FDA Suppresses Alternative Treatments?
Ordinary Everyday Misinformation
I'm suspicious of anecdotal medicine. The sort of thing where
someone claims that a small study by some professor at Bamfloozle University shows that pot
extract or chicken bladders may cure cancer, but the drug companies are
suppressing it because they cannot patent it. 99.999% chance it is total
garbage. 
The patent issue is completely bogus. The first source of potential drug investigations has always been natural substances. Tamoxifen was from yew trees, yes? Was it suppressed? Heck, if not for the pharmaceutical industry researching potential compounds no one would have ever found it. But naturals have tons of extra compounds, many harmful. If there is an active ingredient that can be separated to allow for effective therapy without harmful effects of the other compounds, then there is a market for a standardized product regardless of whether it can be patented. Doctors will use a standardized pharmaceutical product in high preference to the raw form because it provides controlled dosing and at least some level of protection from lawsuits since it will be a standard treatment. So there is money to be made by drug companies, patent or not. These remedies would be a prime interest for the smaller companies that need lower tech, lower cost items they can produce.
"But when Uncle Fremus was told he had 6 months to live, he ate a bushel of chicken bladders and lived another 30 years". First, there always has been spontaneous remission. Before there were any effective treatments there were still death rates, meaning a certain number of survivors. Second, the diagnosis of cancer has been as much art as science, so being diagnosed with this-or-that isn't an absolute either. Plus let's not forget that doctors can be wrong, so the Uncle Fremus story, even if it is true, is meaningless by itself. Besides, if there were any effective direct "home remedies", why is it that cancer survival rates did not rise until modern pharmaceuticals were created?
All this demonizing of drug companies is just silly.
Oncologists would be THRILLED to have an effective low-cost treatment, and would
not hesitate to use natural materials if they are reasonably safe and effective.
The "all docs are in the pockets of drug companies" is pasture patties. And it's
not a matter of doctor altruism. An effective low-cost treatment means that you
can underprice the competition and get more patients at a higher profit margin.
You don't make dime on someone who cannot afford to pay you. If any of the
alternative treatments has real merit, they will swiftly show up as standard
practice after they've been carefully checked to actually work. Until then, if
one wants to gamble his life on them, it is of course his choice. Good luck with
that. 
The "drug companies are suppressing it" stuff is even more
ludicrous. 
Let's say Phizer is nearly finished clinical trials on a new
synthetic anticancer drug. They have spent a fortune in it and it is expensive
to make, but they expect people will still want it despite a high cost. I'm
Bristol-Meyers, and I've found in my lab that extract of pond scum can be nearly
as effective, only I can't patent it. Do I spend years and a fortune developing
my own patentable synthetic drug, or do I simply complete the trials, roll out
my inexpensive alternative and cut Phizer off at the knees? It's a no-brainer,
folks! In a competitive environment, the low cost provider wins, and drug
companies are no different from any other companies in this respect.
All this simple herbal cancer cure stuff sounds to me exactly
like the 100 MPG carburetors the oil companies supposedly bought up the patents
for in order to suppress them. That was complete garbage, too.
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FDA Suppresses Alternative Treatments?
The FDA is
suppressing alternative treatments at the behest of drug companies!
Oh yeah? And the basis for this claim is what, that alternative treatments do not have FDA approval? So did anybody carry out the trials and present the data for approval?? **Deafening Silence**
The FDA does not
suppress anything. What they do is require extensive and controlled trial
evidence before approving something, which necessarily makes it very expensive.
Anyone can submit anything, as long as it meets stiff guidelines. Have companies
sometimes fudged data? Probably so, but that's not FDA's doing. The worst the
FDA has ever been accused of with any actual basis is not being quite stringent
enough combing the data concerning a borderline treatment. If someone meets the
trial evidence requirements for repeatability, effectiveness and reasonable
safety, they'll approve frog eyeballs for treating lumbago. As for how the FDA
goes about its business, you have half the people screaming about treatments
being approved too fast without enough long term trials to uncover side effects,
and the other half screaming that they are too picky and supposedly suppressing
alternative treatments because the process is so long and expensive. What's an
agency to do??? 
