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St. Patrick's Day, March Madness, and Steve Jobs' Liver
Many Americans are probably rubbing their temples and wandering around with a bit of a post-St. Patrick's day hangover. Reader theodp writes with a sobering statistical consequence of traditional heavy-drinking holidays: "Keep in mind that this time of year has traditionally been very good to those awaiting organ transplants, including the late Steve Jobs, as Walter Isaacson explained in Jobs: 'By late February 2009 Jobs had secured a place on the Tennessee list (as well as the one in California), and the nervous waiting began. He was declining rapidly by the first week in March, and the waiting time was projected to be twenty-one days. 'It was dreadful,' Powell recalled. 'It didn't look like we would make it in time.' Every day became more excruciating. He moved up to third on the list by mid-March, then second, and finally first. But then days went by. The awful reality was that upcoming events like St. Patrick's Day and March Madness (Memphis was in the 2009 tournament and was a regional site) offered a greater likelihood of getting a donor because the drinking causes a spike in car accidents. Indeed, on the weekend of March 21, 2009, a young man in his mid-twenties was killed in a car crash, and his organs were made available.'"
Organ donation was open source.
Too bad Steve Jobs didn't promote the cause of organ donation the way he did his iProducts. He might have made a real difference in the world.
until the last second to begin real treatment, things might have turned out better.
Instead, Jobs abandoned common sense and reason in favor of hocus pocus, "alternative" crap which did absolutely nothing to help his condition and may in fact have contributed to its severity.
There's a reason real medicines are tested and "alternative medicine" isn't. If they weren't alternative, they would be listed as medicine, used every day and give tangible results.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Sometimes an innocent person gets in the way of a drunk driver, but usually drunks end up killing themselves in a variety of amusing ways. In the long run it makes society stronger because it weeds out some of the stupidity and addiction genes.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
How clueless you are.
He did indeed promote organ donations. Actively.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhKzyAoiTJE
http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/19/steve-jobs-helps-push-organ-donation-legislation/
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14710654
http://www.forbes.com/sites/velocity/2010/04/20/how-steve-jobs-got-sick-got-better-and-decided-to-save-some-lives/
Need more evidence?
Why didn't Jobs find a compatible donor and pay the person for the organ? The person could have died, but created financial stability for those left behind. Isn't Jobs more important to the world than some failed loser no one has ever heard of? (This post brought to you by Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hobbes!)
Slashdot beta is ugly and it requires lots of stupid javascript.
... feed the ghouls.
Sure, the quantity is great, but the quality not so much...
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Helmet laws suck.
Don't ever wear one when riding your donorcycle.
So does Hep-C and Nyquil overdoes.
It pisses me off that jobs bought his way onto my states donor list. You never know it might have gone to someone who could have got more than two years out of it.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2013/dec/05/steve-jobs-liver-transplant-memphis/
Wouldn't you expect St. Patrick's day to *reduce* the overall number of livers available.
Traditionally it's bikers who are the organ donors in spring.
Unfortunately the helmet laws ruined that a bit.
Thankfully under Obama Care Steve would have been able to get the care he needed. Now mark me as flame bait shitizens
One more reason to hate Jobs. He was able to get on the transplant list in Tennessee only because he had the money to fly out there (to a house bought just for that purpose) whenever he needed to for the various pre-op and post op appointments necessary. There are a TON of these for any organ transplant. Most people don't have the resources to do this. California is the worst place in the nation to need an organ transplant. The region Tennessee is part of is the best. Without his money, Jobs would have died waiting for a transplant -- as would most people in that position. Jobs is scum, but the fault here is America.
See? If that kid had been smoking pot instead of drinking, Steve Jobs would have gotten that transplant!
One more reason to hate Jobs. He was able to get on the transplant list in Tennessee only because he had the money to fly out there (to a house bought just for that purpose) whenever he needed to for the various pre-op and post op appointments necessary. There are a TON of these for any organ transplant. Most people don't have the resources to do this. California is the worst place in the nation to need an organ transplant. The region Tennessee is part of is the best. Without his money, Jobs would have died waiting for a transplant -- as would most people in that position. Jobs is scum, but the fault here is America.
And you wouldn't have done the same for yourself or a loved one, if you had the means? If you feel you need to hate a dead man you've never met, there are plenty of other reasons for Jobs to be hated. Spending his money in a successful attempt at buying himself another two years of life doesn't need to be one of them.
