Excellent! More good economic news this morning!

[_Schadenfreude_]

Originally posted by Scootter
sounding, rolling. leaping. throw the hook, chumed up, thrashing, spooled, drag smoking, broke off, backing down, turned in, spent, gaffed, taged, boated,

Sheesh no need to show off!!

[GRUNHERZ]

Originally posted by miko2d
DmdNexus: So far Big Pharma is not hiring or expanding.

 You must be joking, right?
 "Big Pharma" was killed this summer. I've seen the huge sign on a nation-wide chain drugstore "RE-IMPORTED DRUGS COMING SOON".
 It is a common knowlege that the prices for medicines in the countries that impose price controls do not cover the R&D expenses, only manufacturing costs.
 With drugs selling cheap in US, their R&D will not be sustainable and once their patents expire, they will be no different than any company selling generic drugs for miniscule profit.

john9001: ...ruin the US economy by driving up labor costs.

 That's a good example. A spread of unsustainable .com projects fueled by credit expansion drove the salary of the programmers up about six-fold during the 90s. Because there was no saving and investmant going on in software professionals education.
 Good companies like Sun or Lucent lost both money and good people - and infrastructure was established to create software jobs abroad.
 Obviously those .com original business plans did not forsee having to pay $250K for a programmer with a two-year experience or $150K for a girl who finished 4-months VB classes. They compared the cost of credit with the future profit, forgetting that the very monetary expansion would drive their costs up.

 miko

Hey we agree!  I was just gonna mention the same thing about why Canadian drug prices are so magically low...

Isnt it better then when we fight?  

BTW you nailed the .com salary thing too. I remember my father, an experienced programmer and then manager for years,  telling me that kids outta college, who knew nothing,  earned as much entry salaryas he had as a manager only a few years before the boom..

[Rude]

There's profit in treatment, not in the cure.

[miko2d]

Rude: There's profit in treatment, not in the cure.

 Profit is in selling what the customers are williing to buy, provided the price they are willing to pay covers your expenses - and the government allows you to charge that price.

 The state of science/technology today does not allow us to find cures for most afflictions. To have a cure we must know a cause and we are just beginning the research in that direction.

 But if the cure was conceivable, it is only a government intervention that would prevent producing it - by imposing price controls.

 If there is one thing that is sure it is that the government will step in and not allow the company charge the price that teh cure is worth, thus dissuading others from investing capital in finding cures.
 Just like it is now opposed to charging $800 for a box of pills that saves a person the costs of a $20,000 operation, $10,000 hospital stay and 3 month of lost work.

 Plenty of treaments for severe but uncommon diseases are not developed today because there is too high a burden of the FDA approval which makes it unprofitable to bother - even theugh the affected people would agree to buy drugs after less stringent approval process.

 miko

[kappa]

Originally posted by miko2d
[  But if the cure was conceivable, it is only a government intervention that would prevent producing it - by imposing price controls.

 If there is one thing that is sure it is that the government will step in and not allow the company charge the price that teh cure is worth, thus dissuading others from investing capital in finding cures.
 miko [/B]

Really? How much is the polio vaccine? Or the shot for the mumps/measles?  How about the chicken pocs? Rabbies (sp)?? If a cure was found, the only reason the Gov. would step in would be the result of phamy companies buying the goverment's vote... Not unlike the last 50yrs or so..........

k
AoM