Oh I agree but if he's able to put up some documentation/proof that his claims are valid than I'm OK with how and by whom it's delivered.
But maybe that's too much to hope and he's just slinging mud. Hard to tell without digging into the details but the article does say this:
Not all his claims are backed up, explained, or accurate. But the site still offers an embarrassing catalogue of bad deeds, which Shkreli told STAT he would continually update.
I'm hoping Ars wouldn't have published the article at all unless they put at least some stock in his claims.
I expect each of the dirts will trigger a libel suit in a few days, even if he did post facts with documentation. He might be able to win most of them, but he's going to spend a mountain of cash just defending them.
I get the sense that he is mad because he got hit for something literally the whole industry does. I do find his obvious douchebaggery less infuriating than most pharma companies that hide their douchebaggery by just lying to you
What's wrong with the code? It's just HTML. Do you expect some NodeJS responsive React Web 3.0 app for this? I think the format, layout and code for the website is entirely appropriate for this.
The site is exactly what it should be. Politics aside, both the code and content are just straight to the point which I find very refreshing in an age of all React everything where every step along the way needs approval from a bunch of different people before anything gets done.
He sat down and said what he needed to say. At least he's not afraid to speak his mind.
Honestly, I quite like Shkreli. His YouTube videos are helpful [0], and he is transparently offensive rather than secretly so.
I'm much more turned-off by people that hide in the shadows. Shkreli might exploit the system, but he'll do so in a way that makes it patently obvious which doors need to be closed, and he'll make a joke of it while he does it.
Seems to me he's the George Hotz of the pharmaceuticals industry.
I do too, I've watched him just live streaming hanging out with friends on youtube quite a few times, he's definitely a shit disturber but I actually think he's a very smart guy, and I'm not even sure how evil he is.
I also like that he's knowledgable on many on the subjects on which he speaks, half the people I've spoken to that "hate him" have no idea why other than he made a low volume drug expensive (never mind any of the details behind it)
It might prove the system fundamentally broken but it does it at the expense of people's health and lives. Not a tradeoff I'd care to make, personally.
Sure, but why should anyone care about what you personally think or what tradeoff you'd make? Are you the CEO of a pharma company? Or a politician who has some power over the healthcare industry? No? Then you don't matter.
The people who DO make these decisions think very differently from you. They're all part of the system, and the system is obviously fundamentally broken. Us sitting around and whining about sociopaths doing sociopathic things is not going to make them stop being sociopathic and making decisions that negatively affect peoples' health and lives.
It demonstrates a problem with the system, I'm not sure it is fundamental. There's lots of more widely used generic drugs that are available for a nominal fee.
We can sit around and whine about some guy exploiting a broken system, but that's not going to fix the problem. Everyone's focusing on one guy who exploited the system, while ignoring both tons of other people who exploited it just as much (and probably a lot more, as he pointed out on his website), as well as the brokenness of the system itself.
That's true, they should all be treated with the same amount of contempt. I think making this website is one of the few good things he's done in a while.
Shkreli is somewhat unique in terms of how much of an attention hog and braggart he is, though. Plus his stock fraud and general asshole persona.
It's a zero sum game though. Raising the price of the drug literally just pulls money out of the system and puts it in his pocket at the expense of everyone else.
It's easy to argue the action is parasitic and adds no value.
To me it seems like a tragedy of the commons, the issue is who will be first to stop extracting value this way. Since no one can be expected to, we need to fix the system that allows it, rather than expecting some altruistic behavior from outfits built to generate profit
There is no tragedy of the commons here. This is not a shared resource being depleted. The proper descriptor here is rent-seeking[1] and the Turing/Daraprim case lines up with Shiller's "river chain" analogy.
Again, this isn't anywhere near my wheelhouse, but I think of money the insurance companies allocate from premiums for drugs as being a shared resource that's being depleted. When the margins that insurance companies have set as targets are brushed up upon, premiums go up and we repeat the process again, except the premiums can't go up forever (right? I wonder if an expert on the subject could confirm) and the system will collapse
What you've described is definitely not a commons but a simple pricing outcome for a financial product. In a competitive market you'd expect that price to find an equilibrium, not to rise without bound.
Notwithstanding which, this case exhibits none of those characteristics. It is rent-seeking, pure and simple.
Not quite. Supply and Demand don't quite work that way.
Arguably - if someone 'needs it' then they 'must pay' ergo zero sum ... but in reality demands for most drugs is not quite so inelastic (Ambien, opiods etc.). That said, I'm not sure what the drug in question does.
