Reflections From a Murky Pond

Dating and relationships have changed a great deal over the years, and this mutation has increased in frequency and amplitude in the wake of social media and online communities, many centered around Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs).

We now have a growing number of people having online “relationships” where they’re “dating” people they’ve never even seen, much less met in person!

The Guild’s Do You Wanna Date My Avatar, featuring Felicia Day, sums up the disturbing situation with aplomb, style, and just the right amount, in my rarely humble opinion, of sarcasm-laced humor.

Do You Want To Date My Avatar? Gods! I Hope and Pray Not

Truly, this online dating 2.0 where the participants have never seen each other and conduct their “affairs” solely through the interactions between their avatars leaves me in the position of not knowing whether to laugh or bang my head against the wall.

And how much more bizarre is it going to get now that they’ve developed the Kinect!?! 😯

It’s a pretty good time in the fight against AIDS. A recent study showed that a daily pill, Gilead Science’s Truvada, which already on pharmacy shelves as a HIV treatment could actually help prevent new HIV infections.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine was conducted on 2499 men at 11 sites in six countries: Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand and the United States.

Diligent use of the medication (90%+ daily usage) resulted in a 73% reduction in infection rates over the course of the year-long study. Quite surprisingly, even lackadaisical usage ( 50% daily usage) resulted in a 50% drop in infection rates among the men in the study.

It’s a fact of life, however, that such treatments and potential prophylactics come at a cost.

Associated Press via Yahoo News:

Because Truvada is already on the market, the CDC is rushing to develop guidelines for doctors who want to use it to prevent HIV, and urged people to wait until those are ready.

As a practical matter, price could limit use. The pills cost $5,000 to $14,000 a year in the United States, but roughly $140 a year in some poor countries where they are sold in generic form.

Whether insurers or government health programs should pay for them is one of the tough issues to be sorted out, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

So there’s a median cost of $10,000 per annum in America and $140 per annum in the Third World. That’s approximately a 7,150% variance in price between what Americans must pay for drug and what Third Worlders and/or the various institutions helping them in their fight against HIV / AIDS must pay!

Hellfire! In Uganda where’s there’s a shortage of Truvada, there’s a black market for the drug and, even at black market prices, the cost is only approximately $720 per annum ($2 / dose).

Why is there such a discrepancy and inequality in pricing for this drug? Why is it that Americans with HIV already have to pay such comparatively high prices for Truvada as a treatment?

Big Pharma’s Greed

Is the inequality of costs based upon the greed of the pharmaceutical companies? That’s a seductively easy answer, and one that anyone who studied healthcare costs during the battles over ObamaCare would have to say is not totally without merit.

Yet that would fully explain the degree of inequality in pricing. Given US foreign aid and American based NGOs continued widespread assistance to the Third World’s struggle against HIV /AIDS, one would reasonably expect higher prices than what are being experienced. “Charge all that the market will bear” is an axiom but the market would not, in truth, be the Third World; it would still be America in the form of our federal government and our various charities.

Eating The Rich

An alternative theory would be that the inequality in pricing is based upon some form of ethnoguiltism- and/or oikophobia-driven class warfare which causes our own people to be charged what seems to exorbitant amounts of money in order to subsidize the nearly free care provided to the the Third World.

This is not as easy or pat an answer as corporate greed, but it’s not, in any way shape or form, without merit. We’ve seen this neo-Socialist mindset many times before – in the details of the AGW movement, in ObamaCare itself, in most things billed as “Social Justice,” and in just about anything involving “spreading the wealth.”

Intellectual Miscegenation

A third and, to my mind, more probable hypothesis is, “Why Chose?” I find it likely that the reasons for this disparity between what Americans must pay for treatment vs. what the populace of  the Third World must pay is based upon some misborn hybridization – mongrelization really – of the first two possibilities.

Gilead Science, the makers of Truvada, and the other pharmaceutical companies are private sector firms and, hence, profit-driven. Their investors and shareholders are expecting and demanding positive returns on their investments from these companies. When you factor in the broad use of health insurance, it would be – or should be – expected that they would maximize their returns by charging Americans as much as they could manage to do.

At the same time they well might feel the moral and/or – yes, it could be both – public relations need to provide very low-cost medicine for the rest of the world’s poor.

This would cause an intrinsic conflict with their investors and stockholders who want and/or need these companies to focus on profits and market cap so as to maximize the  investors’ returns. Charity and profits rarely go hand in hand after all.

Therefor, somebody has to pay for this charity, and who better to pay than the American people? After all, we’re all wealthy and we all owe restitution and reparations to the Third World for that fact – or so those of a common mindset keep claiming.

My Thoughts On The Matter

I care about the reason why there’s such a discrepancy and inequality in the pricing of Truvada only insofar as discovering those reasons would be the first step towards correcting what I see as a problem. I don’t even care that much in particular about Truvada or any other of the antiretroviral drug cocktails used to combat HIV / AIDS; the disease doesn’t, despite it’s being an ongoing cause celebre,  affect near as many people – by whole orders of magnitude – than other, less “popular” diseases.

Yet, Truvada’s pricing model is indicative of the entirety of current medical science and technology, especially pharmaceutical science. Americans, rich and poor alike, pay far higher costs than what is charged to the Third World and that just doesn’t seem right.

NOTE: Don’t bother coming here and ranting about how it’s the fault of America’s for-profit health insurance industry; I’ve little tolerance for foolishness and even less for the fools themselves.

The costs of the medicines and procedures are the costs the medicines and procedures. Health insurance, whether it be private, public, or single-payer only spreads out those costs among a pool of payers; it doesn’t positively change the costs themselves.

The paucity of women in the IT sector of the workplace hit the news again recently when Michael Arrington from TechCrunch posted an article asking women to stop blaming the men for that stark gender disparity. As expected, Feminists came out of the woodwork to “comment” on the article and verbally assault the regular patrons of the site.

Mr. Arrington is very, very right; women shouldn’t blame men – at least the men in IT – for the fact that there are few women in the various technology fields. We want more women in IT!

The morale boost and improvement to the work atmosphere alone makes having more women it IT something that we crave. 😉

Nice Racks! We Do So Need More Women In IT

That would be a damn sight – literally – better than the ugly, ugly truth of life and lifeforms in the data center.

Reality Is Often Unpleasant, Especially In IT

So please, ladies – and you Feminists too – don’t blame the men in IT for you’re not being well-represented in technology fields. We want you!

As it stands now, we’re so isolated from women that many IT types who read this post will likely look at the beautiful, half-naked women in the first set of images for a moment and then go on study in-depth and comment upon the actual racks, cable management, and using FreeBSD vs other operating systems They will likely even notice whether or not the ladies are wearing anti-static clips and cables.

Yeah, it’s that bad!

Some things are so bizarre, so far out of the boundaries of normative behavior, that they beggar the sane man’s mind. If the Administrator of NASA, Charles Bolden is telling the truth, then Obama’s view of the world and NASA’s role within it is one of those bizarre things.

It’s utterly nonsensical to think that NASA should be used as a Muslim Outreach program.

According to President Obama’s appointee, however, using NASA as just such a Muslim Outreach program was set forth by President Obama as one of Bolden’s primary goals as NASA’s Administrator. At least that is what Bolden to Al-Jazeera.

Details  from Fox News:

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world.

Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA’s orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al Jazeera that strengthening those ties was among the top tasks President Obama assigned him. He said better interaction with the Muslim world would ultimately advance space travel.

“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering,” Bolden said in the interview.

The NASA administrator was in the Middle East last month marking the one-year anniversary since Obama delivered an address to Muslim nations in Cairo. Bolden spoke in June at the American University in Cairo — in his interview with Al Jazeera, he described space travel as an international collaboration of which Muslim nations must be a part.

If one assumes that Charles Bolden spoke the truth to Al-Jazeera, and there’s little if not no reason to believe otherwise, President Obama’s attitude toward NASA’s role is a stern detriment to our nation’s space program and his overt dhimmitude is a clear and present danger and existential threat to the men, women, and children of the Civilized World.

To Shari’a And Beyond!

The very last thing that we need to do is get the Muslim World involved in America’s – or any other nation’s – space programs. Given the religious mandates, ideologies, and attitudes of these wholly or dominantly Muslim nations, encouraging them or, as is likely planned by Obama, actively helping them to improve their grasp of the sciences and technologies involving space flight – nearly all of which have direct and horrible military or terrorist applications – is utterly and dangerously irresponsible.

These Muslim nations and the Muslim terrorists they spawn and sponsor across the globe can already do quite enough damage. Increasing their rocket and missile technologies is only going to make things far, far worse and costs the lives many innocent civilians.

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In the ongoing war against against identity theft, information loss, and digital espionage, sometimes you have to go “old school.”

Aside from the geek humor that I love so dearly, this cartoon by XKCD is very unusual in that it actually uses the correct words instead of gibberish.

• A’la’ih is the phonetic spelling of Diné bizaad (the Navajo Language) word for the numeral one
• Do’neh’lini is the Diné bizaad word for neutral, but could be used as zero since the Navajo do not have that numeral in their language

Of both both of the above are rough approximations since the Navajo language, Diné bizaad, maps very poorly onto English orthography. It maps even more poorly than Gaelic (Gaeilge) does.