What happens when a billion dollar industry supported by hunters meets the oil industry?

by jenny downing

Oil and Gas Disasters Raise The Ire of Colorado Hunters
[Via DeSmogBlog - Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science]

The Bull Moose Sportsmen Alliance in Colorado has set their sights on the oil and gas industry. In a new report, the hunting and fishing group highlights the damage that the dirty energy industry has done to their hunting and fishing grounds for years. Among the more damning findings are the fact that there are over 100 oil spills every year in just three counties in Colorado – Garfield, Mesa, and Rio Blanco. The state of Colorado has confirmed that no fewer than 77 of these spills managed to taint water supplies of the three counties. These spills combined have leaked more than 5.6 million gallons of oil into the lands that the Bull Moose Sportsmen Alliance works to preserve.

As the Alliance points out, the hunting and fishing industry in Colorado brings in more than $1.2 billion a year, making it more profitable than the sports industry in the state, which includes NFL, NBA, and MLB teams. But thanks to the reckless oil and gas industry, the ecosystems and habitat that hunters and fishermen spend that billion-plus dollars to enjoy are threatened.

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This is not some liberal tree hugger group. Here is their complete agenda:

Conservation
Promote conservation and science-based wildlife and habitat management policies.

Participation
Identify and promote opportunities for recruitment and retention of hunters and anglers.

Second Amendment Rights
Protect Second Amendment rights for sportsmen.

Does the rush for more oil seems to exacerbate problems in the process for retrieving it? Spills may be part of the process but, are there ways to reduce this? We do know that, as we saw last year, there are ways to make it worse.

Wasting the oil in these ways may have been acceptable back in the day when there was lots of it. But wasting oil in a spill does not seem to make much sense today. At $100 a barrel, the amount lost is over $13 million. Perhaps not a lot but those millions add up.

Especially if that $13 million ruins a billion dollar industry.

Is this just the cost of doing business or are there better approaches, ones that will be more win-win rather than zero-sum?

Going back to Twitterfeed

I am returning to my old way – using Twitterfeed – until Facebook fixes the problem.

Please leave a comment if you can see this post.

Facebook does not play well with others

There has been this nice feature of WordPress that allows me to automatically get my posts put on my Facebook feed for my friends to read. The last few days, my posts end up on my profile page, as they should but are not making it to my newsfeed.

Lots of other peopl ehave been reporting the same problem with no real resolution. I’ve spent a couple of hours trying to troubleshoot things and still come back to the problem – Facebook is somehow just not working with this as seamlessly as they used to.

Things should just work.Not get broken at the drop of a hat. Oh well. Goodbye Facebook updates, I guess.

An interesting idea to lower drug costs

by ursonate

Bernie Sanders introduces anti-pharma-patent bill, aims to replace drug monopolies with prizes
[Via Boing Boing]

Jamie Love sez, “Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has introduced legislation in the US Senate that would use prizes to reward medical R&D, and eliminate all drug monopolies. It includes an open source dividend of $4 billion per year.”

Both bills would eliminate all legal barriers to the manufacture and sale of generic versions of drugs and vaccines. The more ambitious bill is the Medical Innovation Prize Fund Act, which would apply to all prescription drugs. The narrower proposal is the Prize Fund for HIV/AIDS Act, which would only apply to treatments for HIV/AIDS. The Medical Innovation Prize Fund would create a prize fund equal of .55 percent of US GDP, which is more than $80 billion per year at current levels of U.S. GDP. The HIV/AID Prize Fund would be funded at .02 percent of U.S. GDP, which is equal to more than $3 billion per year at current levels of U.S. GDP.

The federal government and private health insurance companies would co-fund the prizes, according to formulas set out in the bills. The cost of the prize funds would be more than offset by the savings from the introduction of generic competition for products.

Both bills have some similar features to Senator Sanders’ earlier prize fund bills, but there are also a number of changes. Among those changes are the introduction of an open source dividend element to the bills, which would have at least 5 percent of the prize money going to persons or communities that put knowledge, data, materials or technology into the public domain, or provide royalty free and non-discriminatory access to patents and other intellectual property rights. Annually, this would be more than $4 billion for S. 1137, and $147 million for S. 1138, at 2010 levels of GDP, as an incentive to open source research.

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You can read a little more in depth from this PDF.

What this is doing is decoupling research from development, providing substantial rewards to the creators of new drugs but promoting competition for the manufacture of those drugs.