The drug in question treats a rare degenerative disease of the brain. Precisely the sort of uncompetitive market with inelastic demand that is ripe for exploitation by rent-seeking.
>Raising the price of the drug literally just pulls money out of the system and puts it in his pocket at the expense of everyone else.
That assumes that he is actually pocketing the money. Shkreli was a hedge fund manager and multimillionaire before starting his pharma companies, and claims he has a $0 salary at Turing.
In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXVQOZDKlRE , he lays out his reasoning for raising the price of Daraprim to prices near those of similar drugs. He intends to use the money Turing makes from Daraprim to produce drugs that are not, in his words, "terrible".
Yes. And to people saying "well, but premiums will increase", the number of people who use Daraprim is so small, it won't affect insurance companies or premiums in any meaningful way whatsoever. And that's not even accounting that anyone who has no insurance can just get the drug for free.
Daraprim is used for the treatment of toxoplasmic encephalitis, which can happen when someone has both AIDS and toxoplasmosis.
There were 39,513 AIDS patients in the United States in 2015. About 23% of Americans have toxoplasmosis, so that would be 9087 people who could get toxoplasmic encephalitis. Around 10% of people with toxoplasmosis develop toxoplasmic encephalitis [0], which would be 909 people who need Daraprim.
A course of Daraprim costs $75,000. For 909 people, that would be a total of $68,175,000. Approximately 100M people in the United States have insurance, so that would raise your insurance cost by about $0.68.
Mind you I have no qualification on the subject matter so I'm reluctant to share the results of my attempts to parse the situation and I could be completely wrong, but it sounded to me like there was a drug that was cheap but not very profitable, and he hiked the price to make it more profitable.
He argues most patients won't directly experience that hike because of insurance, and that no one who can't directly afford the increased price will be denied access to it because of Turing's assistance programs. He also argues that the real issue is that there's nothing stopping the company from trying to extract that money from insurance companies, and the government in some cases (and from that I infer that it's a case where if you're the company not taking advantage of the system, you won't be a company for long). And that all the vitriol at the price hike should be directed at what's a fundamentally broken system, in his opinion.
He is a primarily a stock manipulator who specializes in biotech stocks. Before his drug pricing hijinks he started and shuttered to hedge funds, both of which failed owing millions of dollars to cover trades they had made.
He is about as knowledgable about pharmaceuticals as a third tier equity analyst. He's not a researcher -- his degree is in business.
(Don't get me wrong -- I have no love for the pharmaceutical industry. But this guy is nothing more than a promoter.)
He was originally. The context is that Martin and him ultimately had a reasonable conversation, despite the guy being initially furious about Martin's perceived role in increasing drug prices.
I think there might be something about his face that make it irresistible for people to throw dog poop at it, like when he tried to speak on a college campus with Breitbart tech editor and unabashed white supremacist Milo Yiannopoulos.
I would direct frustration toward you, except I've seen news outlets repeat this. (Then again since you said unabashed, perhaps you came up with this conclusion yourself, in which case I'd love to see your evidence.)
Milo Yiannopoulos writes for Breitbart, which is associated with the alt-right nominally. The alt-right is at its core a white-nationalist movement, but it's not entirely so. Some of it is a rejection of modern leftist values, supportive of Western civilization. This is where Breitbart falls. Milo himself doesn't adopt the alt-right title BTW. Milo is anti-feminist and anti-Islam, but not anti-non-white. He is half Jewish ethnically, and he makes constant vulgar jokes about his sexual preference for black men (and these jokes don't describe him in a sexually dominant position either.) He even advocates for a form of reparations for black people. (Edit: maybe reparations isn't the best term. Basically a one-time special consideration to get them back on their feet economically, education-wise, etc)
I think @nero is a piece of work as well but we have to agree that it is not OK to use violence like this.
I'm more sympathetic towards an armed uprising (indeed I say desertion and treason as we define them ought to be decriminalized) even if I don't like it. Throwing a shoe at someone or throwing poop at someone's face is not only stupid but a display of lack of strength. The weak usually throws the first punch.
I wouldn't call Milo Yiannopoulous an 'unabashed' white supremacist. He's an anti-left political agitator, and his behaviour is instrumented towards his personal infamy and profit.