As for drug
companies, they are going to put their limited money for this brutally expensive
process where there is the most promise, based on experience with similar
compounds already proven to be effective, or new research as long as it has
depth and solidity. If I'm research director at Merc and I crank up a $100
million effort to research anything without some awfully good initial evidence
of effectiveness and it comes up bust, my job will very quickly change to saying
"Do you want fries with that?". The people at these companies are not stupid.
They constantly prowl legitimate research for leads, because they have to place
high stakes bets with limited budgets on long term lines of inquiry, and get to
the finish line before the competition or die in the marketplace. If they are
overlooking something you feel is promising (pot cures cancer! snufflebeetles
cure diabetes!), there is likely a shining good reason for it. Anyone can come
up with wonderful sounding conspiracy theories ... they're a penny a dozen
(quantity discount). 
Besides,
even if your pet treatment has some promise, how do you know that what the drug
companies are working on instead does not have more promise and research behind
it?
I think the
alternative treatment folks should quit carping, band together, decide on the
best lines of inquiry, foot the bill to do the trials, and get the approvals.
And if they are unwilling to put their money where their mouth is, there is
likely a shining good reason! 
Medications tinker with your chemistry on an ongoing basis, nothing natural about the process even if the material in question came from a natural source. When done right the molecule has just the right shape to replace, enhance or suppress whatever biochemical path needs it. Of course it often also affects some other similar-looking path that does a different job. Like the COX-2 inhibitors (Vioxx, Celebrex) were created because doctors were begging for decades for something that would have the benefits of aspirin-like drugs to treat arthritis without the serious bleeding issues and other nasty stuff. Somewhere they discovered that aspirin's benefit for arthritis largely came from inhibiting an enzyme COX-2. So they ginned up molecules to do only that, and at first they seemed to do that job, at least in the usual lower doses. Then at larger doses over longer time than the clinical trials ugly stuff started popping up - it likely either affected some other path, or failed to affect a different path that aspirin-like things do affect, leading to the heart attack risk. Body chemistry is ridiculously complex, and a lot of the people in question were more frail and on more combinations of drugs than those in the initial trials.
There's conflicting pressures on all sides of the issue. Patients and doctors often want things faster and cheaper, which says shorter & simpler trials, and at the same time want to minimize the surprises, which means longer and more expensive trials. And there never has been a med without side-effects, so it is always a balancing act of how much benefit under what usage regimen weighed against the downsides, even before surprises pop up.
There's a big money
trail in medicine at all levels, so there inevitably are some cases of
skullduggery. But here's a question: there is also a big money trail in the
media, so why do most of us accept their stories as basically impartial? Maybe
that is a foolish assumption. 
It seems to
me that the media money trail makes them very prone to "sexing-up" a story to
grab eyeballs. If you're NBC and you report that there are simply some
unexpected safety questions about Futzinal, while ABC sensationalizes it as if it
were a big scandal and coverup, guess who gets the eyeballs, ratings and the big
advertising dollars?
Let's also not
forget that if you're a law firm trolling for those big class-action profits, is
it not in your interest to make things look as bad as possible? You don't have
to be right, you merely need to sway a jury. An honest mistake or
underestimation of a complex issue isn't a big winner in the media or the
courtroom. And, son of a gun, court cases are big source of news stories ...
juries and viewers are much the same. 
The publicity is
nearly always presented as some evil drug company marketing a drug despite
knowing full well it was a time bomb. But I think about this: if you're a drug
company and you routinely push into the market with meds having known serious
problems, whatever profit you might make in the short run is going to be long
lost after the lawsuits start rolling in, plus you'll lose sales on your other
drugs in collateral damage. It is not a viable business plan and no company
would last for long doing this, yet the big drug companies have been around a
long time. The reality is inconsistent with the publicity ... gee, I wonder
which one is faulty? 
