Useless Conversation

[Ironwood]

I personally can not come up with a single charity group that has made meaningful progress on any disease.

Then you're not old enough.  When I was a child LEPRA came around and scared the FUCK out of us with Leprosy.

Fast forward to an episode of House and it turns out we cure it these days.

As for Cancer, you all need to research a little.  The progress we've made is HUGE.

I personally think our problem these days is we're not looking at the RIGHT solutions and I think that's mostly due to humans being fuck stupid.  I'd like us to stop dicking around with technology and Chemistry and start SERIOUSLY looking at fixing this shit with genetics and biology.

But that might hurt the teeny-tiny soulful embryos.

[Cyrrex]

As for Cancer, you all need to research a little.  The progress we've made is HUGE.

I personally think our problem these days is we're not looking at the RIGHT solutions and I think that's mostly due to humans being fuck stupid.  I'd like us to stop dicking around with technology and Chemistry and start SERIOUSLY looking at fixing this shit with genetics and biology.

Again, I am more than willing to be wrong here...what do you mean by huge?  Cancer is still dropping people like flies.  Better prevention maybe?  More women getting screened for breast cancer?  I know it is anecdotal, but I personally know exactly zero people who are cancer survivors.  OTOH, I know a lot of dead ones.  My sister is having a scare with Pancreatic cancer, and it might as well be a death sentence if she gets it.  I know this because it happened to my father, and he had zero chance.  Or my second cousin and grandfather, who both got it in they lymphatic systems.  More or less guaranteed result.

I kept your second part of the quote here because this is more along the lines of my own thinking, and maybe this is the point I have been circling around but not getting to:  What is the opportunity cost of all the time and resources we've been investing in the more traditional cures when we could have been spending those resources on more promising alternatives?  If you are going to spend this money so inefficiently, then you might as well send goats to the starving kids in Africa.  More bang for the buck. 

More on target:  every single dollar would probably be better spent on stem cell or some kind of scary nano-tech.

[Phildo]

I know a handful of people who have survived cancer.  My aunt had breast cancer a few years back, for example, and she still leads a healthy and active lifestyle in her 60s.

[Lantyssa]

Again, I am more than willing to be wrong here...what do you mean by huge?  Cancer is still dropping people like flies.  Better prevention maybe?  More women getting screened for breast cancer?  I know it is anecdotal, but I personally know exactly zero people who are cancer survivors.  OTOH, I know a lot of dead ones.  My sister is having a scare with Pancreatic cancer, and it might as well be a death sentence if she gets it.  I know this because it happened to my father, and he had zero chance.  Or my second cousin and grandfather, who both got it in they lymphatic systems.  More or less guaranteed result.

There are hundreds if not thousands of types of cancer.  My dad was a twenty-five year survivor of testicular cancer.

Pancreatic got him because it's just about the most malignant, painful, and shitty form.  As difficult as it is to treat, if we stopped trying then no new methods would ever be discovered and my dad probably would have had months rather than the year we got.  Also, having gone through that... I'd kind of like to prevent it for the next family.

We don't need to focus on just one thing over another though.  We have the resources to solve hunger, and poverty, and research disease treatments.  As a species we're just really shitty at arranging our priorities.

[Numtini]

How much money have we thrown at cancer, and what good has it done?

Please tell me this was meant ironically. We have made huge strides against cancer. Yes, there are some like pancreatic that are still "take a world tour before it's too late, but don't make it a long one", but every cancer used to be that way.

[Yegolev]

I'm sure it was a serious question.  I am also not up to date on Cancer News and have no idea what is going on in general, nevermind which cancer-research charities are the better ones to give my money to.

[Cyrrex]

And it isn't like anyone has actually answered the question. 

[Yegolev]

My answer is perhaps not great: None of them since there is undoubtedly plenty of commercial interest in such a product.  Not so much commercial interest in feeding starving children.

[HaemishM]

When I was growing up in the '80's, cancer was a fucking death sentence. It got both of my grandparents on my dad's side about 15 years apart. A lot of the money that went into "awareness campaigns" in the '80's made people get screenings for cancer that they never got before. Turns out the earlier you diagnose cancer, the easier it is to treat and the survival rates went up dramatically. As a result of cancer research (probably as much to do with more treatments due to the earlier screenings brought about by the awareness campaigns), people are living longer after a cancer diagnosis than ever before in history.

