Support a good cause & win big prizes

[kailomonkey]

Did I win? I'll take the Dung!

 

Okay, I know the draw hasn't closed yet.

[LilBear]

I hope I don't win the rostos cause that will put me into Ent's "rosto horders" category and my storage items will disappear

 

lilbear

 

Edit: On second thought, starting anew with 10 rostos is better than starting anew with nothing

Edited July 23, 2007 by LilBear

[Sir_Exeus]

i am buying a ticket as soon as i get money in paypall. er you do take paypall right?

Edited July 23, 2007 by exeus101

[Enly]

Didn't you read the thread?

 

Okay, I setup a Paypal donation link: Paypal link

They want me to register as a business (with all the additional fees) and all sorts of other requirements in order to claim non-profit status. So, unfortunately, Paypal is going to take a cut of your donations. If you can donate using existing funds, they take less away. You will still get 1 ticket per $5 US donated, but if at all possible, donate through http://www.active.com/donate/tntsoh/JeffWilson instead (since the whole donation goes to the cause).

[0ctane]

Well, I think exeus101 was referring to the fact that transfers using existing funds (rather than a credit card) do not incur the same fees from paypal. Therefore, more money winds up going to the charity. But yes, Paypal is accepted. =)

 

There has been a bunch of activity lately. We are now up to 21 people!

[Grum]

I've made my donation, and I hope that many more people will do so in the remaining 10 days.

[Llywar]

I just hope that if a cure is found, it will become public domain, rather than feed the big pharma pigs.

 

I would think that if a cure gets found a foundation would probably license it pretty openly and it would be cheap.

 

However, more likely than not a cure won't be found, but some really good ideas on how to go about developing a cure might. If that happens and a pharma company is the first to actually develop a cure then it will be expensive - at least until somebody else does develop a cure and makes it cheap. If a patent on the "really good ideas" is obtained then the pharma companies probably wouldn't bother looking into it at all unless it were exclusively licensed.

 

However, most foundations probably wouldn't bother pushing for additional treatments/cures once drugs are on the market that work. It just wouldn't be cost effective most likely. For as expensive as drugs are they do reflect about what it actually costs to R&D a treatment for a disease - and for a non-drug-company to do it there might be even more expense since they aren't optimized for drug R&D.

 

And yes, I know that drug costs go to pay all kinds of expenses other than R&D - but that doesn't necessarily mean that others could do it more cheaply even without the expenses of marketing/profit unless they were doing this sort of activity full-time for many years at a large scale.

 

About the best a foundation could do is subcontract the drug R&D part of the project to a major pharma outfit - but that would be very expensive as it would have to compete with the normal profitable drug R&D pipeline resources. I'm sure if you gave a big pharma $500M or so they would develop your drug, optimize it to some degree, and obtain data necessary for a marketing application. However, that is a lot of cash for a foundation to come up with, and there is a half-decent chance that nothing will come of it.

 

Don't get me wrong - I think that there are certainly problems with the accessibility of medical care in the US. However, while it has become fashionable to blame this on pharma companies there are a LOT of people making a profit from saving lives. And a good chunk of pharma R&D expenses go to doctors involved in clinical trials. Ultimately if you want a lot of people to work seriously at something you need to pay them, and that costs a lot of money. While the world would certainly benefit from open-source drugs just as they benefit from FOSS there are some problems in applying that model to drug R&D (high capital costs, need for human beta-testing, large number of skillsets required, etc). There are certainly ways to redistribute how drug R&D gets paid for, but you can't really change the fact that somebody has to pay for it. If a foundation wants to take on all of this expense so that drugs can be dirt-cheap for the first ten years and not only the years after this then I'm all for it - but most often those crying for cheap drugs aren't willing to actually pay to make them happen.

 

Regardless - I think this idea is a great one - thanks to all that chipped in to make it happen!

[firevalor]

very awsome of you, i myself have been to events such as Relay for life, and other related groups to help cancer research, and support those struggling to survive it.

 

My cousin Zacharry Frolka, died after a long long battle with luekemia(sp) when he was only 14 years old. and i never give up the chance to volenteer in like-events when possible.

 

good for you

[Sir_Exeus]

er i read the thread and saw nothing about paypall. I read the thread a while back so....

[0ctane]

er i read the thread and saw nothing about paypall. I read the thread a while back so....

Read post number 8. =)

[Entropy]

@Llywar

I don't think that the R&D is that expensive.

