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Yes, I do. It’s a global pandemic - if you’re thinking about profit motive at a time like this you are part of the problem. Full stop.

frostwhale 7y ago
Couldn't have said it better. "Why would i develop something that could save millions of lives if it will save millions of lives and might not make me money". Absurd
imchillyb 7y ago
I wish people like you understood economy. Your proposal is completely unimplementable. The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary. That's it. No monies, no solutions. _____ If you stopped to think logically about the situation, you'd see this to be true. If you're proposing robbing peter to pay paul, you're part of the problem. Full Stop!
- mattkrause 7y ago
  You may want to read about the polio vaccine.
  - wiredfool 7y ago
    And Insulin
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      And penicillin.
      - mrob 7y ago
        And the three-point seat belt.
  - bumby 7y ago
    Jonas Salk was the closest I came to idolizing a person due to this. Unfortunately, it seems to be a lot of PR on Salk's part. He tried to patent it and was refused. That's not to say he wouldn't have licensed it for free anyway, but he never had to face that moral dilemma. "They found that it wasn't novel enough to count as a new invention, though. So really, Salk's vaccine was never patented because it was never eligible for a patent, according to Jane S. Smith, who sifted through the March of Dimes' archives for her book "Patenting the Sun."[1] [1] https://curiosity.com/topics/jonas-salk-didnt-patent-the-polio-vaccine-curiosity/ https://curiosity.com/topics/jonas-salk-didnt-patent-the-pol...
    - mattkrause 7y ago
      I haven't read the book, but from that article "they" = March of Dimes, not Salk. And of course, you can defensively patent something and then not enforce the patent too...
      - bumby 7y ago
        >And of course, you can defensively patent something and then not enforce the patent too... That's the same point I made in the above post (albeit through the mechanism of free licensing vs. non-enforcement). "They" is important because it wasn't self-funded research. "There was near unanimity within the organization that the public had already paid for the polio vaccine through their donations"[1] And it wasn't just the March of Dimes. The funding bodies also knew it wasn't patentable. It's not much of a logical leap for Salk to have been part of that discussion and likely had the same conclusion. "is that legally it was thought to be unpatentable. The National Foundation and the University of Pittsburgh, where much of the work was done, had looked into patenting the vaccine."[2] It's not meant to disparage Salk. I doubt he would have chosen to patent it even if it was possible. But, like I stated in the previous post, he was never faced with that decision. There's better examples of corporate altruism (some of which are already mentioned in this thread) [1]https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/the-real-reasons-jonas-salk-didnt-patent-the-polio-vaccine.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/the-real-reasons-jonas-... [2]https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vaccine-20141028-column.html https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vacc...
- moosey 7y ago
  > I wish people like you understood economy. What I understand is that we have decided that one particular measurement, GDP, has been taken to be more valuable than all other measurements. Such as, but not limited to, human welfare. It's been this way since for decades, and we are now laying in the bed that was made.
  - JadeNB 7y ago
    I wish I could remember where I read it yesterday—so many articles on the science, but also the policy and history, that they blur together; but someone pointed out "this thing that you (GP imchillyb, not moosey) think is a natural law has actually only been the case for 50 years, and need not continue forever."
    - moosey 7y ago
      At the end of one of Harari's books he points out that nothing that we see today is natural or inevitable: that there are infinite outcomes for the way that humanity lives and organizes itself. Proof of this can be seen in how we've lived historically. Those in power want us to believe that current power structures were inevitable, that the world wants to return to the current mean should we try to change it. We just have to stop people from getting power over others. I think that this is best achieved through random selection of leadership.
      - JadeNB 7y ago
        > At the end of one of Harari's books he points out that nothing that we see today is natural or inevitable: that there are infinite outcomes for the way that humanity lives and organizes itself. Proof of this can be seen in how we've lived historically. That's true, and a good point, but this was much more pointed: less "had humanity evolved differently, we could have been nicer people" and more "what seems like the inevitably market- and capitalism-focussed way of life that's all anyone has ever experienced was actually a creation of the '60's and after." (Sort of like the current geopolitics of the US, which seem eternal to those of us, like me, who came of political age when they were already fairly well established, but which have actually changed dramatically in the mere 250-ish years the US has been around to have geopolitics.)
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  >The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary The irony of posting this sentence on a website displaying royalty free HTML, on a network that was first built to allow royalty free sharing of information between the military and scientists, with the servers running on royalty free GNU/Linux in a web browser based on royalty free Mosaic and discussing the issue with a whole bunch of unpaid people who like to discuss things for the sheer fun of it, is staggering.
- mdszy 7y ago
  >The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary. That's it. No monies, no solutions. sure, if you're a moneygrubbing piece of shit with no morals. Which, unfortunately, under capitalism, is encouraged.
  - rmrfstar 7y ago
    Is it capitalism or a broken culture that celebrates avarice? Capitalism + public industrial policy made some serious progress. Back in the day there used to be this word called "solidarity". Capitalism does quite well when divorced from the weird self-interest dogma we've cultivated over the past 30-40 years.
