Airport security only applies to those of us who fly commercial. When is the last time the top critters in our government flew commercial? Some of them might never have. When you can charter your own aircraft you don't have to go through security, you go straight to the airplane cabin door. Same deal with government aircraft. These people get treatment that is better than the best we can buy, and they have no reason to care about what the rest of us go through.
If you believe that, then you're uninformed or a flat out moron.
You have not made an argument for the record of how Tennessee voters vote for the president as being somehow significant to the upcoming midterm election. Calling me names does not help your case.
"When average Americans start to realize how disgustingly expensive this new tax plan is going to be for them,..."
We'll all see how things pan out over the next year as this tax plan is implemented. Vote with your wallet.
Many Americans will find they actually take home less once they have paid their taxes under this plan. Pay more, get less - not usually a popular platform. This is likely why the GOP waited so long to introduce their terrible tax bill, so that the worst parts won't kick in until after the 2018 midterms are over. The smartest of the GOP critters are already announcing their "retirement" now so that they won't have this albatross around their necks next November.
You're joking, right? What Trump showed was that if you keep doing outrageous things you can get the media and the American public to forget the last outrageous thing you did. Couple that to the fact that he had the good fortune of running against the only eligible candidate in the country who was capable of losing to him, and you see how we got to this disaster. Hell he could have turned the "crooked hillary" rhetoric down to a less-deafening 7 or 8 and still won based solely on the number of people who were already lining up to vote against anyone whose last name was Clinton.
That's irrelevant. When average Americans start to realize how disgustingly expensive this new tax plan is going to be for them, the GOP will be struggling to distance themselves from it quickly enough to not lose their jobs in the November 2018 elections. While the GOP was clever enough to time this bill so that most people won't have filed their taxes under it before the 2018 elections, enough people will have read the worst parts of it by then that it will be exposed for how terrible it is and how much more so many people will end up paying in taxes in 2019.
She voted with all her GOP colleagues on the deeply unpopular tax bill, and now she's trying to show that she cares about her constituents - rather than just her owners. We'll see if this is enough to keep her in her seat come November.
Sure this is a sign of the end times. Up to this point their entire reason for existing was to get people to waste their time playing stupid games while their information was harvested for advertising. If facebook actually does something with actual faces this can only lead to terrible, terrible things.
I think his drive-by trolling has finally been recognized accordingly; his karma is now at the point where he posts at 0 instead of 1. Will he learn from this? Only time will tell...
The artificial limits placed on the number of doctors is by limiting access to the qualifications--it's not 'as many people as can meet the qualifications,' the AMA is limiting the number of seats available for people to attempt to get the qualifications in the first place
That is a popular myth from people who have been told to dislike the AMA (often as people see it as being too similar to a union for their liking). Let's take a serious look at medical education - which is the key to qualifying to practice medicine in this country- for a moment.
What the AMA does have a say on is the medical school entrance and medical school graduation requirements. They have the ability to certify a medical school as having - or not having - a program that is sufficient to qualify someone to practice medicine in this country as an MD.
What they do not have a say on is how many students can go in to a program, or how many programs there can be. If they were really interested in suppressing the number of practicing MDs, wouldn't they want to shut down (for example) the Caribbean Medical Schools? The programs down there are particularly popular for students who were close to getting in to their choice schools who didn't want to wait another year (or retake the MCAT). Many of them have higher graduation rates than schools in the US as well. If the AMA was genuinely interested in limiting the number of MDs in this country, that would be a great place for them to start as de-certifying those schools would be very easy.
Similarly, the AMA takes no stance against NP, PA, or DO programs. Those all produce medical professionals who can see patients to varying degrees depending on location.
Dropping any attempt to cap the number of seats available in MD programs and instead working purely off of "program must meet these qualifications and standards" would do a lot to help,
You're looking at the wrong scape goat here. The limits are placed by the schools and programs themselves. If you want the schools to attempt to teach anatomy to classes of 400 students at a time, go ahead and make that argument. At least be knowledgeable enough to know where the bottleneck is though before you go pinning it incorrectly.