Sure, it can eat millions over millions of dollars, but many drug companies charge outrageous prices for their shit.

For example, last year I had some nasty alergy that required steroid creams. In the US, they were like 10 USD, and in Romania they were like 2 USD (got a bunch from Romania when I went on my vacation there).

 

Yes, the cost is higher in the US (labour more expensive), but I am pretty sure that it's not 500% higher.

So fuck the drug companies, they are leaches that feed on people's misery and suffering.

[fyrrflyy]

 

For example, last year I had some nasty alergy that required steroid creams. In the US, they were like 10 USD, and in Romania they were like 2 USD (got a bunch from Romania when I went on my vacation there).

 

 

yah yah we all know teh god is trying to increase his muscle mass in hopes of threatening the code to write itself! j/k, I salute you and everyone who donated to this noble cause.

[Entropy]

yah yah we all know teh god is trying to increase his muscle mass in hopes of threatening the code to write itself!

??

[majestyk]

yah yah we all know teh god is trying to increase his muscle mass in hopes of threatening the code to write itself!

??

 

He's probably mixing this up with anabolic steroids?

[0ctane]

I did not really intend this thread to be a commentary on drug companies. I too am not a big fan of Big Pharma, but they have produced some great drugs. The big problem (in the USA) is the health care system in general. The chances of getting the government to legislate universal health care is slim-to-none due to the gigantic health insurance industry and lobby. I think the health insurance industry is more interested in keeping their jobs (and money) than the general welfare of the whole country. That is my two cents, but shall we get back on topic?

 

Donations continue to be strong. 129 donations so far from people all over the globe!

 

I want to provide some more information about the cause. As a Team in Training member, we participate in these endurance and fundraising events for an "honored teammate". My honored teammate is an eight year old girl who lives in a neighboring town. She has had leukemia since she was 3, which started as a fever that would not go away. She is currently in remission, but she still waits to here the words, "you are cured". She is currently in grade school, and she loves cheerleading, reading books, and riding her bike.

 

By-the-way, as I discussed with Entropy before he allowed this contest, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society supports academic research. This means that if a cure comes out of an academic institution, it will be in the public domain, and the academics will patent it before Big Pharma can do so.

[Llywar]

For example, last year I had some nasty alergy that required steroid creams. In the US, they were like 10 USD, and in Romania they were like 2 USD (got a bunch from Romania when I went on my vacation there).

 

Yes, the cost is higher in the US (labour more expensive), but I am pretty sure that it's not 500% higher.

So fuck the drug companies, they are leaches that feed on people's misery and suffering.

 

In reality the cream probably cost $500M to bring to market, and $1.80 per unit to put on the shelves. The Romanians enact price controls at $2 and the manufacturer sells it at that price since 20 cents profit is better than no profit. However, you'll never recoup the $500M 20 cents at a time when you only have ten years of patent life. In the US the prices are much higher which is where the profits actually get made above and beyond the initial outlay. If prices were frozen at $2 everywhere it would be cheap in the US as well, but nobody would bother coming up with an improved version of the cream. Maybe there are some people out there now who the cream doesn't work for - do we want them to have a cream of their own?

 

The issue has nothing to do with labor costs in Romania or the US - nobody in Romania worked on R&D for the product in the first place. It probably isn't even manufactured domestically - if it were then the product bought in the US would be just as likely to have been made in Romania.

 

You are actually in a somewhat similar situation with the EL store (but on a much smaller scale). When you sell somebody a thermal serp sword does it really cost $90 to change a record in their storage data? You could give everyone 5000 thermal serps tomorrow and it would probably only take 20 minutes of your time in total. But that neglects all the effort that you put into having a game in the first place - if you hadn't worked hard for many years we wouldn't be in a position to be buying those swords at all. Now, since EL is the result of a small development team it is possible that you might have undertaken the work even without the possibility of making much money from it. However, you can't really scale that up to an R&D team of thousands of people (which is the number of people in R&D at any of the major Pharma outfits).

