Also, medical consequences have to get pretty costly before they're more costly than selling your home and emptying your retirement account and your kids' college funds.
Also, medical consequences have to get pretty costly before they're more costly than selling your home and emptying your retirement account and your kids' college funds.
I can fairly confidently predict this will not happen like it did for software. Chemical analysis has been around a long time and remains difficult for experts to do accurately without context, let alone for a layman. Gas chromatography, for example, requires large and expensive machinery and some idea of what the substance is composed of in order to determine the concentration of analytes.
Reagent testing is cheap, simple, and straightforward, but it is generally only capable of detecting whether or not some class of substances are present above a particular concentration. You cannot use reagent testing to determine "how pure" a medicine is, let alone whether the impurities (which there will assuredly be) are potentially harmful.
As is currently the case for illicit drugs, I imagine there will be an ecosystem to verify that A) the active ingredient is actually present and B) some limited range of problem impurities are not present, but that is a much less stringent form of quality control than pharmaceutical companies perform.
Some kinds of analysis machinery, like GC, ICP, and DSC or DTA, are probably inherently fairly large; other kinds, like FT-IR, other kinds of spectrometry, TLC, HPLC, other kinds of liquid chromatography, XRF, XRD, and NMR, can be miniaturized and mass-produced. There hasn't been much pressure to do this because bio and chem labs don't care if their spectrophotometer costs US$0.12 or US$12000 or whether it weighs 100 mg or 100 kg; they need one to get their work done, they don't need it to be portable, and they aren't going to lose it because it stays in the lab. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. Even Victorian-era-style reagent testing can be made quantitative in some cases!
Many of the types of analysis listed here are elemental analysis only, which are useless for trying to identify pharmaceutical analytes or determine their concentration.
Out of all of these, microfluidic liquid chromatography is the least science fiction. There's plenty of literature about it but nobody really "has it working", and the reality is that it's not likely to ever have the same capability as benchtop HPLC.
That's mostly true, but if a pill has significant amounts of lead, arsenic, and mercury in it, you know something went wrong, and you shouldn't take it. Even XRF might be enough to allow you to safely use lead-based or arsenic-based catalysts in your synthesis.
> Out of all of these, microfluidic liquid chromatography is the least science fiction. There's plenty of literature about it but nobody really "has it working", and the reality is that it's not likely to ever have the same capability as benchtop HPLC.
Thanks! Can you think of any other plausibly miniaturizable general-purpose analysis techniques? Those are just the ones I came up with off the top of my head. I think microfluidic liquid chromatography doesn't actually have to run faster than the bear, just faster than color-changing DanceSafe test kits.
As for science fiction, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29816434 talks a bit about how today's science fiction is tomorrow's old news.
(my phd in nmr is from 20 years ago... even then it was hard to justify the expense of nmr machines in structural biology...)
Do you think there are some fundamental obstacles to miniaturizing NMR, and if so, what?
The "room temperature" superconductors are not used at room temperature in these cases, they're still cooled down. And so far the only spectrometer I know of where they are used is the still extremely new 1.2 GHz Bruker. And that one is almost certainly somewhere between 10 and 20 million USD. The new superconductors are low temperature superconductors, not room temperature. And even then they still work better at lower temperatures. At best you can remove the liquid helium from the system and use liquid nitrogen only, which is an advantage but still really far from room temperature.
Yes, I don't know if the current room-temperature superconductor material (which really is room temperature, 15°C) will ever be useful for this; it was only discovered in 02020, so it is very unlikely that anyone is using it in a product today, even if they find a way to apply the necessary pressure (267 GPa, thus requiring ultrahard anvils). You're probably thinking of something like YBCO, which is "high-temperature" in the sense you're describing, requiring only LN₂, not "room-temperature".
Costs change over time. There was a time when solar panels cost 100k USD, too. A lot of the costs you're describing are NRE; others are costs that can be reduced.
