How would you deal with the unemployed and Social Welfare

[DeanMc]

There is alot of it in Ireland recently and my feeling is throwing money and ECDL courses at it is not helping? So what would you do? Bearing in mind these must be workable examples!

[SurfDemon]

First off, I would tackle the perception that unemployed people get drunk all the time, some do, some don't. The easiest way to tackle this is to provide food stamps instead of booze money. These food stamps can be traded in for food, fuel, bills etc. Basically, anything but booze, fags and fast food. I think that is a reasonable requirement for getting free money. Of course, people will then argue that these food stamps will just be traded with other people for cash... well that may have been the case in the past, but we now have the technology to ensure that this doesn't happen. What about issuing the person with a credit card with their picture etched on it. This credit card is topped up by the government each month (a fixed amount for the food etc.) and if anyone else is caught using the card (assuming it hasn't been reported stolen) then that person loses their benefits.

[DeanMc]

That sounds like a good idea and I feel that most people who are genuinely unemployed would be happy with that. What about the people who have no intention of getting a job though. Why should people like this continue to live off the state if they never intended to contribute.

[techgnome]

That's how the food "stamp" program work here in the US... they did away with the paper stamps/coupons and started issuing ATM-style cards...

that aside, one has to look at the reasons for the unemployment.... it's all fine and dandy to throw money at the problem, but unless it addresses the correct issues, it doesn't do any good.... that's how the welfare system (doesn't) work in the US.... it throws all this money at all the wrong (in my opin) problems.

-tg

[homer13j]

That's how the food "stamp" program work here in the US... they did away with the paper stamps/coupons and started issuing ATM-style cards...

I can't speak for other states, but here in Ohio going to ATM-type cards has done nothing to stop the rampant abuse of the system. Instead of selling the stamps they simply sell the card itself (along with the PIN number) for half it's face value.

A guy I went to high school with is a good example. He's in his 40s and still lives in his parents' basement and is basically unemployable because of several drug convictions. He considers minimum-wage jobs "beneath" him so he draws a $300/month food allowance on top of a welfare check. Since he doesn't need it he just trades in his food card every month for $150 in pot, coke and meth. So basically my tax dollars are helping to fuel the illegal drug industry in this state.

IMHO if they don't have kids to support, let 'em starve or in this case let momma take care of 'em.

[FunkyDexter]

That sounds like a good idea and I feel that most people who are genuinely unemployed would be happy with that. What about the people who have no intention of getting a job though. Why should people like this continue to live off the state if they never intended to contribute

The problem is that it's almost impossible to separate those who'll take advantage from those who have a genuine need. If you go heavy handed you'll end up denying some people who are in need. If you go touchy-feely you'll end up missing some people who are taking advantage. The only way of getting it right would be to police it heavily and that's likely to cost more than you'll save so at the moment they tend to police people who are defrauding large sums of money rather than those who are just idle.

You can take steps like issuing stamps rather than cash but that has quite a large social stigma attached to it and you've got to ask whether its fair to attach that stigma to someone who's worked their whole life, got made redundant and will probably be back at work within a couple of months. Personally I think this is a fairly reasonable aproach but you still have to understand that you're probably hurting some people that you don't intend to.

The British aproach just seems to be to make the system as difficult as possible to understand so that only those who are willing to spend years working out how it all works are able to get what they should have been entitled to. Since that's the same group who will work out how to get what they shouldn't have been entitled to, this strikes me as exactly the wrong aproach.

[Shaggy Hiker]

IMHO if they don't have kids to support, let 'em starve or in this case let momma take care of 'em.

You've probably heard about the Mormon fundamentalist compound in Texas that was in the news a few months ago. Have you ever taken a look at how their system works? Since polygamy is illegal in every state, the polygamists have one legal wife, and the others are all drawing welfare for their kids. They are doing this deliberately, as sucking cash from the gov'mt while loudly decrying the same, is a cornerstone of their belief system. Therefore, the first half of your statement will STILL leave the door open for some willful cheating.

[dbasnett]

let's see. got sick, lost job, companies insurance didn't have cobra (<19 employees). applied for disability through social security but that takes 6 months and i don't get my retirement amount till i am 65 (i'll be lucky to make it to next year).

shoot the cheaters.

[SurfDemon]

I think that's the crux of the matter. Finding out who is legitimate and who is cheating.

[crptcblade]

mass execution. /thread

[capsulecorpjx]

There is alot of it in Ireland recently and my feeling is throwing money and ECDL courses at it is not helping? So what would you do? Bearing in mind these must be workable examples!

Unconditional welfare doesn't work. People who support this have a good heart, but they dont' take into account game theory and phsycology.

People without jobs, loses spirit. People with a source of income, even meager, has less incentive/pressure to go out find a job.

Welfare is good if it has conditions. Everyone gets into trouble. But it shouldn't be unlimited. It should be like Unemployment Inusrance, with a lifetime limit.

But more important thing, is to get people employed. If S*** hits the fan, the government needs to deficit spend, hire people, get government projects going. Repair the roads ... etc.

This is how America got out of the Great Depression.

