IDK, it's better that they spend money on this rather than offensive weaponry, as it has been shown that it is practically impossible to intercept hypersonic missiles in their terminal flight stage. At least it's good for a jobs program.
The problem is that the plan is obviously to make sure that US wars of conquest can be waged also against nuclear powers without fear of retaliation.
they will be a spoiler candidate if they have to be
I'd rather phrase it as "and they better not run a neolib spoiler candidate". It's not the progressives with popular support who are spoilers, but the neoliberals who are only propped up by corpo lobbies.
I'm saying this as someone who did work for a mid sized company manufacturing medical equipment.
US drug prices are not higher because of R&D costs or whatever. They are higher because when we sold stuff in Europe, the big deal was whether we can sell one treatment for 3 or 4 EUR in a particular country as we were negotiating with the government, when we sold to the US, the megacorp buying it (the only entity we could sell to realistically, as they own 75% of the relevant US market segment) said they will not buy it under 100 USD, and then they also acquired the company I was working at and 3 others like it in a single year.
This was under Biden BTW.
Also, FDA approvals are anecdotally very different from EU approvals. Here, you do the relevant trials, fill the requisite forms, the standards are high, but objective. With the FDA, it's all up to an expert panel, and it can be often hard to understand their subjective requirements.
An optimistic take would be that the US oligarchy will eventually collapse under this chaos and something better might emerge. The pessimistic take is that something worse might also emerge. Or the elite might just carry on despite the collapse, like in 1990 Russia.
So what the US does is effectively making it harder to develop vaccines by creating additional trial burden without supporting said trials, and also I guess removing insurance coverage for non-at-risk groups.
In the meantime, the EU invested 3 billion EUR as part of Horizon 2020 into specifically COVID research, is both working to increase vaccination rates both domestically and abroad around the world, is funding almost 500 trial sites to accelerate the development of new vaccines against COVID. It has created a new agency, HERA to boost pandemic preparedness in the future. Finally, it invested significant money and resources into specifically researching and treating long COVID.
As this moves forward, it might be EU aid groups become a better source of COVID treatment and prevention in the US than anything domestic there. Of course that won't happen, Trump and co won't want to lose face over this, so people will just die.
I know they are doing very well, trust me, I've seen the inside of the beast. It's not Microsoft either, any megacorp will talk to you in terms of how much they lost by not fully monopolising a market segment.
And that is my point, not that they don't make insane amounts of money, but that it will never be enough.
Yeah, but Epic broke the contract. Union has to sue or it's not worth anything. Simple as.
That said, the union could have gotten something else out of this if Epic did the lawful thing. Even the fact that Epic acknowledged they need to follow the contract would have been valuable.
You're right, but I'll take this over anything in the past 30 years. And it will get messy, Orbán will not leave peacefully. But he is making mistake after mistake. These polls don't reflect taking the side of the losing Hungarophobic (no, really) Romanian Nazi presidential candidate Simion - TISZA leadership are literally walking 300km to Oradea from Budapest in a unifying gesture as we speak. And a lot of other things that have happened, like the recent scandal when it was revealed they were / are still trying to start an own invasion of Ukraine. Also Trump.
The DK for example just imploded and are likely to disappear. MM has conceded the election in advance in favour of TISZA.
That said, Orbán can and will change the election system in the coming year, and there is a lot of shit still coming. But something has broken in the system in Hungary in the past 6 months that can't be rebuilt as it was.
He's up for reelection in April 2026, and he's going to lose badly as it looks like now. Orange line is his party. And this summary is skewed most likely and overestimates him, as it takes his own polls into account, you can see that big outlier orange dot over everything on the right. In the current fucked up system, a lead like this is almost enough to rewrite the constitution.
(Legend is a bit confusing, it's TISZA getting ahead, not MSZP, luckily.)
IDK, it's better that they spend money on this rather than offensive weaponry, as it has been shown that it is practically impossible to intercept hypersonic missiles in their terminal flight stage. At least it's good for a jobs program.
The problem is that the plan is obviously to make sure that US wars of conquest can be waged also against nuclear powers without fear of retaliation.