Your comment seems to be merely a way to erroneously connect Shrekli to this, and signals that you think throwing dog poop at people is a constructive political action. There's really nothing more to say in response to this, other than it's doing the Left and everything they stand for a great disservice.
I've recently been on a Laibach tip that has led to an analysis by Zizek[0] that I feel is especially relevant.
To paraphrase: that Shkreli is using "the system" in its most absurd/brutal/greedy/evil capacity in order to highlight the absurdity/brutality/greed/evil inherent in the system.
And say what you will about him but the guy is an Excel pro. There is something somewhat mesmerizing about watching him do the math to value various companies.
The footer indicates a series of alleged inventions in the pharma space by Shkreli / "Pharma Bro". I thought he was a Hedge Fund / Wall Street hack who hustled his way into the Pharma industry all the way up to CEO.
Any facts on the authenticity of these inventions he claims?
Here's the list.
- Co-Inventor of a new series of pantothenate analogs for the treatment of pantothenate kinase associated neurodegeneration, a lethal pediatric illness
- Licensor and innovator of sparsentan, the first endothelin antagonist for focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a rare pediatric kidney disease
- Co-Inventor of a new series of molecules for the treatment of Canavan Disease
- Co-Inventor of a new series of molecules for the treatment of Lafora Disease
- Inventor of a fusion protein platform for the treatment of several rare genetic disorders
- Co-Inventor of a potential treatment for SLO Syndrome
The first sentence and first paragraph of the article says
>This week, a pharmaceutical trade group stepped up its efforts to distance itself from Martin Shkreli, the disgraced ex-CEO of several drug companies who gained notoriety for an eye-popping drug price increase and an indictment for securities fraud. The trade group even made a television ad to try to bolster its image and make clear that it is different—better—than the likes of Shkreli and his greedy ways.
I read that, but I was expecting something (new) that disgraced to be an event focused by the article since the events mentioned in that sentence have already happened. While those events could cause someone to be disgraced, he hasn't seemed disgraced in the slightest.
It's a shill article pumping a false narrative. Hacker News is part of the problem. The headline should read "Martin Shkreli launches website to shame pharma..."
The whole "disgraced" thing is a disingenuous slam to send the reader into the link with a predisposed mindset. The same type of play on confirmation bias that Trump employs.
I know I'm going to get shit for this. But what Shkreli did is common practice, and us disgracing him is Liberals using Alternative Facts. Where in the real world it's common to buy an outdated drug that many people don't use. Raise the price on it and try to innovate the drug into being a better drug, by using the increased profits. He just got himself into trouble because he doesn't know how to handle himself on twitter. I urge people to research this and look further into it, instead of having quick answers. There's a reason he wasn't convicted of anything. Sure, hike pricing drugs does sound evil and I get why people are mad. We want to live in a world where everybody has access to affordable healthcare, but sometimes the way things work aren't always simply put.
It's just as easy to make the tech industry look like a piece of shit. Especially with AI and self-driving cars. How dare Gooogle and YC take away jobs from hard-working middle-class Americans. It's almost worse, instead of price gouging, tech is going to take away jobs of many if not all Americans in the near future, but nobody on here wants to state that fact and say how sleazy tech is.
Now is more important than ever to be truthful with ourselves and how the world works and not get hyped up over shit, until we understand the whole process. Let's problem solve instead of name call and understand the process of things. Like how YC is testing a universal wage for people in Oakland.
Moreso than the gouging on pricing, I have even more of an issue with the situation where he was short in a pharma company, and lobbied the FDA to deny a drug approval that they were working on, on zero medical grounds, but instead purely from the perspective of helping his short position.
health is an industry where you have the potential for "hard capture" of consumers. the "choice" is pay-or-die in the worst cases, pay-or-physically-suffer in others.
price gouging can in effect become a sort of extortion.
yes, one can find comparable situations elsewhere, but the hard "choices" rarely achieve the dire potential of healthcare i suspect.
In practice, innovate the drug into being a better drug seems to be more about getting a patent to increase prices even further than about actual improvements to the drug.
How does this justify anything? Lots of sleazy things are common practice. Some are legal, some are illegal. Commonality and legality aren't really strong justifications for anything.
Shkreli may have been singled out in the court of public opinion, but that doesn't make what he did any less contemptible.
> It's just as easy to make the tech industry look like a piece of shit... but nobody on here wants to state that fact and say how sleazy tech is.
Really? Because I literally haven't seen a single self-driving thread on HN in the past several years that doesn't contain a highly-voted and somewhat lengthy comment thread about this.
