this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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when did HN start shifting tax billionaires, dang needs to get on the case here
it's still far too early in baytime (hell, it's barely morning in eagleeast), gonna check back in on this in 2~3h for when the real fun starts
yep they've woken up now, and they're posting
two from the same esteemed poster:
so true, there's nothing conceivably wrong with making... a trillion dollars... ? on the backs of cancer patients ......?
I wonder how many dollars that is per cancer patient.
taking all people with cancer in the world right now it's at least a couple thousands of pure profits, but if you account for all future humans it's basically giving it away for free!
Yeah but this doesn't make you immortal so for the person to become a trillionaire in a reasonable timeframe (lets say two decades) that is a lot of dollars per treatment which goes to this inventor. Which compared to the payouts other inventors get would make him an asshole in their own class in exploiting sick people.
The hypothetical here is interesting in that it shows this commenter basically being a money maximiser. Say you're the inventor of this cure - you're the only one who understands it, basically it's magic. You have 2 choices:
or you can
But you see it’s your moral responsibility to earn to give™️. This means that in order to do good in the world you have to keep milking every last maximized penny out of your cancer cure. To save people. Altruism, y’see.
the problem is that trials are pretty expensive, we're talking something about billion dollars per compound range for the entire thing from phase 1 to market, and even then some 85%+ fail. (of course phase 1 failure is cheaper than phase 3 failure) at this point all IP is owned by bean counters backed by VCs or one of few mammoth biopharma gigacorporations
i understand that a lots of new drugs is developed this way: an sfba startup gets funded, does a thing, sucks VCs off for few tens of millions of dollars, tries to push something to phase 1 and then either doesn't that and collapses or does that, sells IP to someone bigger, and also collapses (because they fired biologists to hire compliance), or if they don't collapse, they repeat until they do, accumulating half-baked IP along the way
btw this is part of the reason why antibodies are such a big thing, small changes can keep these things patented basically indefinitely and at the same time these are hard enough to make that generics will be pretty hard to impossible. one sane solution would be to try some state-funded research in this area
Yeah I'm kinda familiar with the realities of drug development and testing, which is why I prefaced my comments with the solution being essentially magic. If we find hte magic bullet for cancer I expect it will be a slow grind and a lot of trial and error, so the wealth will be diluted across many entities. Not to mention the current business of cancer care might try hard to stop it...
in american context specifically, from what i understand, the biggest financial black hole are the intermediaries, all these motherfuckers whose job is to say that no, you won't get it paid out of insurance