The purpose of this section is NOT to discourage efforts to reduce environmental impact. Rather, it is to provide some counterweight to the vague and fluffy presentations of the politicians and popular media, which claim that this-or-that is somehow the easy solution to our difficulties. They would have us believe that a few simple changes are all that's necessary to be "green", so that we falsely believe we have solved a problem when in fact we have not.
Forests Create Oxygen For Us
The general idea is that since trees absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen during photosynthesis, then forests are taking our carbon dioxide and providing us with oxygen so that we need to leave them untouched to do their crucial job. Sounds entirely sensible, doesn't it?
Consider these
facts: the carbon dioxide that enters the forest and the oxygen that supposedly leaves are
of course both gasses. But carbon is a solid. Now, picture yourself in your mind exploring a mature forest. You walk along beneath the large trees on the thin
carpet of dead leaves, stepping over the occasional fallen tree. The forest has
been there for many hundreds of years, unsullied by man, quietly taking in tons
of carbon dioxide per acre every year and returning the oxygen.
Question: where
is all the carbon? 
The trees reached their maximum average size and density when the forest first
matured long, long ago, and then new ones grew only when an old one died and
fell. All that carbon dioxide taken in should have left behind many tons of
carbon per acre per year. After hundreds of years you should be walking on a
layer of accumulated carbon material tens of feet thick. You should have to
drill to find soil!
The answer is, of course, that all the leaves, branches, and dead trees decay. And when they decay, microorganisms and fungi take in oxygen and convert the solid material into (guess what?) ... water and carbon dioxide. In a mature forest, then, decaying material releases carbon dioxide exactly as fast as the living trees absorb it, so there is no ongoing accumulation of carbon. This also means that no extra oxygen is released to be used elsewhere, it is all used for decay.
The only way a forest can absorb carbon dioxide and provide oxygen to other locations is if the mature trees are cut, removed, and used for buildings or other uses that do not convert the wood back into carbon dioxide. New trees growing can then trap new carbon: in order for a forest to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it must be logged.
Every species is crucial to the ecology of the planet.
Does it really make
sense that a creature that lives in only one river or a few hundred square miles
of land is vital the the survival of all other life on the planet? If it exists
on only 0.01% of the planet, then the other 99.99% of the planet is obviously
getting along just fine without it and would be unaffected by its absence.
Consider: if the polar bears disappeared,
how much would that affect bluebirds? The answer is not at all. Not all
species are widely woven into the web of planetary ecology; in fact there are
numerous ones that dangle off the outer edges such that their loss would cause
no significant disturbance.
Now, this is not a reason to simply ignore the significance of habitat destruction. Continuing destruction eventually adds up to the point where it does cause serious harm. But making overblown claims about every variant of moss, frog, or bug simply undermines the very serious issues surrounding species preservation. A number of the renewable energy solutions involve expanded agriculture and water usage, which will inevitably impact some small fragile ecosystems. Hard choices may need to be made.
Ethanol Can Replace Gasoline.
If we had converted the entire 2006 corn crop to ethanol rather than only 18% it would have yielded 5.6 times as much ethanol (1/0.18) = 27.2B gal, or 21% of consumption, about 1/5. Of course, converting the entire crop would have a disastrous effect on meat prices. Presently half the crop is used for animal feed, primarily poultry and pork, but for beef as well.
Until ethanol can be produced from cellulose efficiently and on an industrial scale, or gasoline consumption falls drastically, it can only be a minor supplement to gasoline, maybe 10% of total consumption at best.
Vegetable Oil can Replace Diesel
If we used the entire soybean oil crop just for diesel fuel, we could supply 11% of the demand. Diesel fuel is used almost entirely in heavy trucks, farm machinery, ships, freight trains, and heavy equipment, where there are no serious fuel efficiency improvements to be had because this machinery has always been designed with fuel economy as a major priority. Replacing any serious amount of diesel from crop oils is simply not rational, since these oils also have many important food and industrial uses.
