The article doesn't cover this, but it's worth pointing out why the study asks this particular question. With a single-payer system the Nordic countries want to know what the ROI is if we sent letters out to everyone above a certain age offering a free colonoscopy. The study is well-designed to answer that question.
The study does a poor job of helping an individual asking a similar but different question: Is it worthwhile for me to pay out of pocket for a colonoscopy?
The latter question is very important in a system that isn't single-payer and so this has sparked a lot of debate in e.g the US.
The intention-to-screen design of the trial depends heavily on the effectiveness of recruitment and the pre-existing “prevalence” of the test in the setting in which the study is conducted. I can see rejecting an unpleasant, rarely used screening test. But if it were presented in a less impersonal (but still unbiased) way, I imagine recruitment would have been higher, skewing the data towards cost-effectiveness, as re-analyses showed.
I did a colonoscopy last year, and it was covered by my insurance (in the US). I was referred by my primary care physician. My insurance is nothing special, it's the standard type of insurance people have access to when they get a corporate job.
The type of question "are colonoscopies worth it" is not actually people should ask themselves. This is a question your primary care physician should answer, and you should follow their advice. If you don't trust them, just go find another one.
The article says it will "diffuse away" which implies they just let it escape the device. It'll then move through the tissue / fluids, reach the blood and eventually be breathed out. I did a quick google search to see if we already had some level of hydrogen gas in our body.
It seems that bacteria in the human gut already produce some hydrogen gas and that breath contains measurable levels of it[0]. This was news to me, but means that dumping a tiny amount of H2 into the body is probably fine.
One of the four parties in the ruling coalition has rural voters as their main constituency. This weirdness might be the result of them negotiating to keep the cost of driving a tractor around low. I'm not sure what they are doing on the local roads, but I see them a lot when driving outside the city.
In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dives a bit deeper into what sort of "problems" we should choose for yourself if we want a happy life. The gist of it is that we should pick activities that we can loose ourselves in. Everyone's experienced this, where they work on something, look at the watch, and a surprising amount of time has passed. A few examples of good "problems": learning an instrument, coding something or learning a sport.
I highly recommend reading the book, as he goes into the key features that get us into the pleasant flow state, so you know what variables to tweak if you can't get there.
The block time is 2 minutes. You can choose to wait for 0 blocks or 100. The longer you wait the better the security of your transaction, because there's more PoW behind it. All crypto work like this. You also get more security behind your tx by waiting in a PoS system.
If you're buying a coffee the vendor is likely to let you leave the shop after no confirmations (as soon as their node hears about the transaction) but if you're buying a car the same is unlikely to be true.
> but if you're buying a car the same is unlikely to be true.
I don't see why not, it's not like you can buy a car anonymously. If anything there's more security there than with the coffee, and no one is going to attack the Monero network to create a double spend for the price of a car.
In practice people (e.g. exchanges, that know who you are after KYC) still opt to wait a little because if something does go wrong it's a hassle to actually get paid. For the same reason, we are likely to check some of the bills in a large cash payment for authenticity, even though we have effective recourse through the police and the judicial system.
CIDER, which the author of this blogpost maintains, has support for such metadata, under the style/indent key. The hope, when it was created, was that more editors would adopt this, but after years it's not caught on.
I use it extensively and it's both easy to use and super flexible (for the rare cases when you do need that).
> I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets. I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s really about it.
The unspoken premise of this quote is that fame and fortune don't easily convert into each other. The believe that both go hand in hand is what most people get wrong already.
And there is also a certain asymmetry, because popularity at least can be bought to some degree but converting pure fame into lasting wealth is hard work if, depending on the circumstances, possible at all.
That belief has been illustrated in technicolor over the past decade. Plenty of "famous" people on social media have very little to show for it. I'm not talking about the Logan Pauls or PewDiePies of this world - they're clearly outliers - but the average famous person on YouTube or Instagram (tens to hundreds of thousands of followers), might have a decent to great income but they're not "rich", where rich is defined as not dependent on any source of income[1]. Many of them are in fact enslaved to the need to constantly produce new content, which is fine if you enjoy it but perhaps not so much otherwise.
[1] My preferred definition is actually the ability to do what you want, when you want, and with whom you want, which is a little broader than simply money.
> The believe that both go hand in hand is what most people get wrong already.
That's because it used to be true and was for quite a while. Fame means lots of people know who you are, which requires widely amplifying and broadcasting your identity and work. For most of modern human history, technilogical limitations made that broadcasting very expensive. You had to spend some money for each reached human. Think printing pamphlets in Dickens' era.
