Pharmaceutical companies haven't even come up with any cures dude.
This is a totally untrue statement.
However, I do realize how economics work and do not plan to work for a pharmaceutical company for the reason you stated. They have most certainly provided many cures, though. Just not the cures people want (to very difficult-to cure diseases).
The real problem, which perhaps you aren't seeing, is that curing diseases is incredibly difficult.
The 3 big guys are:
Cancer
HIV
Diabetes
HIV is the only one which stays sort of constant--but HIV has developed a way to hi-jack our cells to make more of itself (without destroying the parent cell prematurely). It's an incredibly dickhead asshole virus. It even uses our own signal transduction pathway to fuse with cells and infect in the first place. It's not a normal virus--it's supremely well adapted to fucking humans over.
Cancer and Diabetes however, can seriously start from thousands of different processes in the body. Cancer isn't just
cancer. There are many types and they certainly cannot all be treated the same way. As I've said most of what affects cancer, affects you too (and in the same way)--so this makes it very difficult to kill tumors without killing the person. Generally what we do is stop cell division--that's what chemotherapy is. Fucks with your microtubule assemply so that mitosis can't proceed.
This means that literally all cells in your body stop dividing.
That is really exceptionally bad for you--but it kills cancer pretty good. It's about as close as we've gotten to something that won't outright kill us which can effectively starve the cancer.
Diabetes is caused by a failure of cells to uptake glucose--this can happen for any of hundreds of reasons--all usually corresponding to their own mutations. This isn't something that I think will ever be cured without gene therapy (and there hasn't yet been found a vector for gene therapy that we can target sufficiently to use on humans).
I really do agree with you that pharmaceutical companies have no interest in curing all diseases--however a big part of the why when it comes to that is that the "big" diseases people want cured appear to be incurable. Why would a private company just throw money at a problem they're nearly certain they can't solve?
In reality, they are legally bound to NOT do that (at least not knowingly) else they'd have big trouble on their hands from shareholders.
If I could snap my fingers and make my dreams come true, I'd start a not-for-profit pharma company.
If you get right down to the nitty gritty of it, though, you shouldn't really be (again) assuming that you know how dirty these folks are if you don't have a reference frame for what they are able to do. If you don't know how cancer works (at the cellular and biochemical level) then you aren't really in a position to say one way or the other whether it's curable.
I can tell you as someone who is very interested in curing cancer (of any type) that doing so is a one in a gazillion shot. Cures will come from where they always have--individuals, or academia. There's been recent talk of an antibiotic which might be developed against cancer, some promising early results. From my understanding it's targeting a pathway associated with low oxygen metabolism which cancer generally uses.
Again its important to understand that this is likely to have huge side effects because we are essentially developing drugs against ourselves. That's what makes cancer so difficult to cure. You're literally trying to kill something which might only differ from your cell by 1 or 2 base pairs (in 3 billion) in the DNA. Its like trying to kill you without killing you.
Supremely difficult, and not really an intelligent business investment. Sure you might say "for the good of the people" but how much good does a pharma company do when it's run out of business?
I feel like you try to make everything so black and white. It's not, though. Everything is shades of grey.
As for surpassing you--well I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree here. You really haven't done much to back any of what you've said up.
I'm certified in zero planes, but I'll ask you again--what if any certification do you have in physics, ballistics, or anything which might be in any way shape or form compared to plane crashes and damage expected to result from them.
Let's assume for a second that the plane came in low and was pitched to one side. Tearing one wing off, and torquing the fuselage such that it turns and ripped off the other wing.
See we can sit here and conjecture all day--there are plenty of ways the plane may have lost it's wings, or the wings may have appeared to cause no damage. You literally have no information about the incident than what happened after it, and your information about that is
severely lacking.
When I say I've surpassed you, I mean I appear to know better how to form and support an argument than you. It's not meant as a dig really--it's just that you seemed to have leaned on this idea that I'm younger than you in your previous posts. If you think it matters that I'm younger than you are, then I think it matters that my logical arguments are more sound--especially when considering that you
are older (I'm assuming).
By the way I didn't mean to suggest that the thing would "bounce"--rather that perhaps it bottomed out, tore the wings off and then sent the fuselage sliding into the building. By all accounts the plan hit the ground first.
Here is an account from an eyewittness who seems to suggest that the plane did in fact hit the ground first:
I was looking out the window; I live on the 16th floor, overlooking the Pentagon, in a corner apartment, so I have quite a panorama. And being next to National Airport, I hear jets all the time, but this jet engine was way too loud. I looked out to the southwest, and it came right down 395, right over Colombia Pike, and as is went by the Sheraton Hotel, the pilot added power to the engines. I heard it pull up a little bit more, and then I lost it behind a building.
And then it came out, and I saw it hit right in front of -- it didn't appear to crash into the building; most of the energy was dissipated in hitting the ground, but I saw the nose break up, I saw the wings fly forward, and then the conflagration engulfed everything in flames. It was horrible.
