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Hospital Confirms Steve Jobs's Liver Transplant
CNet is reporting that the hospital where Apple's CEO reportedly got a liver transplant two months ago has now confirmed the truth of these reports. "Steve Jobs underwent his liver transplant about two months ago at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, the hospital confirmed Tuesday. Jobs, who returned to work Apple's campus in Cupertino, Calif., on Monday after a six-month medical leave, 'is now recovering well and has an excellent prognosis,' according to a statement by Dr. James D. Eason, the program director of the Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute. ... While Eason said the confirmation was being provided with Jobs's approval, he cited patient confidentially in saying that he could not reveal any further information on the specifics of Jobs's surgery."
This is the second story in a few hours we've had talking about some guy's liver transplant. It makes me feel like a voyeur. Can we get back to something wholesome and uplifting, like bashing the RIAA?
Qxe4
...And theres no way that if you have something wrong with your liver you won't have a hormone imbalance? Plus really, considering that Apple has plans to appoint a new CEO if Jobs dies, they have done all they need to for their shareholders. Just because you are a CEO of a publicly traded company doesn't mean that your shareholders have to know every detail of your life.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Oh yeah, and Apple lied to investors and the world: the man had cancer and a failing organ, and they claimed it was a "hormone imbalance." I hope the SEC is already working on this...
A few things A) You are not entitled to know everything about Steve Jobs B) The shareholders really only need to know that someone will take the place if Jobs dies C) Steve Jobs, or any other CEO could die of any random cause at any time and D) Perhaps thats all that was confirmed at the time? And I'd say that you would probably have a hormone imbalance if you had a failing organ.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Yes, life is not fair, but honestly this is not a case of someone being rich and privileged because he was born into the right family. Steve Jobs as much as anyone has earned his money. He's worked hard and he's added a lot to society. If we tried to cut him down so things were more fair, then it would be a loss to all of us.
Things will never be completely fair, but the way to make them more fair is to help everyone become more rich and powerful. The only way that can happen is if everyone is more productive: imagine if everyone accomplished in their life things similar to what Steve Jobs has done. When he got fired from, he started another company that made something cool. That's not easy, but he did it.
We don't all have to start our own companies, but if we were all just as productive in our respective fields, we probably would already have synthetic liver replacements. We might have green coal plants. We might have more efficient ways to grow food, allowing the existing farmers to focus their attention on more interesting things (oh, well we already have that one to quite an extent).
This is the way of the future, and it's where the left gets off track: instead of trying to destroy stupid bankers who get rich off naive customers, without producing anything real, the key is to educate those 'stupid' customers to create real things, and to contribute to society in real ways; then the bankers will go off and f*** themselves because everyone will see them for what they are, leeches on society.
Qxe4
Some people have more money and more power and better opportunities than others, but that doesn't make it automatically unfair. Would you cry "foul" if a sitting President took the same actions as Jobs? It's not like he cheated the system (as a President probably would). Would you be angry with a friend for buying a new TV or laptop that you wanted but couldn't afford?
Practically speaking, most patients enter their name into the waiting list of the single most accessible center. The patients then arrange to live near the center as their name approaches the top of the list.
Given that all centers were equally accessible to him, he did exactly what every patient does. He is smart enough to know that a queue of 295 is significantly lower than a queue of 1615, and all other things being equal the rational choice is to go for the shortest line. If you were in Jobs's place, what would you have done differently?
What is the point of having wealth if you don't use it to your advantage? Of course it can be misused, but you're going to have to work a lot harder to argue that that is the case here.
Your brain is not a computer.
Things will never be completely fair, but the way to make them more fair is to help everyone become more rich and powerful.
To paraphrase Bill Cosby (on "mind-expanding" drugs): But what if you're an asshole?
The same applies here:
Most people are the ones I see littering, driving like idiots, buying stupid junk, getting drunk and vomiting in my sunroof, etc.
Do I want them to be any more powerful than they are? Hell, no!
Futurist Traditionalism
Oh heaven forbid that someone actually uses the money they created to get better faster. Heaven forbid that some people are going to be able to afford things that others cannot. Its the same thing with health care. Because there is not an infinite supply of livers, along with an infinite supply of doctors, its true that some people might not be able to afford a liver transplant. Sure, its sad, but such is life.
Assuming the linked article in GP is true:
Why should someone be given preference on the basis of how much money / power they have? Such an idea is right at home in a country like China, but surely it flies in the face of the idea that "all men are created equal".
I know that in Australia / New Zealand we have a strict national transplant system which means that you can only be on the transplant list for your home state. The system is specifically designed so that "Ethnicity, gender, financial, social, celebrity or political status does not affect the allocation of organs... (and) Organs are given to the person with the greatest medical need who has the best chance of successful transplantation."