This meant that, generally, only the rich could afford to become famous. Fame following money and the direction was very rarely reversed aside from occasional cases of infamy like mass murderers.
Broadcast TV made that much cheaper. A single show could reach millions. But production was very expensive so even though the marginal cost per viewer was low, the barrier to entry was still very high. That meant few got in and those were mostly otherwise well connected or part of an established privileged class.
You do start to see an increasing number of "marginally famous" people here who got recognition from being guests or contestants on shows. Think "Jerry Springer" famous. These people tend to be quickly forgotten but have the misfortune of experiencing everything about fame with almost none of the money.
Then the Internet and video streaming happened. Now the barrier of entry is virtually zero — everyone has a smart phone that can shoot video. The marginal cost is zero — ads pay for distribution so the producer fronts nothing. Some money comes in, but its very little. So now there is a larger and larger group of people for whom fame came first and wealth came later or never.
I don't think our culture has caught up to that reality yet. There's still a presumption that anyone famous always has enough money to deal with the downsides but that's sadly not true. I honestly feel bad for people like mid-level YouTubers who have stalkers and death threats but are effectively making minimum wage.
Why trying to become rich? Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress, having more money isn't improving much your happiness. Sometimes it makes it worse. However trying to become rich can be very difficult, tiresome, and disappointing.
> Why trying to become rich? Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress
Generally speaking, to me being rich (disclaimer: I'm not) means having that kind of money today and the confidence that, no matter what happens (barring large scale events like wars or asteroids) I will still have it for the rest of my life.
To me, being rich is simply about living life through passive income sources. Most of the rich people I know live this way - they make their money through investments, especially fixed income assets like real estate.
The moment you have money there is people out there that want to take it. It has always been, there is this part on the Bible that says that when you have money, there will be robbers making holes in your walls to take it. That was thousands of years ago.
It is human nature.
For me, being really rich is that you know the way to make wealth(not money) when you need it. This knowledge is more useful than the outcome of it.
You're basically never 100% safe. In this particular case, the broker at which you bought the index fund units can scam you. It actually happened in Poland maybe 10 years ago - managers at a respectable brokerage firm were taking in orders from people but, instead of buying the requested papers, bought something else which they believed would be more profitable. They ended up being wrong and, when the clients wanted to eventually "sell" their papers (which were never bought in the first place), the company folded as it didn't have enough to pay the clients.
If memory serves, The largest single-day drop was around 25% and the biggest total was around 90%. That leaves 10% to live off of: if you have 10x what’s necessary for the rest of your life invested you can absorb those losses.
To have 10x what's necessary, you need to be able to survive on 1% returns (I'm trying to be generous there). So if you can live on $30,000, you need to have "only" $3MM invested.
You should also not be investing more than 25% of your assets into a single asset class, so you need to have $6-12MM of assets (range depending on considerations) in the first place.
I think having even $3MM is a reasonably called 'rich', but others may disagree.
I don't think the people who are non-obvious rich put their money solely in an index fund. They'll generally have about 50-500 apartment units in some big city, which (if properly insured) guarantees you can weather anything except for wars and asteroids. Maybe they put their earnings into an index fund though ...
>>"have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress" is how many people define "rich".
sure, but "great" is not easily defined. A new car or a jet? A $500K home or a $15M one to host parties with rich and famous. But people usually like to show off, one way or another.
If you hit it big with a company, and have, say, $10 Million you can live extremely stress free everywhere in the world. And very few would know, at least no one in your town or extended family. But quite a few hint at their wealth, political donations, charity (announce it publicly) etc etc. It's tempting, but once you hit the news is over.
In USA people might sue you for one thing or another, but in banana republic countries you can "taxed" by criminals: Give us $1 Million or your child is...
It's very hard to find a life partner who is willing to live merely comfortably knowing they can draw more blood from you, and had to resign your children to mere comfort, knowing they'll have to compete for ever scarcer living-wage-paying jobs.
Merly comfortably? At 10 million dollars, you can live off of 4% of that for the rest of your life. After 15% cap gains, that gives you $340,000 to spend a year. Outside of the bay area, you can easily afford a 5000 square foot house in a top school district, own multiple cars, take lavish vacations, own a second vacation home, pay for your kids college education and more.
What additional benefits are you imagining in which having more money would not "resign your children to mere comfort"?
Ever meet old money? They manage it; that's how they pass their money on through the generations. If you're a tech dude in the Bay Area though, you have my sympathies: many predators.