[Shaggy Hiker]

And then there was that chimp experiment that showed that even chimps have a sense of fair play, and refuse to participate in a system if they think that somebody else is getting a benefit that they are not. This is why we HATE the thought of ANYBODY getting away with anything, which is largely the basis for the whole bit about ranting against welfare cheats. There are plenty of people who would deny welfare to everybody just to prevent any one non-deserving person from getting benefits. This is so fundamental to our makeup that it can be demonstrated in chimps such that it pre-dates humanity itself.

But the chimps in the experiment WERE getting benefits. They were able to trade useless rocks for food. They only refused to trade junk for valuables once they saw another chimp get a more valuable item than they had been getting. At that point, junk was once again useless to them.

We will take positions that hurt ourselves if we perceive others to have benefitted more. That's not a rational position, it's instinctive. If we are intelligent (which I would say we are not, but that's beside the point), then we can recognize the incorrect instinctive response and change it.

[capsulecorpjx]

And then there was that chimp experiment that showed that even chimps have a sense of fair play, and refuse to participate in a system if they think that somebody else is getting a benefit that they are not. This is why we HATE the thought of ANYBODY getting away with anything, which is largely the basis for the whole bit about ranting against welfare cheats. There are plenty of people who would deny welfare to everybody just to prevent any one non-deserving person from getting benefits. This is so fundamental to our makeup that it can be demonstrated in chimps such that it pre-dates humanity itself.

But the chimps in the experiment WERE getting benefits. They were able to trade useless rocks for food. They only refused to trade junk for valuables once they saw another chimp get a more valuable item than they had been getting. At that point, junk was once again useless to them.

We will take positions that hurt ourselves if we perceive others to have benefitted more. That's not a rational position, it's instinctive. If we are intelligent (which I would say we are not, but that's beside the point), then we can recognize the incorrect instinctive response and change it.

Unlimited welfare kills people's spirits and motivation. The way it was enacted before, it also broke up families, because the system won't pay a family with a father in it (only single mothers), so women kicked the men out of the house so they could get the money. What happens? It breeds more physoclogical problems in the kids, increasing crime as especially the sons seek father-figures from gangs.

When you subsidise something, you will get more of it.
Subsidise cancer research? You will get more cancer research, not a cure.

To get a cure you need to put out an enormouse reward (billions of dollars to the group that cures it), as well as conditional funding (example: if a group makes no progress after several years, the funding goes to someone else).

Subsidise unemployment? Why would anyone want to work hard at a minimum wage job to make just a little more than welfare? Without work, people's spirit gets corrupted.

I'm not for doing away with welfare completely. But I like the way it is, after Clinton/Republican Congress reformed it with time limits.

Far-left people have no concept of game theory, or an idea of the consequences of even seemingly socially just ideas.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Unlimited welfare kills people's spirits and motivation. The way it was enacted before, it also broke up families, because the system won't pay a family with a father in it (only single mothers), so women kicked the men out of the house so they could get the money. What happens? It breeds more physoclogical problems in the kids, increasing crime as especially the sons seek father-figures from gangs.

Hard to believe I'm asking this of you, but is that statement based on research or the popular folk-tale crap? The research I have seen all points in a different direction: The state of being poor alters people in both psychological and physiological ways for reasons that nobody has yet been able to explain. Welfare can be added in or left out, the result will be the same regardless. It seems to mostly be conservatives who say that welfare is the cause, but they don't back it with anything but pseudo studies. Of course you can show problems in people on welfare, but those studies are always plagued by autocorrelation. Show me a study that corrects for autocorrelation? I have never seen one.

When you subsidise something, you will get more of it.
Subsidise cancer research? You will get more cancer research, not a cure.

That's crap. Scientists feed on peer recognition and nothing else. There may well be some cynical researchers somewhere who simply stall for dollars, but I've worked with scientists for my entire life, and the vast majority take relatively low paying jobs because they want one thing and one thing only: Recognition stemming from original results.

To get a cure you need to put out an enormouse reward (billions of dollars to the group that cures it), as well as conditional funding (example: if a group makes no progress after several years, the funding goes to someone else).

Try that and see where it gets you.

Subsidise unemployment? Why would anyone want to work hard at a minimum wage job to make just a little more than welfare? Without work, people's spirit gets corrupted.

See point #1

Far-left people have no concept of game theory, or an idea of the consequences of even seemingly socially just ideas.

Neither far left nor far right have a concept of much of anything. Few people who make political arguments back their statements with data.

[Blakk_Majik]

That's crap. Scientists feed on peer recognition and nothing else. There may well be some cynical researchers somewhere who simply stall for dollars, but I've worked with scientists for my entire life, and the vast majority take relatively low paying jobs because they want one thing and one thing only: Recognition stemming from original results.

I completely disagree with this.

Chris Rock said it best, "Ain't no money in the cure". BILLIONS of dollars are given for cancer research each year, yet we still depend on old methods such as chemotherapy for treatment.

While it may be true that some scientist genuinely want to find a cure, I say most of them are full of it. Then you have the drug companies, which I feel are the biggest parasites of the medical "industry", making a bunch of drugs that don't cure anything, much less cancer.

I believe that even if there was a definitive cure, the price would be so high that only the wealthy could afford it. Since they wouldn't be bringing in billions for "research", they'd have to make as much as they could off the cure.

