Such a crumbling beauty...
"Nothing that a couple of spare batteries and a cleaning lady with a duster cannot fix. "
Or, as Tom Waits put it: "Such a crumbling beauty - ah, there's nothing wrong with her a hunnerd dollars won't fix"
187 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jun 2009
Is the ban restricted to the sale of the product, or does it also cover importation? If the former, go for it, if the latter, you might be entering something of a customs lottery.
We're OK for Marmite (in the USA) but we can't get Bovril. Found a few e-tailers offering to ship it from the UK, so got in touch with them and asked what the deal was with it making it through customs. The answer was, they'll guarantee to ship it, but they make no guarantee that customs will allow it into the country.
Leibniz is popularly regarded as the "runner up", true, but he was a contemporary of Newton. Kepler's work was a century earlier and there is a well argued view that had he but went one step further, he'd have come up with calculus (The Watershed is an excellent biography of the man). Hence the form of words "nearly invent".
James Loughner - if you can spare 5 minutes from sitting on your pedestal, making snarky comments about other people's education, you might profitably use them to work on your reading comprehension. It was a very short sentence and nowhere in it did I claim that Kepler invented astronomy.
Destroy All Monsters makes a very valid point about the rent-seeking aspects of the pharma industries in the USA. I think the reason his post met with a poor reception is that people don't understand the scale of the differences between pharmacists in the UK and the USA.
In the UK, pharmacists still add value and provide customers with genuine services - from keeping an eye on prescriptions and raising a red flag over potentially problematic combinations of meds, through giving basic medical advice, to pointing out OTC alternatives that are cheaper than even the patient's £8 (or whatever it is these days, it's been a few years) for an NHS prescription.
In the US, it's nothing like that. Your pharmacist is a glorified supply clerk, whose main expertise is with health insurance billing systems and calculating co-pays. Most people never even see an independent local pharmacist, instead going to WalMart or a local supermarket chain, and any "medical advice" is limited to reading out the directions on the label in a bored monotone, so that everybody else in the queue knows what you've been prescribed.
It's this latter business model that the legal action seeks to protect.
Rather, it's about competition. You've got doctors over-prescribing like mad, pharmacists (basically glorified supply clerks) handling fulfilment and all of them making a tidy little profit from their guild and government enforced monopolies.
The argument from the rent-seekers is that it's about safety. But it's not. Chlorhexedine mouthwash (sold OTC as Cordosyl in the UK) is prescription only in the USA, so's the dentists can make an extra buck. Paracetamol and codeine (another OTC product in the UK) is supposedly a tightly controlled narcotic, though docs here hand them out like sweeties.
It's all about the profit. Folks sourcing prescription meds from other sources cuts into that profit, so must be deprecated.
The purpose of the exercise is to have some regs, any regs, so that:
(a) The bureaucrats and politicians can engage in more empire building and
(b) The industry lobbyists will throw more money, jollies and non-executive-directorships-upon-retirement at the aforementioned bureaucrats and politicians.
Pirate icon because that's what they are.
It's touching to find somebody who still expects the people who "work" at these bullshit organisations to actually do the jobs they purport to do. The rest of us realise it's Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, all the way down.
Sadly, we're in that difficult time when it's too late to work within the system, yet too early to hang the bastards.
Eg, those who got struck off in some PCT list cleaning exercise that went pear shaped, those who moved house within England, but never registered with a new GP, 'cos they weren't poorly or those who moved abroad, etc.
What happens to all their info - do they even have an option of opting out?