The magnets are not the only cost in NMR spectrometers, I think you're seriously understimating the amount of electronics in them. You need to detect very weak signals at several hundreds of MHz, that's not trivial.
To a significant extent you can detect arbitrarily weak signals with coding gain and longer averaging times, although if your benchtop machine already takes ten minutes to give you a result, you probably can't afford to wait more than about 36 dB longer, give you another 18 dB of SNR).
So, I'm not worried about the electronics or the signal processing; there's no such thing as an "amount of electronics". Precision analog equipment is not easy to design, calibrate, and build, but you only need a very small "amount" of it, and it can be mass-produced.
Take resistors. When I was a kid back in the 01980s normal resistors were ±20% carbon composition, which would drift by more than 20% over time or if overvolted, with fiendish temperature coefficients. Now you can't buy a ±20% resistor; most resistors are ±1%, ±0.1% resistors are commonplace, and ±0.01% resistors are easily available for a dollar or two. Precision resistors are now made with an extremum of resistance around room temperature, so the temperature coefficient there is literally zero.
No, what I'm worried about is the physics. I'm not surprised YBCO spectrometers turned out to be a pain in the ass; YBCO is a huge pain in the ass in every possible way. What do you think the physical obstacles are?
Think of NMR as bespoke. Like a large luxury liner built for a rich individual. It's not ever going to be a zodiac.
I think you're wasting your time trying to improve NMR. The value of the technique isn't worth it.
If you had improvements to NMR they would actually go first to other things than doing chemical analysis of anarchist drug batches. IE there are other industries that will buy all your machines if they existed.
The real question is why would you EVER use NMR for just about anything? It's really high cost and the total value of the data is lower than just about any other technique. It really only makes sense in research situations.
Ultimately what everyday people will end up using is whatever is cheap and works well enough. Right now NMR isn't cheap, and neither is FT-IR or XRD, but these things change over time. Benchtop NMR is already good enough for distinguishing between significant classes of contaminants that could be in your purported insulin.
I'm typing this on a 50-gigaflops computer, which is faster than the Cray Y-MP Los Alamos had back in the 01990s, and people routinely buy teraflops video cards now, any one of which is faster than ASCI Option Red, if you remember that. I just drank a mass-produced soft drink out of a can made of aluminum, the metal Napoleon III preferred to gold to exhibit his wealth. Last year Chinese companies brought three covid vaccines to market within six months of the disease's discovery and started mass vaccinations, though most observers had predicted a minimum of 18 months. SpaceX is routinely landing reusable rockets on their tails now, and the world's energy infrastructure is rapidly shifting from fossil fuels to solar.
Things change. Today's science fiction is tomorrow's old news.
Industrial diamonds got "cheap" but large ones never did.
What are the companies, or at least the industries, that would buy all the machines if you could make them much cheaper and/or better?
And even beyond that I don't think the area has enough volumen and is competitive enough to produce significantly lower prices. The high-field NMR area is almost a monopoly right now, the benchtops and lower field instruments are somewhat competitive. But even those are in price areas far beyond someone doing synthesis at home.
It's certainly possible to audit drug quality by sending it to labs, and people do that for darknet drugs all the time, but there are still problems:
1) There is no way to use ex-post analysis alone to achieve the kind of QA that pharmaceutical companies do; they have visibility into the entire manufacturing process and process control. Put another way, a sample of a drug cannot be used to verify that the process used to manufacture it is safe.
2) There is no assurance that anything you get in the future is made with the same process.
The only way I see this working, honestly, is for a rogue jurisdiction to offer safe harbor to "generic pirates". The rogue jurisdiction would offer legitimate regulatory oversight in exchange for tax revenue, and the drugs would be smuggled out of the jurisdiction for sale. To some extent this is already the case in grey markets where brand name drugs which are sold for less in other countries get arbitraged/smuggled back to high-cost markets.
Buy n = 1024 doses of your insulin or whatever, D(0, i) for i from 0 to n - 1 = 1023, homogenize each dose, and divide each one in half into half-doses called E(0, i) and F(0, i).