Ordinary Everyday Misinformation
I Don’t Do (whatever) Because I’m Worth More
Ever heard someone say something along the line of "I don't cut my own lawn because I'm worth $30/hr and I pay someone else only $25/hr to do that". This person then sits watching TV while the lawn service is working. D U M B. The time that you're not busy earning that $30/hr, you're worth not a penny. If the cost of a service is worth it to you to have some goof-off time, then be honest with yourself about that value judgement instead of falling into the phony-excuse trap. And if you could be at work instead, is that $30 before or after taxes? Your spending is after, so compare apples to apples.
You only use 10% of your brain
Pick any other randomly chosen percentage, it does not matter. The whole idea is complete garbage, based on various idiot writers’ gross misunderstanding of how the brain is structured and how it works.
Neurons are not consistent or reliable things. The way the brain achieves any level of repeatability is to have vast numbers of neurons dedicated to perform one tiny function, all doing the same thing but interconnected in a sort of voting arrangement. The response of the massive group does what a single (nonexistent) reliable neuron could do by averaging across a huge number of less predictable real-world neurons. Without this sort of mass redundancy, the brain would be too unstable to function at all.
Unlike a computer, the brain has no general-purpose processing center that can be used for different functions. Every minor function the brain must perform, from determining the pitch of sound in one ear to recognizing pain in one toe to moving that one muscle that closes your left eyelid, has a big clump of neurons dedicated to that one task, plus a lot of specific interconnection between the clumps. Whatever function does not need a lot of processing at a particular moment leaves its clump(s) relatively inactive. But those areas cannot serve any other function, so obviously most of the brain is not highly active most of the time. You may as well expect the TV to mow your lawn when you're not watching it.
This drug taps into your unused brain power or expands your mind
More total garbage, largely from the I-need-an-excuse-to-get-stoned idiots. Not just the brain alone, but neural systems in general have had billions of years of evolution to try every variation of structure and chemistry. A better functioning central nervous system confers an obvious survival advantage, and is highly likely to become dominant in the gene pool, while less effective variants get weeded out. Unless damaged in some fashion, brains work as well as they possibly can without any added ingredients.
Some specific functions, such as short-term memory, have been found to be slightly enhanced by experimental drugs in lab mice, but even that story has been wildly overblown by writers (wishful thinking most likely).
Things such as caffeine, which are very mild stimulants, enhance alertness a little but otherwise make no difference in brain function. They merely make it a bit easier to pay attention, as if there were some environmental situation requiring closer attention to help your survival (such as recognizing edible plants among poisonous ones).
Strong stimulants such as amphetamines (or adrenaline) enhance reflexive reaction (fight or flight) but greatly reduce the ability to think. This is how the brain is structured by evolution – thinking is a slow luxury. With their thinking ability compromised, users mistake the higher level of sensory alertness for better “brain power”.
The “expand your mind” drugs actually cripple your mind, or ability to think clearly. What they do is make you feel as if you’re thinking better, while the opposite is true. They create a chemically-induced fantasy, and like any other fantasy it comes crashing down when reality catches up with you.
Sorry, there is NO pill or potion that
will make you smarter. 
The best you can do
is practice clear thinking by observing examples (such as this page!) because it
is an art that can be learned by most anyone. The path to good thinking is math
and logic, and correctly applying them. Most journalists in the popular
media are excellent examples of how to NOT think clearly.
Make big money with my plan, anyone can do it, no experience necessary!
OK, this is in the top 10 of the perpetual-scams list.
There is not, never has been, never will
be such a thing, at least for more than a brief flash in time. It violates the
basic law of supply and demand, and nothing can do that.
If it truly is easy and anyone can do it, then it cannot possibly provide big money. The supply of “anyone” wanting “easy money” is huge, and they would flood into this endeavor, exploding the supply.