- bumby 7y ago
  >The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary This reads very much like the anti-atheist argument of, "Who's going to stop you from raping and pillaging if there's no almighty being keeping you in line?" It seems more like an indictment of the speaker than of the rest of society.
  - mitchty 7y ago
    > It seems more like an indictment of the speaker than of the rest of society. It most certainly is, I have Christian friends that have used that exact line asking me how I can have morals as an atheist without the threat of a higher diety. As if being nice for the sake of just being nice is an impossible concept. Or in this case that only money would inspire me to do work. As we know from studies, money isn't the only incentive for innovation. In fact at a certain point, ~75k it tends to become less of an incentive.
- zentiggr 7y ago
  So logically, mathematically, in a vacuum, sure. In a world you share with other humans, not so much. Let's say you are in a freak accident, and are paralyzed. Will you commit to only getting the care you can actually pay for by your own earnings for the rest of your life? And how do you bootstrap yourself out of the hundreds of thousands in medical debt for the lifesaving care you get before you even get home? A lot of things happen around this planet because we care for each other, and we help each other. Sorry you can't see that.
- bananabreakfast 7y ago
  Yo, straight up, you are part of the problem with society with this attitude.
- rmrfstar 7y ago
  For the "self-interest produces efficiency" people: Here is a payout diagram for the two-player antisocial/prosocial game: (A,A)=(6,6) (A,P)=(15,5) (P,A)=(5,15) (P,P)=(12.5, 12.5) The unique Nash equilibrium is (A,A). That is the United States right now. Please carefully read Adam Smith [1] before making arguments about incentives and efficiency. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  Saving lives is an incentive. As evidence, I present all of the charitable giving and volunteering related to medicine. It is entirely possible for a thing that saves fewer lives to generate more profit. That's bad, and proves that profit is not 1:1 correlated with value generated.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Yet nothing that isn't paid for, can get done at any scale. The profit motive here was absurd. But any company that makes something useful for this pandemic, must find a business model that works. Else it won't happen.
- cranky_coder 7y ago
  Theranos never had a working product and actively did harm, so I don’t know how having patents would have ever helped them scale that business model. Beyond that, these are extraordinary circumstances. There will be plenty of bailouts and stimulus for you to scale your business model when the dust settles; let’s focus on scaling our response and systems to meet this crisis first shall we?
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    >Theranos never had a working product // Not having to have a working _product_ is actually sensible IMO: maybe patent terms should be limited in such situations (half perhaps). If I invent a new space rocket, how am I going to keep it quiet, as a small time inventor, long enough to get funding, and build the rocket (we're looking at 1000s of NDAs and warding off an entire rocket production facility from public view) ... do I then have to submit it for testing to make sure it conforms to the invention the patent was applied for? Maybe that requires dismantling it, or witnessing it in operation in an extra-terrestrial planets atmosphere (Mars landing capability, say) ... it's just not workable to require an embodiment to be produced. Aside: most countries have utility or design patents that protect actual products, but these are in addition to technology patents because working around a single embodiment or design is relatively easy to do, working around a mode of operation is not. Patent applications are already supposed to be enabling disclosures, that is guides to the skilled person in that field which would enable them to work the invention. This requirement has maybe slipped a bit; but in the US8283155 patent in question they seem to give reasonable information about the operation and scope of their idea [it's not my field]. Just my personal opinion.
- neaden 7y ago
  Ah yes, we can see this with the famously privately funded Manhattan project.
HarryHirsch 7y ago
if you’re thinking about profit motive at a time like this you are part of the problem. Full stop People will remember. A decade or two ago, during a flu outbreak that had pandemic potential (I think it was 2006), the government of Indonesia refused to share early samples. The reason? In the past, vaccine manufacturers had refused to sell flu vaccine during pandemics at a discount to the developing country. From a game-theoretic viewpoint it makes sense - Indonesia isn't worse off if it refuses to cooperate, Indonesian citizens will die anyway. Israel calls this stance "Samson Option".
- hyperman1 7y ago
  This calls for an equivalent for the GPL: Feel free to use our samples, but everything you develop based on it is licensed for free to everyone else.
TallGuyShort 7y ago
That sounds reasonable to reasonable people, yes. But remember that US presidents have considered us in a state of emergency over a drug pandemic for decades. In the US, power like this will always find a way to be used for racist and nepotistic reasons. We're going from 0 to 100 here real quick, and we need to think through the long-term repercussions a little bit.
vanniv 7y ago
"other people should have to give me their shit because I said so" What absolute fucking worthless communist fuckwits you morons are
tomp 7y ago
This kind of thinking is very ... convenient. Say you're a toilet paper maker. In normal times => "your product is trivial to produce, why are you charging so much" => razor-thin margins => almost no profit. In crisis => "why are you thinking about profit" => razor-thin margins => almost no profit. Meanwhile, you have politicians and multinationals evading tax, landlords and universities exploiting naive & vulnerable populations, Uber & Facebook skirting legislation and making bank, CEOs getting away with billions after burning $50B, elites raping kids and getting away with it, ... real "social responsibility".

