What do you think of the US?

[Mari]

Just gonna leave this here....

Georgia Law Could Make Women Who Miscarry Liable For Second-Degree Murder

I wonder how it's expected of the woman to prove she didn't cause it? If you eat sushi when you're pregnant you're gonna go to jail, uh oh.

[skicoak]

The only flaw in most people's arguments against "Big Pharma" is assuming all cost overages are a result of unbridled greed.

Developing drugs is very expensive and many nations do not protect those copyrights. So Company X can develop a drug then have it reverse engineered in a secondary country, (who can market it without lab/development/testing costs)... leaving their only markets to recoup developmental costs being ones with legal protections.

Now obviously, this isn't always the case for inflated pricing but unless all world markets agree to medicinal copyright protections... a movement to cut overall pricing will lead to a heavily reduction in emerging medicines.

[Trevor]

What percentage return would you think is more reasonable for a big pharma company to receive in that case? Like how much more profit compared to manufacturing costs do you think is fair?

Personally, I'd say around 200%-300% return rate, so like 300-400 bucks per person per year at most. Even then, you're looking at paying $9 billion - $12 billion for diabetic Americans vs $37 billion

[Trevor]

it gets worse:

What's behind Georgia's anti-abortion 'heartbeat bill'?

In the first months of this year, nearly 30 states introduced some form of an abortion ban in their legislature. Fifteen have specifically been working with these so-called "heartbeat bills", that would ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

[Mari]

Yeah....How did the separation of church and state work again exactly ^^;

I guess one of the biggest issues I have is the constant hypocrisy. "Oh we keep religion out of legistlation" -> constantly pushes for archaic bs laws rooted in religion.

then the whole free speech thing which only seems to work one way. Hate Speech = Okay, critisizing said hate speech = THIS IS AGAINST MY RIGHTS TO FREE SPEECH

Well, all I can say is that I'm truly sorry for the women who will be affected by this.

[BobbyjoeX]

usually im a prejudice type when it comes to the states (like Canada is better, atleast i dont live in the states) stuff like that.... but as of political standing... the States is not as big of a joke as Canada is right now so... i call a truce. Trump wanted to make America Great again, we need someone to make Canada Proud again... and its not fucking Trudeau

i should add.... i'm not saying Trump is any better, hes also a big fucking idiot... but atleast he hasnt made enemies with every single country in existance

[Kittosaurus]

I am soo happy to be Canadian right now - I can't imagine having that right taken away from me - especially at 6 weeks! Most women wouldn't even know they're pregnant yet!

[skicoak]

For various reasons, insulin isn't the best example of this practice. Foremost of them, it doesn't have a true static development cycle. You can't recoup cost of ongoing research.

But as to the general question, about percentage of return, it's never going to be simple. If a governmental body becomes active in regulation, then you're superseding the general capitalist principals of pricing determined by supply and demand.

But there's always a moral question of placing health before profit.

Ideally, a humane society finds a way to protect all of it's individuals in an equitable manner.

[Trevor]

The hypocrisy works in so many directions that I didn't even know existed.

Like on the one hand you have the alt right screaming about the first amendment like they believe in it or something, then turn around and scream about Islam and Judaism, ignoring the part where the first amendment grants right to religion. They have a totalitarian ideology and yet they complain when they feel their rights are being removed

Then on the other side, antifa, you have people screaming about the alt-right full of suppressing sorts of totalitarians (which they aren't wrong about) but then have this "suppress the suppressor" mentality that inevitably leads up to making an authoritarian state despite the fact that the sorts of people who I'd expect to be in antifa are communists/anarchists.

As far as religion is concerned, the so called 'religious right' (bible thumpers) can't even be fucked to follow their own religion properly. Literally the entire point of Christianity is to love each other, and yet somehow being gay is inexcusable.

It's all really

[baasinsimple]

Well, no. It is democracy, not a pure democracy, sure, because no pure government of any kind works. No other country this size or this diverse in lands or ideologies or this numerous in population even really attempts democracy on a large scale and merely have a thin guise of democracy (aka, russia and china) Canada's a different case because they have only about a tenth of the population of the US. The electoral system is to essentially make sure there's representation of all issues is presented within all 50 of the states and bring representation to all the States' population's issues whether it be social or agricultural or what have you. Honestly the need for this comes out of the fact that there isn't a hub like NYC in every state, actually going by your suggestion the state governments in the mid-north and the south-west would have almost no fair representation at all in government and so we couldn't even present their issues correctly.

Really, I think it's quite a brilliant system even if it's highly flawed, but Rome wasn't built in a day, and the US is already passed the population of Rome at it's height, so considering that, I'd say we've done a fair job in creating an outline. Now it's time to hammer out the details.

[baasinsimple]

Then there's the problem of where to draw the line. When you're country has a population of 333 million all slapping together politically, it kind of becomes hard to pinpoint.

[scythe]

That's why we have judges, to interpret the intent of laws, and set precedent for other cases down the line. Convicting anyone of murder for a miscarriage would never happen in a country like the United States, even if a vaguely written law appears to open the door to that possibility.

[Trevor]

actually what they describe is a republic, as per the US being a democracy, a republic AND a constitutionalist country, yes there’s a very fine difference between all three of those things. The idea of even having a president at all is the republic piece of our structure. But you are right, if we didn’t have the electoral college, the government wouldn’t listen to any of the problems that farmers and natural resource harvesting folks have.

The issue really comes up tho when it’s like those areas start dictating what larger masses of populations are and aren’t allowed to do like for example when you make it illegal for gay people to marry and shit like that tho. Or when that 30% of people who don’t believe in climate change manage to get a climate change denialist into power and makes it harder for the 70% to fight climate change because their states make all their money off of coal mining and stuff

[scythe]

Without the private medical businesses in the US, all those countries, including my own, with affordable and "free" healthcare couldn't exist. Solving that situation, which places an unreasonable burden on US citizens who can't afford health insurance, is so complicated we'll probably have to wait for a quantum computer to do it for us.

[Mari]

@Scythe

Those are the same judges that marry children off to pedophiles, so allow me to be very doubtful that "It would never happen"

[scythe]

I agree with you on how messed up that is. Don't get me started on the system turning a blind eye to abuses in the name of religious freedom.. but I think when it comes to this specific issue, there'd have to be strong political and public will to lead to anything like women falling afoul of the law for natural miscarriages.

[Trevor]

the very reason those states are shitting out those bills now of all times is because Kavanaugh is in the Supreme Court, which means if anyone were to challenge those bills, chances are his right wing mind set will unravel the previous precedent in Roe v Wade or at least that’s the theory, better get use to him as well, he’s in the SC until he either leaves on his own accord or until he dies

[scythe]

I think you'll find we're full of surprises.

[Trevor]

i mean most of the movies you’ve ever seen will either come from Hollywood, or Bollywood, and i’m confident you’ve never heard of Bollywood before

in fact actually i saw someone post about the marvel movies in here earlier

[ble]

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