Mix pairs F(0, 2*i) and F(0, 2*i + 1) into 512 new doses D(1, i) for i from 0 to 511. Homogenize these new doses and divide each one in half into half-doses called E(1, i) and F(1, i).
Mix pairs F(1, 2*i) and F(1, 2*i + 1) into 256 new doses D(2, i) for i from 0 to 255.
And so on, until in step k = lg n = 10 step you mix the half-doses F(k - 1 = 9, 0) and F(9, 1) into a single dose D(k = 10, 0). Send this D(k, 0) off to the lab to be analyzed.
If the lab is equipped to detect dangerous impurities in your insulin at one-thousandth the danger level, which is reasonable for many contaminants, and the sample comes back clean, then you know that all 1024 doses were safe, though some of them may have the wrong dose. Mix the remaining 1023 doses well so that they all have the same dose and store them safely.
If not, you need to track down the contamination (or massive dilution), so in the next iteration, you send E(9, 0) and E(9, 1) to the lab for analysis. If one of them comes back safe, you know the 511 doses that were mixed into it were okay, and you can mix them well and store them safely, then repeat the process on the contaminated subtree.
Depending on your cost function (latency, shipping and handling costs, etc.) and your priors for correlation among the samples, it might be worthwhile to recurse more deeply on failure: instead of sending E(9, i) for i from 0 to 1 to the lab, you might instead send them E(6, i) for i from 0 to 15. If one out of 30 doses was randomly contaminated, for example, about 14 out of the 16 groups will be bad on average, while if it's one out of 100, then you'll have about 7 bad groups out of 16. At some point you need to give up on the recursion, too, or you'll end up testing almost all 1024 doses when they're all bad.
This of course doesn't solve the problem of future buys, just reduces it by the factor of n.
Not really. It's more like a system to selectively remove intellectual property rights without destroying the financial incentive to develop drugs.
IP is an interesting point, although I'm not convinced that generating the IP is more than a small fraction of the cost of a drug. An aggregate I saw from 2011-2018 puts Research at only 17% of revenue, and only some proportion of that is geared towards generating IP. That is to say, with all else removed you could generate an IP only company for 17% the cost of drug sales.
Well, sure. But that's not what this is actually about. The titular anarchists are not inventing new drugs, they're finding alternative ways to get drugs that have already been invented.
> That is to say, with all else removed you could generate an IP only company for 17% the cost of drug sales.
I am not convinced that accurately reflects the reality of running a pharmaceutical business, even if incentives/competition is somewhat warped in healthcare. There are a lot of penny-stock pharma companies whose only mission is to generate valuable IP. They're notorious for being volatile (since their outcome is basically binary on the results of research), but not for being great investments. If what you are asserting was actually true, those sorts of firms would generate ~5x higher returns, on average.
... yes and they're doing so because in part regulatory capture, lobbying, and corruption have lead to unaffordable drugs. So that is, partially, what this is actually about. But sure there are other reasons for people to manufacture their own drugs outside of formal channels.
>I am not convinced that accurately reflects the reality of running a pharmaceutical business, even if incentives/competition is somewhat warped in healthcare. There are a lot of penny-stock pharma companies whose only mission is to generate valuable IP. They're notorious for being volatile (since their outcome is basically binary on the results of research), but not for being great investments. If what you are asserting was actually true, those sorts of firms would generate ~5x higher returns, on average.
That's actually my point. Generating the IP looks to be low value compared to wading through all the insane regulatory barriers, developing sales channels in-bred with medical board licensed doctors and FDA regulators that examine sales materials, lobbying for regulatory capture and all the other expensive pursuits that arguably may not add much value to the ill person consuming the drug. Another words, I'm not sure removing IP from the equation really changes the cost of drugs that much.
No, it's not. This is ideological libertarian nonsense. There's a reason pharma came to be regulated in the first place. All this will lead to are more injuries and death of consumers.