It will also create competition for the sort of research that continually succeeds in finding products.That is, the groups that can be innovative and continue to win prizes again and again will be recognized while those that simply throw money at projects (such as Big Pharma) will fall.

The companies that are best at producing and manufacturing drugs will win in the marketplace while those who are best in research will be rewarded by the prize money. Which will be about $80 billion a year at current levels.

And it also includes competitive intermediaries who will help divvy the prize up for groups that take care of intermediate steps in the process – such as clinical trials, open source databases, etc.

I do not see this substituting for current government funding of basic research. This will be funded by insurance companies and the government but the added competition will provide cost savings that pays for it all.

It would be a win-win in many ways. But I imagine it will have no chance of becoming law.

It is a creative way of working around the problem of high drug costs,introducing competition in ways that would positively benefit not only those with the most efficient processes but also all of us.

We shall see.

This might work if they were more open about it

by Nadya Peek

Medical Justice caught impersonating happy patients on Yelp, RateMDs
[Via Ars Technica]

Recently we reported on Medical Justice and its efforts to help its clients squelch negative patient reviews. Now evidence has emerged that MJ has also been posting positive reviews on behalf of its clients on multiple review sites.

The first to notice the trend was John Swapceinski of RateMDs.com. Between November 2010 and March 2011, six IP addresses registered to Medical Justice collectively submitted 86 ratings to his site. They reviewed a total of 38 doctors in Florida, New Jersey, California, North Carolina, Hawaii, Texas, Illinois, and seven other states. Several of them appear to be known MJ clients. At our suggestion, Yelp reviewed its logs and found that those same six IP addresses had also been responsible for numerous favorable doctor reviews on Yelp.

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They claim they are working on a program to get people to rate the doctors right in the office. A good way to capture rel people and get the positive along with the negative.

That could help the consumer as well as the review sites. A real win-win.

But these reviews should be identified as such. And Medical Justice should be open about whether it is filtering any of these reviews at all.

Any sort of sock puppetry will kill this. And, unfortunately, MJ’s lack of openness seems to be more puppetry focussed than consumer focussed.

As reflected when you search Google with “Medical Justice” where some of the top 5 hits discuss MJ misconduct going back to 2008.

Just like old times for Microsoft

by aanjhan

Microsoft has received five times more income from Android than from Windows Phone
[Via asymco]

Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who released a big report on Microsoft this morning.

Microsoft is getting that money thanks to a patent settlement with HTC over intellectual property infringement.

Microsoft is suing other Android phone makers, and it’s looking for $7.50 to $12.50 per device, says Pritchard.

HTC Pays Microsoft $5 Per Android Phone, Says Citi.

A rough estimate of the number of HTC Android devices shipped is 30 million. If HTC paid $5 per unit to Microsoft, that adds up to $150 million Android revenues for Microsoft.

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MS raked in money from the sale of computers, even if none of its products was not present on the computer. One of the great licensing innovations of all time.

Now it is raking in money from the sale of cellphones, even if none of its products was not present on the cellphone.

Sheer genius. Not for developing innovative products that change the world but for having innovative lawyers that find ways to get the company huge amounts of money without having to actually produce products of their own.

For Google, when it rains lawsuits, it pours

Google launches NFC payment service, eBay sues alleging theft
[Via AppleInsider]

After Google unveiled the Google Wallet Near Field Communication mobile payment service on Thursday, eBay and subsidiary PayPal filed a lawsuit alleging the project’s team lead stole trade secrets to create the service.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google showed off the new mobile payment Android app at an event in New York City Thursday. Google Wallet utilizes virtual cards, such as a Google Prepaid Card, to ‘tap to pay’ via NFC technology.

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Trade secrets lawsuits can be tricky but since the Google guy negotiating a deal between Google and Paypal was also negotiating a new job at Google, one wonders about the obvious conflict of interests. And the fact that the Google approach looks so similar to the Paypal approach.

Will Google step up like Apple?

Lodsys also threatens Android developers with legal action over in-app purchases
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Developers have reported that patent holding firm Lodsys is also targeting Android apps,” Electronista reports.

“Those who’ve used the new Android in-app purchasing have been sent the same letters claiming that they infringe on patents,” Electronista reports. “As with the iOS cases, the notices are focusing on smaller developers that would be less likely to have a chance of fighting back.”

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One of the commenters made the point that of course Google will step up. All they have to do it what they have always done in app arena – copy Apple. As long as they remember to “Find and Replace” every instance of  the word “Apple” with the word “Google”, and get the lawyer’s name right.

The Apple letter is that good.