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I understand why you don't like this comment.

I don't understand why this is worth your commenting on but you're silent on the airing of somebody's dirty laundry between their death and their funeral.

What this signals to the Hacker News community is disturbing to the extent that I'm not sure I want to spend any more time here.

Simply assuming that the proper allocation of resources is easy in this or any other industry is wishful thinking. If drugs have any substitutes the demand side already goes from easy to hard. When drug treatments can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars we have more demand for medical treatments than we have supply. Even the concept of providing drugs "at cost" is complicated because costs vary not only with the price of inputs but with amount supplied.

On the supply side the inputs for the pharmaceutical industry aren't infinite.

Whether it's chemists, chemicals, warehouse space, machinery, or time all of these things are rivalrous. When you put a chemist on one project you take them away from another. If you put a chemical in one drug you take it away from another. If you make a factory produce one drug it stops producing another.

In order to solve the problem of maximizing the benefit of the resources being used we can use a market that uses prices and profits to coordinate itself, or we can have a group of really smart people trying to reason out what is needed where. Markets are historically good at solving this type of problem, bureaucrats are historically bad at it.

If a new drug isn't useful it doesn't matter if the manufacturer has exclusive rights to it.

If people are buying/being prescribed drugs that don't improve their health that's a different problem that won't be solved by changing intellectual property law.

My argument only requires that people own their own property/labor and have the freedom to trade those things with others.

Without those freedoms we're in some dystopian/totalitarian state.

Governmental regulations (safety, etc.) make the cost of developing a new drug extraordinary. Without exclusive patents on the back end companies won't have a reason to foot the bill on the front end.

Even without regulations developing and testing a new drug wouldn't be economical if somebody else could steal your formula the moment you figure out that it works.

Clueless movements elect clueless representatives who mirror their clueless beliefs.

It absolutely makes a difference. There's no way to properly regulate an industry without understanding it.

But like I said above, people don't care about fracking because they don't even understand what it is. It's just a buzzword people use when what they really want is to stop the entire industry. Or maybe they hate how our society runs. Or they hate rich people. They're angry about something but it's almost never the practice of using water pressure to break rocks thousands of feet beneath the earth's surface.

Stop leaks in what process? Fracking or oil and natural gas production?

Do you have some evidence that more methane is being released into the atmosphere during the weeks of fracking than during the years of production?

> Fracking involves drilling an oil or gas well vertically and then horizontally into a shale formation.

No, that's a horizontal well. Vertical wells get fracked all the time. Non-shale wells get fracked all the time. Fracking is any time you intentionally fracture rock formations with pressurized fluids.

> ...studies that show fracking operations leak, vent, or flare between 2 and 6 percent of the gas produced, Howarth said.

That's not fracking. That's leaking, venting and flaring. Those things may happen on wells that have been fracked but that doesn't mean they're caused by fracking.

If you're opposed to methane entering the atmosphere trying to stop the breaking of rocks a mile beneath the earth's surface is a bizarre way to solve that problem. At that point you're not trying to stop leaking, you're trying to stop production and for some reason are trying to do it under the guise of stopping fracking.

> For example, would you start the y-axis on a graph of global temperature at –273.15°C (absolute zero)

> This is a lazy statement

Yes it is.

> This is missing what the graph is trying to convey.....It only makes the graph more readable.

The problem is that so many decisions are made trying to tell the right story that eventually the underlying data barely matters at all. If top 400 doesn't work maybe top 100 will, or top 10, or top 1000. If going back to 1950 doesn't work then maybe 1960 or 1940.

If you don't care about things like best practices you can simply choose the shape of the graph you want and go from there. Maybe this time they did it with effective tax rates. It doesn't matter.

There's your tax bracket and then there's what you actually pay after deductions, loopholes, etc.

The common argument is that the 70% rate of the 1950's was never actually paid by anybody and the effective tax rate was much lower. By looking at actual taxes paid that entire argument can be skipped.

Anybody who studies historical taxes professionally should know this, so when they use a worse measure it looks like they're doing so because it fits their narrative.

That has to be the worst x-axis on a graph I've seen in a long time. The grid lines measure 0-10th, 20-30th, 40-50th, 60-70th, 80-90th, 95-99th, 99.99th, Top 400? That's atrocious, not only is it non-linear, not only does it have a line with regularly spaced dots giving the impression of continuity, but it skips from percent groups to absolute numbers?

If we're talking about historical taxes why are we looking at tax rates and not taxes paid? Taxes paid by percentage income would be a huge improvement, and absolute taxes seems like an essential number for this conversation.

I'm stunned when I see things like this associated with major universities and newspapers.

edit: The y-axis also goes from 10-70% instead of 0-100%. So both axes are suspicious and the numbers being presented are known for their inaccuracy.

> Could you elaborate?

The idea is that a good publishing record gives one better career prospects. By accepting and rejecting papers journals are giving a signal used by academia in their hiring and promotion decisions.

If you're an administrator overseeing a scientific department your skills are probably in administration, not chemistry or physics or what have you. What you would really like is for a team of top chemists to tell you who the best chemists among your staff or hiring prospects are. That level of consulting would be cost prohibitive but the journals are providing a similar service that is apparently being exchanged for exclusive publishing rights.