These things are pretty much the definition of "one raindrop can erode a mountain" type of issues. Awareness campaigns seem kind of stupid but they can have an effect. They'd likely have more of an effect if our healthcare system was a fucking miasma of stupid designed to suck profits from desperate people who want to live. Also be better if our drug companies were less interested in prolonging an illness through palliative measures as opposed to curing an issue, or could stop selling boner pills long enough to cure something.

[schild]

Lots of cancer is still a death sentence.

I personally can not come up with a single charity group that has made meaningful progress on any disease.

Then you're not old enough.  When I was a child LEPRA came around and scared the FUCK out of us with Leprosy.

Fast forward to an episode of House and it turns out we cure it these days.

As for Cancer, you all need to research a little.  The progress we've made is HUGE.

I personally think our problem these days is we're not looking at the RIGHT solutions and I think that's mostly due to humans being fuck stupid.  I'd like us to stop dicking around with technology and Chemistry and start SERIOUSLY looking at fixing this shit with genetics and biology.

But that might hurt the teeny-tiny soulful embryos.

Fuck soulful. I don't care what we do to embryos.

Anyway, LEPRA, afaik had nothing to do with curing Leprosy. Unless of course you lived in Malta 45 years ago. Besides, LEPRA does some tangible good besides what they do with leprosy. In fact, LEPRA is pretty great and would have been a fucking awesome alternative to sinking money into the absolutely endless money pit that is an ALS cure. Fuck, Malaria is a bigger problem than ALS.

As for the multiple responses above about making huge strides in Cancer. Yes, we've managed to find poisons that put it into a nice coma for a bit if it's caught early enough. I'm not sure I'd call that huge strides. Every year there's one or two pieces of news about how we're one step closer to curing Cancer, but we have absolutely no fucking clue how many steps there are in that process. Is it a noble goal worth working towards? Yes. Is there any charity that's actually going to be behind finding a cure? Maybe, if we count universities and pharmaceutical groups and think tanks "charities." There's an insane amount of money in curing cancer, the chances of it happening or being even tangentially related to a charity is pretty fucking low.

[Khaldun]

Look, even what we know about cancer that doesn't cure it is helpful and due to a lot of investment of time and money. One of the depressing but important things we've learned is that it's not one thing--different cancers have very different causes and courses of development. We've also learned that in some types there's only a subsection of the people who get it who can be helped with medical intervention--e.g., some people who get an initial tumor, the tumor will never progress or develop further; some people who get an initial tumor, it's guaranteed to go malignant and metastasize no matter what anyone does and the patient will suffer recurrence even if the tumor is removed early or killed with therapy; in some patients timely intervention is highly successful and profoundly life-extending. The more we know about why people are in either of those three categories, the closer we'll get to further progress.

What I wish as far as medical charities go is that folks would raise money for diseases that kill or hurt many millions of people in the developing world. There's almost no research on pharmaceutical or other cures for trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), for example, because Big Pharma doesn't see any money in it. Even malaria doesn't get nearly enough attention from researchers. The Gates Foundation is putting some money into this kind of work but a lot more would be helpful. It might even be self-interested for Europeans and Americans to do so in that climate change almost guarantees that some of these diseases will spread (or return, since malaria used to be endemic in much of North America) into previously temperate regions.

[Numtini]

Yes, we've managed to find poisons that put it into a nice coma for a bit if it's caught early enough. I'm not sure I'd call that huge strides.

My mother died a few years ago, she was a 25 year survivor with no recurrence. I have another friend who's coming up on 25 years, again no recurrence. It all depends on the cancer. We've had very significant strides on breast, certain types of Leukemia (a quick google found one with 80% remission only half recurrence = 40% cure rate), and I don't really know what else. I have a friend at work dying of cervical cancer, which will be the second since I got here in 2000. How many years ago did we discover this was caused by HPV and now we have a vaccine that will cut, what is it, 90% of it?

I won't disagree that a little money goes a ludicrously long way in the developing world though. The same can be said of a lot of things though.