The fact is, by using the money you created to buy better drugs or treatment, you are not directly affecting anyone else. With a unique item like an organ, you are depriving someone of a chance at life.
It's a bit like the difference between 'pirating' a movie and 'pirating' a ship off the coast of somalia, in one case no-one is (directly) worse off and in the other, one party forcefully deprives the other of an item.
Anyway, I know where I'd rather get sick. :P
That's not exactly how it went down.
On January 5th, Jobs said that he had a hormone imbalance. On January 14th, he said that he had "learned [his] health issues are more complex than [he] originally thought".
A Whipple procedure really screws up your digestive system and almost everyone afterwards has bouts of weight loss, etc. It's altogether possible that his doctors thought that was going on until metastases were discovered between Jan 5th and Jan 14th.
It's a complicated matter, you know-- how much are stockholders entitled to know versus an executive's right to privacy in his medical information.
And there we go again, Slashdotters and their utter failure to grasp the most basic and fundamental aspects of economics. He's created jobs, lots of them, both directly by employing people and indirectly by having the employees spend money, by buying from manufacturers and other partners which employ and pay people, by creating value, and so forth. And that's for being a basic big employer, if you look at his influence over the markets his company dabbles in or the influence of his products in other markets then that's even more.
You just got troll'd!
In my experience (I'm a doctor), almost all cancer patients go into denial and will downplay the severity of their symptoms. Steve Jobs is a billionaire, a tech guru, and all that, but he's also a human being. Based on what's publicly known, I'd say that his pancreatic islet cell cancer spread to his liver and that his liver tumour was non-resectable, and now he's ended up with a new liver by way of getting rid of the metastases. He describes his situation as a 'hormone imbalance' because that's one of the consequences of his condition, but the underlying diagnosis is far worse than that. Bottom line is that he's a very sick man... a cancer patient with a liver transplant has a limited life expectancy, and his role is now going to be figurehead/part time inputter of ideas more than being the day-to-day boss. Richard
You guys have a private health care system. Forget about Steve Jobs having a plane so he can fly to a transplant centre and start worrying about the large portion of your population that can't afford basic health care.
Yeah, that means YOU are the rich and privileged one.
Posting anonymously to avoid undoing moderation, but this just had to be answered. You're making a pretty serious error in logic here:
In the 90's, the conservative harping about the loss of morality fell on deaf ears. Who cared if couples opted not to marry and have children? Who cared if corporations became greedy? (Greed was good, right?) Now we reap the harvest we've sown: corporate greed has reduced the effective wages to poverty level, and we're now finding that the economic boom dependent on an ever increasing consumer base is unsustainable, largely in part because the necessary consumers were never born.
Those same conservatives that were screaming about unmarried couples (an issue to social conservatives) were pushing for deregulation of corporations (an issue for fiscal conservatives). You're conflating a concern with social morality (gay marriage, marriage of couples that live together and/or have children, abortion, etc) with a concern for corporate morality. In general (and there are exceptions on both sides) liberals tend to more less concerned about the latter, but more concerned about the former, while conservatives are the opposite.
Liberals (in general) don't care whether or not a couple is married, because their marriage or lack of one is not impacting society in general. It's a matter of personal choice. I lived with my wife for 6 years before we formalized the arrangement with a wedding. How were we hurting anyone? By contrast liberals (in general) care whether a company is trying to screw its customers, because that problem DOES impact society in general. It's hurting the customer or customers being screwed in an unfair way.
Conservatives (in general) care whether a couple is married, because for them to live together otherwise is a violation of the moral code of the conservative. They seem willing to make and enforce laws that require individuals to follow the moral code that they themselves have chosen to follow. Hence laws against gay marriage. It won't hurt society in any way to let couples of the same sex join together in the same way that couples of the opposite sex do, but it's against a moral code that conservative believe in so they want to stop it. Conservatives also (in general), I will grant you, care whether a company is screwing it's customers, but they seems to care about this in a abstract way. They might say it's immoral, but because they believe that market forces will eventually weed out the immoral or unfair in the market they are unwilling to directly legislate against it much of the time.
"Morality" is not really the problem here. Everyone has different ideas of what is or is not moral. I have no moral problem with two people marrying or not marrying as they they see fit, but you clearly do. The problem is that our government is not trying to do the most good for the most people. It's trying to do the most good for big companies and hoping that THEY will do the most good for the most people. Companies, however, are almost totally without either morals or scruples. It's a side affect of being made up of too many people for anyone of them to take responsibility for the actions of the whole.