Well, if you add aerodynamics to the equation, the bubble suddenly isn't that favorable anymore. And then there's stability and, as you already brought up, safety.
That said, I fully agree that the only sensible answer in "no". Striking similarities? What striking similarities? Google's car looks much more like a Smart than like Mayer's concept, and Smarts have been around (and copied) since 1998, 13 years before Mayer made her "bubble car" sketch. Slow news day?
Are you sure you replied to the right post? Because the one I'm seeing above yours says "when you have the same trip that so many people take everyday". You're from a small town? Congrats, you get to take your car everywhere. That's the way it is, even in the countries that have the best public transport. I'm all in favor of elaborate public transport networks, even if they run at a slight loss and governments have to chip in. I believe governments often recover the cost in "externalities"(*) such as decreased road maintenance and stimulating the economy. But, one needs to be a bit pragmatic; one just cannot expect every tiny town to get service to all the nearby centers every 10 minutes, else the loss is not "slight" anymore. This is just an obvious disadvantage one ought to be aware of when moving to a small town.
(*) For the nitpickers among us: note that these only satisfy the definition of "externalities" from the narrow view of the transport providers; from the broader view of the government, they are not. Hence the quotes.
And I'm even certainer you're dead wrong, AC. We don't even have realistic theoretical proposals for actual space-time-folding devices that would be of utility for space travel, and the most optimistic estimates of the energies required are in the ballpark of converting the mass of an entire planet to energy. Meanwhile, the current holy grail of energy generation is commercially viable fusion reactors, which we don't have, and which would be far from efficient enough even if we had them.
In comparison, printing a copy of someone on another planet isn't all that difficult. The only things you need are:
(1) the ability to freeze a human body to solid state and revive them after thawing (given current progress, this may become possible in a number of decades)
(2) the permission to destroy the originals (you'll always find a few volunteers)
(3) technology to (destructively) index all the atoms and bonds in a large solid organic body (slowly approaching the required resolution, though speed will still need to improve a lot)
(4) technology to build an arbitrary large organic body at cryo temperatures, presumably one atom at the time. This part is still the furthest out, but nanoscience and nanotech are advancing every day, and at least, there is no fundamental hurdle.
Sure, it will take many generations of technical progress, but if civilization doesn't collapse in the meanwhile, we'll eventually get there.(*) The same cannot be said about folding space-time in a way that is useful for space travel, which the laws of physics may very well have put out of reach of any baryonic life form. This is a bit of a disappointment for SF fans dreaming of a pan-galactic society, but that's how life is.
(*) Then again, once you have (1), you could just as well freeze someone, clad them in a few meters of lead to protect them against cosmic radiation, and shoot them to another planet along with the equipment to revive them. That would be way easier, faster and cheaper than the contrived scenario of printing someone new.
And the legal opinion there was that to switch licenses would require the approval of every copyright holder.
+1; the Linux kernel was not the only high-profile real-life case of a FOSS project doing just that. I'm actually surprised GP apparently didn't knew of that; it received ample coverage on this very site.
Think is fuzzy yes, but only some people realize this.
FTFY. The conscious is nothing but a clever mechanism that creates the illusion our thinking is not fuzzy. Giving up that illusion is scary; some people never manage. But it does make one a more effective thinker.
I'm not saying you don't have a point, but Wikipedia's accuracy is actually close to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Anything people do will have errors, whether due to malice or incompetence. And even if it doesn't initially, accuracy is a moving target, and errors in science and medicine will accumulate over time as our knowledge itself evolves. In my experience, statements such as yours are often used by the intellectually lazy to dismiss Wikipedia as evidence that their worldview is out of touch with reality, so a little bit less hyperbole would be advantageous for intelligent discourse. Sure, people will try to push their agendas. They will be frustrated by bona fide editors as well as people trying to push an opposite agenda, and the end result comes out quite OK compared to other sources of information.