[Nebu]

As someone that does NIH funded cancer research, I can state confidently that there is well spent money and poorly spent money.  As political as research funding has become, science has sadly become more trend conscious.  If you want to get funded, you had better be working on the latest "hot" topic.  If we want to improve research, we need to improve the system that decides which research gets to be done.  

Good luck with that.

[Lantyssa]

Yes.  Which is why I said our priorities are a bit fucked.

Sometimes we get it right.  A lot of time there's senseless waste.

[IainC]

As of tonight, I'm on holiday for two weeks. I'm flying over to London with the ladyfriend on Monday morning whereupon we shall take a first class train up to Inverness. Overnight there on the shores of Loch Ness then across to Portree on the Isle of Skye where we are going to do a photography workshop for the rest of the week. After that we have four days to pretty much please ourselves - as long as we are back in London the following Tuesday evening for our Wednesday morning flight back to Madrid, we can grab a train and head off to wherever our fancy takes us in the meantime. Can't wait to get away from the awful weather here and into a normal climate again.

[Ingmar]

Too bad that your impending crushing Blood Bowl defeat tonight will cast a pall over the entire trip!

[WayAbvPar]

That may be the first time anyone has ever fled TO Scotland to escape awful weather.

[Ironwood]

Fucking awful time to do it.  It's been gorgeously scorching recently and only started being 'normal' again the past couple of days.  Long story short, take a fucking brolly.

[Merusk]

TIL that 67F is "scorching" in Scotland.  Time to move.

[Chimpy]

Sure enough the weather here went from unseasonably cool highs never above the low 80s for the last month or so to BAM mid 90s with 95% humidity the day the students move back into town.

Did get lucky today and got an email from the president of our organization saying that he was extending business casual attire until after labor day because of the expected heat next week so I won't have to wear a tie until September.

[IainC]

It's 37º every day here. I hate that kind of heat. I'm much more comfortable at 15º

[cmlancas]

Same.  The Tampa heat is so muggy I feel like I enter a sauna when I get into my car.

[Strazos]

Whooo, I has Mexican internets.  

EDIT: and interestingly, it's fiber all the way to my modem, which I've never seen in a residential setting.

[Nebu]

Whooo, I has Mexican internets.  

EDIT: and interestingly, it's fiber all the way to my modem, which I've never seen in a residential setting.

The third world finds yet another way to be superior to the US.  Yay!

[schild]

Whooo, I has Mexican internets. 

EDIT: and interestingly, it's fiber all the way to my modem, which I've never seen in a residential setting.

The third world finds yet another way to be superior to the US.  Yay!

Eh. That's pretty snide for you. Internet in America fucking sucks. My 300 down/50 up is a total anomaly among the USA (where Google Fiber and stuff like Grandecom aren't a thing).

[Trippy]

Dang earthquake woke me up.

[Ingmar]

Not me!

[schild]

http://frakingfilms.net/2014/08/24/actor-richard-attenborough-has-died-at-90/

Yet, Suge Knight escapes death and Justin Bieber doesn't even get shot.

Earth sucks. Granted, Richard was super fucking old.

[Ironwood]

90 ain't a bad innings with his life.

[schild]

[Signe]

Here is a picture of Drew Falconeer that I found online:

[Draegan]

I spent the weekend in the Rockies. Shitty weather, fun time though. Ate a 6 course 5-star meal in a cabin at 11,000 ft.

So I gave my two weeks notice today. It went incredibly well and my bosses were sad to see me go but said they would never begrudge a man for bettering himself. It was incredibly professional.

Here's to my next adventure of working from home and earning a lot more money.

[WayAbvPar]

No commute and more money? Where do I sign up?

[Sky]

Catching up as I was out most of the weekend.

I like to give to hospice care as my main charity. Boots on the ground and those people are fucking saints. Also to the rescue mission as people should have food and clothes no matter how shitty their life has become.

An old high school friend asked if I knew what mods for minecraft were because her kids wanted one. I did as asked, but also installed Technic Platform and suggested they try a couple of those modpacks instead (they've only ever played vanilla and had some amazing construction on their LAN worlds). I am now a hero at their house.

But it also made me want to play goddamned minecraft again.

[Draegan]

No commute and more money? Where do I sign up?

New position is an Account Manager for the entire northeast. I'll be travelling quite often, but the days I'm not travelling I get to work from home.