Oh, and an doctor of osteopathic medicine is a doctor. They just got a DO instead of an MD. That's pretty much it on the differences: they can, legally, get the same medical license with the same authorizations and everything as somebody with an MD, and can join the AMA if they wish.
You seem to have missed the point there. You were bashing hard on the AMA and I showed one of many ways that one can be licensed to practice medicine without going through an AMA accredited MD program.
In the USA you just show up at ER and don't pay if you don't have a med plan and they can't turn you away.
That is not entirely true. If you are having a medical emergency the ER cannot turn you away for lack of insurance but that doesn't mean they can't bill you for coming in - and they will. They're just limited in how far they can go with their attempts to collect on fees before they hand them over to the government.
Furthermore as already pointed out the hospital only needs to stabilize you. If you need an organ transplant and you have no insurance, that simply won't happen. If you went in because you were suicidal you'll be kept for a couple days and then sent right back out.
Why did California scrap their proposed single-payer plan a few months ago? Because it would have bankrupted the state. California!
That is a sweeping over-generalization. Have you read the proposed bill? I expect not. Have you actually bothered to listen to the comments from any of its authors? I expect you haven't done that either.
In fact, based on your reply I can't see any reason to suspect you even bothered to read my earlier reply to you. Do you actually want to participate in a discussion or do you just want to throw talking points at me?
Just because the GOP says that, doesn't make it true. The rest of the industrialized world uses some form of single-payer and their nations aren't going broke. We use a market-based system with essentially no floor and we are going broke. We are the only industrialized nation where it is even possible to go bankrupt due to medical debt.
The solution is to relax regulations, not increase them
Single payer does relax regulations. The biggest barriers to health care right now come from the insurance industry, not the government.
Remove the artificial limits placed on the number of doctors by the AMA
You really need to look in to what you're saying. Several problems exist with that statement.
First of all, we have alternative paths to practicing medicine. Ever hear of a Nurse Practitioner? They are able to practice medicine on their own now in several states. Ever hear of a Physician's Assistant? They are taking patients independently for routine cases in many states as well. Ever hear of a Doctor of Osteopathic medicine? They can also see patients on their own. We also have pharmacists who can do more patient care than before in many situations - they are doing a lot more now than just handing out prescriptions and selling Sudafed.
Do you really want someone practicing medicine who has less qualifications than that?
Cap malpractice payouts through tort reform.
Malpractice payouts are a trivial expense compared to what goes to the top of the insurance industry. In fact most doctors pay vastly more in malpractice insurance than they will ever pay in malpractice settlements. The reason why so few doctors go in to Obstetrics (for example) isn't because they are actually concerned about the possibility of committing malpractice, but because the insurance industry requires them to carry absurd terms for their malpractice insurance. Sure, the lawyers are getting a big cut but it is dwarfed again by what the insurance company execs get - and the insurance execs get it regardless of their own performance while the lawyers have to prove a case in court to get the big paycheck.
In other words the bulk of your argument reads like an ad for the insurance industry.
Currently the US subsidizes much of the world's healthcare costs.
No. The rest of the world does quite well without any such imagined subsidies.
When we pay $50 for a pill that other countries pay $5 for, we are effectively keeping many drug companies afloat, and funding their R&D, etc. If the whole world only paid $5 per pill, then it would be a problem. Either all prices would go up, or R&D would cease, etc.
Several things are wrong with that statement.
First, drug company CEOs are also disgustingly over-compensated.
Second, a very large part of the cost per pill goes in to advertising. Very few companies outside the US allow drugs to be advertised at all. In the US we see drug ads on TV, hear them on the radio, see them in the newspaper, on the sides of buses, on billboards, in magazines, etc. Few 8 year olds in the US haven't seen and heard the name Viagra, even if they don't know what it is.