If I could flag your post, I would. This is purely political nonsense and a god-like attempt to disprove something through fiat.
Most major OSS projects are controlled by a few companies who pay developers to work on them. They're more like industry consortiums than DIY anarchist collectives.
The solution isn't to destroy capitalism or exclude industrial companies from participation. We tried that a century ago. It went badly, because, as it turns out, capitalism is better at limiting the damage done by ambitious psychopaths than the alternative systems are; if Beria had been born in Ohio maybe he would have ended up running a soap company or a division of GE instead of mass-murdering dissidents.
Similarly, the GPL (and, to a lesser extent, non-copyleft open-source licensing) reduces the damage selfish companies can do to software projects and the people and companies that depend on them.
We need to figure out how to do the same thing to drug companies and the FDA, because they are just killing far too many people and causing far too much needless suffering today.
I think that's the main reason that most sane leftists* are some flavour of anarchist these days.
* not including social democrats/other liberals in the "leftist" bracket.
That sounds compatible with mere free trade amongst men without any sort of socialism. Seems like leftism wants some involuntary reallocation of capital, but maybe I'm mistaken. If they don't I'd say they're just charitable capitalists.
Or say I have a full fledged industrial scale wave soldering, mass PnP, full inventory of millions of dollars worth of components. I need it to feed my family, I'm not going to just hand it to you after I gained it through consensual trade fair and square. Doesn't that require coercion? I'm not just going to give up my goods I worked hard for, what's going to happen when the comrades see the loaded barrel of a rifle protecting that which feeds my family? I think a lot of people needing to feed there families are going to have a lot of rifles, and they're not going to be very happy about someone coming along to "open up access" to means of production of their business.
When you take my means of production, you deny ME access to what I gained without coercion, by using coercion.
This all just sounds like a violent way of less efficiently allocating capital, under the guise of non-coercion. Access to property should require consent, otherwise you have coercion. Seems to me free market trading of private property fits a lot more neatly with the oxford definition of anarchism.
The only way in which you "own" something while you're not directly using it is by the implicit threat of the police and the military. Its kind of ironic that you accuse anarchists of violence while simultaneously withholding resources with threats of direct violence.
You have to understand, we're talking about an alternative economic system here, not an immediate action. Anarchism in practice within capitalism is things like this article, or mutual aid - people helping out others in need,and cooperating on mutual benefit. Anarchists also squat unused properties to feed and house the homeless, or come together to form cooperative societies in a few places like Oaxaca and Rojava.
> When you take my means of production, you deny ME access to what I gained without coercion, by using coercion.
That's not true - under anarchism, you would have access to use the lab, but so would other people. It would be available in common.
>That's not true - under anarchism, you would have access to use the lab, but so would other people. It would be available in common.
So I bought it and now what if I need it 24/7 to run PnP on boards that pay for my family? You're gonna tank the economy by repurposing capital used efficiently and profitably and instead just open up for somebody to just take over the production capability I paid for? That's not consensual.
>The only way in which you "own" something while you're not directly using it is by the implicit threat of the police and the military.
No I own it through consensual trade. The only way it is taken away is either consensual, by giving my permission to transact it away or for someone else to use coercion and take it.
There are a few different economic models within leftism, including market socialism, which still involves trade but replaces corporations with worker cooperatives. Obviously that's incompatible with anarchism but they can exist alongside each other and mixed together - these ideas don't have to be purist.
> So I bought it and now what if I need it 24/7 to run PnP on boards that pay for my family? You're gonna tank the economy by repurposing capital used efficiently and profitably and instead just open up for somebody to just take over the production capability I paid for? That's not consensual.
Again, under an anarchist system you wouldn't need to pay to feed your family. Imagine for a moment, our current society but instead of everybody withholding their goods with demand of payment, these goods are just available to those who need them. No currency, no trade, just sharing and cooperation. Operation of machinery can still be restricted to the qualified through a syndicate (kind of like a medieval guild) but the labour is performed cooperatively. You could still do the job you love (if you love it - otherwise, you're free to explore other options), your family would be fed, you would have a house and so on. I wouldn't be in favour of any economic system that increased the amount of human suffering. I like people, I have a lot of empathy.