And how big is the sampling error? If it would be 200% more, it would be significant for sure, but 30% more? Meh, same ball park. And even if it were outside the confidence interval, 30% more errors than a very respected source won't keep me from reading Wikipedia and referring to it in casual discussions. Nor will EB's 30% less errors make me uncritically accept everything they say; three inaccuracies per scientific entry is still a huge lot. They're basically in the same league. One advantage Wikipedia does have is quick coverage of newly emerging topics (historic natural disasters and such).
the point would be that not everybody has your positive experience with religion
acting surprised that people react negatively, or that they would even have a reason to be negative seems to be intentionally uninformed, if not just plain trolling
Chances are that the people who have to endure your negative reaction have no connection (other than sharing the same religion) to the people who gave you your negative experience, and are actually surprised. You'd just make an impression of "having issues".
within certain limits; these absolutes you seem to be reasoning in don't play well with reality. To give a more extreme example, if you are involved in an accident in which you lose your genitals, and end up in intensive care for a short while, with little acute pain and a prognosis of full recovery, you don't get to decide to die because you dread staying a virgin forever.
Last I checked, losing your balls doesn't come with being unable to breathe on your own.
I did mention you ending up in intensive care for a while. What did you think I meant by that? I thought it was pretty clear I meant you had life-threatening injuries, but the genital one would be the only permanent one. Pretty clear to people using common sense, that is.
My point was: during the timespan you're in intensive care, you'll almost by definition die if they don't support your life, so they can let you die just by withholding treatment. By this, I wanted to illustrate that withholding treatment is far from the only criterion to make it legal, as you asserted.
You're accusing me of setting up strawmen?
Fuck you and goodbye.
Oh, so it's only cool if you're the one doing it to other people, and else you resort to cursing?
Major Hanlon's razor fail. Not to mention things such as "benefit of doubt" and "mature worldview". Apparently it's not only religious nutjobs who see the world in terms of "good" and "evil"...
Probably only if there was something better that they could be doing with their time, like holding a car wash to make money for the person
Sure, that's why I carefully mentioned "can't do anything about the situation" multiple times. Perhaps I should make that "can't do or are unwilling to do"; if you're not going to do the effort to set up a car wash anyway, there's little harm in throwing in a prayer. People do stuff that serves no purpose other than making themselves feel better all the time; if you have a beef with unproductive passtime, you might as well start attacking things such as relaxation, entertainment and unproductive sex.
or setting up some sort of online presence that could be helpful, or taking the same amount of time to google locked in syndrome and relay information that could be useful...
Let's not kid ourselves; those things are unlikely to be actually helpful. It's like waving a dead chicken, or, you know, praying. Sure, there's a nonzero chance that the poster will appreciate something that comes out of the online presence or the Google search. There's also a nonzero chance that the poster is religious or just open-minded, and really appreciates all the offers of prayers.
Maybe it's because I'm getting tired, but I couldn't make a lot of sense out of the rest of your post. You seem to be going though some strange kind of internal dialogue, something like:
You: "I don't like your religion because it tells people to do such-and-so." (other than praying, which by itself is a pretty damn harmless way to pass the time) Imaginary religious opponent: "but... but... I pray for people who are in trouble, so I'm a good person, so surely your 'legitimate beef' is invalid."
If this is what you're thinking, I have to point out that I've never heard a religious person using that as an actual argument in an actual discussion, and if they do, it must be pretty rare, so it sounds a little bit like a strawman (or should I say windmill) argument.
Being in "constant agony" is nowhere specified in the ethical guidelines as a defining criterion for a best-interests analysis. You're simply pulling that out of your ass.
Nope, I'm giving that as an (admittedly coarse and imperfect) definition for the very difficult concept "quality-of-life" (or rather, lack thereof). You might want to read up on that. It is one of the concepts on which the concept "medical futility" is based.
And you continue to conflate withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment with euthanasia. They are two completely different things.
There is a difference, but the line is already blurry from a legal point of view, and nearly nonexistent from an ethical point of view. You might be conflating ethics with law.
It's the patient who gets to decide what his or her level of suffering is, and whether or not it is reasonable to continue life-sustaining medical intervention.
Only within certain limits; these absolutes you seem to be reasoning in don't play well with reality. To give a more extreme example, if you are involved in an accident in which you lose your genitals, and end up in intensive care for a short while, with little acute pain and a prognosis of full recovery, you don't get to decide to die because you dread staying a virgin forever.