Third, a lot of critical drug R&D steps are done in public institutions, and the majority of the testing is as well. This isn't funded by the drug prices as much as it is funded by tax dollars.
The other issue is that there is unlimited demand for healthcare, and limited supply.
That's a cop-out at best. In countries with single-payer how many people are hypochondriacs driving "unlimited demand"? You'll still have plenty of people who won't want to go see a physician for whatever reason. People still need to go to work and take care of their basic life needs.
The reason health care is so costly in the US can be found at the top of the insurance companies. Many of the top execs of these companies - including the ones that are listed as "non-profit" or "not-for-profit" take in guaranteed annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most Americans. The "Affordable Care Act" just gave these greedy capitalists the keys to the kingdom as well, in guaranteeing them customers for the rest of time.
People dropping out of the insurance market and having no coverage won't solve this problem. The solution is to finally have our country behave like a modern industrialized nation and have a single-payer system. It's too bad nobody was willing to propose such a sensible thing.
No, I'm saying that the very fact that "In June 2016 John Oliver bought up $15M of medical debt and forgave it." makes him a "champion of wealthy doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and excessive medical costs in America."
Do you understand what he actually did? He did not give $15M to anyone. He bought the $15M of debt for ~$60k. The people you are trying to demonize here got little if any money from the $60k that he spent, it went almost entirely to the debt market itself that was bundling and re-selling the debt. The people who the debts were originally owed to had sold and written off the debt some time ago.
Now, did his action do anything about the excessive medical costs? Arguably no. What it did do though was relieve a small random number of people of debts that could have come to cost them their cars, their homes, their livelihoods, and perhaps even more. Medical debt is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy in the US. If you have another plan for this problem, we would love to see it; criticizing someone else for doing something about it does not help.
You seem to have a decent understanding of the disease and treatment. Could this also prevent the onset of olivopontocerebellar atrophy? The symptoms appear to be similar, but I don't know if the mechanism which is blocked by this treatment would also prevent OPCA.
My initial inclination would be to say no.
I'll be brutally honest and admit I had never heard of OPCA before you mentioned it, so I had to look it up. When reading the description on wikipedia it sounded to me a lot like CJD (aka Kuru, aka Prion disease, aka human madcow) and it says it can be brought on by prions. It sounds like there are some with genetic traits as well but the genes are not understood, which would make it impossible to target their expression currently.
By comparison Huntington's Disease is better understood on the molecular level. While we don't fully understand the function of the Huntingtin protein (beyond the role of mutant forms of it in Huntington's Disease), it is a fairly clear target.
A single shot, or treatment. If it goes thru the bloodstream seeking copies of a gene wouldn't it find those genes in the testes/ovaries?
No. The drug - which is actually RNA based not DNA based - only interferes with messenger RNA. It essentially stops production of the Huntingtin protein (not a typo, the gene is Huntington and the protein is Huntingtin) in cells that are expressing the gene. We understand that expression of this later in life - particularly expression of the mutant form of the gene - is a direct cause of Huntington's Disease. While the function of the protein in its wild state is not fully understood, it does seem to have an important role in development. Hence we wouldn't want to shut down its expression completely in generations to come.
As for reproductive tissue, it should be unaffected as the drug is injected into the Cerebro Spinal Fluid (CSF) which usually does not reach testes and ovaries.
The treatment for future generations would probably come by way of gene editing; this is gene silencing. If you want to look up the techniques this is based on RNA interference while gene editing is more often done by CRISPR.
A lot of the debts they buy are fraudulent. They rarely get paperwork, and if they do it's often incomplete or just wrong. In many cases the debt was not paid because it's fraudulent or the details are incorrect.
