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I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

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Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#201
post #189

THERE was a farmer who lived in the countryside. He was a real jnani. He earned his living by farming, He was married, and after many years a son was born to him, whom he named Haru. The parents loved the boy dearly. This was natural, since he was the one precious gem of the family. On account of his religious nature the farmer was loved by the villagers. One day he was working in the field when a neighbour came and…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12634855 and marked it off-topic.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#202
I'm a bit sad that so many here go on tangents instead of finding out what Pieter really is/was about. Trust me, when you go through his blog entries at hintjens.com and read his books, you will find yourself in a magic wonderland of better ways to program and be happy. This is not a sad day.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we Europeans just have less faith in the goodness of corporations. As it stands, they seem like the perfect opportunity for a scam - they'll freeze you up, then after some years they'll say "unfortunately there's still no cure", and your family can then opt between paying a large annual sum in perpetuity or killing you. While I hope my descendants would have the guts to tell them to burn me up, I can't in good…

Maybe you should work on making your contract law more trustworthy then, if you think corporations can just randomly decide to extort your family years later.

Kinda hard to ensure it keeps being trustworthy after you're dead.

Also, who said it was random? What if they simply run out of money, for any of the hundreds of reasons why companies do? Laws can't magically force them to keep it running if they literally can't afford to.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#204

Third parties: Please don't downvote or flag the parent comment out of existence. I understand the urge, but it merits a considered response, and I would greatly appreciate your forbearing to deny me the opportunity to replace this placeholder comment with one.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635729 and marked it off-topic.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mother, aunt, grandmother, all died of cancer (brain, breast, metastasis of liver cancer). F*ck cancer indeed. Support marijuana reforms. Best hope we have.

I'm sorry, but what is the connection between those two?

Those two? I'm assuming cancer and marijuana? What we know of several of the cannabinoids is that they participate in apoptosis of the cancerous cells. You get several cell divisions each day in your body that go bad but the cell knows something is wrong and terminates itself with its mitochondria. Cancer happens when apoptosis fails to happen in those circumstances. It's one of the bright hopes of cancer medicine that understanding this process will bring about a general cure.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#206
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing this as a reply to all the comments regarding death; I think "death" is just another condition like disease or disability that will eventually be defeated through technology. Someday we will have medical immortality and maybe even mind-backups, to "restore" a person (or a very close approximation of them) in the case of accident/violence. We should be looking at death as something surpassable and not necessar…

You make death out to be a problem, which is... unintuitive. What is to gain from "fixing" it?

I wouldn't kick a 500-year lifespan out of my genome, would you?

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 500,000 people die of cancer in the US, and over 8 million worldwide. Maybe you can't do something about one particular person today but millions of more future deaths can be prevented. Some of the people here will be dying "early" deaths in 10 or 20 years. You won't be saying: "well, you've gotta go someday when you have a couple of kids", for example.

I like your post, but before you will inspire few folks to visit some cancer fighting "non-profit" venture, it is important to look at cancer further then just those companies that are fighting it (but of course would never want to end it for good - I mean after all they have a lifetime mission (and salaries to pay), right?) You see, cancer was a tiny spot on radar just 50 years ago. Or 100 even more. So the question…

> You see, cancer was a tiny spot on radar just 50 years ago. Or 100 even more. So the question is - what happened? Have we somehow changed overnight as a spices? No we haven't.

First, variety is the species of life.

Second, the reason cancer wasn't "on the radar" is because we didn't know much.

If you look into the history of cancer, it has existed forever. Wikipedia claims Hippocrate himself wrote about it! [1]

And as late as the 19th century, survival rate was around 10%.[2]

Your concerns have very little, if anything, to do with cancer. Monsanto didn't even exist in the 19th century.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_awareness

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what I think you're saying, but the right words can be very tricky here. Maybe this "productization" will get us all to a point where we are all okay talking about it openly and frankly, without making a big deal about it? What's a "big deal"? For my friend, I knew her and she seemed like a nice person. I did not know her that well, though. The first couple of times somebody posted how sad they were on h…

I am not great with words, please accept my apologies. When I say "big deal", I meant it more like talking about homosexuality is now less of a "big deal" then it was back in the day. I am not saying that the loss itself is not a big deal, just talking about it shouldn't be. Maybe, if we live in a society where it's easy to talk about death then maybe the grieving process would become easier too. Right now, people te…

I agree that it should be easier to talk about death. And tech really isn't the issue there -- unless the tech is keeping us in a cocoon.

Back when the U.S. Civil War happened, photography was still new. Some folks thought that the new tech would finally wake people up to the horrors of war.

Didn't work out like that. People already knew the horrors of war and dying. You could run a picture of ten thousand people dead on a battlefield and while people felt the severe pain of that loss -- it was not horrifying to them. They lived with it everyday. (In fact, some early uses of photography was taking pictures of the recently dead. So you could remember them.)

I don't know. I may feel completely different about all of this when it comes my turn. I am really glad that the voices of people about to be silenced forever can be heard. In fact I think it's such a special thing that it really shouldn't appear next to an ad for Spacely's Space Sprockets.

We should have open and honest dialogues about death, yes. That doesn't mean that we should think of death in the same way as we might think of buying a newspaper. There's a categorically different thing going on here, regardless of any extraneous baggage that anybody might carry into the discussion.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radiation and chemo therapies are one of the most horrific things one can endure. Depending on the type of cancer, you can go in a few weeks, months, or fight the battle for years. Even if you endure and persist, which gets progressively easier for a lot of cancers thanks to more advanced therapies, you have to fear recurrence. I'm not at all opposed to ending one s own life if done without severe psychological issue…

It's your own life to take and as long as your brain still works and you have some freedom of movement, nobody can actually stop you from doing it if you're so determined. And granted, when talking about mental illnesses that are considered treatable, like depression, you can't expect assistance for suicide. But when talking terminal illnesses, like cancer or dementia, then not legalizing assisted deaths is not only…

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Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#210

I have known Pieter since around 2002. We didn't meet or talk that often, but usually we would have a fun few hours every FOSDEM. On one of those occasions we defined "our" religion, stallmanism.com Pieter transferred the site and domain to me a few days ago. In the past few months I have been almost obsessed with consuming everything he wrote and published. It is exactly my way of thinking. Of questioning reality an…

I'm just discovering him, and reading through his blog. His writing is just what I needed right now, at this time in my life. Particularly about how to be happy. I think when you've lived such a prolific life, you don't need any last words. His life's work speaks for itself.

I only just discovered him too. It turns out we knew some of the same people in the UK. I'm very sad I hadn't heard of him or his work earlier.

>His life's work speaks for itself.

Very much this! A loss to all - but a life well lived.

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