Wrong link? This is an article on "medical futility", and it does refer to "quality-of-life", as I asserted. It contains one precedent, which is largely in agreement with the conditions I had in mind. Admittedly, those conditions are a bit more elaborate than what I wrote in my post; I'm not here to write whole essays on "quality-of-life" and "medical futility", and you'll have to assume good faith. My main point is that there are narrow legal and ethical limits within which a patient is allowed to choose to die, and that the case in TFA is outside them for the time being.
It continues to amaze me how human beings refuse to view death as part of the natural process of life, much to their own and society's detriment.
You're setting up a big strawman here. Would it not be to society's detriment for the child in TFA to grow up without mother, or for the poster and all his family to lose a beloved one at the tender age of 28, hastily unplugged before anyone could know how well she would recover (in that respects, I advise you to read some of the posts further down this discussion, including my own). What if it would be your mother or sister, and I were the dick shouting "unplug her!" while you'd rather would like to first see her stabilize and get a solid prognosis on her recovery? Also, if a very poor person catches bacterial bronchitis and obtains antibiotics through medicaid, would you also say that's to "society's detriment" and they should "learn to view death as part of the natural process of life"? The fact that society steps up for those in trouble is what differentiates us from solitary animals. It only becomes a problem when the intervention is both futile and unwanted, which is why we have these laws and ethical guidelines. In other words, yes death is part of life and shouldn't be averted if there's no good reason to do so, but "good reason" is hard to define and subjective, and laws and ethical guidelines by nature play it safe as to not offend anyone. I think the current laws in the liberal jurisdictions I was talking about strike a good balance; what you're proposing could too easily lead to excesses and injustices. As "parts of life" go, death is a pretty irrevocable one... Here's some further food for thought. I can't say I agree with every last letter of it, but it's a good though-provoking read.
What part of "without being in constant agony" did you not understand?
Even if the patient is not terminally ill or permanently unconscious, it is not unethical to discontinue all means of life-sustaining medical treatment in accordance with a proper substituted judgment or best interests analysis.
Nice attempt at ripping a quote out of context, but you need more contextomy practice; you forgot to edit out the "in accordance with a proper substituted judgment or best interests analysis" part, which severely undermines your standpoint. You'd have a stronger case if you could show me a precedent where someone who has a reasonable prospect of regaining concsiousness and being able to communicate with her surroundings without being in constant agony was legally euthanased.
she is incapable of breathing on her own. There is no medical or ethical obligation to keep her on artificial life support against her wishes, or the wishes of her medical proxy if she is incapable of making a decision on her own.
Totally, utterly incorrect. Even in the most liberal jurisdictions (I'm thinking Belgium and the Netherlands), pulling the plug on the life support system of a patient who has a reasonable prospect of regaining concsiousness and being able to communicate with her surroundings without being in constant agony is leaglly murder, medically a clear-cut violation of Hippocrates' oath, and ethically almost universally condemed. And in this case she is already conscious, able of rudimentary communication, and not in severe agony, so there's no wiggle-room there. At this point, you couldn't pull the plug on her even if she asked to, becuase her mind is clouded by being in the process of recovering from a severe stroke. I can't believe I'm even having this conversation; pulling the plug is so blatantly out of the question that it's slightly scandalous someone even suggested it.
59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. The authors left open the possibility that this was a chance finding.
Let's get one thing out of the way first: it doesn't make much sense to me that prayer would do anything for the patient - positive or negative. I do, however, firmly believe prayer is highly beneficial for the person who does the praying. Not in a metaphysical sense but in a psychological sense: the relatives, these poor people, are sitting there, stressed out about the dire situation their beloved one is in, and there is nothing they want more than being able to help, only they cannot. Prayer is as old as humanity, and it is for a reason: it's a psychological coping mechanism to deal with a situation out of one's control. I believe it's a normal and healthy part of the human brain's reaction to helplessness; it channels the maddening will to do something about the situation. Denying the existence of deeply rooted psychological impulses and coping mechanisms never did us much good; think for instance of celibacy. There are many books and studies about the benefits of meditation on the mind, but meditation and deep, sincere, selfless prayer are really one and the same.