The debt industry has lots of problems, for sure. I have no doubt that lots of debts that some companies are trying to collect on are based on faulty info. I can say thought that Rolling Jubilee has historically used the contact information they get with the debts they purchase and informed the debtors that they have been forgiven. Does it work 100% of the time? Almost certainly not. But if even a fraction of them work out and relieve people of debts that they would otherwise be getting hounded over - often of no fault their own - then it is worth while IMHO.
And of course if you don't like the group you're free to give them nothing. They'll keep rolling along.
"John Oliver, champion of wealthy doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and excessive medical costs in America."
[citation needed]
Counter citation: John Oliver buys $15M in medical debt, then forgives it. Is he perfect? No. But if you want to claim that he is the opposite of what the citation shows him doing then please be so kind as to give a reason for someone to think you didn't just pull that line out of your own posterior.
A while back I heard about RollingJubilee.org. They purchase debt on the secondary market (did you know there is a secondary market for individual debt? I didn't know that before hearing of this group) for a small fraction of its face value and then forgive it. This includes lots of student loan and medical debt in particular.
It so happens that this ends up being about as non-biased in its selection of debt as you can be, as well - the debts are bundled (like mortgages) which has the result of the group never knowing whose debt they are purchasing when they purchase it (until after they have it). Have you ever had a collections agency call you about an overdue debt? At that point your debt has already been sold at least once on a secondary market. This group comes in after that point to buy the debts that the first collections agencies have given up on. These debts are still valid when they buy them; they are legally entitled to collect on their full value if they want but instead they contact the debtors and forgive them.
In days gone by, I would say that nobody on slashdot could be stupid enough to say that as a serious response (and hence say that you were being sarcastic). However the depths of stupid that I have seen here recently cause me to know that is no longer a safe assumption. I will hope you are being sarcastic and leave it at that.
If the traffic light is about to turn green, and I still have two more messages to send, then I don't have time to spell everything out.
I hope you're being sarcastic. If you are reading and sending text messages while you are driving a car you deserve to lose your license. I have absolutely zero tolerance for anyone who believes that they can safely operate a 2 ton vehicle when they aren't looking at the road; such menaces should lose their license on the first offense and face a severe penalty.
I'm still waiting for a solution to the text messages that people send me that insist on using stupid abbreviations for actual words. We don't pay by the character to send/receive text messages any more, please use real words. Even respectable companies do that with their text messages from time to time; please don't use "R" in place of "are", "U" in place of "you", "B" in place of "be", "2" in place of "to" (or "too") or make other such idiotic assaults on our language.
I would expect that you might miss modern society when your computer needs a repair or upgrade and nobody makes or sells parts for it. Maybe aside from that you live completely off the grid, I don't know. I do feel reasonably comfortable in guessing that you own a computer though as IPOAC would be a really difficult way to post to slashdot.
perhaps if we weren't chained to the globalist narrative, we'd end up with devices that better fit the environment in which they are used, using locally sourced materials and parts
There are some things that are important that just aren't available everywhere. Even if we go back to 1950's level technology we still need certain raw materials for making circuits that come mostly from specific parts of the world. If you were to go further and assume that most people would be OK with never traveling at a speed higher than 20mph we can make things a little easier to make with only locally sources materials and parts but that's a big change for most people.
That is also ignoring the number of people who would be promptly and permanently thrown out of work by such an effort as many jobs are built around a global economy and modern amenities.
I'm not convinced that works on the level required to keep up a modern society (or even a reasonable resemblance of one). If we think of any modern and complicated device (cars, phones, computers, etc) you are dealing with global supply networks to get components to the final point of assembly. What then if someone in (what we currently call) Iowa wants a car? Would it not be nearly impossible for one to ever make it there? It seems like this could plummet many areas back in time by a lot.
While I wouldn't mind knocking the financial sector back several pegs, I think the consequences on most of the working population would be too dire to handle.
