These title changes are getting ridiculous. The original title was actually descriptive. I have no idea what this article is about without going to the comments or clicking on it. The whole point of a link title is to describe the link.
What Dreams May Come
351–360 of 399 posts
Re: What Dreams May Come
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Just burn me" isn't cheap -- heck, this example from else-thread is worse than what I found with some research: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7393011 Also, your family and friends might want to see you before science does whatever with you, and that will cost more than any of us would like to think it will. Funerals aren't cheap, and I was told when buying life insurance to expect all funeral expenses (viewin…
Wait, if my familly wants to bring me to some woods and burn me in a fire, can't they just do it?
You need a better fire than that if you want to properly cremate someone instead of making some barbecue.
Re: What Dreams May Come
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Look up any research on happiness." Boy we are really dialing it up to 11 in this thread.
Seems like a reasonable summary of positive psychology to me: experiences and people, not things.
A van and a house purchased under the expectation that you aren't going to die at 35 doesn't seem like negative excess.
I don't know what branch of psychology castigating people that have more than you falls under, though.
Re: What Dreams May Come
#354Jonathan here. Being woke up by my wife crying because the donations just aren't stopping is both heart-breaking and comforting. For those of you who haven't seen the 'Bucket List' post, here's what it says at the very top: As I try to deal with the reality that is my impending death I can't help but wonder how many things I might have been able to accomplish given just a little more time. When I was diagnosed, I had…
Jonathan, my heart truly goes out to you. Someone very close to me was diagnosed with stage 3 melanoma a few months ago, so while I can barely imagine what it must feel like to face this, I do know what the medical picture looks like and the information available looks grim. I don't want to tell you about your disease, but if you haven't yet, please find a way to get evaluated at md anderson. They're in Texas, and po…
I am hopeful that I live long enough for the next great breakthrough to happen. The treatment that I am on didn't get FDA approval until late 2011 and is actually working to shrink the tumors. Unfortunately, they don't know where mine originated and it has progressed so quickly that they don't give me good odds. I literally went from being fine one day to having cancer the next. There were no external signs and the internal tumors are huge, ranging in size from golf balls to soft balls.
I have hope but I'm also being realistic based on how my treatment has progressed. I have to plan for the reality that I may not have more than 9 months and hope that I'm still here in 15 years. It's a very difficult place to be emotionally.
With regards to MD Anderson, I've heard great things from them, however, I trust my doctors and they work with many of the doctors from MD Anderson. Before they did my gamma knife treatment they actually sent the MRI results over to a neuro-surgeon peer group to ensure that the right actions were being taken. They have taken no chances and are doing the right thing as far as I'm concerned. I continue to do my own research looking for the next best thing and will definitely consider MD Anderson should I find that they have something better available than the treatments I'm on.
Re: What Dreams May Come
#355Depressing that someone facing death would worry about Disney World and Casa Bonita. I spent a vacation at Disney World when I was 9 years old and recognized it as a plastic mold-injected bore--not in those words at the time, but good god I knew it was a tiresome waste of life, even at that age. Casa Bonita is a South Park episode. Enough said about that.
But hey, you're the one who didn't buy life insurance like a responsible parent, so a non-sad sob story is your only chance of paying off your SUV. Great. Why do I care about your SUV? Also, why do I care whether you get a pricey funeral rather than a county funeral? Also, why are you more important than all of us who are born to die?
Also, why was this posted?
Re: What Dreams May Come
#356Jonathan here. Being woke up by my wife crying because the donations just aren't stopping is both heart-breaking and comforting. For those of you who haven't seen the 'Bucket List' post, here's what it says at the very top: As I try to deal with the reality that is my impending death I can't help but wonder how many things I might have been able to accomplish given just a little more time. When I was diagnosed, I had…
As someone who was also diagnosed with skin cancer recently and who's mother is dying of metastatic cancer, I can particularly relate. It's amazing that simply being told you're sick can physically make you so. If you want someone to talk to, I'm available. Contact information is my profile. Good luck.
I wouldn't say that it's made me physically sick. I am physically sick but it's the emotional toll that is the worst. Just knowing that this body is dying and there is nothing I can do is frustrating and when I consider what it means for those around me I become an emotional wreck. I could care less if I die, but I do care about what it will do to my wife, my kids, my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, uncles, cousins, close friends, even complete strangers who took the time to send me $5 and a few simple words of encouragement. These are lives that I've touched in some way and my death will impact them. Some more than others but it will still impact them. Doing what I can to lessen that impact and make it a more positive experience for them is the least I can do as my final act of thanks towards humanity.