See also literally every HN UBI thread for the past several years.
And that's just comment threads. Yesterday alone there were two stories on the front page for most of the day about social consequences of self-driving.
So it seems like people -- especially self-driving people -- are thinking about this, have a wide variety of opinions on the trade-offs. And when they believe as you do, often actively advocate for policies that would help the people whose jobs they might displace.
There's also the fact that technology (both self-driving and drugs) brings good along with the bad. Perhaps if Shkreli had created a new drug and then price gouged that drug, the situation might be a bit more comparable. But that's not what happened.
> Now is more important than ever to be truthful with ourselves and how the world works and not get hyped up over shit
Or, in Shkreli's case, understand how the world works and also get hyped up over shit. His business model should be illegal.
So you're saying that he should sell the drugs at a low cost, forgoing profits, for what exactly? Service to the US people? If you want companies to give up most of their profit just to be nice, then create laws to do so. Either have a socialised R&D system, or make it easier for other companies to create generics.
Nothing besides the FDA is stopping a competitor from selling generic Daraprim. And if it's not economically viable, then maybe the government should contract at fixed prices to ensure the availability of otherwise unfeasible drugs.
This defense of crooks on the basis that the system is broken is a bit ridiculous. The morality of their behavior is an independent issue. It's possible that the system is broken and also the people who exploit those flaws are assholes.
By analogy, insecure software is both common and also often inexcusable. Incentives are not aligned to encourage secure software. That's a real structural problem. But those problems don't make credit card theft morally permissible.
Also, I think what Martin does should be illegal. And also that the behavior is reprehensible even when it's not illegal. Criticism and action aren't mutually exclusive...
Since you used the phrase "Alternative Facts", can you point to where people have looked at an objectively verified fact, and then knowingly lied about it being something else?
Shkreli very much reminds me of Yiannopoulos; they are both trolls in real-life, and their only strength is yielded from driving up notoriety in the media and online and staying relevant due to that. Yiannopoulos does however have what looks like a stable platform (Breitbart), but this article implies that Shkreli doesn't, so if people really want to oppose him, the best way is to ignore him and let his ejection from the Pharma circle be complete.
Congress could solve this problem tomorrow with the stroke of a pen, but they won't. Just set a ceiling on what their profit margins can be, like a public utility. Done.
We've banned this account for continuing to violate the guidelines after we've asked you to stop. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13472882 and marked it off-topic.
This man could be a folk hero if he continues down this path. It's fascinating that people think Shkreli is a villain, when all he did was put an actual face on how a broken facet of healthcare works in the United States.
I feel like it is a classic political move to put a face to an issue like this.
California, seemed to do the same thing, by having patrons ask for water at restaurants. Obviously, the benefits of this weren't just that the directly saved water, but the indirectly saved water of making people think twice about water usage.
Regardless, I think most people like thinking in the concrete rather than the abstract, which makes it easy to shit on a specific person like Martin Shkreli, instead of the whole pharma industry.
Novartis:. Creates a huge "nonprofit" foundation in San Diego, claims tax deduction for research and transfers IP to self... Until the IRS intervenes. At some point the professor running the place gets embroiled in two mini-scandals about possibly fraudulent science perpetrated by postdocs in the lab and is asked to leave so he can focus on more closely monitoring his employees. They did some pretty cool structural biology, though.
Pfizer: triggers a constitutional crisis by bribing a city to declare low and middle class neighborhoods as blighted to develop a factory, case goes to supreme Court; despite winning reneged on promise to build factory. Then shutters a factory in Lansing, forcing employees to move to the more expensive San Diego, then lays off 2/3 of their site there, too.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadBut maybe that's too much to hope and he's just slinging mud. Hard to tell without digging into the details but the article does say this:
Not all his claims are backed up, explained, or accurate. But the site still offers an embarrassing catalogue of bad deeds, which Shkreli told STAT he would continually update.
I'm hoping Ars wouldn't have published the article at all unless they put at least some stock in his claims.
Are you ok with being price-gouged on your healthcare as long as the pharma companies say "please" and "thank you"?
He sat down and said what he needed to say. At least he's not afraid to speak his mind.
I'm much more turned-off by people that hide in the shadows. Shkreli might exploit the system, but he'll do so in a way that makes it patently obvious which doors need to be closed, and he'll make a joke of it while he does it.
Seems to me he's the George Hotz of the pharmaceuticals industry.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8gjB1PSXv_oAUSAQ16S0fA/vid...