I'd go even further and say it's good for you to pray if you're not closely involved; it gives your mind a time-out from the constant stream of information, and gives you a moment of serenity to contemplate the madness of your lifestyle. In the case of a disaster (where applicable), it might arouse feelings of empathy, and might make you more likely to donate, or support political efforts against the causes that made the disaster claim so many lives. And even if not, it's a kind gesture towards the people who are immediately involved. In that sense, I fully support GP's statement.
So as an atheist, you might be bothered by the idea of people praying, but really, that's just another form of evangelic intolerance. Specifically, intolerance of people who see life different - the same kind of intolerance you, as an atheist, probably find highly offiensive in some religious groups. When confronted with non-atheists who can't do anything about the situation, do encourage them to pray - it's good for them! When you're the one whose close relative is fighting for their life, in lieu of praying, take 15 minutes to observe your own mind trying to cope, desparately seeking for ways to do something about the situation, however futile. Perhaps you'll come to better understand those who pray.
First, I'm sorry to hear about the misfortune that struck your sister-in-law. I know you and your family must be going through immense stress right now, and it's extremely distressing to feel helpless - in such times, one has a strong urge to try to somehow improve the situation, even if there is realistically no way. My advice is: don't panic, get some rest yourself, give it some time. If you're positively sure she's able to willfully move her lips, no matter how much effort it takes her, it does not qualify as locked-in syndrome, far from it. She's recovering from a stroke, so it is to be expected every action from her part will be extremely exhausting. This is very likely to get better, and as long as there is a neural connection to her eylids and facial muscles, her brains will learn to make the most of it, especially since she's only 28. Also, if I understand the situation correctly, it cannot be ruled out that some other functions may recover as well. Before deciding upon a course of action, she needs rest, and you just have to wait and see which motoric functions recover. Next step is therapy to teach her brains to make the most out of these functions, which will take months. Assuming everything is reasonably stable and the cancer itself is under control, the worst-case scenario she's looking at is a life like Stephen Hawking for the coming several years. She'll enjoy seeing her son grow up, and have the prospect of (robotics and neuron-machine interface) technologies around the corner that hold the promise to dramatically improve her quality of life.
Thanks for illustrating the concept "whackjob" in my previous post. Saves me some explaining. Or wait, was that for real? You never know with Poe's law...
Exactly; as an illustration, take those three "unreasonable CC homework" questions for his 3rd grade daughter comedian Louis C.K. posted on twitter, and got a storm of support for in the "finer" media. Ignoring the fact that the homework questions were not part of the CC as such, I disagreed on all 3 accounts:
- first question: you get 6 boxes (the picture showed only the top 3 of them) and are asked to write "A" in half of them, "B" in 1/3 of them, and "C" in 1/6. For crying out loud, what kind of number-dyslectic moron thinks this is a difficult assignment? He must be hoping his daughter aspires to also be a comedian (or a journalist apparently), because she sure as hell won't get into higher education if she's being led to think she shouldn't learn to solve that. The media storm that followed was eerily reminiscent of idiocracy...
- second question: sure, you and I, as a parent, may not know what a "pictograph" is. However, you and I hopefully know how to use Google. After a 30-second search, I discovered "pictograph" is just a scary term for an innocuously simple concept. I bet his daughter was drilled in class on what a pictograph is and how to construct one before being given that assignment; not the teacher's fault if she wasn't paying attention, and as a parent, you shouldn't balk at a word you don't know unless you never want your offspring to learn more than you know.
- third question: he apparently deleted that one after a few days because I don't see it on his profile anymore; probably he realized just how stupid it made him look. Anyhow, the question consists of a number of separate, very simple equations. He pretty much admits in his tweet that the equations are not really too hard as such, except for the last one, which doesn't seem to make any sense at all. Just stare at that last one for 20 seconds... right, it's a simple typesetting error! Specifically, what you're seeing is two equally easy equations that are unfortunately concatenated on one line by lack of a line break. Was this guy drunk when he posted it? And even if not, is lashing out without thinking what he considers "being a good role model"?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you add aerodynamics to the equation, the bubble suddenly isn't that favorable anymore. And then there's stability and, as you already brought up, safety.
That said, I fully agree that the only sensible answer in "no". Striking similarities? What striking similarities? Google's car looks much more like a Smart than like Mayer's concept, and Smarts have been around (and copied) since 1998, 13 years before Mayer made her "bubble car" sketch. Slow news day?
