I doubt there is a single person alive who cannot donate anything. And even if there are, they can still be on the list, and they probably would have been since before they got sick too.

You made an assumption, which was that you can only be on the list if you can donate an organ upon your death (which like I say, is probably everyone. You'd have to be pretty damn sick to not even be able to donate a cornea). No-one, apart from you, has suggested that you can only be on the list if you are likely to be healthy enough upon your death to donate an organ. If that were the rule, I agree, it would make no sense. But I don't think it's what's being suggested here.

True, it's not real mathematics. But it is unquestionably useful, and promotes a general level of numeracy (as distinct from an understanding of mathematics) amongst the population. I wish I'd learnt my times tables, whereas now I reach for the calculator to get the joke in the Hitch-hikers Guide.

How? That does't make any sense.

If you are willing to donate organs after your death, you sign up to the list. The list is binding. This means that if you're on the list and you die, your organs are harvested and then the hollow corpse is handed over to the family for an undertaker to stuff with sawdust. Your family is not consulted, the process is automatic and driven solely by a) Your death, and b) Your prior decision.

Once you're on the list, you are eligible for transplants, should they ever become necessary. If you're not on the list, then you're not eligible - unless you're under some age of consent limit. Maybe there's a grace period of a year say, during which you need to make the choice but are still eligible for transplant.

Where's the problem? Or is your comment written under the misapprehension that the GP's proposal applies to live donors, whereas it in fact applies only to dead ones?
   

Well, since this suggestion is about the current organ donor scheme, which only kicks in when you're dead, I'm not sure that there would be a big problem.

If your medications mean that your organs are no longer in a fit state to be useful to another, then I guess they don't get donated.

The extremely simple suggestion proposed by the GP seems to have generated a great deal of very silly discussion, chiefly from ACs - is there a clever troll around somewhere having a bit of fun?

I'm not so sure that you're right about that. If, say, at eighteen one chose whether or not to be a donor, and that the consequences of that choice were as described above, then many people would choose the donor option. In the UK at least, one makes that choice when applies for a driver's licence (AFAICR). The problem is that the choice isn't binding, as already mentioned by several posters in this thread and others. If that particular ethical dilemma could be navigated and the donorship became a choice of and only of each individual donor, then I think the parent's solution would work.

Currently, I can declare myself a donor - as I and many others already have done - and have that extremely personal decision reversed by traumatised family members. This should not be possible.

Dr House is fictional character who, if ever made real, would kill probably 90% of the cases he managed.

Ooops. Fed the troll.

Not exactly, the article is proposing a solution to a shortage of transplant donors. The solution it proposes is a market in organs, which is clearly insane to anyone with a functioning brain.

  jythie's proposal is a much saner solution to the same problem, in which (and here I'm putting words into the poster's mouth, but I feel I'm pretty safe) the decision to be on a donor list would be binding, and only those on a donor list or below the age of consent would be eligible for transplants.

That sounds pretty sensible to me.

Really? What safety reasons? There are no cars that can travel on a public road at almost 45 meters per second even remotely safely. Car accidents at speed are not generally caused by cars falling to bits on the road, but by their drivers being human beings and thus making a hash of the extremely demanding task of piloting a vehicle that will have travelled four meters in a tenth of a second.

Well that sounds terrible for you. I do mean it actually, though it might sound snarky, a nasty flu really is perfectly awful. The last one I had hit the whole family, kids and all, at the same time. Now that sucked.

Many people all around the world are working very hard to try and cure Influenza, and lots of other even more horrible viruses. Like, oh I don't know, HIV for example. They are extremely tough. They aren't really alive, so you can't kill them as such. And things like the flu mutate at the drop of a hat, making vaccines effective only for short periods. Every flu you get is actually a different disease, and if you happen to get more than one at a time, you'll probably be infectious with a whole new variety.

Against many bacterial infections, and against viruses that for whatever reason don't mutate as fast as the flu, medical science has been extremely successful. I think you should cut it a break.

Which would be great, except that I think there might be a more general principal at work here - something related to Entropy or Thermodynamics or something - which might place an upper limit on how reliable any machine can possibly be. Which isn't to say we couldn't make cancer much less common, but something about how many pathways lead to the development of tumours makes me think that it might be a fundamental eventual side-effect of being alive at all.

Well.... ok....

But sometimes you do chop it off, if it's really bad. And if you're a horse you generally get shot.

Yeah, but on the other hand capital letters are easier to recognise instantly on their own than lowercase letters, you know shift is pressed because you just pressed it, and the fact that a big 'flag' appears above the letter when you've pressed them is very helpful visual feedback. On android the stock keyboard's letters light up under your fingers, which is a bit pointless.

Why do you think physical keyboards have capital letters on them, when people write lowercase letters far more often?

Not that I'm arguing that you shouldn't be able to install different keyboards on an iOS device, just that I think the apple on-screen keyboard is actually really very good indeed.

Hardly. Some people wind up in a hospital bed strapped to pulleys and weights, others with metal frames plunging into their flesh, and yet others hobble home in a plaster cast. You do seem to be oversimplifying to me.

Other than that you make excellent points :)

Same here. I'm not sure that everyone would agree on a definition of harm though, wherein the devil of the details lies.

That was a pretty interesting article you linked to, not so much because of the 90% figure, but that there are religious academics (to whom no-one appears to be listening, thankfully) who don't even believe that the rhythm method is moral. Good lord. No pun intended.

I have a serious question: Are there really people, in this day and age, living in the modern world, who actually believe that contraception is immoral? I mean, people other than the pope that is, and his opinion is a bit moot anyway since he's supposed to be celibate. Because I do find that perfectly extraordinary, and would love to hear some rationale behind it.

Gosh, we did all manage to make sex into quite a big deal, didn't we?