The people who DO make these decisions think very differently from you. They're all part of the system, and the system is obviously fundamentally broken. Us sitting around and whining about sociopaths doing sociopathic things is not going to make them stop being sociopathic and making decisions that negatively affect peoples' health and lives.
Shkreli is somewhat unique in terms of how much of an attention hog and braggart he is, though. Plus his stock fraud and general asshole persona.
It's easy to argue the action is parasitic and adds no value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Notwithstanding which, this case exhibits none of those characteristics. It is rent-seeking, pure and simple.
Not quite. Supply and Demand don't quite work that way.
Arguably - if someone 'needs it' then they 'must pay' ergo zero sum ... but in reality demands for most drugs is not quite so inelastic (Ambien, opiods etc.). That said, I'm not sure what the drug in question does.
That assumes that he is actually pocketing the money. Shkreli was a hedge fund manager and multimillionaire before starting his pharma companies, and claims he has a $0 salary at Turing.
In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXVQOZDKlRE , he lays out his reasoning for raising the price of Daraprim to prices near those of similar drugs. He intends to use the money Turing makes from Daraprim to produce drugs that are not, in his words, "terrible".
There were 39,513 AIDS patients in the United States in 2015. About 23% of Americans have toxoplasmosis, so that would be 9087 people who could get toxoplasmic encephalitis. Around 10% of people with toxoplasmosis develop toxoplasmic encephalitis [0], which would be 909 people who need Daraprim.
A course of Daraprim costs $75,000. For 909 people, that would be a total of $68,175,000. Approximately 100M people in the United States have insurance, so that would raise your insurance cost by about $0.68.
[0] 10.2% seroprevalence of toxoplasmosis, and 1.2% incidence of toxoplasmic encephalitis in the study at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1258/0956462053654230
He argues most patients won't directly experience that hike because of insurance, and that no one who can't directly afford the increased price will be denied access to it because of Turing's assistance programs. He also argues that the real issue is that there's nothing stopping the company from trying to extract that money from insurance companies, and the government in some cases (and from that I infer that it's a case where if you're the company not taking advantage of the system, you won't be a company for long). And that all the vitriol at the price hike should be directed at what's a fundamentally broken system, in his opinion.
He is a primarily a stock manipulator who specializes in biotech stocks. Before his drug pricing hijinks he started and shuttered to hedge funds, both of which failed owing millions of dollars to cover trades they had made.
He is about as knowledgable about pharmaceuticals as a third tier equity analyst. He's not a researcher -- his degree is in business.
(Don't get me wrong -- I have no love for the pharmaceutical industry. But this guy is nothing more than a promoter.)
[1] http://usuncut.com/resistance/martin-shkreli-gets-poop-face/
https://youtu.be/YzRbC7lQ-EQ?t=45s
I would direct frustration toward you, except I've seen news outlets repeat this. (Then again since you said unabashed, perhaps you came up with this conclusion yourself, in which case I'd love to see your evidence.)
Milo Yiannopoulos writes for Breitbart, which is associated with the alt-right nominally. The alt-right is at its core a white-nationalist movement, but it's not entirely so. Some of it is a rejection of modern leftist values, supportive of Western civilization. This is where Breitbart falls. Milo himself doesn't adopt the alt-right title BTW. Milo is anti-feminist and anti-Islam, but not anti-non-white. He is half Jewish ethnically, and he makes constant vulgar jokes about his sexual preference for black men (and these jokes don't describe him in a sexually dominant position either.) He even advocates for a form of reparations for black people. (Edit: maybe reparations isn't the best term. Basically a one-time special consideration to get them back on their feet economically, education-wise, etc)
Are you confusing him with Richard Spencer?
I'm more sympathetic towards an armed uprising (indeed I say desertion and treason as we define them ought to be decriminalized) even if I don't like it. Throwing a shoe at someone or throwing poop at someone's face is not only stupid but a display of lack of strength. The weak usually throws the first punch.
I wouldn't call Milo Yiannopoulous an 'unabashed' white supremacist. He's an anti-left political agitator, and his behaviour is instrumented towards his personal infamy and profit.
Your comment seems to be merely a way to erroneously connect Shrekli to this, and signals that you think throwing dog poop at people is a constructive political action. There's really nothing more to say in response to this, other than it's doing the Left and everything they stand for a great disservice.
Tell that to all his black boyfriends.