[Shaggy Hiker]

There have been 'cures' suggested and attempted for decades now. We have a viable vaccine against cervical cancer which is being opposed by conservative groups, we have linked many forms of breast cancer to specific genes that can be identified decades before the onset of any cancer, and chemotherapy just means "treating cancer with chemicals". The actual chemotherapy drugs have changed considerably in the last two decades to become more specific and more effective. Survival for many types of cancer has increased enormously.

Up until the beginning of the last century (WWI time), you could die from the common cold, and the average life expectancy at birth in the US was in the mid-40s. If you survived to age 30, your average life expectancy was only slightly shorter than it is today. The reason for this is that there was huge infant mortality in ALL countries, and much higher mortalitly from infection in all countries, prior to the discovery of antibiotics.

Everyone today, with the exception of the extremely old, cannot remember a time before antibiotics provided a cure for pretty nearly any bacterial agent. Since bacterial diseases caused so much death, we almost equate modern medicine with antibiotics. That's not correct. We are very effective against bacteria, but take a look at the diseases that are not bacterial in origin. We have zero control on the common cold (viral), we have vaccines for some other viruses that don't mutate wildly, but we have almost zero control for viruses for which we lack vaccines. We can only deal with the influenza by identifying the particular strain each year and making vaccines targeted at that strain. Without the vaccine, the best we can do is treat the symptoms, and lots of people die from those symptoms annually. Therefore, our track record against viruses can be summed up to just one question: Is there a vaccine? If there is, great! Our bodies can be trained to deal with those viruses. If there isn't...we sit on the sidelines, feebly trying to help the body win the fight, but unable to assist.

So of the three major sources for disease we can say this:

Bacteria: Antibiotics gave us a solution.
Viral: Vaccines, if they exist, give us a solution, and otherwise we are nearly helpless.
Genetic: We are almost entirely helpless.

Cancer is genetic, in that it is caused by genes running amok. Despite having a single name, it is a multi-headed monster, just like the common cold. There isn't one thing, so there isn't one cure. We are very effective against some, we are helpless against others. The tools at our disposal are changing year by year, and survival probabilities are considerably higher than they were just ten years ago.

What would a cure look like? Do you seriously expect a pill that can knock out every type of cancer? Cancer is nothing but rapidly dividing cells. Some essential cells in our body grow like that throughout our lives. Chemotherapy was originally just intended to knock out ALL rapidly dividing cells, which is why it made your hair fall out, and you bone marrow fail, leading to anemia and a flattened immune system. Modern chemotherapy drugs are intended to increasingly target just the peculiarities of specific cancer cells, but those drugs will work well against some, and not at all against others.

There will never be a single cure, because cancer is not a single disease. There are already cures for some types, while others are death sentences. This is the best that we can expect in all worlds. Since there is not one thing called cancer, but a whole range of things, then there will be a whole range of treatments that will have to be tailored to the specific type of cancer.

We have been so successful against bacteria because bacteria are as different from us as any two organisms can be. They are prokaryotes, while we are eukaryotes, as are algae, plants, protozoans (like giardia), fungi, and all other animals. Antibiotics target those differences. Drugs against our fellow eukaryotes, such as fungi and giardia, are toxic to us as well, so they have to be administered carefully so as to kill the target and not take the host along, too.

Even when it comes to bacteria, people have been too free in the use of antibiotics. There are now strains of bacteria that are resistant to EVERY known antibiotic. Since bacteria can transfer the resistance from one strain to another (it's as if a bird could transfer the genes to develop feathers to you), the day may well be approaching when antibiotics will stop working. Perhaps at that point the average life expectancy at birth will drop back into the 40-50 range where it has been for all of human existance until the last few decades.

You don't want a cure, you want a magic potion.

[Blakk_Majik]

I am quite aware that cancer is a complicated disease, no matter which kind a person has.

And no, I don't expect a pill that would knock out every type of cancer. If such a pill existed, it would be priced well out of the range for common people.

Also, I am well aware that many different types of "cures" have been proposed/experimented with over the past few decades, but how many of them are accepted treatment methods? And guess what? If it's not a standardized method of treatment, my insurance isn't gonna pick up the tab on it. At that point, I can choose to try and "live with it" based on the treatment my health coverage will pay for, or I can go bankrupt trying to pay for it out of my own pocket. And I don't know about you, but I don't have a few hundred thousand to spend on an "experimental" treatment.

Are you seriously trying to tell me all the money that has been spent on cancer research has yielded satisfactory results?

Sure, there's a vaccine that tries to prevent a woman from developing cervical cancer, and that's great, but what about all the women that have it already? Reality check: A vaccine doesn't help you if you already have the disease.

I want them to come up with something for the big boys: breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, brain cancer. Where is the hope for patients diagnosed with these diseases?

You say I want a magic potion, but that is far from the case. I just want proof that all the money being spent on cancer research is yielding results. And trust me, it's not just cancer. There are other diseases like AIDS and Diabetes that I think companies make too much money off of to cure them.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Would you like a retroactive cure? Can you tell me exactly how much money it should take to find a solution to any problem? Fermat's theroem was just a math problem, and the proof took a couple centuries and the development of a novel form of mathematics, so it clearly isn't the proof Fermat talked about.

