Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Tony G]

Awesome update Jeff! Truly amazing work. Would that extend beyond cancer to other diseases? My Dad is dealing with PSP and the research sounds fascinating also but it won't be in time for him or many others for a while.


By the way, The Killer Protiens would be a great name for a band.

[hack]

Nice job explaining that.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Awesome update Jeff! Truly amazing work. Would that extend beyond cancer to other diseases? My Dad is dealing with PSP and the research sounds fascinating also but it won't be in time for him or many others for a while.


By the way, The Killer Protiens would be a great name for a band.

I think you are referring to Prostate Cancer and the use of PSP ( polysaccharopeptides) in the treatment of it. Is that correct?

As I mentioned, there is a ton of research being done on cancer therapeutics ...... it is where the money is both private and public. Whichever entity (and it is unlikely it will not be just one) comes up with sure fire drugs that control or prevent cancer, by what ever means, is going to make billions, maybe eve trillions.

Cara's research is very specific with regard to mechanical approaches in the endothelial cells of the lymph system that would ostensibly be brought about by drugs to produce an immune response that could stop them.

Her post-doc studies in Switzerland will be with an immunologist who is studying immune responses. This is not her area of research at present. She will be bringing her engineering and fluid dynamics knowledge to the team she'll be working with.

Here's who recruited her. The video gives you a good basic insight into the kind of work she is doing and Cara will be doing (easy to understand):

http://www.macfound.org/fellows/878/

Here's a link to the lab she runs and the Swiss University Cara will be joining as a researcher.

http://swartz-lab.epfl.ch/

[Tony G]

Actually he has progressive supranuclear palsy. It's a Parkinsons like disease. Terrible to see him deteriorate with it

[Jeff Buchanan]

Sorry to hear that, Tony. That is a tough to watch.

Therapeutics in the Neurosciences tend to focus on stem cells and regeneration therapies. I know nothing about this.

I did learn a little about my brother's journey with Glioblastoma Multiforma - a brain cancer. Therapeutics here involve the development of adjunctive chemo therapies that enhance the effectiveness of currently used tumor reducing or shrinking drugs. The thinking here is they can use less toxic doses of chemo drugs because those drugs are made more efficient in attacking specific cell structures by these adjunctive therapies. Very different stuff. Its already on the market so, these approaches, while new, represent the research done 10-20 years ago.

It takes decades to bring a drug to market in this country. Less in Europe. I think the go slow approach is better but it can be frustrating.

[entropy]

Jeff... your comment about the people you see in middle georgia and comparing to your kids triggered a discussion I had lately with a peer... basically, my assumption is the divide between those with advanced skills or education and those without is widening.

[entropy]

and btw... sounds like some really interesting research. You should be proud.

[Tony G]

basically, my assumption is the divide between those with advanced skills or education and those without is widening.

Knowing full well the world needs ditch diggers too, not everyone will slot into an advanced skill or education job. There almost needs to be a billet system where you should have some reasonable chance of employment before you go into college/ university. I have a co-worker that has a son with 4 years of loans for what turned out to be a graphics artist. The catch is he doesn't want to leave SE Mich. so there's a very small job pool for him and the loans are still there. I don't know what the number of people are that aren't working in the degree field they graduated in but reducing those kind of mismatches would be a start to getting student loans pointed in the right direction.

Technical schools and trade schools could actually stand to be built up more. Companies that used to employ laborers and now need workers that have to do precise measurements or employ other skills are having difficulty filling positions.

[Hannibal]

There's already a tool available for this kind of evaluation. It is called "financial accountability". Unfortunately, people don't use it anymore.

[hack]

And if you look at economic history it's unclear if they ever did. Today, half of student loans are in default or forebearance. If you choose to blame that on individuals failing to be prudent, and if you believe the system is reliant on individuals making prudent choices, then you need a different system. One designed on what reality is rather than what it ought to be. I don't see a whole lot of data that supports the idea that a good system is one that relies on that. I see a lot more that says people are idiots and you have to save them from themselves if you want a healthy and sustainable economy.

[Tony G]

Is it saving them from themselves or saving ourselves from producing more of something than we need?

I think this is the other side of the "everyone should be able to won their own home" coin. We are taught to think everyone should go to college when that isn't the reality or even the best thing for us.

[Hannibal]

And if you look at economic history it's unclear if they ever did. Today, half of student loans are in default or forebearance. If you choose to blame that on individuals failing to be prudent, and if you believe the system is reliant on individuals making prudent choices, then you need a different system. One designed on what reality is rather than what it ought to be. I don't see a whole lot of data that supports the idea that a good system is one that relies on that. I see a lot more that says people are idiots and you have to save them from themselves if you want a healthy and sustainable economy.