frostwhale 7y ago

Couldn't have said it better. "Why would i develop something that could save millions of lives if it will save millions of lives and might not make me money". Absurd

imchillyb 7y ago

I wish people like you understood economy. Your proposal is completely unimplementable. The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary. That's it. No monies, no solutions. _____ If you stopped to think logically about the situation, you'd see this to be true. If you're proposing robbing peter to pay paul, you're part of the problem. Full Stop!

mattkrause 7y ago
You may want to read about the polio vaccine.
- wiredfool 7y ago
  And Insulin
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    And penicillin.
    - mrob 7y ago
      And the three-point seat belt.
- bumby 7y ago
  Jonas Salk was the closest I came to idolizing a person due to this. Unfortunately, it seems to be a lot of PR on Salk's part. He tried to patent it and was refused. That's not to say he wouldn't have licensed it for free anyway, but he never had to face that moral dilemma. "They found that it wasn't novel enough to count as a new invention, though. So really, Salk's vaccine was never patented because it was never eligible for a patent, according to Jane S. Smith, who sifted through the March of Dimes' archives for her book "Patenting the Sun."[1] [1] https://curiosity.com/topics/jonas-salk-didnt-patent-the-polio-vaccine-curiosity/ https://curiosity.com/topics/jonas-salk-didnt-patent-the-pol...
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    I haven't read the book, but from that article "they" = March of Dimes, not Salk. And of course, you can defensively patent something and then not enforce the patent too...
    - bumby 7y ago
      >And of course, you can defensively patent something and then not enforce the patent too... That's the same point I made in the above post (albeit through the mechanism of free licensing vs. non-enforcement). "They" is important because it wasn't self-funded research. "There was near unanimity within the organization that the public had already paid for the polio vaccine through their donations"[1] And it wasn't just the March of Dimes. The funding bodies also knew it wasn't patentable. It's not much of a logical leap for Salk to have been part of that discussion and likely had the same conclusion. "is that legally it was thought to be unpatentable. The National Foundation and the University of Pittsburgh, where much of the work was done, had looked into patenting the vaccine."[2] It's not meant to disparage Salk. I doubt he would have chosen to patent it even if it was possible. But, like I stated in the previous post, he was never faced with that decision. There's better examples of corporate altruism (some of which are already mentioned in this thread) [1]https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/the-real-reasons-jonas-salk-didnt-patent-the-polio-vaccine.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/the-real-reasons-jonas-... [2]https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vaccine-20141028-column.html https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vacc...
moosey 7y ago
> I wish people like you understood economy. What I understand is that we have decided that one particular measurement, GDP, has been taken to be more valuable than all other measurements. Such as, but not limited to, human welfare. It's been this way since for decades, and we are now laying in the bed that was made.
- JadeNB 7y ago
  I wish I could remember where I read it yesterday—so many articles on the science, but also the policy and history, that they blur together; but someone pointed out "this thing that you (GP imchillyb, not moosey) think is a natural law has actually only been the case for 50 years, and need not continue forever."
  - moosey 7y ago
    At the end of one of Harari's books he points out that nothing that we see today is natural or inevitable: that there are infinite outcomes for the way that humanity lives and organizes itself. Proof of this can be seen in how we've lived historically. Those in power want us to believe that current power structures were inevitable, that the world wants to return to the current mean should we try to change it. We just have to stop people from getting power over others. I think that this is best achieved through random selection of leadership.