It seems to me that your view is that everything less than a complete cure is failure and evidence of greed. A vaccine that prevents a cancer is not good enough because, of course, it doesn't cure the existing cancer. Do you think that if you give people a certain amount of money they can go up to god and buy a solution from him? There isn't a cure because the problem is insanely difficult. Look at the results of a couple recent cancer vaccines that went into trial. To get to human trials, they had to show clear promise in tissue and animal studies, yet one of the vaccine trials was terminated early after the people receiving the treatment had a totally unexplained INCREASE in mortality. It could have been random, but a treatment that should have reduced their cancers was correlated more closely with their early demise. They tried it in tissue: It worked. They tried it in animals: It worked. They tried it in humans: The humans died. Was it the vaccine, and if so, by what mechanism did it work?

All those other partial treatments that were tried over the years, and which you claim are not accepted treatments: They didn't work when tried in humans.

Our understanding of cellular chemistry is far from complete. Only in the last couple years was it discovered that things your grandparents ate could be causing cancer in YOU. It was found that certain substances could bind to DNA and alter the translation process, thereby altering cell operation. That wasn't a real surprise, what surprised people was that some of these alterations could be passed down for a couple generations, though it's my understanding that they work themselves out after sufficient generations, which is understandable, since half the genetic material of the offspring would come from the non-impacted parent.

Therefore, a fundamental piece of cellular chemistry, with clear and obvious impacts on development, and it wasn't even discovered until a few years ago.

So has the money spent on cancer research provided satisfactory results? The answer to that question has to be: How should I know? By stating that the entire research is driven by a desire for money rather than a cure, you suggest that had the money been spent somewhere else we would be significantly farther along than we are now. If you are right, then the money spent so far has NOT produced satisfactory results. If you are wrong, then the money spent so far HAS produced satisfactory results, because no other alternative is better. Now, if you can show how the money should have been spent to reach a better answer, then I'll consider whether your solution has merit. Yet I find it hard not to read your statements as an expectation that if you had enough money you could simply buy an answer. Until very recently, it was assumed that the vast majority of problems facing a human's life, had no solution. There are entire religions based on this concept. Some might argue that ALL religions are based on this concept, and I'd tend to agree for western religions. Only because you were born in this age could you be pardoned the hubris of assuming that all questions had answers that can be determined in fixed time frames. Only now can you assume that the reason we don't have a cure for X is simply because the scientists are too greedy to actually give us the cure.

[Blakk_Majik]

Where did I say anything other than a complete cure was a failure?

Let me approach this another way. Let's say your boss asks you to write an application. Now, for two years you collect this insane salary because you graduated from MIT. At the end of two years, all you have is a few screens that "kinda" work and a bunch of failed theories about how to make the rest of it work. How long do you think you will stay employed? What if it isn't just you, but 4 other people of equal or greater intelligence than yourself, and it's 10 years later? Do you think the company would allow this to continue? Of course not, unless they like to bleed money. It's quite apparent neither you or any of your collegues know how to solve the problem.

Unlike any other profession, medicine seems to get a free pass. All they have to say is that "we're so close, we just need (insert amount of money and/or time here)". The fact is, there is no pressure to find a cure. As long they can sell ways to help people "live with" the disease, and it's accepted, the race for the cure will be a brisk walk.

No matter what disease you have, as long as a company like GlaxoSmithKline can keep you alive and popping pills every day for the rest of your life, there is no incentive to cure you. Medicine is about money now, it's not about helping people. Insurance companies want sky-high premiums for coverage, then turn around and try to deny as many claims as they can. Drug companies want you to feel well, as long as you have to keep pumping your body full of whatever is in the pill they made.

Think about this. If I smoke weed, I'll get high. I will get hungry, and probably sleepy. The effect is more or less the same no matter who smokes it. It didn't take years of the plant being studied in the lab to come up with this. There were no clinical trials. They didn't have to test it on animals. The drug does what it does to whomever chooses to smoke it.

Now let's take a drug made by a medical drug company. They put all this money into research, they do the clinical trials, and finally get approval by the FDA (a government organization I trust less and less everyday). Even if we both have the same disease, I could die from taking it, while you could be cured. Huh?

So where am I going with this? I think they're spending too much time on making chemicals. Why isn't more money being spent on developing natural remedies? I wouldn't be surprised if the cure for cancer was some obscure plant that could only be found somewhere like the Amazon rainforest or something.

[Shaggy Hiker]

If you are a programmer and do a crap job, you get fired, and they find someone else. If you are talking about cancer...the business REALLY wants the solution (the business is people, the solution is a cure)....and there is nobody else out there to hire. Who are you going to turn to if science fails? Would you like to try a witch doctor? Go right ahead, people went that route in most societies for thousands of years, so you'll have plenty of company.

But you DO provide an alternative, and it IS a viable alternative. Only one problem: It has been in practice for decades if not millenia, and so far it has failed to provide an answer, either. If some culture was free of cancer, and could attribute it to an herbal remedy, it has been studied (except that none exist). If an organism has been found to be free of cancer (sharks), then THEY have been studied to see whether or not the technique can be applied to humans (nothing so far).