 

The bottom line is that somebody has to pay the $500M for R&D. Now, there are a lot of other ways to do that than charging the people who need the pills. However, you can't just make the costs go away by enacting price controls - this European tactic only works because the US tolerates bearing most of the costs of drug R&D. If the price on your cream drops to $2 everywhere then you won't see any new drugs coming out of private R&D. Personally I think there are better solutions - such as leaving the private system alone and starting up a competing public system that funds R&D and outsources later development to the established pharma companies - the resulting drugs would be widely licensed and would be dirt-cheap - taxpayers would bear the heaviest costs. The competition would keep prices down on less innovative drugs. However, if private industry developed a treatment not available from the public R&D effort they could still make lots of money from it - and as the treatment wouldn't exist at all otherwise it is still a net-benefit to the public. If the public R&D effort is highly successful it would eventually replace the private efforts via normal market forces. If the public R&D effort becomes a bureaucratic boondoggle then we'll still have the status quo (as opposed to no new medicines). Proponents of both private and public solutions can sleep soundly at night knowing that their side will win out in the end, and either way the consumer is better-off. No matter what the public effort will help benefit those who have rare disorders that will never be profitable for private R&D to address.

 

Keep in mind that R&D most benefits people who are currently healthy - new treatments for disease will almost certainly come too late for people who are sick today. R&D benefits most people who are healthy now, but who unknowling will contract some horrible condition that is currently untreatable. In the US the cream developed two years ago will cost $10, but the one that was used 15 years ago is probably $1.50 - and the same will be true 15 years from now. If you freeze R&D the cost might seem to disappear, but it is only because you take away the choice from the consumer about whether they'd rather spend more for a newer product.

 

The main thing that I'm trying to communicate is that the drug cost problem is a bit more complex than it might seem on the surface. That doesn't mean that the status quo is acceptable. It does mean that simplistic solutions aren't necessarily the right ones, and that solutions that destroy drug companies aren't necessarily in the best interests of those who are ill (and even more so those who are currently healthy). Just look at how hard it is to balance the EL economy and think about what it would be like if there were 30,000 highly-skilled workers involved in it full-time!

 

And I really don't like discussing this topic in this particular forum. I think we can all agree that supporting this cause is a great thing and it really is above debates over the best way to solve the worlds public health problems/costs. Again I'd like to thank those who have donated both prizes and money to this effort!

[shallara]

Not to dismiss the interesting discussion on the big companies and whatnot...

but.. only a couple more days left!!

Once again, I'd like to take a min and say THANK YOU 0ct!

For taking the time and devotion to do this event,

For taking the time to organize the in game aspect, which I'm sure has brought more attention to it,

For CARING!

[LabRat]

I just donated via PayPal

 

I hope the excess covers the paypal charge - they seem to pick a number at random

 

(shells*@aol.com)

[0ctane]

Not to dismiss the interesting discussion on the big companies and whatnot...

but.. only a couple more days left!!

Once again, I'd like to take a min and say THANK YOU 0ct!

For taking the time and devotion to do this event,

For taking the time to organize the in game aspect, which I'm sure has brought more attention to it,

For CARING!

Of course, thanks to all who are participating and spreading news of the event. Can you believe that we are nearing $2000 from EL players! Amazing!

 

I hope the excess covers the paypal charge - they seem to pick a number at random

They do seem to pick a random % to strip from all transactions. A lot of variables. Thanks for your donations!

[Rockfall]

Of course, thanks to all who are participating and spreading news of the event. Can you believe that we are nearing $2000 from EL players! Amazing!

 

thats superb!!! thanks again for this

[Wizzy]

I would like to add to the prizes 25K silver ore. If that is any help to get those ebul rich people to buy more tickets..

 

Jumpy

[0ctane]

I would like to add to the prizes 25K silver ore. If that is any help to get those ebul rich people to buy more tickets..

 

Jumpy

Thanks for the silver ore, Jumpy!

 

One day left to contribute.

[Looter]

im broke untill i start my new job next week and i dont have a paypal account anyway, if someone can do a gc to usd conversion then i will buy a ticket. i would also offer something towards the prize fund if its any good but is that helping to sell tickets? if not the best i can do is make a donation in a few weeks when i get payed (is that possible?).. anyway good work all of you, i take my hat off to ya!

[0ctane]

Sorry, but I do have a deadline on the contest (there are intermediate deadlines on my fundraising). Maybe someone you know can spot you. Prizes have definitely helped get people to donate, but it is pretty late in the game (so to speak). If you want to donate something, I see a "Magic Removal Stone" in your siggy.

Edited July 31, 2007 by 0ctane

[Looter]

heh that went ages ago but i do have a spare CoL if thats any good, i just hope its not too late to help get people buying tickets.