    - JadeNB 7y ago
      > At the end of one of Harari's books he points out that nothing that we see today is natural or inevitable: that there are infinite outcomes for the way that humanity lives and organizes itself. Proof of this can be seen in how we've lived historically. That's true, and a good point, but this was much more pointed: less "had humanity evolved differently, we could have been nicer people" and more "what seems like the inevitably market- and capitalism-focussed way of life that's all anyone has ever experienced was actually a creation of the '60's and after." (Sort of like the current geopolitics of the US, which seem eternal to those of us, like me, who came of political age when they were already fairly well established, but which have actually changed dramatically in the mere 250-ish years the US has been around to have geopolitics.)
alasdair_ 7y ago
>The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary The irony of posting this sentence on a website displaying royalty free HTML, on a network that was first built to allow royalty free sharing of information between the military and scientists, with the servers running on royalty free GNU/Linux in a web browser based on royalty free Mosaic and discussing the issue with a whole bunch of unpaid people who like to discuss things for the sheer fun of it, is staggering.
mdszy 7y ago
>The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary. That's it. No monies, no solutions. sure, if you're a moneygrubbing piece of shit with no morals. Which, unfortunately, under capitalism, is encouraged.
- rmrfstar 7y ago
  Is it capitalism or a broken culture that celebrates avarice? Capitalism + public industrial policy made some serious progress. Back in the day there used to be this word called "solidarity". Capitalism does quite well when divorced from the weird self-interest dogma we've cultivated over the past 30-40 years.
bumby 7y ago
>The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary This reads very much like the anti-atheist argument of, "Who's going to stop you from raping and pillaging if there's no almighty being keeping you in line?" It seems more like an indictment of the speaker than of the rest of society.
- mitchty 7y ago
  > It seems more like an indictment of the speaker than of the rest of society. It most certainly is, I have Christian friends that have used that exact line asking me how I can have morals as an atheist without the threat of a higher diety. As if being nice for the sake of just being nice is an impossible concept. Or in this case that only money would inspire me to do work. As we know from studies, money isn't the only incentive for innovation. In fact at a certain point, ~75k it tends to become less of an incentive.
zentiggr 7y ago
So logically, mathematically, in a vacuum, sure. In a world you share with other humans, not so much. Let's say you are in a freak accident, and are paralyzed. Will you commit to only getting the care you can actually pay for by your own earnings for the rest of your life? And how do you bootstrap yourself out of the hundreds of thousands in medical debt for the lifesaving care you get before you even get home? A lot of things happen around this planet because we care for each other, and we help each other. Sorry you can't see that.
bananabreakfast 7y ago
Yo, straight up, you are part of the problem with society with this attitude.
rmrfstar 7y ago
For the "self-interest produces efficiency" people: Here is a payout diagram for the two-player antisocial/prosocial game: (A,A)=(6,6) (A,P)=(15,5) (P,A)=(5,15) (P,P)=(12.5, 12.5) The unique Nash equilibrium is (A,A). That is the United States right now. Please carefully read Adam Smith [1] before making arguments about incentives and efficiency. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments
UncleMeat 7y ago
Saving lives is an incentive. As evidence, I present all of the charitable giving and volunteering related to medicine. It is entirely possible for a thing that saves fewer lives to generate more profit. That's bad, and proves that profit is not 1:1 correlated with value generated.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