Slashdot Mirror
Airport security only applies to those of us who fly commercial. When is the last time the top critters in our government flew commercial? Some of them might never have. When you can charter your own aircraft you don't have to go through security, you go straight to the airplane cabin door. Same deal with government aircraft. These people get treatment that is better than the best we can buy, and they have no reason to care about what the rest of us go through.
"That's irrelevant."
If you believe that, then you're uninformed or a flat out moron.
You have not made an argument for the record of how Tennessee voters vote for the president as being somehow significant to the upcoming midterm election. Calling me names does not help your case.
"When average Americans start to realize how disgustingly expensive this new tax plan is going to be for them,..."
We'll all see how things pan out over the next year as this tax plan is implemented. Vote with your wallet.
Many Americans will find they actually take home less once they have paid their taxes under this plan. Pay more, get less - not usually a popular platform. This is likely why the GOP waited so long to introduce their terrible tax bill, so that the worst parts won't kick in until after the 2018 midterms are over. The smartest of the GOP critters are already announcing their "retirement" now so that they won't have this albatross around their necks next November.
You're joking, right? What Trump showed was that if you keep doing outrageous things you can get the media and the American public to forget the last outrageous thing you did. Couple that to the fact that he had the good fortune of running against the only eligible candidate in the country who was capable of losing to him, and you see how we got to this disaster. Hell he could have turned the "crooked hillary" rhetoric down to a less-deafening 7 or 8 and still won based solely on the number of people who were already lining up to vote against anyone whose last name was Clinton.
That's irrelevant. When average Americans start to realize how disgustingly expensive this new tax plan is going to be for them, the GOP will be struggling to distance themselves from it quickly enough to not lose their jobs in the November 2018 elections. While the GOP was clever enough to time this bill so that most people won't have filed their taxes under it before the 2018 elections, enough people will have read the worst parts of it by then that it will be exposed for how terrible it is and how much more so many people will end up paying in taxes in 2019.
She voted with all her GOP colleagues on the deeply unpopular tax bill, and now she's trying to show that she cares about her constituents - rather than just her owners. We'll see if this is enough to keep her in her seat come November.
Sure this is a sign of the end times. Up to this point their entire reason for existing was to get people to waste their time playing stupid games while their information was harvested for advertising. If facebook actually does something with actual faces this can only lead to terrible, terrible things.
I think his drive-by trolling has finally been recognized accordingly; his karma is now at the point where he posts at 0 instead of 1. Will he learn from this? Only time will tell ...
The artificial limits placed on the number of doctors is by limiting access to the qualifications--it's not 'as many people as can meet the qualifications,' the AMA is limiting the number of seats available for people to attempt to get the qualifications in the first place
That is a popular myth from people who have been told to dislike the AMA (often as people see it as being too similar to a union for their liking). Let's take a serious look at medical education - which is the key to qualifying to practice medicine in this country- for a moment.
What the AMA does have a say on is the medical school entrance and medical school graduation requirements. They have the ability to certify a medical school as having - or not having - a program that is sufficient to qualify someone to practice medicine in this country as an MD.
What they do not have a say on is how many students can go in to a program, or how many programs there can be. If they were really interested in suppressing the number of practicing MDs, wouldn't they want to shut down (for example) the Caribbean Medical Schools? The programs down there are particularly popular for students who were close to getting in to their choice schools who didn't want to wait another year (or retake the MCAT). Many of them have higher graduation rates than schools in the US as well. If the AMA was genuinely interested in limiting the number of MDs in this country, that would be a great place for them to start as de-certifying those schools would be very easy.
Similarly, the AMA takes no stance against NP, PA, or DO programs. Those all produce medical professionals who can see patients to varying degrees depending on location.
Dropping any attempt to cap the number of seats available in MD programs and instead working purely off of "program must meet these qualifications and standards" would do a lot to help,
You're looking at the wrong scape goat here. The limits are placed by the schools and programs themselves. If you want the schools to attempt to teach anatomy to classes of 400 students at a time, go ahead and make that argument. At least be knowledgeable enough to know where the bottleneck is though before you go pinning it incorrectly.
