WI Technology never advances?

[Simon_Jester]

People also love cheap products too, though. The generic drug import business from Canada made plenty of money over the years, and as the rationale for supporting pharma company profits dries up, I think voters would lose patience with the bullshit.

~20% of pharma revenues goes to R&D. And Canada isn't known for many new medical innovations. Theoretically in a free market, pharma profits would have to go down.

That's kind of Wong's point. The only thing that keeps pharmaceutical company profits so high is that the companies are at least using some of the money for research. Remove that rationale and people start getting really tired of having medical expenses run up every single year. There's no point in keeping a big research consortium around to do no research, and so many drugs could be made relatively cheaply without the medium-term monopoly the companies get from patents.

Drones are cool if you have air superiority. They suck balls if the enemy has any kind of interceptor aircraft (or missile or drone) that can reach their altitude.

It would be WWII all over agian but with drones.

Late-WWII fighter planes actually could intercept drones without difficulty.

They're small and very hard to find on radar- but yeah, the optimal aircraft for hunting them would probably be something like a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-in ... y_aircraft]COIN plane with a bunch of Sidewinders. Relatively cheap to fly, doesn't have to be all that fast, especially since drones' big advantage is their ability to hang around in the same place for a long time anyway.

[ryacko]

That's kind of Wong's point. The only thing that keeps pharmaceutical company profits so high is that the companies are at least using some of the money for research. Remove that rationale and people start getting really tired of having medical expenses run up every single year. There's no point in keeping a big research consortium around to do no research, and so many drugs could be made relatively cheaply without the medium-term monopoly the companies get from patents.

My point is actually that the profits would cease to exist. Theoretically in the long run in economics, profits will approach zero.

That research consortium would bankrupt eventually and competition between companies will reduce prices.

[Darth Wong]

Look at oil, for example. We're running out of it, or at least cheap sources of it, and even though supplies are limited, people are not only looking the other way, they're actually buying gigantic luxury vehicles which dwarf the large vehicles of my childhood. They are thumbing their noses at the problem. That is a lack of will to solve the problem, to say the least.

Do you have a source for this? This source claims otherwise.

That's interesting. I was under the impression that SUV sales are as strong as ever, but then again, I live in a banking town where there's still plenty of money flowing. I would be interested to see if the reduction in SUV buying patterns is across the board, or only among people who are hurting from the economy and can't afford it right now.

And then there's contraception: a technology which can handily solve many problems in the developing world. But can we use it to solve those problems? Of course not. George W. Bush withdrew all US support for the UN family planning initiative

And what about your Prime Minister, Stephen Harper?p

What about him? What does that have to do with the point I'm making about the stupidity of attacking contraception in an overpopulated world?

Bush is not, and never was, your President. Canuks have no more standing to criticize him with respect to refusing to support international family planning initiatives, than they have standing to criticize the Prime Minister of Israel or the Prime Minister of Mongolia.

Oh silly me, I thought that anyone with a fair point to make should have authorization to criticize.

[Memnon]

People also love cheap products too, though. The generic drug import business from Canada made plenty of money over the years, and as the rationale for supporting pharma company profits dries up, I think voters would lose patience with the bullshit.

~20% of pharma revenues goes to R&D. And Canada isn't known for many new medical innovations. Theoretically in a free market, pharma profits would have to go down.

That's kind of Wong's point. The only thing that keeps pharmaceutical company profits so high is that the companies are at least using some of the money for research. Remove that rationale and people start getting really tired of having medical expenses run up every single year. There's no point in keeping a big research consortium around to do no research, and so many drugs could be made relatively cheaply without the medium-term monopoly the companies get from patents.

I think you actually had a more relevant point with the new tool idea -- the OP said

What if by act of ROB, Humanitys technological level will never evolve beyond what we have for the next 500 years? What woould happen?

Emphasis added. To me, this seems to be a kind of video-game like abstraction; I'll treat it that way for now.

For instance, if you researched 'antibiotics' in some hypothetical video game, the game would not say "According to our simulations, you are likely to have penicillin and maybe a few other natural antibiotics that are easily isolated; this makes sense based on your current technology tree."

Instead, I'd view this as a kind of abstraction that says "With your current other technologies, these are the antibiotics you're likely to have; assuming that biodiversity is endless (as people seem to be doing by assuming that a killer bug would be resistant to current state-of-the-art medicine), it's likely that you can find more and, eventually, mutate or generate more once you have the 'prerequisite techs.'" In my view, we do have the 'prerequisite techs' for many more medicines including antibiotics (though it's probable many of the low-hanging fruits have been picked). I don't think this is a no-limit fallacy; rather, I think it's possible that increasing innovation using existing methods could prove to be very relevant.

Another example would be with GM crops. Most of the current ones on the market are made for use with an herbicide, or they have pesticide in the plant tissue or something like that. But there's nothing stopping us from using easily available, though somewhat expensive, current technology to increase yields or nutrition.

"What we have" is not static, though I'm curious as to how truly new 'techs' would be stopped. Maybe all of the governments, companies, and researchers involved either give up on the problem or encounter a mental firewall of some sort.

I can think of a couple natural disasters that would be truly hard to fight with modern tech though. For instance: an undetected asteroid striking the Earth, a supervolcano eruption, or the clathrate gun being way worse than we think.