? 

1. Because when everyone in the galaxy is charged with war crimes for their mass genocides against particular species... it would be nice to have a body count as evidence.

2. Nope!