What does "losing all grounds for discussion" mean? Discussion with who? The decision makers responsible? How are we discussing anything with them now? Nobody knows their names, or at least not enough people do. What is the value of discussion with them anyway? Are we going to talk them out of being absolute bottom-feeding assholes?

To be clear I am not advocating vigilante mobs of any sort. I would like to see these people's homes with protesters in front though.

I think we agree on the goal, not on the methods. It took decades for these companies to become what they are. If you listen to some people you should just burn them to the ground and go personal vendetta mod on their executives.

What I'm saying is that we should be careful about how we do it, because in fine the "how" is as import as the "why". Things don't happen in a vacuum, you have to deconstruct them and get to the root causes, otherwise you're just rushing to another failed system. Let's say you manage to get the execs out, what do you think will happen ? The new ones will turn everything 180 degrees and sell drugs at loss ? No, why ? Because the whole system is tweaked for profit.

Every time health pops up on HN, the majority of Americans defend their system and criticise the European way. There is a bit of a cognitive dissonance here, people can't expect a private/for profit company to do the right thing when it comes to public health. On top of that the demographic of people who voted Trump very much intersects with the one needing cheap health care, it clearly indicates that people are voting against their own interests in term of health, that alone would hint that there is a much bigger thing going on than "greedy execs control everything".

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2016/11/19/illness-a...

I think there's a lot of room between "we can't know their names lest any of them get inconveniently shamed" and "burn them to the ground".

But yes, I agree with the rest of what you're saying at least partially. Root causes are important, I just think there's a danger of going from that principle to never actually doing anything because we're looking for one more link in the chain and ignoring the assholes right in front of us.

It's the civilized discussion of the past that has created this problem, and you're right, dead people are the result.

The only solution that works every time is for enough of us get angry and voice that anger in concrete ways that shame and vilify those captains of industry (and henchman politicians) who blithely choose to harm other people because there's more profit in it than giving a damn.

That's not the most convincing of all possible arguments when the problem is dead people - who really didn't need to die.

Herein lies a big problem I have with the current culture in the US. We celebrate our independence (July 4th is right around the corner) but we do not celebrate the choices that led to it. A person can barely even hint at the cost of such social change without crossing the lines of what society now deems acceptable discourse.

I am having a hard time to see how I can tell people who can no longer afford lifesaving medicine due to profit maximization to value a civil discussion culture higher then their survival. Or differently put to value my principles higher then their survival. And that is the current situation, a decades long discussion about how the right to profit trumps peoples survival. And that situation has a running tab in the form of people dying so that people profiting on that misery and despair are not confronted with the consequences of their actions. All of this not even touching the problem of neutrality in a life or death situation of out powered people. Desmond Tutus mouse and elephant come to mind.

> I am having a hard time to see how I can tell people who can no longer afford lifesaving medicine due to profit maximization to value a civil discussion culture higher then their survival.

Tell them to act in a civilised way and to not vote for Trump who clearly stated his stance on public health.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2016/11/19/illness-a...

The individuals might not survive that long. Or might not quietly accepts the situation if the majority votes for Trump regardless. I understand that dying quietly would be less of a hassle but dying on easily preventable causes rarely is friction less.

I would also suggest asking yourself why you view protests outside of peoples houses less civilized then them condemning people to death to make a bigger profit.

Have you read the article? There's dead people already.

If you haven't ever done so, please go and read 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail', by Martin Luther King, Jr. I won't try and quote any relevant sections here, as it is far better to read the whole thing;

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

> That's how you end up with dead people.

Bossnapping and other militant protest forms are well known to French protest culture and it's rare that people die there.

Yes, it works where the protest culture is already in place. You can't ask Americans to do the same, someone will inevitably bring a gun and it'll go south very fast, as it happens almost daily in all sort of public demonstrations, peaceful or not, in the US.

There is no points of comparison between the US and France when it comes to protests. LA riots, black panthers, vs may 68 and yellow jackets...

Regarding LA riots, black panthers, vs may 68 and yellow jackets, there's a world (an ocean?) of differences between the reasons which lead to each of the events, with the situation of blacks in America having nothing to do with the situation in France today and the same with the start of the LA riots vs the start of May 68.

So, get rid of the guns.

> That's how you end up with dead people.

We already have dead people, friend.

We must secure the existence of civil argument and a future for healthy discourse

Ouch. I thought I was being cutting, but you win hands down.

>No matter how fucked up these things are you don't want to lower yourself to their standards, you'll lose all grounds for discussion.

This is the classic centrist liberalism argument that we have to maintain civility at all costs.

The time for civility was back when the drug companies were doing things like pushing bad legislation (that didn't directly hurt people) or the like.

The time for civility is over. People are dying because drug companies are too greedy and unregulated. The only way to get them to stop being utter vacuous wastes of oxygen is, in the long term, regulation. But in the short term? Harass the fuck out of them. I have exactly zero sympathy for the pharma execs that are profiteering off human misery.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not what the site is for. Worse, it destroys what it is for (curiosity), so we ban accounts that do it. If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd be grateful. There's more explanation here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

>The only way to get them to stop being utter vacuous wastes of oxygen is, in the long term, regulation.

Anything specific?

I mean it depends on the context, right? I just mean that generally speaking, when there is nothing forcing people to be decent, it is clearly not simply enough for "wow this is morally reprehensible" to be a deterrent.

For profiteering off generic medication, I think some sort of subsidized natural monopoly producing and selling generics would work. Clearly, there isn't enough profit in the generics to make money off them without acting in a malicious anti-competitive manner, so incentivizing it otherwise must be necessary in a market system.

Alternatively, have a purely nationalized "company" that's funded by taxpayers and "sells" generics at cost. I think the value to society of cheap, readily available generics make this worth it even if it's not something that could survive in the market.

I work in biotech/pharma, and not all of us are greedy sacks of shit as some people seem to think. I'm not an exec and cant speak to their ethics broadly, but like any industry where people make big bucks you have greedy asshole-y people here too. But coming back to regulation, the FDA's primary mandate is the safety of the populace, its not to create economic incentives or disincentives. The FDA has been slowly increasing the standard required for compliance, which in turn raises the operational cost to ensure safety/efficacy/reliability/etc (obviously a very good thing IMO) but that in turn has also increased both the incidence and the cost of failure. When one product that sucked up a cool 10-50M of capital fails, the company has to recoup the cost elsewhere. Of course nobody wants to take a haircut themselves, so they just bump up the prices. I think a lot of this has to do with the ways companies in general pretty much have to absorb market risk to give a false sense of stability to their workforce. Maybe if our corporate system were structured where it was OK to fail, people might be less inclined to mask the failure on the balance sheet to please Wall Street.

>Alternatively, have a purely nationalized "company" that's funded by taxpayers and "sells" generics at cost. I think the value to society of cheap, readily available generics make this worth it even if it's not something that could survive in the market.

Well, maybe.. I'll keep an open mind but when has the government done anything cheaply or efficiently? They will have to sub-contract at-least some parts of it out just like they do with weapons or infrastructure or other projects. Government contractors are going to milk the system with their '$100 screwdriver' invoices.

> This is the classic centrist liberalism argument

Is this the step 1 of the identity politics game ? Paint someone as X Y Z and be done ? In what world being civilised is constrained to "classic centrist liberals" ?

All politics is identity politics. Putting "identity" in front of it is a weasel word to deflect, as you've just done.

My point still stands. Remaining civilized at all costs in the face of incivility is as insane as trying to calmly debate someone as they are in the process of murdering you.