>Again, under an anarchist system you wouldn't need to pay to feed your family
Perhaps, but what if no one wishes to feed me for free voluntarily. Won't I be forced to either engage in trade, do everything myself, or take it by force? What if I want to spin up my PnP machine, make some boards, and trade it with somebody who's not down with the whole make stuff without money and hope it all works out. I'm not going to let you stop me, are you going to come kill me or what's going to happen?
My personal view of what ends up happening to leftist communities is their either become dystopian to ensure your property is now the public's property, slide into democracies, or go into limited-government libertarian type scenarios. The latter is basically what Rojava is in practice and kind of my experience with the Kurds in general who I would describe as basically very generous capitalists who just want to chill in the fucking mountains away from the 4 nasty governments surrounding them.
If you can keep it small like a family unit some communist like organization may stay together, although even families can have a hard time with it. You need the consent of everyone for that sort of thing to be non-coercive, and you may not be able to get it.
> Guess people like me gotta be put in the gulag.
Again, you're thinking of MLs. My primary value is decreasing human suffering and increasing preference fulfilment. Neither of those are fulfilled by senseless ideological violence.
> My personal view of what ends up happening to leftist communities is their either become dystopian to ensure your property is now the public's property, slide into democracies, or go into limited-government libertarian type scenarios.
I'd rather live under a social democratic capitalist society like I currently do than the USSR. Freedom is important - I want to increase it, not decrease it. There's plenty of room for democracy within anarchism, and anarchism is the original source of the term "libertarian" so yes I agree on the latter point - the main point of disagreement is whether capitalism can really be libertarian. I think that replacing a competitive, isolating economy with a cooperative sharing economy would be a positive thing for everybody.
I think the kurds are a good example of an incremental step in the right direction - their economy is more oriented towards sharing and cooperation, which is inherently a step away from capitalism because capitalism relies on individualistic trade negotiations rather than sharing.
Edit: I just thought, if you've watched the later seasons of The Walking Dead, the communities are a pretty good example of anarchist community, including the union-of-unions part.
For clarity, by "socialism" I don't mean Robin Hood socialism, taking from the rich to give to the poor; that's coercive. I mean that socialists aim for a more-equal society. So I'm saying that anarchists are people that aim for a more equal society, and hope to achieve that using processes and structures that minimise hierarchy.
As I said before, though, you might benefit from reading at the introductory section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism.
I'm not saying leftists can't exist in anarchism as some sort of pact or contract amongst leftist, in the sense of without coercive hierarchy. But I don't see how anarchism is inherently leftist. If leftism means socialism or some form of redistributing property involuntarily, that sounds coercive.
Voluntary exchange of property and capital is the opposite of coercion. It seems capitalism fits in neatly with anarchism.
Which Oxford definition? You've cited "The Oxford Dictionary" up-thread. There's a bunch of online lexicographical resources that are unrelated to the OED, but trade on its name and reputation.
At any rate, a brief definition from a concise lexicon is no substitute for doing some proper reading on the subject. And even reading will leave you pretty confused about how it can possibly work; participation in an anarchist collective might blow your mind.
Anarchism isn't some cursory subject for me. Someone up thread mentioned Rojava as an example of something closest to an anarchist collective. I went there and lived there. What I found was voluntary trade which we commonly call capitalism. I find this to be compatible with anarchism when trades are made voluntarily and not say, by strong arm of government forcing how you trade with people or the strong arm of some "anarchist" "opening up access" to your capital.
Allowing workers to join the board, perhaps as a response to an all-out strike, might be a step towards worker's collectives.
It's much easier to articulate the objectives than the path.
If you can find some other way to allocate payment to workers that's fine if everyone is agreement. Me, I like commodities and currencies. If not dollars a gold bar will work fine, you needn't pay me in fractions of a factory floor or whatever. I ought to be able to negotiate with a factory owner to be paid that way.