Oh, and an doctor of osteopathic medicine is a doctor. They just got a DO instead of an MD. That's pretty much it on the differences: they can, legally, get the same medical license with the same authorizations and everything as somebody with an MD, and can join the AMA if they wish.
You seem to have missed the point there. You were bashing hard on the AMA and I showed one of many ways that one can be licensed to practice medicine without going through an AMA accredited MD program.
In the USA you just show up at ER and don't pay if you don't have a med plan and they can't turn you away.
That is not entirely true. If you are having a medical emergency the ER cannot turn you away for lack of insurance but that doesn't mean they can't bill you for coming in - and they will. They're just limited in how far they can go with their attempts to collect on fees before they hand them over to the government.
Furthermore as already pointed out the hospital only needs to stabilize you. If you need an organ transplant and you have no insurance, that simply won't happen. If you went in because you were suicidal you'll be kept for a couple days and then sent right back out.
Why did California scrap their proposed single-payer plan a few months ago? Because it would have bankrupted the state. California!
That is a sweeping over-generalization. Have you read the proposed bill? I expect not. Have you actually bothered to listen to the comments from any of its authors? I expect you haven't done that either.
In fact, based on your reply I can't see any reason to suspect you even bothered to read my earlier reply to you. Do you actually want to participate in a discussion or do you just want to throw talking points at me?
Single-payer would bankrupt the country.
Just because the GOP says that, doesn't make it true. The rest of the industrialized world uses some form of single-payer and their nations aren't going broke. We use a market-based system with essentially no floor and we are going broke. We are the only industrialized nation where it is even possible to go bankrupt due to medical debt.
The solution is to relax regulations, not increase them
Single payer does relax regulations. The biggest barriers to health care right now come from the insurance industry, not the government.
Remove the artificial limits placed on the number of doctors by the AMA
You really need to look in to what you're saying. Several problems exist with that statement.
First of all, we have alternative paths to practicing medicine. Ever hear of a Nurse Practitioner? They are able to practice medicine on their own now in several states. Ever hear of a Physician's Assistant? They are taking patients independently for routine cases in many states as well. Ever hear of a Doctor of Osteopathic medicine? They can also see patients on their own. We also have pharmacists who can do more patient care than before in many situations - they are doing a lot more now than just handing out prescriptions and selling Sudafed.
Do you really want someone practicing medicine who has less qualifications than that?
Cap malpractice payouts through tort reform.
Malpractice payouts are a trivial expense compared to what goes to the top of the insurance industry. In fact most doctors pay vastly more in malpractice insurance than they will ever pay in malpractice settlements. The reason why so few doctors go in to Obstetrics (for example) isn't because they are actually concerned about the possibility of committing malpractice, but because the insurance industry requires them to carry absurd terms for their malpractice insurance. Sure, the lawyers are getting a big cut but it is dwarfed again by what the insurance company execs get - and the insurance execs get it regardless of their own performance while the lawyers have to prove a case in court to get the big paycheck.
In other words the bulk of your argument reads like an ad for the insurance industry.
Currently the US subsidizes much of the world's healthcare costs.
No. The rest of the world does quite well without any such imagined subsidies.
When we pay $50 for a pill that other countries pay $5 for, we are effectively keeping many drug companies afloat, and funding their R&D, etc. If the whole world only paid $5 per pill, then it would be a problem. Either all prices would go up, or R&D would cease, etc.
Several things are wrong with that statement.
First, drug company CEOs are also disgustingly over-compensated.
Second, a very large part of the cost per pill goes in to advertising. Very few companies outside the US allow drugs to be advertised at all. In the US we see drug ads on TV, hear them on the radio, see them in the newspaper, on the sides of buses, on billboards, in magazines, etc. Few 8 year olds in the US haven't seen and heard the name Viagra, even if they don't know what it is.
