The RCMP, reports of the Country of Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Mounted_Police). And the RCMP is "a police service for the whole of Canada to be used in the enforcement of the laws of the Dominion, but at the same time available for the enforcement of law generally in such provinces as may desire to employ its services."
The most important part is the RCMP enforcement in provinces is at the DESIRE of the provinces, in this case The Ontario Provincial Government.
There is a giant chasm between "F* Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad".
Some people would like you to believe it's close, and they would be wrong. Stalin murdered/tortured people en masse. Trudeau oversaw a government (democratically elected mine you) through a once in a century pandemic.
The convoy of protesters made a point, was allow to make it for sufficient period of time, and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.
When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.
At some point, enough is enough. The Pandemic ended, public heath was restore, and none of what the protesters did mattered. None of the protesters continue to be persecuted by the Government of Canada, Ontario, or the City.
>There is a giant chasm between "F* Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad".
There might well be a giant chasm between Trudeau and Stalin, that's a matter of proper objective measurement which I don't think is easy and certainly has never been done. There is no chasm whatsoever between "fuck Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad". Not even much semantically. In choosing one politician/bureaucrat/whatever over another, I do not agree that anyone ever need justify their choices. Someone saying "I've stopped supporting this politician" whether don't politely or rudely, is valid. Protesting need not have any more message than this.
If protesting did require something more sophisticated than the assertion that one no longer supports them, then the weaseliest politicians and other charlatans could abuse that requirement (in fact, they already try to do so, and apologists make that easier for them to attempt it).
>and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.
It's unclear that a majority disagreed. It's unclear to me that there remains a majority at all in Canada.
>When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.
Again, I'm not sure that's reality. If they could be deluded into thinking there were more of them than there were, what makes you immune to the reverse?
>and none of what the protesters did mattered.
We at least agree that it didn't matter in the ways that they hoped. But it mattered otherwise, when we saw the Canadian government use unjustifiable tactics to punish them even before they had been convicted of any crimes.
>None of the protesters continue to be persecuted
Well gee. When you put it like that, that "none *continue* to be persecuted" the complaints do sound kind of silly.
Encanto's villain is the concept of generational trauma and manifested by grandma. I believe she isn't evil, just traumatized and passing it on to the next generation unwittingly. Others believe her to be evil because real life people don't stop being who they are after a song number.
I think it's a really innovative villain because generational trauma is real and lots of people have to deal with it. It some times takes more than one generation to leave a vicious cycle.
Also, "We Don't Talk About Bruno" serves the role of a Villain Song in Encanto and roughly the place in the story where the Villain Song fits, but beautifully subverts expectations and illustrates the generational trauma as its consequences in gossip and hearsay in a rather strong way, while also being the kind of "banger" and preternatural earworm that a good Villain Song can be.
No, the parent comment should experience them in the way I love dystopian fiction, at arms length. They should also make sure it never makes it to their corner of reality.
Judging from the chef's response -- linked twice in the comments on the OP -- they're quite serious; the chef regards himself as an avant-garde artist.
As to how they got, not one but IIRC three, Michelin stars I can only speculate:
* They got them a while ago, and weren't quite as avant-garde back then. (In order to stay avant-garde, you have to get constantly more outré?)
* The menu fluctuates depending on availability of ingredients and the chef's mood; the Michelin reviewers just got lucky and arrived on a better day.
The point is that we should reconsider giving (temporary) monopolies to companies that are based public research.
I suggest that we should give merek the for profit monopoly, but allow for non profit manufacturing. If another organization wants to make the vaccine but not derive profit from the process, let them.
Manufacturing takes time and money to develop. Revenue should pay for those costs. The non-profit gains experience, but no profit. The for-profit gains profit. If the for-profit decides to raise prices too high, there will be a willing and capable competitor waiting in the wings.
This is completely incoherent. Consider a book author who has a monopoly on for profit publishing, but anyone else can publish for no profit.
The book author’s expected profits would plummet as it would be the wild west in production.