Since the demand depends on price, the demand at a high price, i.e. the easy money, is quickly saturated. Then the excess supply causes the price to collapse. The price will fall until enough increased demand is created and enough excess supply is squeezed out to achieve balance. Only the ones that can operate on lower prices and higher effort will survive, but that is not the promise of the scam, now is it?
The reason anything pays well, and it does not matter what it is, lies in there being good demand yet some sort of restriction on the supply. Usually that restriction has to do with special expensive training required (technical, medical), unusual ability required (professional sports), difficult or dangerous work (rescue, firefighting), artificial barriers based on political power (unions), or a combination of these.
There is no Easter bunny, no free lunch, and no high-paying easy job requiring
no experience that anyone can get into. 
The stock market is gambling
Let’s be clear about something: the stock market can be used for gambling, and some idiots do indeed use it that way. But it is totally false that its function is to facilitate gambling; it is to facilitate investing, and there is absolutely NO connection between the two. Is the purpose of organized sports gambling because there are people who bet on the outcome of games? Of course not. Investing is totally different than gambling, and if you personally don’t understand the difference, let a financial advisor or mutual fund manager who does understand do the work for you, because investing works where gambling does not. On a very simple level, here is the story of stocks and stock markets:
A company is “public” when anyone can trade shares of its stock. A company “goes public” by selling shares of stock, usually to raise money for expansion rather than obtaining, or in addition to obtaining, loans from banks or bonds (a bond is a loan from investors).
A share of stock is a license to have a small involvement in the economic performance of a company without being financially responsible for the company’s debts. Generally when a company does well at its trade, it gives some of the profits to shareholders as a dividend, so much money per share of stock. That gives a share of stock a certain value, and since stock is like any other private property, an owner may sell his shares to another person if he wishes.
A stock market is merely the public forum or auction where buyers and sellers come to agreements to buy or sell their shares; the price is up to the participants and what they are willing to pay or accept. The “market average” you always hear about (and there a many) is simply an average of the prices for a selection of stocks that is supposed to in some fashion represent the entire market. Whether any average does is a matter of debate. What would the average price of the most commonly sold groceries at a store tell you about each specific item in the store?
Investors buy or sell shares of a stock based on their perceived future performance of the company, which is based on deep research into many economic factors connected to the particular company, the specific industry the company operates in, and the economy in general. A gambler, by contrast, usually knows little or nothing about a company or industry and buys or sells based on not much more than guesses. An investor thinks the value of a share lies in the company and the economy, where a gambler thinks the value lies in the price.
Stocks get traded by investors due to different investing criteria by different investors. What constitutes financial value varies widely with investing style. Some look for stable present dividends, some look for future growth without present dividends, some look for poorly performing companies that are recovering and should provide future rewards. As any given company’s situation varies with time, the type of investor wishing to hold its stock also changes, so the stock gets traded. Plus, each investor within a given style has a different set of criteria for how it assesses a company.
It may looks chaotic to the casual observer, but stock trading by true investors,
and these are the vast bulk of traders (mostly institutions such as pension and
mutual funds), is anything but gambling. If you want to gamble, go to a casino.
If you want to secure your future, invest.
To hear the politicians, pundits, and newscasters, one would think converting a vehicle to hybrid drive automatically greatly increases the fuel economy. The reality is a lot less simple than this, though it is not that hard to figure out. Here is the real story. Keep in mind that all the power for a hybrid still comes from burning fuel in an engine. What no one talks about is that every energy conversion in the hybrid system has some loss; nothing is 100% efficient. The terms alternator, battery, and so on below refer to the electric drive system.
The alternator and its control circuits run around 95% efficient.
The battery itself, and I'm assuming the latest lithium-ion type, runs around 92%. And yes, batteries do have losses; the charging voltage is always higher than the discharge voltage.
The electric motor and its control circuitry run around 90%.
The end-to-end efficiency for the electric drive path is the product of these efficiencies = 0.95 x 0.92 x 0.90 = 0.79 or let's be generous and say 80%.
