So what you are essentially saying... is that he was "just following orders".

Too soon in the comments?

Of course we should poke.

The only way to learn is to poke.

Actually, islet cell adenocarcinoma is detectable. You can do it with a rather simple/cheap blood test.

However, nearly no insurance carrier will pay for this blood test (I just had a friend who died from islet cell adenocarcinoma (pancreatic cancer), which was in fact treatable, but Kaiser Permanente did not cover the testing at the point she had her first symptoms.

NB: The following is NOT medical advice; consult an oncologist, if you have any of the following situations...

It was a type that would have been resistant to the standard Paclitaxel & Gemcitabine chemo combination; however, with the addition of an O6 methyl transferase inhibiter to reduce the effect of the MGMA gene on the long arm of chromosome 20 (the DNA repair mechanism), it's likely the chemo would have been able to be made effective, as a combinatoric therapy (without the inhibiter, the repair mechanism repairs the targeted cancer cells DNA as well, so the chemo -- most chemo relies on methylation of the gene sequences -- would not be able to sufficient damage the cancerous cells DNA to stop the cancer.

BTW: This is the same mechanism that causes Temozolomide insensitivity in glioblastoma multifome (a type of frequently fatal brain cancer, due to the ineffectiveness of the chemo).

So if you've got either one of those, and you have an "adventurous" oncologist, ask them if they are willing to try the chemo again, in combination with an inhibiter. Note that they will want to ramp the chemo dose, since the inhibiter will make *all* the cells more sensitive to the DNA damage (the usual dose will be too high, because the balance is between "just enough to kill some healthy and all cancer cells", and this effectively will disable the repair mechanism entirely).

--

Most pharma companies don't investigate combinatoric therapies, except as a last ditch effort to rescue a drug that's looking like it's ineffective, since doing so means cooperating with competing companies.

Isn't the article actually about... "You big charities concentrating on finding a cure when there are treatments for CF are really annoying the piss out of those of us who are currently making an ass-ton of money off of selling treatments".

So the *actual* problem they are addressing is the problem that big charity isn't funding their treatment research, and they are instead having to fund treatment research themselves, and that cuts into their profits. In other words, it's not enough that all of the public funding going toward the disease is spent in big pharma labs on deriving *yet more* treatments, they also want all of the privately funded research to *also* be directed at more treatments.

Yeah, I'm a little cynical, but then again, I'd personally be happy flying to Eastern Europe and subsequently living with Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus to have my Parkinson's cured, should I ever have to deal with the disease, than living with what passes for treatment in the U.S. everywhere but in clinical trials.

This is bullshit.

I think the major reason that the CFF is ignoring treatments is that any treatment which does not result in a cure is, by definition, an ongoing revenue stream for big pharma, and therefore big pharma has that angle covered: if they come up with a treatment that works, they have a customer for the rest of that customers life. And there is no incentive for big pharma to then work on a cure.

In fact, if you were to come up with a cure for something which represented a huge existing revenue stream, you would likely have an "accident" before you were published.

In terms of CF itself, the current state of things is that researchers have demonstrated CRISPR/Cas9-mediated repair of the CFTR locus in human intestinal stem cells -- which means, were they reimplanted in the donor, they would replicate and replace the defective intestinal cells over time.

If the technique can be successfully used in vivo (we have so far been reluctant to use CRISPR/Cas9-mediated modifcation on living humans, since it can impact germ line cells), then it represents a cure. See also:

http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-...

The full paper itself is downloadable, without charge, from that location.

As to the major question of why concentrate on a cure ... so that your children and grandchildren don't inherit the disease, of course.

Hi. My sister lives in Alaska. The population density is one person every 2 square kilometers (1.3 people per square mile).

Where exactly should she go to catch the public transportation from her cabin, and into Barrow?

Thanks for any info!

(Validity of public transportation as an option is proportional to population density).

Curious... can I... list the names of organizations, tools, and resources that I've unconsciously gravitated to via unconscious bias to combat unconscious bias?

A couple of things:

(1) There isn't actually a class action lawsuit yet, since there are certain legal disclosures which must be made in order for it to legally qualify as a class action lawsuit. Among these, is going to a court, and getting a registered class.

(2) It's a solicitation for business; the article attempts to make it look like Uber drivers spontaneously banding together, but the domain name is registered to a lawyer at a Boston law firm. The Boston law firm, incidentally, went to the trouble of anonymizing who registered the domain where the domain contact from the lawsuit site has their email address, but they forgot to do the same thing for the lawsuit site.

(3) If you want to unionize Uber drivers, which would have long term benefits for the Uber drivers (assuming the courts hold them to be employees; the case in question applied only to a single person, not all Uber drivers, as a class), then by all means, attempt to unionize them. Just don't try and backdoor it as if this were a collective bargaining situation, collect a single class action payday, and then leave the drivers high and dry.

