10 year lease on each TLD. 9 years in each goes to public auction which determines the rate for the next 10 year lease.

So then you just have to send copies of your one time pads to everyone you want to have conversations with. What could go wrong?

You are aiming at the wrong target. It's not some sort of zero sum game where spending more on physician samples or TV ads means spending less on R&D. Each dollar spent on ads more than pays for itself in extra revenue. And the system doesn't put HR, advertisers, and sales people above R&D - their jobs are all just as short lived these days in pharma. If you are going to blame anyone blame the investors - every free dollar goes to stock buybacks, not advertising. Anyway, I don't really see the congress and the senate directing the NIH on which drug candidates to pursue and which congressional districts to spend the money in working much more efficiently.

Well, the money end of drug development (Pharma) went through massive layoffs and shrinkage during Bush II the Lesser's reign. I think more people were laid off than actually employed in Pharma at any one time (and no, quite a lot of them did not find further research jobs).

Actually, the problem is that if an investment doesn't pay out for over 10 years a 200% payout is actually kind of skimpy. When you factor in risk of complete failure, you really need more like 1000% for it to make sense to start spending.

Some of that is because most new antibiotics aren't really all that new. The one on that list with the shortest "shelf life", levofloxacin, is a fluoroquinolone. We had already been using fluoroquinolones for 25 years by the time lefofloxacin came around.

And that is why biotech is funded by VC firms and eccentric rich folks.

drug testing in China seems to have hit some hiccups though. Too many fraudulent trials.

Oddly enough Cuba is actually a player in biotech, and has invented a treatment for malaria amongst other things.

But if you look at the big advances from over the past 30 years. PCR? Corporate. Cure for hepatitis? Corporate. Advances in DNA sequencing? Corporate.

And you can pull those same numbers for other companies and find that as an industry Pharma spends more on R&D than any other as a percentage of revenue. Sure, Google and Intel beat them but they are the outliers of the tech world, not the average.

So let the people with hepatitis die until Gilead finds a treatment for c. diff too?

The subsidies didn't get cut (well, maybe for a year or so during the last recession), they even increased faster than inflation most years. They just haven't grown nearly as fast as the cost of research. The concept of "low hanging fruit" applies big time to drug discovery, and the fruit that are left are much harder (and more expensive) to pick than the ones people chased in the 70's and the 80's. That said, year in, year out, about 25% of new drugs are invented in academia, principally through public funding. They are then licensed out to Pharma for the expensive part: clinical trials.

The solution to that will be private hospitals with much better hygiene and isolation of patients. And if you have to ask then no your insurance won't cover them.

Untracked freemen? The most valuable use of tracking will be of c-suite executives. At $1k per hour and up, their time is far too valuable to leave unexamined. And seeing as they are getting so much of their work done while out of the office (on the golf course, over drinks, etc) it would really be best if they were just tracked all the time.