Third, a lot of critical drug R&D steps are done in public institutions, and the majority of the testing is as well. This isn't funded by the drug prices as much as it is funded by tax dollars.
The other issue is that there is unlimited demand for healthcare, and limited supply.
That's a cop-out at best. In countries with single-payer how many people are hypochondriacs driving "unlimited demand"? You'll still have plenty of people who won't want to go see a physician for whatever reason. People still need to go to work and take care of their basic life needs.
The reason health care is so costly in the US can be found at the top of the insurance companies. Many of the top execs of these companies - including the ones that are listed as "non-profit" or "not-for-profit" take in guaranteed annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most Americans. The "Affordable Care Act" just gave these greedy capitalists the keys to the kingdom as well, in guaranteeing them customers for the rest of time.
People dropping out of the insurance market and having no coverage won't solve this problem. The solution is to finally have our country behave like a modern industrialized nation and have a single-payer system. It's too bad nobody was willing to propose such a sensible thing.
No, I'm saying that the very fact that "In June 2016 John Oliver bought up $15M of medical debt and forgave it." makes him a "champion of wealthy doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and excessive medical costs in America."
Do you understand what he actually did? He did not give $15M to anyone. He bought the $15M of debt for ~$60k. The people you are trying to demonize here got little if any money from the $60k that he spent, it went almost entirely to the debt market itself that was bundling and re-selling the debt. The people who the debts were originally owed to had sold and written off the debt some time ago.
Now, did his action do anything about the excessive medical costs? Arguably no. What it did do though was relieve a small random number of people of debts that could have come to cost them their cars, their homes, their livelihoods, and perhaps even more. Medical debt is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy in the US. If you have another plan for this problem, we would love to see it; criticizing someone else for doing something about it does not help.
You seem to have a decent understanding of the disease and treatment. Could this also prevent the onset of olivopontocerebellar atrophy? The symptoms appear to be similar, but I don't know if the mechanism which is blocked by this treatment would also prevent OPCA.
My initial inclination would be to say no.
I'll be brutally honest and admit I had never heard of OPCA before you mentioned it, so I had to look it up. When reading the description on wikipedia it sounded to me a lot like CJD (aka Kuru, aka Prion disease, aka human madcow) and it says it can be brought on by prions. It sounds like there are some with genetic traits as well but the genes are not understood, which would make it impossible to target their expression currently.
By comparison Huntington's Disease is better understood on the molecular level. While we don't fully understand the function of the Huntingtin protein (beyond the role of mutant forms of it in Huntington's Disease), it is a fairly clear target.
A single shot, or treatment. If it goes thru the bloodstream seeking copies of a gene wouldn't it find those genes in the testes/ovaries?
No. The drug - which is actually RNA based not DNA based - only interferes with messenger RNA. It essentially stops production of the Huntingtin protein (not a typo, the gene is Huntington and the protein is Huntingtin) in cells that are expressing the gene. We understand that expression of this later in life - particularly expression of the mutant form of the gene - is a direct cause of Huntington's Disease. While the function of the protein in its wild state is not fully understood, it does seem to have an important role in development. Hence we wouldn't want to shut down its expression completely in generations to come.
As for reproductive tissue, it should be unaffected as the drug is injected into the Cerebro Spinal Fluid (CSF) which usually does not reach testes and ovaries.
The treatment for future generations would probably come by way of gene editing; this is gene silencing. If you want to look up the techniques this is based on RNA interference while gene editing is more often done by CRISPR.
A lot of the debts they buy are fraudulent. They rarely get paperwork, and if they do it's often incomplete or just wrong. In many cases the debt was not paid because it's fraudulent or the details are incorrect.