He lived 11 years after the initial diagnosis. Most people are dead within a year or two of being diagnosed. Maybe if he had undergone barbaric treatments of mass toxins and radiation he would have died sooner. Who's to say? The fact is, he beat the odds by a long shot.
Being the hippie that he was he ignored all attempts to get him on 'western' medicine to treat his known cancer for more than 8 months, preferring instead to treat it with fruit diets and whatnot. When that clearly has no effect it was very much too late. Oh well.
Accident. Sure it was.
And you wouldn't have done the same for yourself or a loved one, if you had the means?
He literally closed his post with "the fault here is America." Answering your question BEFORE you asked it. He's clearly not blaming Jobs, but the system that allowed it to happen.
Spending his money in a successful attempt at buying himself another two years of life doesn't need to be one of them.
I disagree. He took a liver that would have gone to someone else. That someone else had to wait for the next liver, in turn pushing back the next person in line, all the way down. There is a liver waiting list after all, not a surplus.
Job's pulling a liver from the queue could well be responsible for someone else's (or even multiple people's) situations deteriorating due to the extra waiting imposed on each of them.
That's bad enough, but to top it off, he refused proper early stage treatments with opting for homeopathic until he'd squandered any chance he had with conventiional treatment, and only then in a last ditch effort to survive did he snatch a liver out of the queue.
To make an analogy -- he's like a soldier entering a triage hospital full of injured and dying soldiers, and because he's shown up he gets care that someone else won't. The fact that's rich and got to buy a helicopter lift to the triage hospital of his choice is bad enough, but it turns out he'd ignored orders and all sane advice and wandered out onto the battlefield in his pajamas instead of combat gear... because it was more comfortable.
So someone *else* is probably going to die because of this.
Ignoring his doctors in favor of homeopathy for pancreatic cancer merits a darwin award; but waiting until the last second and then queue shopping a liver took it from someone who probably deserved it more.
Yes, his post was closed with "the fault here is America", but the post titled "Steve Jobs bought himself a liver" started with "One more reason to hate Jobs."
You raise a good point with the fact that Jobs squandered valuable treatment time with his homeopathic herbal horseshit.
As far as I've read, the shenanigans that he employed to be put on the transplant list in Tennessee consisted of qualifying himself as a Tennessee resident, certainly after unleashing an army of minions to figure out that the list was shortest in Tennessee.
But the fact remains that he got on the list, legally. To say that someone else deserved the liver he got more is up for argument, but by whose standard do we make that call? In an ideal world we give organ transplants to the most deserving first. One could argue that his providing jobs for thousands of people and using his pulpit as a public figure to evangelize the need for organ donors provided more good for society as a whole. If it were my son on the transplant list and some rich bugger bought his way in before us, sure I'd be pissed. But if I were the rich bugger, you bet I'd try to buy our way onto a shorter list.
I never met the guy and my impression of him is a greedy SOB, but I can't hate him because he threw money towards trying to save his life. He worked the system just like anyone else could have, if they had the resources.
One big improvement would be to make organ donation the *default* when obtaining a driver's license in the US. That way, people could opt out, but most people just "accept the default"... and then far more organs would be available to save the living.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Someone with less money died waiting for a liver.
Someone with less money died waiting for a liver.
I understand that. Someone else died to make that liver available, too. No matter who is at the top of the list, there is someone at the bottom of the list who isn't going to get a liver in time. Was he less entitled to a liver than an average person because he was Steve Jobs?
I'm not trying to paint him as Saint Jobs, everything I've read about the guy makes me think he was a grade-A asshole. But the reason I responded to the post as I did was because the poster seems to think that because he spent his money in an attempt to save his life, we should hate him for it. I disagree with that; if I had the means to shop around for the most favorable transplant recipient list to put my family member on, I would do it. Maybe that makes me selfish.
Did the young man in question die because he was drunk, or because some drunk killed him?
If some drunk killed him, did the drunk die as well (as should be the case, whether by accident or on purpose)?
Jobs was entitled to wait in line with the rest of the people who needed a liver in his area.
Doesn't take an army of minions....common knowledge that whatever region Tennessee is in has shortest wait for liver transplant. The idea that money makes any difference in the allotment of organs is reprehensible. Jobs, in this case, is a symptom of a diseased system. But, as usual with that scumbag, he sure manages to be example A of how corrupt and evil the system is.
If necessary, I could move to Tennessee and support myself in a rather bare-bones fashion while waiting for a liver. Plenty of people could. It isn't for the super-rich only.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes