Jump to content

TwiceHorn

Full Members
  • Posts

    38466
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    2

Everything posted by TwiceHorn

  1. Sink the Gooners! Ooorah!
  2. Or maybe helping run the family-owned construction company in rural Georgia. Y'know where they hire all the PhD level framers, roofers, and concrete-pourers.
  3. Like you, I tend to prefer to buy a couple of years old, with mileage under 30k. And, I share your views on a lot of those vehicles. Looks like the good news here is that you only want/need to drive it for a couple of years assuming you carry through your threat to buy a Scout. So, depending on the vehicle warranty and exact age, you should get approximately that two years out of the standard warranty, another year or so from a CPO, so that may be something worth considering. Also, on the sedan-end of things, you might wish to add gently used Cadillac CT4 (small) and CT5. The depreciation situation on those is favorable for the gently-used buyer and they are more fun drives than the Lexii, as a general proposition, even with the base engine. Up the ante to the -V, non-blackwing, and you have a pretty fun rig that's different from the ubiquitous krautwagens and lexii, yet possessing a certain upper-middle dignity.
  4. But management often does not and treats them like a commodity.
  5. TwiceHorn

    3D Printing

    What's the issue with "engineering materials"? Outgassing? It seems that using filaments is the enabling basic technology. That's a pretty good idea. As I have mentioned, I did some patent work in this area probably 25 years ago and the state of the art was attempting to form planar layers. I wonder who came up with the filament thing?
  6. America has always had this banal aspect to its popular culture. It didn't stop us from being the greatest technological power on earth for the last 50-75 years. And, yeah, sure, we depended on the odd Hungarian, Kraut, Brit etc. to pull it off. The main problem has been the underfunding and devaluation of public education that comes from you-know-who. And let's not forget a culture of unrestrained capitalism that redirects some of the best minds and best educated into dubious rich-making endeavors like VC and PE.
  7. Laura Loomer, the hero no one thought we needed or wanted. Finally Trumpco and Musk have scorned a bipolar OCD wackjob that occasionally actually does know what she's talking about. This is fucking hilarious.
  8. Any monopoly, even a temporary one, on a product like a drug is going to evoke this reaction. But, pharma is a research and development intensive industry and the limited monopoly is intended to facilitate or incentivize investment in such endeavors and the innovation they produce. For all pharma's faults and fuckery, this is fundamentally true. Maybe a shorter term is in order, but no one else in the world is doing that. As mentioned previously, a lot of the gambits employed by pharma in the patent system have been legally removed, and more are in-progress and have been for years. Still, when it takes several years to work a patent through the system, and it lasts for about two decades more, it takes some time for those change to ripple through to the present day. Remember that the patents we're bitching about today were filed 20 years ago. The other thing is the price itself. It's not the price the market will bear if no one is actually paying that price. Europe grants patents with essentially the same effect and duration as US Patents, but they pay a lot less, or at least the publicized price is a lot less. Same is true in every other first-world country. There are a lot of other things going on here besides patents.
  9. You're my hero!
  10. TwiceHorn

    3D Printing

    Significantly under. The guys above can fill you in on the latest and greatest for home use.
  11. TwiceHorn