To paraphrase: that Shkreli is using "the system" in its most absurd/brutal/greedy/evil capacity in order to highlight the absurdity/brutality/greed/evil inherent in the system.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BZl8ScVYvA
Any facts on the authenticity of these inventions he claims?
Here's the list.
- Co-Inventor of a new series of pantothenate analogs for the treatment of pantothenate kinase associated neurodegeneration, a lethal pediatric illness
- Licensor and innovator of sparsentan, the first endothelin antagonist for focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a rare pediatric kidney disease
- Co-Inventor of a new series of molecules for the treatment of Canavan Disease
- Co-Inventor of a new series of molecules for the treatment of Lafora Disease
- Inventor of a fusion protein platform for the treatment of several rare genetic disorders
- Co-Inventor of a potential treatment for SLO Syndrome
>This week, a pharmaceutical trade group stepped up its efforts to distance itself from Martin Shkreli, the disgraced ex-CEO of several drug companies who gained notoriety for an eye-popping drug price increase and an indictment for securities fraud. The trade group even made a television ad to try to bolster its image and make clear that it is different—better—than the likes of Shkreli and his greedy ways.
The whole "disgraced" thing is a disingenuous slam to send the reader into the link with a predisposed mindset. The same type of play on confirmation bias that Trump employs.
His whole story even made him a character Watch Dogs 2.
It's just as easy to make the tech industry look like a piece of shit. Especially with AI and self-driving cars. How dare Gooogle and YC take away jobs from hard-working middle-class Americans. It's almost worse, instead of price gouging, tech is going to take away jobs of many if not all Americans in the near future, but nobody on here wants to state that fact and say how sleazy tech is.
Now is more important than ever to be truthful with ourselves and how the world works and not get hyped up over shit, until we understand the whole process. Let's problem solve instead of name call and understand the process of things. Like how YC is testing a universal wage for people in Oakland.
price gouging can in effect become a sort of extortion.
yes, one can find comparable situations elsewhere, but the hard "choices" rarely achieve the dire potential of healthcare i suspect.
How does this justify anything? Lots of sleazy things are common practice. Some are legal, some are illegal. Commonality and legality aren't really strong justifications for anything.
Shkreli may have been singled out in the court of public opinion, but that doesn't make what he did any less contemptible.
> It's just as easy to make the tech industry look like a piece of shit... but nobody on here wants to state that fact and say how sleazy tech is.
Really? Because I literally haven't seen a single self-driving thread on HN in the past several years that doesn't contain a highly-voted and somewhat lengthy comment thread about this.
See also literally every HN UBI thread for the past several years.
And that's just comment threads. Yesterday alone there were two stories on the front page for most of the day about social consequences of self-driving.
So it seems like people -- especially self-driving people -- are thinking about this, have a wide variety of opinions on the trade-offs. And when they believe as you do, often actively advocate for policies that would help the people whose jobs they might displace.
There's also the fact that technology (both self-driving and drugs) brings good along with the bad. Perhaps if Shkreli had created a new drug and then price gouged that drug, the situation might be a bit more comparable. But that's not what happened.
> Now is more important than ever to be truthful with ourselves and how the world works and not get hyped up over shit
Or, in Shkreli's case, understand how the world works and also get hyped up over shit. His business model should be illegal.
Nothing besides the FDA is stopping a competitor from selling generic Daraprim. And if it's not economically viable, then maybe the government should contract at fixed prices to ensure the availability of otherwise unfeasible drugs.
By analogy, insecure software is both common and also often inexcusable. Incentives are not aligned to encourage secure software. That's a real structural problem. But those problems don't make credit card theft morally permissible.
Also, I think what Martin does should be illegal. And also that the behavior is reprehensible even when it's not illegal. Criticism and action aren't mutually exclusive...
How can it become a better drug? It's a specific chemical compound.
Hacker news has become totally cucked.
Your comment adds nothing to the conversation.
My comment is pointing out that, "Hey, sometimes a counterpoint can be correct! Try stepping outside of your echo chamber every once in a while!"
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/01...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/arts/music/martin-shkreli...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/dec/02/martin-shkr...
California, seemed to do the same thing, by having patrons ask for water at restaurants. Obviously, the benefits of this weren't just that the directly saved water, but the indirectly saved water of making people think twice about water usage.
Regardless, I think most people like thinking in the concrete rather than the abstract, which makes it easy to shit on a specific person like Martin Shkreli, instead of the whole pharma industry.