Monetary Evil: Curing People Of Deadly Diseases Bad For Revenue, Says Goldman Sachs

An example of how we seem to priortize making money over all else, screw morality, Goldman Sachs is warning companies not to come up with cures for deadly diseases, because that's not a good moneymaking business model.

As CNBC and other news outlets report, Goldman Sachs analysts, in a report called "The Genome Revolution" asked "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?"

The answer to Goldman Sachs, apparently, is no.

Here's an excerpt from the report: "The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies.......While the proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."

In other words, better to let people die slow, painful deaths while draining their bank accounts with expensive treatments, than just partly draining their bank accounts while allowing people to go on living.

Goldman Sachs cites a hepatitis C treatment from Gilean Sciences, which achieves a cure rate of more than 90 percent. The company came out with a handy dandy new Hep C cure whose sales peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015. Those profits have been falling ever since, because so many people have been cured of the disease that there's not as many remaining left to treat.

Also, if you don't have hepatitis C, you're not going to transmit it to other people, which is bad for business. Says the Goldman Sachs report: "In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines"

Moral of the story, in Goldman Sachs world: Make sure Hep C is chronic, so people keep paying for treatments, and make sure it spreads to other people, keeping the revenue stream alive, even as people die and/or go bankrupt.

It also turns out that non-infectious diseases like cancer are a bit more profitable because there's always going to be people coming down with cancer. It's not an infectious disease, so "the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise."

The takeaway here is that since big financial companies like Goldman Sachs seem to be our overlords these days, scientists should stop finding cures for diseases, especially genetic cures that have the potential of stopping a disease via one major innoculation.

Many American businesses depend on millions of people suffering from chronic, incurable, expensive diseases, and you commie scientists and doctors better not interfere with that business model!

Halloween Proved Donald Trump Jr Is Stupid

Donald Trump Jr. took this Halloween pic of
his daughter Chloe to make a stupid political point,
and boy that did not go well at all. 

I got a chuckle over the mini-uproar reacting to a Tweet sent out by Donald Trump Jr., son of our "illustrious" president.

He took a sad pic of his young daughter Chloe at Halloween with this message: "I'm going to take half of Chloe's candy tonight & give it to some kids who sat at home. It's never to (sic) early to teach her about socialism."

As many respondents and The Guardian pointed out, this was a, um, flawed analysis of socialism. Of course he was also using his young daughter as a political prop and demonstrating his own selfishness, but we've come to expect that from the Trump family.

 A good response came from Elite Bear Agents: 

"My man, 'socialism' was her getting that free candy in the first place. You taking half for reasons she can't understand is capitalism."

Ouch!

Then there's nice from Nick Pettigrew:

"Your kid went begging from hard-working people for candy. The kid who stayed home got theirs because their parents worked to pay for it. In your simile, if anyone's the socialist, it's Chloe." 

I liked this response from Matt Blackwell, too:

"It's telling that junior thinks that 'walking around getting gifts from people' is a good metaphor for 'earning money.'"

The ever-reliable and wise J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, also responded beautifully with this sarcastic missive to Junior:

"Fill her bucket with old candy left by her great-grandfather, then explain that she has more because she's smarter than all the other kids."

I'll close with my favorite snipe at Junior, given the tax "reform" plan Junior's dad is pushing: Amir said this: 

"Or you could just take 99% of Chloe's candy, eat it, and tell her to wait for it to trickle down."

Perfect!

Fox News On The Hunt For Those Dastardly Anti-Business Kids Movies. This Time: Lego.

Thank goodness for Fox News, and Fox Business News for once again rescuing the kids of This Great Nation from a movie that that could encourage the innocent children to not fawn over billionaire corporate executives.

Fox Business News says "The Lego Movie"
is indoctrinating our kids into hating CEOs
and the American Way of Life!  

As we all well know, we must teach our children to expect slave wages and to be expected to work 100 hours a week as adults so those poor unfortunate billionaires can become trillionaires.

But it turns out,  Fox Business News has uncovered the latest evil plot by those evil Hollywood liberals. It's in the children's feature "The Lego Movie."

I haven't seen the movie, so I might be a little fuzzy on the facts, but apparently, a villian in the movie runs some sort of corporation.

Charles Payne of Fox Business News is pained that the villian is, Sigh! once again a CEO. Says he:

"Why is the head of a corporation, where they hire people, people go to work, they pay their rent, their mortgage, they put their kids through college, they feed their families, they give to charities, they give to churches - why would the CEO be an easy target?" Payne wondered.

Um, maybe because the standard movie plot device is the main characters triumph over someone or something much more powerful than they, and CEOs tend to be powerful?

Yeah, I know, that's my Marxism or something talking. (Never mind that I'm pretty much a card carrying Capitalist. I just not capitalist enough for our friend Charles Payne.)

I think Payne just wants to ignore the fact, that a zillion commentators have noted before I got around to it here:

Not to be Captain Obvious, but the movie is in part one great big advertisement for Legos. Presumably the CEO of the company that makes Legos thought it was a swell idea to tie his product in with a popular movie.

It worked. "The Lego Movie" is boffo at the box office, Lego is going to sell stuff hand over fist, he's going to make a lot of money, presumably the workers at Lego are thusly going to keep their jobs, their houses and will feed their families.

Capitalism wins and the CEO of Lego is a hero! Hurray!

Fox Business has been on the patrol a lot in recent years guarding us from such Marxist indoctrination or our children in the form of movies like "The Lorax,"  "The Muppet Movie" and "Wall-e."

Back in 2012, Lou Dobbs at Fox Business News had this (comical, at least to me!) take on the dangers of "The Lorax."

"Hollywood is once again trying to indoctrinate our children," Dobbs warned.

See! I told you the Marxist were indoctrinating our children!

Go on, Lou:

Lou Dobbs said The Lorax was "demonizing the 1% and espousing green energy policies"

Green energy policies! Oh, the EVIL! God forbid our children grow up and get well paying jobs making wind turbines and solar energy installations!

Then those kids working on wind turbines and solar energy will get decent paychecks because the CEOs of the wind and solar companies had the smarts to create these companies because they, are, um, Capitalists.

Hmmm.

We also had the Great Muppet Wars of 2011, when Fox News said "The Muppet Movie" demonized the oil industry.

(The Muppets did it in a sneaky way, too, by not actually mentioning the oil industry in the movie, but still, the subversion was there. Fox News says so)

And this did turn into a war, especially when Miss Piggy responded to Fox News by saying the anti-oil charge against The Muppet Movie was "almost as laughable as accusing Fox News of being news."

Oh, those leftist Muppets will stop at NOTHING when turning our children into commies!

It is true CEOs are often protrayed as villians and rarely seen as heroes in movies, as USA Today points out. But aren't they being a teensy, weensy bit defensive?

After all CEOs tend to have a lot of perks that protect them from the rabble: Money, power and prestige among them. And after all, CEOs are a good source of villian ideas. Most are pretty honest, but a few are spectacularly crooked.

Jeff Skilling of Enron, anyone?

Anyway, as I said, thank goodness for Fox News. I'm sure they'll keep protecting us from that brand of capitalism the movie studios torture us with by selling movies and product tie ins and overpriced popcorn in movie theaters.