131–140 of 233 posts
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Maybe he has more urging matter than claiming this ? Thought about the paperwork and taxes handling ? Could you do that for him ?
He provides a paypal link for donations in the post, and for most people $64k is a non-insignificant amount (i.e. would be worth the effort of claiming).
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Cancer requires clinging to glimmers of hope. Yes, he felt that way at the time and yes, he wrote it down, but these improbabilities are all anyone ever has, its not over till it’s over. I read that post too, going from a tiny undetectable bump under the skin that only his partner noticed, to unbearable pain pressing against his spine making him unable to sleep and think clearly. It seems like 4 months were wasted ju…
> Cancer requires clinging to glimmers of hope. Does it, though? Is there anything that suggests the mental state of the patient is a factor in the efficacy of treatment? Pieter Hintjens has written a bit against the "fight" model.
This was simply about the user experience itself. A dramatic way of saying that people grasp for hope, not that "beating cancer" requires glimmers of hope, only that the "user experience of cancer" involves the patient/host/victim grasping for them. I'm surprised you read it any other way, but I can see how, yeah this definitely wasn't one of those unquantifiable "beat cancer because they're a strong fighter [and everyone else that didn't was a useless weak wimp that gave up]" voodoo posts. His blog post was one of those glimmers of hope. It is predictable that people do that because they have nothing else. No more, no less.
The point is that deep down he still knew the odds and that his mortality was still in question.
Its "the last good day", a trope in cancer, where things seem normalizing and improving, but you don't know its the last good day.
Thanks.
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He provides a paypal link for donations in the post, and for most people $64k is a non-insignificant amount (i.e. would be worth the effort of claiming).
Well, it feels like a passive publicity stunt, so far, to me.
I believe open source work is amongst the greatest works of charities ever. It is just staggering the amount of work that goes building/maintainer open source. And I possibly wonder every week on who are these wonderful people creating/maintaining them. My heart goes to maintainer & family. Everybody in this forum needs to do a bit. Request everybody to donate generously via paypal mentioned in the link.
@Dang : Could you please change the title to convey this better. 'Dhcpd will need a new maintainer' - doesn't tell the real story.
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Australia has free education as well, and optional private education. University is paid but fairly reasonable, and there's a loan system, though it could be better imho.
I'm sure you could find ways to spend more money and increase the quality of that free education, no?
Edit: if you don't like it you can always pay for private education - it to is partially government funded.
This is so sad because if you read his blog post from January 2021, he sounds so very hopeful and happy at the prospect of the immunotherapy working. It sounds like he discovered a new lease of life. Being thrown from that situation to the new prognosis which is infinitely worse, sounds like a hammer blow.
Immunotherapy came from left field as a cancer therapy - and for stage 4 cancers, the 4/5-year survival rate is much better than control groups - about 50%.
Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel prize in medicine for their work in cancer immunotherapy.
There's an interesting documentary on Jim Allison's work - see https://www.breakthroughdoc.com/ (for USA PBS viewers: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/jim-allison-breakt..., for TVOntario viewers: https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/jim-allison-breakthr...)
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The only reason it costs millions to treat cancer patients is because of medical patents allowing companies to extract profit margins of several thousand percent (or more). In countries like Australia, where drug companies have to negotiate a fair price with a single government agency, the cost of treatment is an order of magnitude lower.
This is not true. MRI machines are not expensive because of "patents". They are expensive because they are expensive devices that utilize superconducting magnets which need a constant supply of liquid helium. Various drugs are expensive because (regardless of patents) there aren't enough patients to justify mass-production, so the price stays high. Sometimes even with mass production drugs are hard enough to make tha…
The "private prescription price" is the un-subsidised cost that people not covered by Medicare (e.g. foreign residents) pay. The discounted PBS price is what regular residents pay, the concession price is for people on low incomes or pensions.
Even un-subsidised, you're typically looking at a price 80% lower than what people in the US pay. With subsidies, it's closer to 90-95% less. This has nothing to do with manufacturing costs - manufacturing in Australia is more expensive. It's entirely because our government doesn't allow pharmaceutical companies to profiteer from their IP to the obscene extent that the US government does, and we've had a right-leaning government for 19 out of the last 25 years.
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The problem with healthcare is that "basic minimum" is wildly subjective. Healthcare is still very expensive. There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really don't have that kind of societal overabundance, not yet. So how much do you spend per patient? Are there certain diseases that you don't spend any publi…
The only reason it costs millions to treat cancer patients is because of medical patents allowing companies to extract profit margins of several thousand percent (or more). In countries like Australia, where drug companies have to negotiate a fair price with a single government agency, the cost of treatment is an order of magnitude lower.
So yes you have a point in that especially in the US the dollar amounts attached to treatments aren't necessarily indicative of the effort involved. Treating their argument charitably though, as a species we have finite capacity, and "spend millions per patient" is a linguistic shorthand for "we don't have enough resources to evenly distribute this level of care to everyone."
That argument isn't infallible (e.g., it's pretty easy to get a majority to agree on upper and lower bounds for such an idea, so picking a number in between might still be reasonable), but it's much more interesting to pick apart the thing they're trying to say rather than the exact words they used.
He came over to NetBSD from Gentoo a number of years ago, bringing dhcpd with him. An excellent acquisition for NetBSD. He has been a dedicated and thoughtful BSD developer. This is very sad news.
As someone else commented in this thread, would be surprised if anyone could find a higher quality alternative. This one is free, open-source, written by a volunteer, not by a company nor by any organization that accepts money derived from online ad sales.