(4) They lied about opt-out for the class, rather than opt-in.

In your analogy, Uber is the state and the driver is the gambler.

Only it isn't gambling, if the slot machine always pays out to the gambler.

Car analogy...

OK, I lied, it's not an analogy. It's specifically about cars.

This is exactly how the service departments work at automobile dealerships, down to the requirement that the mechanic provide a certain class of tools, codes of conduct towards customers, wear a dealership logo'ed coverall, collects time and attendance data (contractors are paid by hours worked in the contract, so this has to be collected), attendance data (reserving a bay is expensive, and you want contractors who are eager to be present; you also have to collect this information to know how much liability insurance to carry), maintains umbrella insurance for the worker based on worker liability for faulty repairs, or injury while on the dealer premises), and issues checks (they aren't actually paychecks unless the worker is on a payroll; they're just checks). All work products remain the property of the contracting agency (in this case, the auto dealership).

% whois llrlaw.com ...
Registrant Organization:
Registrant Street: 100 Cambridge Street, 20th Floor
Registrant City: Boston
Registrant State/Province: Massachusetts
Registrant Postal Code: 02114
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Phone: 6179945800
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: ssimpson@llrlaw.com ...

% lynx llrlaw.com ...
Welcome to Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C.
The Labor, Employment & Class Action Specialists
Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C. is a plaintiffs’-side employment and union-side labor law firm, whose attorneys have achieved national recognition for their work representing employees and unions in wage and hour, discrimination, and other employment-related litigation. ...

So.

Is it an ambulance chaser that's trying to assemble a class for a class action lawsuit?

Not sure. But indications from the original link are that they are not stating the primary plaintiffs, they aren't stating a docket number, and they aren't stating the percentage they will be taking of any settlement.

They also, as madsenj37 has previously pointed out, made claims on forced class membership based on a misinterpretation of the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

But it will be fun to sit back and watch them go fishing in deep pockets that don't exist in terms of Uber not yet having IPO'ed, but the timing is a bit coincidental, isn't it?

Let's assume this is true, for the sake of argument. It isn't, as published financials demonstrate, but let's ignore them as propaganda, and assume your statement is true.

Your argument boils down to:

(1) Uber drivers are bad at math

(2) I am better at math, so I can see how they are being cheated

(3) Uber drivers must be protected by society from being bad at math

(4) Despite the fact that society condones state run lotteries, which are a tax on people who are bad at math

Is there anything I have missed?

How is an employer holding that money back and giving it to the government, instead of paying it to the worker directly, any different than paying the whole thing to the worker, and the worker making the payments to the government out of what they receive?

How is it any different from paying it to a contracting agency that hass full time employees, and the contracting agency holding that money back and giving it to the government, instead of paying it to the worker directly?

Over 23% of the U.S. workforce, including former congressmen, presidents, mail carriers, and military personnel, will receive some form of government pension which covers these things already. The rest of us are expected to have to pay for either ACA or medigap insurance ourselfs -- for which we can receive a tax credit, but we only get that if we paid taxes in that fiscal year, and it only comes back to us as a tax refund. Otherwise, the money is just "gone"; for example, if we are retired.

You seem to have the stupid idea that contractors are not responsible for paying their taxes, or that they will get away with not paying them, and that this will kill people like your mom, because the federal government isn't already running at a deficit, and is loathe to go into debt to pay benefits.

At the very worst, enforcement becomes a bigger job; and while states don't like it, it will mean more jobs for enforcement personnel, including auditors, and more jobs for CPAs and for tax preparers, and so on. So it will result in a net creation of jobs by making tax collection a more manual process.

From my point of view (jobs creation, disruption of a taxi industry who won't do pickups in the Inner Sunset in San Francisco, even if you schedule your trip to the airport days ahead of time), Uber contractors are a win all the way around.

And yeah, if it starts becoming a big issue, I'm going to follow up on the "incorporation as a private contracting agency franchise" idea myself. I've already had some emails from a couple of interested VCs.

I think we will just program the labor to do the work, given that the labor won't be done by humans anyway.

Alternately, we could gameify remotely operated manipulators, or require a certain amount of work, if you wanted access to zero-gee for all sorts of fun stuff. Call it an "air tax", if you want.

At this point, as Brunner predicted, the population of the Earth would no longer fit completely on the Island of Zanzibar, but we still have a huge amount of empty space avaiable, but if you're right, perhaps you don't get more than Basic Cable once you have more than 2 children?

Planet based nuclear is more heat-cycle efficient than planet-based petroleum. Regardless, it'd be possible to use other space-based technology to lower the amount of incident thermal.

As far as materials, we have an entire solar system and Oort cloud.