The whole "financial accountability" thing has, historically, worked pretty well when it has been tried. Or, at least, it usually works a lot better than the alternative. When it doesn't appear to be working, it is almost always because, somewhere, financial accountability has been removed from the equation and moral hazards have been created. In the case of student loans, there is no process by which the lender can judge your future ability to pay back your loan, and I'm guessing that they are forbidden by law from seeking out this information or using it. Another big problem is that the moral framework needed for concepts like financial accountability has disintegrated over the past couple of generations.

Education ultimately has the same problem as housing and medicine -- it has been declared a "right", and, therefore, cost doesn't matter. If higher education was viewed as the privilege that it should be, then lenders would do stuff like demand money down and demand that you major in something financially useful. But they don't do this, so you can borrow a bunch of money to major in Native American poetry, wait tables, and then default on your loans when you are 25. As fucked up as the housing market is, imagine if it was like the student loan market, and you could buy a house with a zero down loan, no job, and no requirement to pay it back for four years. Unthinkable.

In the meantime, colleges can jack up the price of tuition all that they want, because they know that the money is there to pay for it.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Hannibal, that is a very accurate description of the current state of affairs regarding student loans.

I'd add a few other thoughts:

(1) Every organized society, via their governments, has to make choices about certain things essential to its preservation and well being. Among a handful of pretty important things is education.

(2) The United States does a piss poor job among developed nations in illuminating the choices regarding education and then acting on them. In terms of the quality of the work force, i.e., its ability to produce the goods and services that keep the native economy buzzing, the US is being quickly surpassed by China and other SW and SE Asian Economies. This is not a criticism of America, so, get off your high horse if you want to take aim at this point I just made. It is what it is and the decades ahead are going to see the gap widen between the strength of economies of the countries I just mentioned and the US economy.

(3) A strong system of educating the work force you anticipate needing is a crucial issue for society and the US is shitting the bed in that regard badly.

What Hannibal mentions is a symptom of the dumb ass things our US government has done to facilitate educating its citizens ..... its not unlike the dumb ass things the Feds did to allow "every citizen to own a home." We now know how that went. Our educational system is likely to suffer the same crisis going forward but nobody with the power and/or brains to do anything about it will.

Take note of the huge shift in the US demographic over the last decade. Young people who cannot accomplish even some of the most basic life skills grow exponentially in numbers while those that have not only mastered basic skills but have gained new ones for the new world economy decline. And guess who is flocking to American shores already prepared with terrific basic educations in mathematics and the sciences from their home countries to take those jobs that require these more advanced skills? Chinese and Asians. Millions of them. These young people will rise to the top, they will govern, they will be making the decisions that will affect our society when culturally they barely understand what being an American means ..... other than they are not restrained by their restrictive governments that rule them back home.

Thus, there are risks to the freedom we allow. I don't have any answers to this. The problem is huge and isn't going away, just like the Federal Debt and collectively our elected officials keep kicking the can on that down the road. Its frustrating is all I can say. Once again, we are left here to bitch about it.

[hack]

When it doesn't appear to be working, it is almost always because, somewhere, financial accountability has been removed from the equation and moral hazards have been created.

Agreed. But its no shock that attempts are made constantly on a daily basis on all levels of economic activity to remove accountability from the equation. Financial accountability is a pipe dream because money and power are intoxicants and always have been. Again -- design a system that works for humans as they are, not as they ought to be. Assuming a system with financial accountability is simply the flipside of pure communism. It's a form of utopia that won't happen.

Tough questions on education. My point isn't that it's a right or that all should go, however. I brought it up simply as an example of financial accountability. For whatever reason, it's not happening. Your way to phrase it would be that it was removed in this instance by eliminating creditworthiness from the equation, which is accurate. It is however just one of so many ways in which financial accountability does not exist. When it's not happening to the extent of 50% at risk of default, you have to start wondering about the system as opposed to the people in it.

[Hannibal]

When it doesn't appear to be working, it is almost always because, somewhere, financial accountability has been removed from the equation and moral hazards have been created.

Assuming a system with financial accountability is simply the flipside of pure communism. It's a form of utopia that won't happen.

Nahh. You only have to go back a generation or two to find that it was once customary to pay for a home with a significant chunk of money down, and it wasn't unthinkable for you to pay for a medical test with $300 out of your own pocket instead of your insurance company getting charged $5,000 for it. I don't think that this is inevitable, or that it is an unavoidable side effect of human nature. To me, financial accountability does mean accepting what people are and not what they ought to be. People can't remove their own financial accountability. Someone else does it for them under the guise of redistibutive "fairness".

If you disagree with me, don't worry. I'm part of an ever-shrinking minority.