A large proportion of all Western disease is self-inflicted through what we ingest: rheumatism, arthritis, psoriasis, Type II diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, osteoporosis, cancer.

A second problem is that we tend to have "disease care" rather than "health care". True "health care" would remove the disease-causing agents from our menu to keep us more disease-free, rather than slicing, irradiating, and drugging us once things have gone wrong.

Think about it: that hunch-backed, fat, rashy-skinned crone that you see hobbling around the retirement center was quite likely a hot babe when she was 17 or so. What the hell happened to her?

It was the "food" she ate.

I've never been a user of a mainframe system, and I understand they were coded to be a lot more reliable than desktop class microcomputers. But having started using computers in the early 80's as a small child, and seeing where we are now, there's just no comparison.

I was programming the IBM System/34 in 1981.

If my program produced incorrect output, or failed to compile, the first thing I did was check my code for errors. Why? Because it was always my own coding error that caused the problem.

If there were any errors in the implementation of either the hardware or the software of that System/34, I never found any of them. I didn't find my first platform bug (an issue in SEU on an AS/400, if I recall correctly) until about 1988 or 1989.

I'm not coding for those platforms any more. Today when I experience incorrect output from my programs, I immediately suspect the platform implementation. And often, it is the platform implementation, not my source code. That was to me utterly unthinkable on any mainstream platform before about 1985.

(Actually, in my experience there is an exception to this miserable situation. OpenBSD is like a 1980's IBM System/38: everything is documented; the documentation is findable, complete, correct, and matches the behaviour of the documented system; and, with very,very few exceptions, everything works exactly as intended. That's why I use it, and that's why my name is on the donations page.)