What you’re really saying is “we should pay massively less for vaccine development”. Which again, sounds nice, but....why would anyone have developed a vaccine? It’s a complex project which costs billions and has taken 12+ months while taking resources away from competing projects.
The public money is an incentive to get people to put those considerations aside and devote all their resources to vaccine development. This is a sensible public investment in a return to normalcy.
Exactly. The idea that the public funds research, but corporations can monopolies the results of that research for profit, is just disgusting. Non-exclusive deals are fine. Exclusive ones not, at least not within the country/countries that funded it; they already paid for it, and denying them access is basically theft.
Drug companies also fund their own research, to the tune of massive expenditures. What you’re suggesting would incentive these companies to disengage from partnerships involving public funding. Whoever pays for the research, each company’s goal is to profitably sell a non-generic treatment. If the only way they can do that is to eschew public funds, they will do this and the result will be less cooperation and a far reduced ability for the government to influence the direction of private sector research, and more importantly shape private sector manufacturing and the quantities of specific treatments supplied to the market.
Honestly, this is overblown. Most of the budget for these corporations goes to marketing, and the R&D mostly goes to repatenting efforts or incremental repurposings. They rarely come out with anything new, and if you look at recent years you may as well say that they never do.
You hit the nail right on the head. This is the same with basically every consumer product in capitalism, which is why it’s so inappropriate for life saving medicine.
The article that graph comes from indicates that is self-reported data from the companies which may not be consistent in what is considered R&D vs. marketing cost.
Maybe I'm mistaken here, but one such case was Sofosbuvir and its pricing was indeed very controversial.
Rant. Prime time TV is now pharma pushing their drugs with the occasional programming jammed between the ads. All those ads are coming from their extreme markups. Placebo and manufacturing artifacts aside, a molecule is a molecule, buying generics should be the default.
It is bad enough, but the real disgrace is pharma salespeople masquerading as GPs prescribing meds according to who is sponsoring them. Instead of telling people about the active ingredient they send them to buy BRAND. At least this is my experience in the 2nd world.
> I suggest that we should give merek the for profit monopoly, but allow for non profit manufacturing. If another organization wants to make the vaccine but not derive profit from the process, let them.
Not-for-profit manufacturing would have to be done by the government itself, wouldn't it? Otherwise, what other entity would and could actually pay to set that up?
Non-profit companies exist all over the US. Even non-profit drug manufacturing is done to some extent, but at a much smaller scale right now than we could have. The companies still charge money for services, the employees get paid, but the governance of the company is not focused solely on increasing profit margins. Most medical core science is done non-profit right now, at US universities. Many universities have on-premise small-scale manufacturing capabilities which serve their own needs, in medical labs but also others, like materials sciences and chemical science/engineering. There's no intrinsic reason why those couldn't be ramped up, or even pooled between physically close universities by creating a joint non-profit entity.
Patents are one tool to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Publicly funded research is a different tool. Usually, patents are based on privately funded research.
the problem is for a competitor to emerge, they have to do a lot of work after X years.
My proposal is to have a company parallel develop processes so we can have competitor after expiry immediately. The competitor can't profit from it, but it can do work at 0 cost.
Society at large is being asked to make drastic adjustments because of a collective health issue.
Why is the corporate "right to make profit" sacrosanct when nothing else is?
This is a clear case of Eminent Domain. All mandated, mandatory, Covid-19 related products must be offered at cost, or even better, we should just nationalize drug companies. We're all in this together and companies need to adjust to "new normal" as well.
The Ottawa police, report to the city of Ottawa. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Police_Service)
The Ontario police, report to the Province of Ontario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Provincial_Police)
The RCMP, reports of the Country of Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Mounted_Police). And the RCMP is "a police service for the whole of Canada to be used in the enforcement of the laws of the Dominion, but at the same time available for the enforcement of law generally in such provinces as may desire to employ its services."
The most important part is the RCMP enforcement in provinces is at the DESIRE of the provinces, in this case The Ontario Provincial Government.
Some Canadians may know the above.
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