Here in the UK, all of those things were public, until they were privatised in the '80s. I'm in a position to compare the service we used to have with the one we have now. In every case, they're worse (I deliberately didn't mention telecoms). The only service here that hasn't yet been completely privatised yet is health; unfortunately it's rapidly being privatised, and becoming more like the US system (I've spent a fair bit of time recently in hospitals and clinics).
The NHS is paid for collectively; "free at the point of delivery", as they say (which is a lie). But they do refuse to do some expensive treatments; many other treatments have very long waiting lists (hip replacements). They only have to squeeze harder to force more people into private treatment.
NHS would not exist. It is an institution of violence, funded coercively.
Goodness, what a weird thing to say. It is Britian's most-loved institution.
I've never met anyone in Britain that disapproves of the NHS. We were all born in the NHS, doctors visited us as children when we got chicken pox, and the whole thing was organised so as to provide the best response they could to the public's needs. Village hospitals, visiting midwives, comprehensive GP service.
We were never asked to pay.
So are you seriously advocating a "system" where all services are provided by private businesses that are free to withdraw services at any time? Where different services (IC, CT scan, MRI, ENT, surgery) are all provided by different companies in different locations? Where unprofitable locations get zero service?
Even bosses love the NHS - it means they don't have to include insurance in the comp.
Thatcher privatised nearly every government-run business operation, but she balked at privatising the NHS. It was too popular.
Of course it's funded coercively; it's funded from general taxation. But "violence"? What can you possibly mean?
I didn't say everything has to be profitable. There's plenty of ways to consensually operate without profit. Farmer do it in the US with coops and pooled buying of feed and fertilizer and all manner of other stuff. Charities also do things unprofitably but consensually. I'm good with whatever non-coercive way you find to get your CT scan.
I have heard that KAR operates on roughly-anarchist lines, and works well; I'm very interested in large-scale, working, contemporary anarchist and collective societies. The only other one I can think of is Catalunya, which is sometimes described as anarchist. It appears to me to be mostly capitalism with a strong public sector, along with some major collectivised industries. But I'm not familiar with how decisions are made.
I'm very interested to hear that you've spent time in Rojava.
[Edit] Clarified, I hope.
All of the time I spent in Rojava was as a member of YPG. It was a few months. Most of the time was on border or self-defense tabor for defense against ISIS. My contributions were not particularly note worthy, mostly just helping them maintain their positions.
Naturally my view was not the best view of civilian. But I did travel through much of the territory and witness the people. There is definitely class and considerable disparity in quality of life, as their are nicer condos in the city cores and people in slums in the perimeters. Capitalist vendors are in the cities selling anything from cell phones to nuts. Most of the vendors were your garden variety 3rd world stalls kind of like how the storage facilities look with the metal sliding gates in front that they open up when ready for business.
Middle East culture is in general very hospitable and once taken as a guest you are taken care of until you decide to leave. But If you just entered the country as a civil citizen I'm not sure you'd find your lot any better off than in the traditional capitalist government in KRG. Qamislo and Erbil for instance are worlds apart in what they offer, although the wars are no doubt a large part of that.
It's my understanding there is collective union for some of the farming, oil extraction, and maybe some other natural resource extraction. Traditionally the kurds have also gotten a lot of income from smuggling due to their unique position in the mountains but I do not know how that is interconnected with governance.
OK, I was referring to the region in Iraq. My mistake. I need to get better-informed. Thanks for your account.
From the language you use, I suspect you are a USAian; the term "leftist" seems to be used mainly as a term USAians use to express their contempt for socialism. In most of the world, "socialism" is not a bad word. But the term "leftist" is often used by authoritarians to describe the "terrorists" they're using the army to suppress.
