Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman wrote a typically informative article on how evil drug companies price gouge consumers and lie about how much it costs them to develop drugs. Lets take a look. Drug prices in the United States are out of control, and rising. The reason is that the United States permits pharmaceuticals to…
July, 2002
-
-
I was a bit surprised to see a number of otherwise sensible people, including Glenn Reynolds, come out in support of a bill that would make it legal for Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canadian pharamacies where some medicines (though not all) are cheaper than in the United States. Canada has lower drug prices…
-
I’ve read a lot of commentary about Microsoft’s Palladium initiative over the past couple weeks, but Dave Winer manages to sum it all up in a single sentence, They’re putting a lot of effort into something that no one I know wants. They should just apply truth in marketing and call it Xbox II. Microsoft…
-
The BBC reported last week on an independent review board set up in Scotland to look at a bizarre issue — who should get the organs of children after they die in Scottish hospitals? The only thing more bizarre than a commission to look into that question is the practice that led to it —…
-
A couple months ago the media was trumpeting research claiming too much sleep could shorten a person’s life span. Now researchers at Pennsylvania State University claim that women are much better sleepers than men and speculate this might explain why women live so much longer, on average, than men. The Pennsylvania study, which only examined…
-
Here’s one way that appears more and more likely to increase your life span — eat as few calories as is possible while still maintaining a “healthy” diet. I put healthy in quotes there on purpose, because in many ways health is a subjective criteria and many people might not be willing to give up…
-
When Dutch political candidate Pim Fortuyn was shot and killed by an animal rights activist, an official funeral was held in the Netherlands even though ultimately Fortuyn’s body would be interred in an Italian cemetary. So they’re finally getting around to digging up his coffin to ship it to Italy, which isn’t that odd, but…
-
The Onion has an interesting take one industry that can be expected to lobby hard for their right to spam. (Anyone want to start a pool on how long it takes a Chinese newspaper to report that as true?)
-
EFF co-founder John Gilmore is filing a lawsuit attempting to overturn regulations requiring people to show their identification at airports. Gilmore says such requirements are unconstitutional. It is difficult to imagine any scenario in which a court does not simply point to Sept. 11 and rule that requiring identification or air travelers is well within…
-
John Robb and Dave Winer take at face value Alan Greenspan’s assertion that his data are free of spin. Winer writes, Very interesting note on John Robb’s weblog about Alan Greenspan’s number crunching that routes around the noise added by corrupt management. “We do have a set of profits data which, for all practical purposes,…