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Patents give you monopoly pricing power and patented drugs have huge gross profit margins. Given that, while part of the price increase will be passed on to consumers sellers will also cut prices.

To put it simply if they could charge higher prices without losing volume they already would because no one else can produce that drug so there is no competition to keep prices down.


I think they will just pass the tariffs on and that will be it.

Corporations are notoriously greedy.


Which is why they are already charge the price that maximises their profits. If they charged more the increased profit per unit would be more than offset by lower sales.

A good diagram of supply and demand with monopoly pricing power us the easiest way to explain this. I cannot find a good one online that shows the effect of tariffs though. In essence its worth losing some profit per unit to avoid losing too many sales.


Medicines typically have inelastic demand, which is why it needs heavy government regulation.

Look into what happened with Insulin prices in the US in the recent past for a lesson on that.


If demand is inelastic why have they not raised prices already?

Your positions are:

1. Corporations are greedy

2. Corporations will pass the tariff onto customers

#1 would imply drug companies charge the maximum price the market will bear. If so, how will they accomplish #2?


Whenever they have an excuse to increase prices, they do. Mostly because when the tariffs go away they can stick to the current price.

Tariffs are perfect in that it is not even an excuse. Maybe they can throw in an extra for their pocket too.


A lot of EU countries are using Palantir and dependent on US big tech too

Too late. The NHS is already heavily reliant on AWS. Not the only ones either.

As things are Europe (except Russia and a few others) is utterly reliant on Americas. Read up on how difficult things became for the ICJ judge the US sanctioned. If the US ever blocked almost any European countries access to online services they economy would collapse.


Modern England, but not London. Revived from hibernation like sleep. The book is That Hideous Strength. The last book in a trilogy and unfortunately the best IMO - and it feels very relevant and farsighted to me now.

A Spark is still not cheap hardware though. It is only cost effective for heavy users (i am not one).

Why did they do that?

Presumably because the school district got a slice of the money from the publisher.

You need science to realise that guns are a danger to kids?

No, but I believe that science and quantifying the specific danger leads to better policies than going on vibes. For instance, laws to require safe storage are based on data quantifying reductions in harm to children [1]

Data beats vibes, even when vibes are qualitatively correct. I’m surprised this is surprising.

1. https://journalistsresource.org/health/child-access-preventi...


I am only on FB for a group I admin that is useful and helps people. its more like forum hosting for me.

Almost all my friends have stopped posted. The only social thing I see from most people is wishing people happy birthday.


So how did people manage before we had these things?

bible study and alcoholism

Maybe not that early, but writing did eventually undermine the ability to memorise things. It used to be common for people to memorise long works - it is one reason why epic poetry was popular and designed to be memorable. Memorising even a few hundred lines is unusual now.

I wonder whether it has contributed to the evolution of smaller brains: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-brain-...


> Memorising even a few hundred lines is unusual now.

Memorizing a few hundred lines of epic poetry probably is indeed unusual. But I bet most people have more than a few hundred lines of poetry in the form of song lyrics memorized (along with the tune of the song).


> (along with the tune of the song)

A lot of cultures that emphasize oral memorization will have things like this as memory aids

For example, Buddhist mantras have a specific way to pronounce, and if you alwaya do it this way memorizing becomes much easier

Or for a more Western thing, prayers also have a specific cadence that is learned alongside the text itself and that aid memorization


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