Therefore delivering power to the wheels through
the electric drive requires at least (1 / 0.8) = 125% as much fuel as delivering
the same power directly from the engine. Add to that the fact that all the extra
hardware adds weight, which detracts from fuel economy. So how can it save
fuel?? This is the devil-in-the-details part. How much a hybrid saves, if any,
depends very heavily on the "driving cycle", or how much power is needed for
what length of time during a trip.
The biggest source for savings comes from being able to shut off the engine for some portion of the time, and not all hybrids are capable of doing this.
All engines have spinning losses. That is, merely keeping the engine in motion costs energy.
The fuel wasted on spinning losses is proportional to the engine's size and increases with the rotational speed, but is largely independent of the power being produced by the engine. At idle it is maybe 5% of the engine's maximum capacity, but easily doubles at cruising speeds.
When an engine in use is spinning at higher speeds but lightly loaded, the total fuel used is less than if it were under heavy load, but since a good portion of that fuel being used goes to spinning losses rather than delivered power, it is less efficient.
Consider the driving pattern of a typical car in the city or dense suburbs on fairly level streets. A similar driving cycle applies to congested traffic during the typical rush-hour commute, when the normal average speed stays far below the posted limits.
At a stop, of course no power is needed.
From a stop, high power is required briefly (depending on acceleration) until the cruising speed is reached.
At a steady speed, low power is required. Even on modest inclines, maybe 15% of maximum engine capacity is typically needed.
In this driving cycle, much of the time is spent either at a stop or at a modest speed. In a well-designed hybrid driven conservatively, and gentle driving is very key, most of the time the electric motor can carry the load alone and the engine remains off. Especially at the cruising speed, this represents a significant savings in fuel by eliminating the spinning losses.
As long as the engine can remain off for enough time, the fuel saved can overcome the fact that it must burn 25% more fuel to deliver the power to the wheels through the electric system.
The less the power being used, the longer the engine can remain off. When the engine runs, there is an upper limit to the charge rate, so there is a minimum charging time. Therefore, as the driving load is increased, the fuel saving rapidly deteriorates at the ratio of variable engine off time to minimum on time falls.
When the off time falls low
enough, it no longer compensates for the losses of the electric drive and the
engine may as well run constantly even if the electric motor can still handle
the load. Once the engine must run constantly, the electric system can only
harm fuel economy, so it is shut off and the hybrid vehicle is no different
than a normal one (it may act as hybrid assisted, discussed later, but this
actually decreases economy vs. not using it at all).
The regenerative braking is nice but not nearly as great as it may seem. First, it is only effective on gradual stops because the electric system cannot decelerate any better than it can accelerate. Second, often the motor acts as the generator and not only is it less efficient as a generator, but also it can't extract power below a certain speed so that part of the stop must be done the usual way. The vehicle makers sometimes offer it because it takes no significant extra hardware and sounds good.
Vehicles that routinely use most of the engine's maximum available power, such as highway trucks, locomotives, and other transport vehicles, do not have a driving cycle that is suited to hybrid drive. Also, most cars operating primarily at highway speeds have a power use pattern that presents only limited chances for the hybrid system to provide a benefit. On even modest uphill grades, the power demand exceeds the electric drive's capability or drains the battery so fast that there is not enough engine off-time to overcome the conversion losses. On level or mild downhill slope the electric drive can handle the load, but even then the drain rate is fairly high due to air resistance and limits the chance for enough engine off-time for serious fuel saving. The high-MPG hybrids achieve highway mileage mainly by being small vehicles with small engines; my 16-years-old Geo Metro gets 50 MPG with no special technology.
The
other major type of hybrid is the hybrid-assisted drive. Here the engine always
runs and delivers the bulk of the power, but when an extra burst is needed such
as for acceleration from a stop or passing, the electric drive provides that
extra. This allows a higher level of performance from a smaller engine. As
explained earlier, an engine's spinning losses are related to its size, so a
smaller engine means smaller spinning losses and thus better economy. But realize this: you could get
even better fuel economy by simply using the smaller engine without the
conversion losses and weight
of the hybrid assist. What you lose is the performance. So in a hybrid-assist
vehicle a lot of expensive stuff gets loaded on just for the pizzazz.
