Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 03:59:39 -0700 From: "Crist J. Clark" <cristjc@earthlink.net> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>, Salvo Bartolotta <bartequi@neomedia.it>, "P. U. (Uli) Kruppa" <root@pukruppa.de>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Use of the UNIX Trademark Message-ID: <20011011035939.W387@blossom.cjclark.org> In-Reply-To: <00ad01c15232$ea21a340$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>; from tedm@toybox.placo.com on Thu, Oct 11, 2001 at 01:58:37AM -0700 References: <20011011095845.B475@lpt.ens.fr> <00ad01c15232$ea21a340$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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On Thu, Oct 11, 2001 at 01:58:37AM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: [Too many snips to track them all.] > No, the overpopulation is a result of the disruption of the traditional > way of life in many of these areas. I don't recall reading that > the American Indian had significant overpopulation problems and > they were around for thousands and thousands of years. Mayans and Aztec's may have had some over-population problems in their urban areas. Not sure what that has to do with anything. Traditional ways of life change. Wherever you live, did people live like you 100 years ago? > >Overpopulation also has little to do with the pill, and more to do > >with the fact that in a poor family, children are cheap labour and > >hence regarded as valuable assets; especially sons. > > And why do you think this is? It's because many of these societies were > changed from the nomadic hunter-gatherer/tribal to farmers by ignorant > Europeans. > Most country borders in Africa today were drawn with total disregard for > ancient tribal boundaries, that's why there's been so many civil wars there. > > Most of the do-gooders and social workers in the Third World have exactly > your attitude - overpopulation is either a Good Thing or an Indifferent Thing. > Very few are actually out there preaching and telling people it's wrong to > have 10 children even though the disasterous results of that are evident > all around them. It's a classic "Dilema of the Commons" problem. It's just like energy conservation efforts here in California. It's hard to get one person to turn their air conditioner down. One person turning it down does not make a difference. But if everybody does it... It is economically advantageous for any one family in many of these "third world" regions to have as many children as possible. Just one family having 10 children doesn't make a difference. But if everybody does it... [snip] > Today, we have an array of cancer treatments > >which are still of no help if you were diagnosed just a bit too late. > > Have you ever wondered why the incidence of cancer has skyrocketed in > the last 50 years or so? [snip] > Well, guess what - there's > no OFFICIAL reason for most cancers. Some are obvious, like smoking causes > lung cancer, destroyed ozone causes skin cancer, but most cancer rates have > no obvious reason. I think the reasons are pretty clear. First, we do not have reliable data on historical trends. We don't really know what the incidence in cancer was 200 years ago. We really don't know how much, or if at all, the incendence of cancer is rising. The reason is something we've tocuhed on a lot here already, improvements in medical science. Everybody dies. Everybody dies because something kills them. Medical science can cure a _lot_ of stuff that it used to not be able to cure. One of the things that medical science still as trouble with is cancer. That means more people live longer and have an opportunity to get cancer and get sick from it. 50 years ago, how long was the life expectancy? I'm going to take a completely wild guess 'cause I don't feel like looking it up and say it was one's early sixties, if even that. Now it is somewhere in the seventies? Of all of the cancer cases, how many of them develop in people in the range from mid-sixties to mid-seventies? This is prime time for prostate, breast, colon, and a lot of other relatively common cancers. There are more people living long enough to get cancer. The effect is that when you look at mortality statistics, you'll see more deaths per 100 000 due to cancer than you did 100 years ago. But I have never seen anyone actually normalize the data and take into account that where as 100 years ago, you had large numbers of people dying from scarlet fever, mumps, measles, dysentery, etc., and very few die from these kinds of things today. But if anyone has cites for peer reviewed papers from scientific journals on the topic, I would be greatly interested in seeing a study that accounts for these things. [snip] > There is far too much evidence that many of these so-called "diseases" are > actually natural responses to screwed up lifestyles. I know that people > will tar and feather me for saying this but by gun there's a right way > to live and a wrong way to live. And either way you are going to get sick and die from _something._ People have always died of something. Funny how people keep living longer despite "screwed up" lifestyles. Fresh fruit and vegetables are good for you. High sodium and fat are generally bad. In cold regions of the world before refrigeration or high speed transportation, no one had fresh fruit or vegetables all winter. They often lived off of fatty foods that had been preserved by salting them. I wonder if these people were not constipated from December until March. Obviously, these people should have known better and moved to warmer climates. That would be the "right way" to live. Not that it mattered much. They all died of something more mundane before they lived long enough to develop colon cancer. Human's have been living "screwed up" lifestyles since pre-history. > Freedom must have responsibility and > you don't have the right to stuff your face with McDonalds cheeseburgers > every day of your life until you keel over with a heart attack at age 55 > then expect the rest of us to dump all our tax dollars into funding > research into a new medicine that will dissolve your cholesterol and > allow you to continue stuffing yourself like a pig with both trotters in > the trough. People shouldn't smoke. People should not overeat. People shouldn't eat saturated fats. People shouldn't sit around all day. People shouldn't have multiple sexual partners (and catch diseases). People shouldn't hang glide (you can fall and get hurt). People shouldn't drive cars (you could get in an accident). People shouldn't drink too much alcohol (liver damage, mouth, throat, stomach cancer as well as increased likelyhood of trauma due behavior). People shouldn't ever leave their house (any human or animal contact is risky with respect to disease or one could be attacked). Pretty much _everything_ people like to do has some inherent risks. We are mortal and the world is a risky place. Lot's of people like to do risky things. I don't like McDonalds hamburgers, but I must admit I do occasionally like to have a few drinks and hit the town with some friends. I do other risky things too because I derive great enjoyment of them. Where the balance between the enjoyment a person gets from a behavior against the risk it entails lies is very personal thing. I don't know you, maybe you are really into skydiving. Why should society, via public health costs or increased insurance premiums, pay for your medical bills when you bust your leg on a bad landing? You took the risk. I don't think skydiving is an acceptable risk versus what benefits I would get out of it. Why should I pay? > Only if the emphasis on the medicine is on solving the root of the problem > not alleviating the symptom. Today the entire emphasis in Western medicine > is fixing the symptom, once that's done your free to go back to your > artery-hardening, lung destroying lifestyle if you wish. As long as that's > the attitude, the system is fundamentally screwed up and making it a > public industry isn't going to change much. This is because study after study has shown that changing people's behaviors is a very, very hard thing to do. It is a pretty common assumption that you cannot change a person's behavior. So, what is the medical profession to do? They do not live in a vacuum. Do you really want the medical profession to sequester itself in an ivory tower and make proclamations about how _you_ must behave and what ailments it will and will not treat? No, the medical profession is part of our society and our society wants the medical profession to fix all of our problems without us having to do anything we don't wanna. It's not really just something wrong with Western medicine as it is a problem with what Western society as a whole expects and demands of the medical community. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@alum.mit.edu cjclark@jhu.edu cjc@freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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