Are you sure you replied to the right post? Because the one I'm seeing above yours says "when you have the same trip that so many people take everyday". You're from a small town? Congrats, you get to take your car everywhere. That's the way it is, even in the countries that have the best public transport. I'm all in favor of elaborate public transport networks, even if they run at a slight loss and governments have to chip in. I believe governments often recover the cost in "externalities"(*) such as decreased road maintenance and stimulating the economy. But, one needs to be a bit pragmatic; one just cannot expect every tiny town to get service to all the nearby centers every 10 minutes, else the loss is not "slight" anymore. This is just an obvious disadvantage one ought to be aware of when moving to a small town.
(*) For the nitpickers among us: note that these only satisfy the definition of "externalities" from the narrow view of the transport providers; from the broader view of the government, they are not. Hence the quotes.
Yup, you got it.
And I'm even certainer you're dead wrong, AC. We don't even have realistic theoretical proposals for actual space-time-folding devices that would be of utility for space travel, and the most optimistic estimates of the energies required are in the ballpark of converting the mass of an entire planet to energy. Meanwhile, the current holy grail of energy generation is commercially viable fusion reactors, which we don't have, and which would be far from efficient enough even if we had them.
In comparison, printing a copy of someone on another planet isn't all that difficult. The only things you need are:
(1) the ability to freeze a human body to solid state and revive them after thawing (given current progress, this may become possible in a number of decades)
(2) the permission to destroy the originals (you'll always find a few volunteers)
(3) technology to (destructively) index all the atoms and bonds in a large solid organic body (slowly approaching the required resolution, though speed will still need to improve a lot)
(4) technology to build an arbitrary large organic body at cryo temperatures, presumably one atom at the time. This part is still the furthest out, but nanoscience and nanotech are advancing every day, and at least, there is no fundamental hurdle.
Sure, it will take many generations of technical progress, but if civilization doesn't collapse in the meanwhile, we'll eventually get there.(*) The same cannot be said about folding space-time in a way that is useful for space travel, which the laws of physics may very well have put out of reach of any baryonic life form. This is a bit of a disappointment for SF fans dreaming of a pan-galactic society, but that's how life is.
(*) Then again, once you have (1), you could just as well freeze someone, clad them in a few meters of lead to protect them against cosmic radiation, and shoot them to another planet along with the equipment to revive them. That would be way easier, faster and cheaper than the contrived scenario of printing someone new.
And the legal opinion there was that to switch licenses would require the approval of every copyright holder.
+1; the Linux kernel was not the only high-profile real-life case of a FOSS project doing just that. I'm actually surprised GP apparently didn't knew of that; it received ample coverage on this very site.
Yeah, there will be a world market for maybe five of these things.
Agreed on all points.
so most applications bypassed DOS and went straight to machine language.
For a voting machine, that sounds very much like a feature.
What is meant by "more PE" in the title?
Premature ejaculation?
Penis enlargement?
Physical education?
Pulmonary embolism?
Polyethylene?
Perhaps related ;)
Think is fuzzy yes, but only some people realize this.
FTFY. The conscious is nothing but a clever mechanism that creates the illusion our thinking is not fuzzy. Giving up that illusion is scary; some people never manage. But it does make one a more effective thinker.
I'm not saying you don't have a point, but Wikipedia's accuracy is actually close to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Anything people do will have errors, whether due to malice or incompetence. And even if it doesn't initially, accuracy is a moving target, and errors in science and medicine will accumulate over time as our knowledge itself evolves. In my experience, statements such as yours are often used by the intellectually lazy to dismiss Wikipedia as evidence that their worldview is out of touch with reality, so a little bit less hyperbole would be advantageous for intelligent discourse. Sure, people will try to push their agendas. They will be frustrated by bona fide editors as well as people trying to push an opposite agenda, and the end result comes out quite OK compared to other sources of information.