The debt industry has lots of problems, for sure. I have no doubt that lots of debts that some companies are trying to collect on are based on faulty info. I can say thought that Rolling Jubilee has historically used the contact information they get with the debts they purchase and informed the debtors that they have been forgiven. Does it work 100% of the time? Almost certainly not. But if even a fraction of them work out and relieve people of debts that they would otherwise be getting hounded over - often of no fault their own - then it is worth while IMHO.
And of course if you don't like the group you're free to give them nothing. They'll keep rolling along.
"John Oliver, champion of wealthy doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and excessive medical costs in America."
[citation needed]
Counter citation: John Oliver buys $15M in medical debt, then forgives it. Is he perfect? No. But if you want to claim that he is the opposite of what the citation shows him doing then please be so kind as to give a reason for someone to think you didn't just pull that line out of your own posterior.
I remember seeing that. That show took advantage of the same principle, in purchasing the $15M of medical debt for around $60k.
A while back I heard about RollingJubilee.org. They purchase debt on the secondary market (did you know there is a secondary market for individual debt? I didn't know that before hearing of this group) for a small fraction of its face value and then forgive it. This includes lots of student loan and medical debt in particular.
It so happens that this ends up being about as non-biased in its selection of debt as you can be, as well - the debts are bundled (like mortgages) which has the result of the group never knowing whose debt they are purchasing when they purchase it (until after they have it). Have you ever had a collections agency call you about an overdue debt? At that point your debt has already been sold at least once on a secondary market. This group comes in after that point to buy the debts that the first collections agencies have given up on. These debts are still valid when they buy them; they are legally entitled to collect on their full value if they want but instead they contact the debtors and forgive them.
In days gone by, I would say that nobody on slashdot could be stupid enough to say that as a serious response (and hence say that you were being sarcastic). However the depths of stupid that I have seen here recently cause me to know that is no longer a safe assumption. I will hope you are being sarcastic and leave it at that.
If the traffic light is about to turn green, and I still have two more messages to send, then I don't have time to spell everything out.
I hope you're being sarcastic. If you are reading and sending text messages while you are driving a car you deserve to lose your license. I have absolutely zero tolerance for anyone who believes that they can safely operate a 2 ton vehicle when they aren't looking at the road; such menaces should lose their license on the first offense and face a severe penalty.
I'm still waiting for a solution to the text messages that people send me that insist on using stupid abbreviations for actual words. We don't pay by the character to send/receive text messages any more, please use real words. Even respectable companies do that with their text messages from time to time; please don't use "R" in place of "are", "U" in place of "you", "B" in place of "be", "2" in place of "to" (or "too") or make other such idiotic assaults on our language.
Who said I wanted to keep up a MODERN society?
I would expect that you might miss modern society when your computer needs a repair or upgrade and nobody makes or sells parts for it. Maybe aside from that you live completely off the grid, I don't know. I do feel reasonably comfortable in guessing that you own a computer though as IPOAC would be a really difficult way to post to slashdot.
perhaps if we weren't chained to the globalist narrative, we'd end up with devices that better fit the environment in which they are used, using locally sourced materials and parts
There are some things that are important that just aren't available everywhere. Even if we go back to 1950's level technology we still need certain raw materials for making circuits that come mostly from specific parts of the world. If you were to go further and assume that most people would be OK with never traveling at a speed higher than 20mph we can make things a little easier to make with only locally sources materials and parts but that's a big change for most people.
That is also ignoring the number of people who would be promptly and permanently thrown out of work by such an effort as many jobs are built around a global economy and modern amenities.
International IP licensing for local manufacture.
I'm not convinced that works on the level required to keep up a modern society (or even a reasonable resemblance of one). If we think of any modern and complicated device (cars, phones, computers, etc) you are dealing with global supply networks to get components to the final point of assembly. What then if someone in (what we currently call) Iowa wants a car? Would it not be nearly impossible for one to ever make it there? It seems like this could plummet many areas back in time by a lot.
While I wouldn't mind knocking the financial sector back several pegs, I think the consequences on most of the working population would be too dire to handle.