    3D Printing

    They're in fairly massive use in industry for prototyping parts and have been for a decade or more. A few companies make small runs of production parts using them, as well.
  12. Are you wearing a fez in your profile pic?
  13. No, Vivek, they hire foreign-born engineers and scientists because they can pay them less and they're essentially indentured during their H1B.
  14. Well, hiring recycled P5 coaches is no guarantee, either. See, e.g Brian Kelly; see also Jimbo Fisher. Coach hiring is hard.
  15. I don't work for pharma, that's not my area. I am, however, a patent lawyer.
  16. Fuck. Your. Own. Face.
  17. More to the point, the major complaint about patents is extension of a patent monopoly beyond the initial 20-years-from-filing term. Since the 1995 changes to the patent laws, that has become less of an issue, because all patents in a family of related patents expire on the same day. The other major complaint seems to be "broadening" the monopoly beyond the basic drug composition. Yes, pharma files a shitload of patents, often on things beyond or peripheral to the original composition and dosage and method of manufacturing, creating an alleged "patent thickpolet." But the reality is that the thicket boils down to a few basic patents and the broadened monopoly is more a theoretical construct and not a real impediment. The rest of the problems, and I'd submit the bigger problems are external to the patent system or very specific to drug-related patent legislation, that maybe should be repealed or refined. For example, in that I-Mak paper you cited, one of the more alarming stats is that Enbrel seems to go off-patent in the US in 2029 versus 2016 in the EU. What happened there is Amgen's predecessor licensed the composition from UT and applied for a series of patents on top of UTs that expired in 2016. It was one of the first biologics invented and approved for a therapeutic use. But where things went different is that Roche applied for a patent on manufacturing such drugs that proved to be hugely important to the industry. Amgen bought that technology and patent family, extending the monopoly, not on Enbrel, but on the method of manufacturing TNF inhibitors and similar drugs that seems to be indispensable to the technology. That set of patents expires in 2029 in the US, through a quirk relating to the 1995 patent law changes. Europe, on the other hand, has always had 20-year-from-filing terms, so the Roche/Amgen patents expired at approximately the same time. So, like shit software patents filed in the 80s and early 90s that fueled the "troll problem." it will take some time for pre-1995 patents to shake out of the system so that everything expires at the same time. Like the "troll problem," there are some anomalies in the system that will work themselves out and probably shouldn't be "reacted to" at this late date.
  18. I never said any of that. I find the patent analyses of outfits like I-Mak to be rather facile, however. The patent system as applied to pharma has some peculiarities that are not generic to the patent system as a whole. Some are specific to drugs, as in patent term extensions and the treatment of generics under Hatch-Waxman. Other problems are more directly tied to the FDA, which grants exclusivity by name and de facto in ways unrelated to the patent system. Any efforts at patent reform aimed at restraining pharma need to carefully do just that, so as not to fuck it up for the other thousands of users of the patent system. But with interested parties whipping up uninformed outrage, I'm not confident that's going to happen. Also, note that the proposed solutions above are mostly all outside of the patent system.
  19. Well, that's not usually the reality. It is true that pharma milks the living shit out of the patent system and every other legal/regulatory regime applicable to them. But, in almost every patent thicket, it boils down to a relatively small handful of patents that have competitive value, and those tend to be focused on the actual technological merit of the invention, rather than some peripheral, possibly trivial bullshit. If you drill down on any of the alleged patent thickets, you'll find that there are usually fewer than 10 patents, in one country, at least, that are enforcing the monopoly. And, expiration dates matter. Tremendously. It doesn't matter how many patents cover something if they all expire on the same day: they're off-patent on that day. And, generic manufacturers aren't helpless. They're as sophisticated as the "innovators," but lack the leg up that innovation confers. They are frequently in pari delicto with the innovators in taking ANDA infringement settlements that pay them to hold off pursuing valid claims until patent expiration or some other event. In many cases, a "generic" on one drug will be "brand" or innovator on another.
  20. Bill Norton is such an ordinary, white bread name these days, it almost seems like it's made up.
  21. One thing that's wrong with her, she ain't got no tittays.
  22. Shkreli didn't even deal in patented drugs. His gambit was "orphan drugs." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug The key passage there is this: Under the ODA orphan drug sponsors qualify for seven-year FDA-administered market Orphan Drug Exclusivity (ODE), "tax credits of up to 50% of R&D costs, R&D grants, waived FDA fees, protocol assistance[10]: 660  and may get clinical trial tax incentives.[13]
  23. Just for the record, it is not the combination of any old syringe with the pharmaceutical composition that makes it patentable. The syringes have special features that are unique to the composition in question, or to the type of patient or some such. It's really just a patent on an insulin syringe or applicator. And infringement is easily avoided by selling the composition/drug in a vial, as you note. But there are some strange things going on in pharma where it seems only single-use syringes get prescribed and the vial gets left out. It is interesting to know that the analogs are an actual improvement on straight insulin. I should say very interesting in that it has improved your outcome. In the patent game more broadly, there are patented improvements that aren't really improvements, but various anomalies give them the market reception of a massive improvement. I'm not actually aware of many of those in blockbuster or important drugs, other than the syringe-type scenario, which I guess is like prescribing the branded over the generic, but dialed to 11.
  24. Of course I'm aware of patent thickets, I do this for a living. The patents in a thicket all expire on the same day One of the main things driving the US problem with generics is that filing an ANDA is considered an act of infringement, so a potential generic doesn't have to be made, used or sold in the US (the usual acts of infringement) before a patent owner can sue. Otherwise, a generic manufacturer could be approved and ready to sell on patent expiration, but not here. That's not applicable to any other kind of patent. It's the result of pharma lobbying.
×
×
  • Create New...