Bigger
fuel savings could be had by simply accepting sluggish performance.
In summary, true hybrid drive (not hybrid-assist) offers serious fuel savings for driving in congested areas at modest speeds, provided the driver is calm and gentle about acceleration and braking. That last bit excludes about 75% of the people I have ever observed. But it is not at all a general-purpose answer for improving fuel economy for all vehicles.
The argument goes
like this: without the low-cost labor of immigrants the cost of (you name it)
would be $50 a pound. Aside from being totally false, this argument is usually
made by those promoting legalization of the present illegals, which of course
would not preserve the low cost, so it is doubly stupid.
I’ll also show that wages for this type of
farm work could easily be high enough to refute the “Americans won’t take these
jobs” argument, without harming affordability. It may well still be necessary to
employ legal visa workers due to a shortage of Americans physically capable of
this hard work, but the wage cost is not the significant issue it is made out to
be.
Let’s do the math
for a typical crop, tomatoes. I grow my food and pick lots of tomatoes, so I’m
not talking from ignorance. Imagine yourself in front of a tomato plant. Reach
out and grab a tomato, pull, move your arm to your side near the ground where
your pick bucket or tray is, and release the tomato. It takes a whopping 3
seconds at a leisurely pace. But
let’s assume you’re an idiot newscaster or
television talking head 
, and even using
both hands it takes you 5 seconds per tomato (ridiculously slow).
(60 sec/min) ÷ (5 sec/tomato) = 12 tomatoes/min.
Let’s say you turn around and dump your bucket or swap trays on the cart moving down the row behind you, taking 30 seconds every 5 minutes, so it takes you 5.5 minutes to deliver your 60 tomatoes picked in 5 minutes at the ridiculously slow pundit rate …
60 tomatoes ÷ 5.5 min = 11 tomatoes / min delivered.
Now let’s also say you take a 5 minute refreshment break every 20 minutes, so that you’re picking for only 45 minutes out of the hour.
(11 tomatoes/min) X (45 pick minutes/hr) = 495 tomatoes/hr
A typical small commercial canning tomato weighs 4 oz, so
(495 tomatoes/hr) X (4 oz/tomato) = 1,980 oz/hr = 124 lb/hr.
Right now legal temporary farm laborers receive, by federal law, a minimum of $9.80/hr, so the cost of even clumsy incompetents picking the tomatoes is (980 ¢/hr) ÷ (124 lb/hr) = 8 ¢/lb. Capable workers would cost less.
What
do tomatoes sell for in the stores? A 15 oz can of tomatoes contains about 12
oz of tomato plus some water, so the pick labor cost in that can of tomatoes
is (12÷16) X (8¢) = 6¢. And it sells for around $1.50, so the pick cost is
(6÷150) = 4% of the selling cost. Fresh tomatoes run closer to $2/lb, so the 8¢ pick cost
is still 4% or less. 
If pay were doubled to $19.60/hr, do you really think the extra 8¢ per lb on something that sells for around $2/lb is going to crash the market? Not hardly. It is slightly less than the typical sales tax. But would a lot of unskilled Americans be willing to do farm picking work for $20/hr? Construction laborers work harder for less!
You can do the same sort of analysis on other crops and find a very similar
result. The percentage of the selling cost represented by the picking labor is
only a few percent even if you're a clumsy journalist or pundit, so the cost argument is bogus
nonsense.
The key has to be preventing some farms from employing illegals as a way to underprice the competition, which ties right back into the need for tough employment verification. And just as in other labor categories, legal temporary workers would still be available if labor demand outstripped domestic supply. Bottom line, the cost argument is just another smoke screen, another in the long line of big lies put out by politicians, pundits, and special interest groups.