So your suggestion was excellent, but it has been in operation in one form or another for millenia (organized teams searching for herbal remedies are probably only decades old, depending on how you count it). Do you have another option?

As for smoking weed, your example is seriously flawed. You stated yourself that you WILL get hungry, and PROBABLY sleepy. You might also become extremely paranoid, depressed, or happy. The actual results vary enormously for every drug, not just a few. With medical drugs, the actual results for some of them are so subtle that you are really looking for a modest benefit for a modest risk. However, there IS a risk to every drug I have ever heard of (side effects). In fact, every substance is considered to be toxic, it's just a matter of dose. People die every year from drinking water, so even that isn't safe. So the question you must answer for ANY drug you take for any reason (and, indeed, nearly any decision you make), is whether or not the harm is going to be greater than the benefit. Your example fell down because you stated that pot produced a general effect, and you compared that against the specific effects of other drugs. If you compared the specific effects of pot against the specific effects of other drugs, then the two are the same. Of course, you can take this to extremes if you note that the direct application of high speed lead to the brain does not always have the same result.

[Blakk_Majik]

When is the last time you heard of a person dying from smoking too much weed at one time? I'm not saying it never happened, but I've never heard of it.

I mean really, there's a medicine out for rhumetoid arthritis that has lymphoma as a possible side effect. What?!
I can take a pill to make me happy, but if I get off it, I might kill myself. Huh?!

I still feel that the keys to today's ailments are in the Earth, not in a lab. And until science convinces me otherwise, the guys in the lab coats are just as useful as NASA.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Virtually every successful drug we have ever found has come from the earth, so I certainly wouldn't disagree that there will be others coming from them.

I just took a pair of aspirin, since I am attending a virtual web-based conference while walking on a treadmill (this is the lunch break), and having covered 16 miles during the morning session, my feet are a bit sore. Therefore, I resorted to what I have called my "second half" drug since breaking a bone in my foot during a hike twenty years ago. A pair of aspirin around noon will keep me going for the afternoon session.

The reason I bring that up is that aspirin has some terrible side effects for some people. For me, during the hike with the broken bone, it led to anemia that robbed me of endurance and slowed my pace until I figured out what was going on. That's a pretty minor side effect, which I can manage around. Thus I continue to take aspirin as needed, despite the side effect. However, some people have suggested that the FDA would not approve aspirin if it were proposed today because of the severity of the side effects (which can include death for some people). Of course, all the other drugs approved for the same types of minor pain relief, such as acetaminophen and ibuprofen, come with their own side effects like liver damage, so you are litterally picking your poison when you choose to use any of those drugs.

Aspirin is a naturally occuring substance that was used for hundreds or thousands of years in it's natural herbal form before being identified and concentrated into the pills I just took. A fine example of not only the benefits that can be derived from natural sources, as well as the potential harm that can derive from those natural sources as well.

I'm not sure what you meant about smoking weed, though. I didn't think that I had stated or implied that pot had death as a side effect. Was it in reference to every substance having a lethal dosage? If so, then the fact that I don't know what the lethal dosage happens to be for pot really doesn't make any difference to the point.

[capsulecorpjx]

If you are a programmer and do a crap job, you get fired, and they find someone else. If you are talking about cancer...the business REALLY wants the solution (the business is people, the solution is a cure)....and there is nobody else out there to hire. Who are you going to turn to if science fails? Would you like to try a witch doctor? Go right ahead, people went that route in most societies for thousands of years, so you'll have plenty of company.

But you DO provide an alternative, and it IS a viable alternative. Only one problem: It has been in practice for decades if not millenia, and so far it has failed to provide an answer, either. If some culture was free of cancer, and could attribute it to an herbal remedy, it has been studied (except that none exist). If an organism has been found to be free of cancer (sharks), then THEY have been studied to see whether or not the technique can be applied to humans (nothing so far).

So your suggestion was excellent, but it has been in operation in one form or another for millenia (organized teams searching for herbal remedies are probably only decades old, depending on how you count it). Do you have another option?

As for smoking weed, your example is seriously flawed. You stated yourself that you WILL get hungry, and PROBABLY sleepy. You might also become extremely paranoid, depressed, or happy. The actual results vary enormously for every drug, not just a few. With medical drugs, the actual results for some of them are so subtle that you are really looking for a modest benefit for a modest risk. However, there IS a risk to every drug I have ever heard of (side effects). In fact, every substance is considered to be toxic, it's just a matter of dose. People die every year from drinking water, so even that isn't safe. So the question you must answer for ANY drug you take for any reason (and, indeed, nearly any decision you make), is whether or not the harm is going to be greater than the benefit. Your example fell down because you stated that pot produced a general effect, and you compared that against the specific effects of other drugs. If you compared the specific effects of pot against the specific effects of other drugs, then the two are the same. Of course, you can take this to extremes if you note that the direct application of high speed lead to the brain does not always have the same result.

Shaggy you're misunderstanding us. We're not saying switch away from Science to "witchdoctor", we're saying switch from one Scientific Lab to another.