I'm ok with socialism when it's done consensually. If a bunch of people want to go live on a commune, more power to them. It's when you come for the equipment and capital I use to manufacture things and feed my family, is when you're gonna start needing the commune comrades to enact violence if you want to steal that from me. And to do that seems.... coercive and non-anarchistic.
My own political views are neither here nor there. I live in the UK, but I don't support Labour; I don't think Labour is socialist, and I do think they're authoritarian and militarist. I don't know how you can scale up anarchism from a collective to a nation; I do know when things are going in the wrong direction.
> I'm ok with socialism when it's done consensually.
You mean, when you can opt out, apparently.
Yes precisely, this to me is the essence of anarchism. To have the free will to opt-out or opt-in to any voluntary exchange without coercion. To keep my factory floor if I like, and if people voluntarily want to buy enough widgets from me that I can build a space ship, that is great for everyone because I've given the world lots of value and they've voluntarily given it back to me in exchange for that value.
It's really strange to me that leftist anarchists and capitalist anarchist are such bitter enemies. I think both can survive under the banner of a system without coercion. Anarchist socialism is merely what happen when some group of people consent to each other to share their resources. Those that don't consent and want to use free trade instead look more like capitalists can continue to do so. Personally I pick the latter because I think it will bring me more prosperity, but I'm very live and let live and can see both ideologies living peacefully side by side so long as no one coercively tries to take the property of another.
Not enemies; I don't have bitter enemies. I just see opposition to capitalism as a pretty fundamental aspect of anarchism. I'm not gatekeeping "anarchist". I see you as hijacking the term; a capitalist anarchist is not an anarchist, it's a libertarian, or an individualist. I think you know this.
I think your persistent claims that small traders are capitalists is disingenuous. There's nothing against trade in anarchism or in socialism. Trade is not the same as capitalism.
I'm afraid I don't like being referred to by you as a "leftist" - nobody calls themselves a leftist. That's a term used by people who dislike socialism and want to portray socialists as "bad". So I think I will not respond to this thread again.
[Edited for grammar, mainly]
Ok, you won't be missed (nor remembered), pathetic leftist gate-keeper of the word anarchism. Hopefully you find a True Scotsman worthy of the title.
I admit my use of "pathetic" was self-defense from being accused of being a hijacker, which I found to be a personal attack against something objectively untrue based on the Oxford English definition of the word "anarchism."
> choose to use "anarchism" to mean a non-leftist ideology
I thought using leftist was offensive (even though I didn't mean it offensively) and you asked me not to? You're a hypocrite too.
>you should expect that most people will misunderstand you
I expect you will misunderstand because of your willful ignorance of the term. Calling it 'hijacking' is a lot different than calling it different from whatever looks mainstream to you. There is no mainstream brand of anarchism, it's an ideology without coercion that can manifest in many ways.
Spare me the speech about politeness. You called me a hijacker of a term and say "I think I know this." No I do not, in fact I know the opposite. I think you're an arrogant and self-serving keeper of the word anarchism, one who tries to hide their vulgarity in pretty language and has the gaul to act like a victim for a curt retort.
Do not expect me to censor myself going forward, however. I understand that could result in being banned. I'm OK with that, as I'm not really interested in communicating in a place with censorship.
Because, as a post below notes, this is a pure fantasy. At this point you're proposing actual magic.
>Linux versus, say, Solaris and Microsoft Windows
Your choice of operating system isn't going to severely harm or kill you. "Move fast and break things" is a problem when the "things" are people.
>medical consequences have to get pretty costly before they're more costly than selling your home and emptying your retirement account and your kids' college funds.
Welcome to the reality of healthcare in the US for the uninsured (and often times for the poorly-insured).
If it were me I'd just make it all in one go, hopefully enough to be set for life, huge pile of it whatever drug I need to stay alive. Create a homogeneous mixture, GC/MS the mixture for purity and then package it for long term storage.
No, it's classic libertarian fantasy bullshit. Medicines aren't toys, and we know exactly what happens when they're unregulated.
if someone glad to try some secret drug, maybe they can killed by error one...