And how big is the sampling error? If it would be 200% more, it would be significant for sure, but 30% more? Meh, same ball park. And even if it were outside the confidence interval, 30% more errors than a very respected source won't keep me from reading Wikipedia and referring to it in casual discussions. Nor will EB's 30% less errors make me uncritically accept everything they say; three inaccuracies per scientific entry is still a huge lot. They're basically in the same league. One advantage Wikipedia does have is quick coverage of newly emerging topics (historic natural disasters and such).
the point would be that not everybody has your positive experience with religion
acting surprised that people react negatively, or that they would even have a reason to be negative seems to be intentionally uninformed, if not just plain trolling
Chances are that the people who have to endure your negative reaction have no connection (other than sharing the same religion) to the people who gave you your negative experience, and are actually surprised. You'd just make an impression of "having issues".
within certain limits; these absolutes you seem to be reasoning in don't play well with reality. To give a more extreme example, if you are involved in an accident in which you lose your genitals, and end up in intensive care for a short while, with little acute pain and a prognosis of full recovery, you don't get to decide to die because you dread staying a virgin forever.
Last I checked, losing your balls doesn't come with being unable to breathe on your own.
I did mention you ending up in intensive care for a while. What did you think I meant by that? I thought it was pretty clear I meant you had life-threatening injuries, but the genital one would be the only permanent one. Pretty clear to people using common sense, that is.
My point was: during the timespan you're in intensive care, you'll almost by definition die if they don't support your life, so they can let you die just by withholding treatment. By this, I wanted to illustrate that withholding treatment is far from the only criterion to make it legal, as you asserted.
You're accusing me of setting up strawmen? Fuck you and goodbye.
Oh, so it's only cool if you're the one doing it to other people, and else you resort to cursing?
... sole intent being to mean-spiritedly...
Major Hanlon's razor fail. Not to mention things such as "benefit of doubt" and "mature worldview". Apparently it's not only religious nutjobs who see the world in terms of "good" and "evil"...
+1 Insightful and eloquent.
Probably only if there was something better that they could be doing with their time, like holding a car wash to make money for the person
Sure, that's why I carefully mentioned "can't do anything about the situation" multiple times. Perhaps I should make that "can't do or are unwilling to do"; if you're not going to do the effort to set up a car wash anyway, there's little harm in throwing in a prayer. People do stuff that serves no purpose other than making themselves feel better all the time; if you have a beef with unproductive passtime, you might as well start attacking things such as relaxation, entertainment and unproductive sex.
or setting up some sort of online presence that could be helpful, or taking the same amount of time to google locked in syndrome and relay information that could be useful...
Let's not kid ourselves; those things are unlikely to be actually helpful. It's like waving a dead chicken, or, you know, praying. Sure, there's a nonzero chance that the poster will appreciate something that comes out of the online presence or the Google search. There's also a nonzero chance that the poster is religious or just open-minded, and really appreciates all the offers of prayers.
Maybe it's because I'm getting tired, but I couldn't make a lot of sense out of the rest of your post. You seem to be going though some strange kind of internal dialogue, something like:
You: "I don't like your religion because it tells people to do such-and-so." (other than praying, which by itself is a pretty damn harmless way to pass the time)
Imaginary religious opponent: "but... but... I pray for people who are in trouble, so I'm a good person, so surely your 'legitimate beef' is invalid."
If this is what you're thinking, I have to point out that I've never heard a religious person using that as an actual argument in an actual discussion, and if they do, it must be pretty rare, so it sounds a little bit like a strawman (or should I say windmill) argument.
Being in "constant agony" is nowhere specified in the ethical guidelines as a defining criterion for a best-interests analysis. You're simply pulling that out of your ass.
Nope, I'm giving that as an (admittedly coarse and imperfect) definition for the very difficult concept "quality-of-life" (or rather, lack thereof). You might want to read up on that. It is one of the concepts on which the concept "medical futility" is based.
And you continue to conflate withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment with euthanasia. They are two completely different things.
There is a difference, but the line is already blurry from a legal point of view, and nearly nonexistent from an ethical point of view. You might be conflating ethics with law.
It's the patient who gets to decide what his or her level of suffering is, and whether or not it is reasonable to continue life-sustaining medical intervention.
Only within certain limits; these absolutes you seem to be reasoning in don't play well with reality. To give a more extreme example, if you are involved in an accident in which you lose your genitals, and end up in intensive care for a short while, with little acute pain and a prognosis of full recovery, you don't get to decide to die because you dread staying a virgin forever.