For example, say we're funding cancer research in a huge lab at Duke Univeristy, 5 years pass, little or no progress at all? Funding will be switched to a new lab, at a different university, maybe the Lab at UNC or even a private company.

All this with a large, 10 to 50 billion dollar reward to be divided among the individuals who made contributions to the cure.

It's the Carrot and the Stick.

[techgnome]

There's a flaw with that.... 1) The assumption that there's ONE lab doing research... odds are, it's being conducted at hundreds of labs.... 2) What's "progress"? is it something that works? Or the elimination of a 100 things that don't? Let's say lab A finds out that ideas 1-1000 don't work.... but since nothing works, funding is pulled.... and sent to the next lab ... Lab A wants to protect their work, and so doesn't share the 1000 things that didn't work.... so LAb B does the same 1000 tests... which still don't work, but guess what? Time's up... repeat with next lab. Meanwhile Lab E discoveres that if they fake their results, they can milk it for a little more time.... and that takes us right back to where this thread started... weeding out those taking advantage of the system.

-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

That's how it currently works. People write proposals for grants that are funded or not. There are lots more facilities writing proposals than there is money to go around, so the better granting agencies use a peer review process to decide who gets funding. Sometimes the peer review process is wildly partisan because the peers doing the reviewing have a stake in the game (this happened just recently for fish research in the NW, so I'm not talking about just medical science). Sometimes the decisions are almost laughably bizarre. For example, a friend of mine lost his job when his funding was cut (actually, he moved to a different project who's principle had resigned, but his old job ceased to exist). His project was held up as the finest example of an excellent, well-designed, well-run, productive research project...but the funding agency changed priorities and zeroed them out in almost the same breath.

This may not be the case when it comes to drug companies. I don't know how private research institutions are run, but academic and government systems are run on the basis of researchers competing for very limitted resources, and the competition can be very intense, as people lose their jobs if they can't bring in enough cash to pay for their own positions (I have a friend who just left one school because he wasn't able to get enough grants). There are probably sweetheart deals out there, but they are the exception rather than the norm. On the other hand, those who have demonstrated good track records are able to survive a few duds, as it happens in most fields.

Though, now that I think about it, what is a good track record? For private drug companies, the product is probably a marketable drug, but that's not generally the objective of a scientist. After all, a marketable drug needs to do more than be effective, it has to have tolerable side effects (cyanide kills cancer 100% of the time in very low doses...would you buy it?), and it has to be deliverable in that the drug needs to be something that can be reliably synthesized in a consumable form with some reasonable shelf life. Thus, the first step is that the scientist comes up with a theory as to how something will work. They then have to design an experiment to test the concept. Since there are so many interactions, and since cancer is our own cells, so we need something that will kill part of us but not all of us, most ideas die at this stage along with the test subjects. If something looks promising, then it moves out of the basic research arena into a product development arena where a synthesis process needs to be developed (do you remember when that yew bark proved to have a useful agent? We risked driving the humble yew to extinction before a synthetic path was developed). If the process is viable, then the drug moves back to the research arena for applied testing. This usually involves a different type of researcher, as the mechanism is agreed upon. Most drugs that reach this stage die at this stage. One of the more notable in the last few decades was probably Interferon that looked so promising that it received a major feature-story write-up in Time magazine back in the 80's (might even have made the cover, but I could be wrong about that)...then it proved to be ineffective in actual trials and faded away fast.

The research world is the most competitive arena I am aware of in the work place. It's far more competitive than coding, far more competitive even than business...though if I knew more about show business, I might rank it lower.

Therefore, when I see the vast amount of money poured into cancer research, and the relatively modest advances that have resulted, I don't first assume venality or corruption, but rather that the problem is vastly greater than people generally realize. This is borne out by reading the journals, which I still partake in, though it's not my field. Every time I encounter another article where the understanding of cellular processes gets re-written from what I learned in college and grad school, due to a series of recent experiments, I am further amazed at the complexity of the cell, and further impressed by both how much we have learned, and how far we still have to go.

We simply don't know enough to answer the biggest medical questions, which is why they still ARE the biggest medical questions. In the meantime, we have wiped out smallpox, hammered TB, nearly eradicated polio, and have a steadily weakening arsenal against the major bacteriological diseases that were the leading cause of death for most of human existence. If there are still high hurdles yet before us, it is simply that they really are that high.

[capsulecorpjx]

That's how it currently works. People write proposals for grants that are funded or not. There are lots more facilities writing proposals than there is money to go around, so the better granting agencies use a peer review process to decide who gets funding. Sometimes the peer review process is wildly partisan because the peers doing the reviewing have a stake in the game (this happened just recently for fish research in the NW, so I'm not talking about just medical science). Sometimes the decisions are almost laughably bizarre. For example, a friend of mine lost his job when his funding was cut (actually, he moved to a different project who's principle had resigned, but his old job ceased to exist). His project was held up as the finest example of an excellent, well-designed, well-run, productive research project...but the funding agency changed priorities and zeroed them out in almost the same breath.