Yet nothing that isn't paid for, can get done at any scale. The profit motive here was absurd. But any company that makes something useful for this pandemic, must find a business model that works. Else it won't happen.

cranky_coder 7y ago
Theranos never had a working product and actively did harm, so I don’t know how having patents would have ever helped them scale that business model. Beyond that, these are extraordinary circumstances. There will be plenty of bailouts and stimulus for you to scale your business model when the dust settles; let’s focus on scaling our response and systems to meet this crisis first shall we?
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  >Theranos never had a working product // Not having to have a working _product_ is actually sensible IMO: maybe patent terms should be limited in such situations (half perhaps). If I invent a new space rocket, how am I going to keep it quiet, as a small time inventor, long enough to get funding, and build the rocket (we're looking at 1000s of NDAs and warding off an entire rocket production facility from public view) ... do I then have to submit it for testing to make sure it conforms to the invention the patent was applied for? Maybe that requires dismantling it, or witnessing it in operation in an extra-terrestrial planets atmosphere (Mars landing capability, say) ... it's just not workable to require an embodiment to be produced. Aside: most countries have utility or design patents that protect actual products, but these are in addition to technology patents because working around a single embodiment or design is relatively easy to do, working around a mode of operation is not. Patent applications are already supposed to be enabling disclosures, that is guides to the skilled person in that field which would enable them to work the invention. This requirement has maybe slipped a bit; but in the US8283155 patent in question they seem to give reasonable information about the operation and scope of their idea [it's not my field]. Just my personal opinion.
neaden 7y ago
Ah yes, we can see this with the famously privately funded Manhattan project.

HarryHirsch 7y ago

if you’re thinking about profit motive at a time like this you are part of the problem. Full stop People will remember. A decade or two ago, during a flu outbreak that had pandemic potential (I think it was 2006), the government of Indonesia refused to share early samples. The reason? In the past, vaccine manufacturers had refused to sell flu vaccine during pandemics at a discount to the developing country. From a game-theoretic viewpoint it makes sense - Indonesia isn't worse off if it refuses to cooperate, Indonesian citizens will die anyway. Israel calls this stance "Samson Option".

hyperman1 7y ago
This calls for an equivalent for the GPL: Feel free to use our samples, but everything you develop based on it is licensed for free to everyone else.

TallGuyShort 7y ago

That sounds reasonable to reasonable people, yes. But remember that US presidents have considered us in a state of emergency over a drug pandemic for decades. In the US, power like this will always find a way to be used for racist and nepotistic reasons. We're going from 0 to 100 here real quick, and we need to think through the long-term repercussions a little bit.

vanniv 7y ago

"other people should have to give me their shit because I said so" What absolute fucking worthless communist fuckwits you morons are

tomp 7y ago

This kind of thinking is very ... convenient. Say you're a toilet paper maker. In normal times => "your product is trivial to produce, why are you charging so much" => razor-thin margins => almost no profit. In crisis => "why are you thinking about profit" => razor-thin margins => almost no profit. Meanwhile, you have politicians and multinationals evading tax, landlords and universities exploiting naive & vulnerable populations, Uber & Facebook skirting legislation and making bank, CEOs getting away with billions after burning $50B, elites raping kids and getting away with it, ... real "social responsibility".