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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
"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-pol...
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-...
[2]https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vacc...
The article makes it sounds like a more institutional decision not to move forward, which I think is rather different than attempting to spin a refusal into good personal PR.
sure, if you're a moneygrubbing piece of shit with no morals.
Which, unfortunately, under capitalism, is encouraged.
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.