And yes, there is substantial precedent for this.
Wrong link? This is an article on "medical futility", and it does refer to "quality-of-life", as I asserted. It contains one precedent, which is largely in agreement with the conditions I had in mind. Admittedly, those conditions are a bit more elaborate than what I wrote in my post; I'm not here to write whole essays on "quality-of-life" and "medical futility", and you'll have to assume good faith. My main point is that there are narrow legal and ethical limits within which a patient is allowed to choose to die, and that the case in TFA is outside them for the time being.
It continues to amaze me how human beings refuse to view death as part of the natural process of life, much to their own and society's detriment.
You're setting up a big strawman here. Would it not be to society's detriment for the child in TFA to grow up without mother, or for the poster and all his family to lose a beloved one at the tender age of 28, hastily unplugged before anyone could know how well she would recover (in that respects, I advise you to read some of the posts further down this discussion, including my own). What if it would be your mother or sister, and I were the dick shouting "unplug her!" while you'd rather would like to first see her stabilize and get a solid prognosis on her recovery? Also, if a very poor person catches bacterial bronchitis and obtains antibiotics through medicaid, would you also say that's to "society's detriment" and they should "learn to view death as part of the natural process of life"? The fact that society steps up for those in trouble is what differentiates us from solitary animals. It only becomes a problem when the intervention is both futile and unwanted, which is why we have these laws and ethical guidelines. In other words, yes death is part of life and shouldn't be averted if there's no good reason to do so, but "good reason" is hard to define and subjective, and laws and ethical guidelines by nature play it safe as to not offend anyone. I think the current laws in the liberal jurisdictions I was talking about strike a good balance; what you're proposing could too easily lead to excesses and injustices. As "parts of life" go, death is a pretty irrevocable one... Here's some further food for thought. I can't say I agree with every last letter of it, but it's a good though-provoking read.
Fortunately for a lot of suffering people...
What part of "without being in constant agony" did you not understand?
Even if the patient is not terminally ill or permanently unconscious, it is not unethical to discontinue all means of life-sustaining medical treatment in accordance with a proper substituted judgment or best interests analysis.
Nice attempt at ripping a quote out of context, but you need more contextomy practice; you forgot to edit out the "in accordance with a proper substituted judgment or best interests analysis" part, which severely undermines your standpoint. You'd have a stronger case if you could show me a precedent where someone who has a reasonable prospect of regaining concsiousness and being able to communicate with her surroundings without being in constant agony was legally euthanased.
she is incapable of breathing on her own. There is no medical or ethical obligation to keep her on artificial life support against her wishes, or the wishes of her medical proxy if she is incapable of making a decision on her own.
Totally, utterly incorrect. Even in the most liberal jurisdictions (I'm thinking Belgium and the Netherlands), pulling the plug on the life support system of a patient who has a reasonable prospect of regaining concsiousness and being able to communicate with her surroundings without being in constant agony is leaglly murder, medically a clear-cut violation of Hippocrates' oath, and ethically almost universally condemed. And in this case she is already conscious, able of rudimentary communication, and not in severe agony, so there's no wiggle-room there. At this point, you couldn't pull the plug on her even if she asked to, becuase her mind is clouded by being in the process of recovering from a severe stroke. I can't believe I'm even having this conversation; pulling the plug is so blatantly out of the question that it's slightly scandalous someone even suggested it.
Further down in the same article:
59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. The authors left open the possibility that this was a chance finding.
Let's get one thing out of the way first: it doesn't make much sense to me that prayer would do anything for the patient - positive or negative. I do, however, firmly believe prayer is highly beneficial for the person who does the praying. Not in a metaphysical sense but in a psychological sense: the relatives, these poor people, are sitting there, stressed out about the dire situation their beloved one is in, and there is nothing they want more than being able to help, only they cannot . Prayer is as old as humanity, and it is for a reason: it's a psychological coping mechanism to deal with a situation out of one's control. I believe it's a normal and healthy part of the human brain's reaction to helplessness; it channels the maddening will to do something about the situation. Denying the existence of deeply rooted psychological impulses and coping mechanisms never did us much good; think for instance of celibacy. There are many books and studies about the benefits of meditation on the mind, but meditation and deep, sincere, selfless prayer are really one and the same.