This may not be the case when it comes to drug companies. I don't know how private research institutions are run, but academic and government systems are run on the basis of researchers competing for very limitted resources, and the competition can be very intense, as people lose their jobs if they can't bring in enough cash to pay for their own positions (I have a friend who just left one school because he wasn't able to get enough grants). There are probably sweetheart deals out there, but they are the exception rather than the norm. On the other hand, those who have demonstrated good track records are able to survive a few duds, as it happens in most fields.

Though, now that I think about it, what is a good track record? For private drug companies, the product is probably a marketable drug, but that's not generally the objective of a scientist. After all, a marketable drug needs to do more than be effective, it has to have tolerable side effects (cyanide kills cancer 100% of the time in very low doses...would you buy it?), and it has to be deliverable in that the drug needs to be something that can be reliably synthesized in a consumable form with some reasonable shelf life. Thus, the first step is that the scientist comes up with a theory as to how something will work. They then have to design an experiment to test the concept. Since there are so many interactions, and since cancer is our own cells, so we need something that will kill part of us but not all of us, most ideas die at this stage along with the test subjects. If something looks promising, then it moves out of the basic research arena into a product development arena where a synthesis process needs to be developed (do you remember when that yew bark proved to have a useful agent? We risked driving the humble yew to extinction before a synthetic path was developed). If the process is viable, then the drug moves back to the research arena for applied testing. This usually involves a different type of researcher, as the mechanism is agreed upon. Most drugs that reach this stage die at this stage. One of the more notable in the last few decades was probably Interferon that looked so promising that it received a major feature-story write-up in Time magazine back in the 80's (might even have made the cover, but I could be wrong about that)...then it proved to be ineffective in actual trials and faded away fast.

The research world is the most competitive arena I am aware of in the work place. It's far more competitive than coding, far more competitive even than business...though if I knew more about show business, I might rank it lower.

Therefore, when I see the vast amount of money poured into cancer research, and the relatively modest advances that have resulted, I don't first assume venality or corruption, but rather that the problem is vastly greater than people generally realize. This is borne out by reading the journals, which I still partake in, though it's not my field. Every time I encounter another article where the understanding of cellular processes gets re-written from what I learned in college and grad school, due to a series of recent experiments, I am further amazed at the complexity of the cell, and further impressed by both how much we have learned, and how far we still have to go.

We simply don't know enough to answer the biggest medical questions, which is why they still ARE the biggest medical questions. In the meantime, we have wiped out smallpox, hammered TB, nearly eradicated polio, and have a steadily weakening arsenal against the major bacteriological diseases that were the leading cause of death for most of human existence. If there are still high hurdles yet before us, it is simply that they really are that high.

touché

[zaza]

My field is physics rather than biology or medicine, but I believe the systems are similar enough (and I've seen it from both the academic and industrial sides) for me to add my two cents worth.
The fundamental point of science is to find things out, NOT to deliver a cure for cancer or a new type of car etc. To have an expectation that science WILL deliver a particular result is absolutely contrary to the very nature of science; once you get into the realm of predetermining your results you've already failed. Politicians always misunderstand this, perhaps wilfully as they have every reason to want to see particular results delivered.

If you go down the road of making funding reliant upon results, in effect politicising science, you'll just end up creating an environment in which results are prioritised over scientific rigour and you'll weaken the field as a whole by rewarding poor research, which presumably is precisely the opposite effect that you intend. The misunderstanding that you have here is to associate a negative result with bad science, or bad researchers. Your assumption is that if you are a cancer researcher and you haven't discovered the cure, then the funding deserves to go to somebody who is a better researcher. That is simply not the case; people make discoveries because they don't have to go down all the blind alleys each time; other people have done that for them. It's the collective effort that makes the whole endeavour produce results, and that includes all the failed experiments.


Precisely the same argument applies to the pharmaceutical industry. There's no denying that drugs are expensive, and some prohibitively so, but consider this. Each drug that makes it to market has to cover the entire cost of its research, which includes all the failed experiments. It takes years to come up with a successful drug, and you have to pay staff, equipment, premises etc. On top of this, because it is private these companies don't share their research so each company makes the same mistakes as the others, effectively duplicating all that effort.

So there you have it; either you have the private approach, which will be costly but focused on results, or you have the public approach which will be comparatively less expensive but also less focused. In my opinion, you need to separate out the science from the engineering. Publicly fund the science (to figure out the principles and how things actually work) because what is most important there is that when a result is delivered, we can be sure that it is right. Privately fund the engineering to bring the product to the market, because we want this to be done in the most cost-efficient way.

Funnily enough, that's not too different from the model we have at the moment.



To add a personal note, I actually worked in industry in medical physics for a couple of years, doing projects centered on homogenising the base magnetic field in MRI scanners. MRI scanners are extremely expensive, BUT the costs involved in actually coming up with an entirely new way to do the fundamental science (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) in a more cost-effective, higher-resolution, manner that delivers more functionality to the end users (doctors) are also very high, and the prospect of pursuing such a goal in the knowledge that your project might actually not work in an end product is what makes them expensive.

[DeanMc]

Cancer.............. more important than social welfare.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Did you think we would stay on topic?

[DeanMc]

Not really, although the the topic has made a tangent its still mature and very interesting to read. My statement was an observation. People tend to talk more about issues they feel are more important whether they are the subject of topic or not. Carry on though this thread is becoming quite enlightening.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Actually, I think it died when capsulecorpse (I always pronounce his name this way, and certainly don't understand the correct spelling) started talking in French.