Re: What Dreams May Come
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who are "they"? Hypotheses and projections are constantly refined. But in comparison to estimates on things like coal or climate, the population growth models are almost trivially simple, and while the numbers are adjusted up and down regularly to account for actual data, all data we have show the population growth consistently slowing down. For starters, one of the things that make the population models straightforw…
I appreciate your arguments, but why then is the world population graph basically linearly increasing since the 60s? It's not slowing down.
There are some confounding factors:
- The growth rate is slowing. The growth in absolute terms is still sufficient to make the line look near linear when you look at it over such a long time span, especially given that life expectancy is also increasing almost everywhere (see my last point below).
- The growth rate is fairly low. E.g. around 2005, the growth rate was about 1.1%, and the decline is slow (e.g. it's projected to get to around 0.33% or so around middle of the century), so seeing the change on a graph that plots billions of people against a period of decades gets tricky.
- There are large temporal distortions due to changes in life expectancy, and the size of generations. To give an extreme example: Consider if a population to begin with was static - births and deaths were perfectly matched. Now consider if this population stopped having children, yet at the same time, everyone started living 40 years longer. In this (totally impossible of course) scenario, it would take 40 years from the birthrate collapsed until the population size would start dropping. While something that extremely obviously would not happen, less extreme variations are. E.g. some areas of China has a birth rate of well below 1 child per woman, and the country as a whole is well below 2, while you need somewat more than 2 to maintain a population (to account for men + people who never procreate), but the population is still increasing because population is still young on average due to the massive population growth in the 50's and 60's coupled with rapidly increasing life expectancy.
This last point means that we're still seeing a combination of the effect of birth rates going as far back as at least 1950's and all increases in life expectancy since, that correctly reflects current growth, but gives us a very distorted idea of where the population size is headed.
Re: What Dreams May Come
#358Depressing that someone facing death would worry about Disney World and Casa Bonita. I spent a vacation at Disney World when I was 9 years old and recognized it as a plastic mold-injected bore--not in those words at the time, but good god I knew it was a tiresome waste of life, even at that age. Casa Bonita is a South Park episode. Enough said about that. But hey, you're the one who didn't buy life insurance like a r…
Depressing that you wouldn't even bother to take the time to actually read and see what is going on here. If the only thing you can focus on Disney World and Casa Bonita then it is obvious where your priorities towards humanity lie. And the fact that you bring up South Park in relation to Casa Bonita tells me even more about your lack of passion when it comes to your fellow man. I can only hope that you'll find someone who changes your perspective and you find your heart before it withers and dies.
With regards to funeral costs, have you even looked at what these cost now? It's obvious to me that you haven't or you wouldn't have bothered to mention a county funeral.
With regards to importance, I'm no one. I'm not worthy of the attention this has gotten, but I am human. And that's the point. This is about being human and caring about fellow humans, period. There are people who deserve this far more than I but that doesn't change the fact that someone felt this was worthy of attention and to that person, I say thank you.
Thank you for seeing that this isn't about me, it's not about a pricey funeral, it's not about trips. It's about providing for my family as best as I can given the circumstances. It's about giving them peace of mind when they have lost something important.
May you find your heart before experiencing the loss of a loved one. May you realize that this has nothing to do with frivolous capitalism and everything to do with being human and doing everything you can to provide your family even after you're gone.
Re: What Dreams May Come
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really quite a huge number of people are asking that question already. And a massively disproportionate amount of science funding goes towards cancer research. Far more people in the world die of communicable and vector-borne diseases or illness related to malnourishment. These issues get much less research attention and funding because so many people in the western world are focussed on cancer. So while my heart goe…
You are right for the wrong reason. The problem with cancer research is that we are trying to solve an unsolvable problem, wasting disproportionate amounts of money. In some sense, cancer is a symptom of a body gone havoc. Research should be targeted upstream, to really tackle the root cause. It is like trying to fix a hardware issue by patching software. Yes, you can get some results by implementing better error cor…
Reminded me of this article about Cancer Research and how we may still have a long way to go.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/world...
Re: What Dreams May Come
#360Depressing that someone facing death would worry about Disney World and Casa Bonita. I spent a vacation at Disney World when I was 9 years old and recognized it as a plastic mold-injected bore--not in those words at the time, but good god I knew it was a tiresome waste of life, even at that age. Casa Bonita is a South Park episode. Enough said about that. But hey, you're the one who didn't buy life insurance like a r…
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