I'd go even further and say it's good for you to pray if you're not closely involved; it gives your mind a time-out from the constant stream of information, and gives you a moment of serenity to contemplate the madness of your lifestyle. In the case of a disaster (where applicable), it might arouse feelings of empathy, and might make you more likely to donate, or support political efforts against the causes that made the disaster claim so many lives. And even if not, it's a kind gesture towards the people who are immediately involved. In that sense, I fully support GP's statement.
So as an atheist, you might be bothered by the idea of people praying, but really, that's just another form of evangelic intolerance. Specifically, intolerance of people who see life different - the same kind of intolerance you, as an atheist, probably find highly offiensive in some religious groups. When confronted with non-atheists who can't do anything about the situation, do encourage them to pray - it's good for them! When you're the one whose close relative is fighting for their life, in lieu of praying, take 15 minutes to observe your own mind trying to cope, desparately seeking for ways to do something about the situation, however futile. Perhaps you'll come to better understand those who pray.
First, I'm sorry to hear about the misfortune that struck your sister-in-law. I know you and your family must be going through immense stress right now, and it's extremely distressing to feel helpless - in such times, one has a strong urge to try to somehow improve the situation, even if there is realistically no way. My advice is: don't panic, get some rest yourself, give it some time. If you're positively sure she's able to willfully move her lips, no matter how much effort it takes her, it does not qualify as locked-in syndrome , far from it. She's recovering from a stroke, so it is to be expected every action from her part will be extremely exhausting. This is very likely to get better, and as long as there is a neural connection to her eylids and facial muscles, her brains will learn to make the most of it, especially since she's only 28. Also, if I understand the situation correctly, it cannot be ruled out that some other functions may recover as well. Before deciding upon a course of action, she needs rest, and you just have to wait and see which motoric functions recover. Next step is therapy to teach her brains to make the most out of these functions, which will take months. Assuming everything is reasonably stable and the cancer itself is under control, the worst-case scenario she's looking at is a life like Stephen Hawking for the coming several years. She'll enjoy seeing her son grow up, and have the prospect of (robotics and neuron-machine interface) technologies around the corner that hold the promise to dramatically improve her quality of life.
Thanks for illustrating the concept "whackjob" in my previous post. Saves me some explaining. Or wait, was that for real? You never know with Poe's law...
Exactly; as an illustration, take those three "unreasonable CC homework" questions for his 3rd grade daughter comedian Louis C.K. posted on twitter, and got a storm of support for in the "finer" media. Ignoring the fact that the homework questions were not part of the CC as such, I disagreed on all 3 accounts:
- first question: you get 6 boxes (the picture showed only the top 3 of them) and are asked to write "A" in half of them, "B" in 1/3 of them, and "C" in 1/6. For crying out loud, what kind of number-dyslectic moron thinks this is a difficult assignment? He must be hoping his daughter aspires to also be a comedian (or a journalist apparently), because she sure as hell won't get into higher education if she's being led to think she shouldn't learn to solve that. The media storm that followed was eerily reminiscent of idiocracy...
- second question: sure, you and I, as a parent, may not know what a "pictograph" is. However, you and I hopefully know how to use Google. After a 30-second search, I discovered "pictograph" is just a scary term for an innocuously simple concept. I bet his daughter was drilled in class on what a pictograph is and how to construct one before being given that assignment; not the teacher's fault if she wasn't paying attention, and as a parent, you shouldn't balk at a word you don't know unless you never want your offspring to learn more than you know.
- third question: he apparently deleted that one after a few days because I don't see it on his profile anymore; probably he realized just how stupid it made him look. Anyhow, the question consists of a number of separate, very simple equations. He pretty much admits in his tweet that the equations are not really too hard as such, except for the last one, which doesn't seem to make any sense at all. Just stare at that last one for 20 seconds... right, it's a simple typesetting error ! Specifically, what you're seeing is two equally easy equations that are unfortunately concatenated on one line by lack of a line break. Was this guy drunk when he posted it? And even if not, is lashing out without thinking what he considers "being a good role model"?