[DeanMc]

Yeah pity.

[capsulecorpjx]

Actually, I think it died when capsulecorpse (I always pronounce his name this way, and certainly don't understand the correct spelling) started talking in French.

I resent being called a corpse good sir.

**WHAP**

I challenge you to a duel!

[FunkyDexter]

I challenge you to a duel!

Surely, if you're a corpse, you've already lost.

On the subject of directed funding of cancer research damaging that research, it can also damage the testing that follows. My ex is a geneticist and her organisation tests cancer drugs before they get submitted to human and animal testing. A year or so ago a drug came through that had measurable benefits. It got tested and the results were published giving a strong indication that the testing would pass. Part of her job is to examine the theory as well as the immediately measurable resuls and when she did this she identified that the aproach they were using would have diminishing benefits over time had serious long term implications that could actually lead to the patient being far more susceptible to cancers in the future. In essence, what the drug company had produced was designed to get through initial testing and get to market but wouldn't actually have any real benefit in the long term and would actually be damaging (she did explain the scence to me but it was way above my head). She came under huge pressure from her boss not to publish her concerns because they knew that the drug company would simply so elsewhere for their testing and they represented a major source of funding for her organisation. She was being asked to put human lives at risk for the sake of a bottom line. I'm proud to say she went ahead and published anyway.

The problem is that the testing is carried out by a private company. They recieve public funding but that funding is dependent on the number of clients that source them as a service. In effect making that funding part of the package that the drug company offer them. The leverage is therefore in the drug companies interest rather than the public's. I'd have thought that, while there may be an argument for keeping research in the private sector, testing should be entirely public.

[DeanMc]

Thats a very good point.

[Blakk_Majik]

The story FunkyDexter just posted is a prime example of why I don't trust drug companies. And if you think that's an isolated event, you're smoking some really bad stuff.

It makes you wonder who the drug companies are really in this for? If they were in this for the sole purpose of helping people, why would they hide/manipulate test results/clincal results? If they can't buy the results they want from one lab, they just go to another one. And the FDA is no better, since they are pulling drugs off the market left and right that they themselves approved for sale to us. Nice to know that the government cares as much about my health as much as the greedy drug companies do.

[FunkyDexter]

I think you need to separate the concepts of companies from their employees.

Any capitalist will tell you that the purpose of a company, any company, is to make money for it's shareholdes/owners/interested parties. That applies to drug companies just as much as any other type of company. Their purpose is not to cure cancer and if they suceed in doing so that's an incidental benefit. A means to an end but not the end in itself.

The employees of the company are very different. Research scientists in particular are a motivated bunch. They're working in a career that, while hardly minimum wage, is not as well paid as they could achieve if they went into a different career (these are intelligent people after all). They're generally motivated by a sense of self worth derived from the work they carry out rather than the pay check they will collect at the end of the month.

It's much the same for us developers. I like writing programs. My company likes making money. The fact that those two motivations compliment each other is the only reason they employ me and the only reason I work for them.

[Blakk_Majik]

I understand that the employees may want to actually cure the disease, just as I'm sure there are research scientists that want to cure disease. However, the money lies in "band-aiding" the problem, so to speak. It's simple math that I will make more money selling a million people a pill for the next 40 years of their life than I will make curing a million people of a disease one time. That is unless, I make the cure expensive enough to compensate for the lost revenue of them not taking my drug for a long time. At this point, the cost is so high that only those with either really great insurance or those who are very financially sound (both of which don't apply to most Americans) will be able to afford it.

This, in turn, means it is completely within the realm of possiblity for one to assume that cures may exist, but are simply not made available.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Great, I go away for a couple weeks and end up in a duel with a zombie. What do I have to do, bring him back to life?

That pressure that FD mentioned isn't restricted to issues concerning money, either. I was under similar pressure for about the stupidest reason, but many here have felt the same: My boss felt that his boss wouldn't like what I had to say, and tried to supress it.

I have no doubt that there are bean counters who will only do what maximizes profit, and I have no love for the drug companies, despite reluctantly agreeing with them in general, but far more decisions are made based on fear of offense than financial concerns.

[zaza]

I understand that the employees may want to actually cure the disease, just as I'm sure there are research scientists that want to cure disease. However, the money lies in "band-aiding" the problem, so to speak. It's simple math that I will make more money selling a million people a pill for the next 40 years of their life than I will make curing a million people of a disease one time. That is unless, I make the cure expensive enough to compensate for the lost revenue of them not taking my drug for a long time. At this point, the cost is so high that only those with either really great insurance or those who are very financially sound (both of which don't apply to most Americans) will be able to afford it.

This, in turn, means it is completely within the realm of possiblity for one to assume that cures may exist, but are simply not made available.

Nah, drugs companies spend a lot of money promoting their products. If you've ever read a medical journal (such as the BMJ), you'll notice it's stuffed full of advertising. They sponsor conferences. I suspect that in the US they openly advertise on TV.
The first drugs company that can say "We've cured cancer, and look at what else we've got for your haemorrhoids" will pull in the cash like nothing else.