True. I guess "rich" because you can pay your family bills and have the hobbies you love and "rich" in "rich and famous" don't mean the same kind of wealth.
The difference in stress of needing to hold onto a job, versus of being their voluntarily, is huge. And it's not binary. If you have a few years cushion saved up, it's a huge decrease in stress. If you have a mortgage paid off and enough to retire off of, most people in the world would call that 'rich.'
Because there is an unlimited number of things you can do with it. You're limited only by time and your imagination.
I've never understood the premise I'm responding to, it doesn't make sense, unless a person has zero ambition and zero creativity - and I don't think that's true of anyone.
I could never have enough money. I could never run out of good things to use it on. Give me $100 trillion and a thousand years, please.
You could spend $100 billion and 60 years of your life on just going after Malaria and you might not manage to vanquish it. You could spend tens of millions of dollars and decades on trying to eliminate homelessness in a small city and still not eliminate it (swap out homelessness for any number of problems that need fixing in most any nation, or city). There is what might as well be an infinite number of good uses for money, at every possible scale. I'd run out of time long before I'd run out of positive uses for large amounts of money.
Yeah, the DOT has some value to baseline effectiveness of programs: if they have $30,000 they can improve some intersection or stretch of highway and save one life a year. They can always turn extra cash into lives saved, so they use that to measure the effectiveness of spending. (Preventing malaria deaths is much much cheaper, maybe the conversion rate should be lower, but let's go with 30k for now.)
If someone says they don't want $30k because they live comfortably, even though they could immediately donate it to GiveWell, it's like saying they don't value saving other lives because their life is fine.
Substitute in anything else you value. You could sponsor modern art competitions, or film preservation, or buy land for ecological preservation, or help fund policy research on key issues from think tanks...
People reflexively associate money with consumptive hedonism, so it can seem like a negative, but it can also support almost any value you have.
Money can build you and tacky gold lined apartment and buy you a loud sports car, but money can also cure the sick, feed the hungry, and house the homeless.
Sure being rich is nice, you can do more things than most people.
My point is that you will probably never be rich. The concept of rich people is to be more healthy than most people. So you should probably not have a shitty lifestyle because you want to be one of them but you aren't succedding. If you enjoy trying, good for you.
Ambition and creativity is different than wanting to be rich. A researcher usually does not care about money but would love the frontpage of Nature or a Nobel price. A musician is usually more thinking about its art and the people than the sales. A politician wants power. Lots of examples.
Saving the world and making the society better with a lot of money is good, but thankfully rich people are not the only solution.
It is a useful illusion to have while destroying it. Hey, we will fix this in 10 years with our billions. It is a huge pill we incidentally forget we swallow daily. No need to remind.
If you don't become rich, the money that you would've earned will land in somebody else's pockets and presumably they can also use it for some good (possibly even greater one).
Money is life force in a quantifiable form. We literally trade life for money. If you have a drive to accomplish something greater than you alone could accomplish in a lifetime, then you need to amass capital so you can buy other peoples time and energy.
This. When people act like money is worthless after $X, I think of Musk and Bezos pushing us towards space. I'm sure they both spend plenty of cash on useless shit that doesn't improve their lives at all, but if they only had $10 million each then nobody would landing large reusable rockets right now.
That depends on your personality and the job. Although, as I've noticed, seeking money as the number one goal tends to lead to jobs which cause more stress and a lower quality of life. For example, I could make more money at top tech company but then I'd have bureaucracy and a vacation policy (I took 6 weeks last year) to deal with.
Top tech company offers 5 weeks vacation per year and offers unpaid leave too. The hard part is extricating yourself from (fake-) important projects long enough to enjoy a vacation.
You have unemployment and more than enough time to find a new job. And let's say you don't find one, the state will still give you enough money for you to survive. Maybe you will have to reduce your lifestyle and be unhappy for some time but there is no need to seek to be rich just to prevent an unlikely future.
> You have unemployment and more than enough time to find a new job. And let's say you don't find one, the state will still give you enough money for you to survive.
Quite a few commenters on this forum live in parts of the world where that is not the case. It's certainly not the case for the majority of the world's population.
I sense an optimism of someone who yet not lived through a major recession. When the economy takes a nosedive, even janitor jobs can be hard to come by.
And welfare, even where it is available, is usually severely capped both in amount and duration. You may not die of hunger but losing your place to live is entirely realistic.
It's true, I haven't experienced a recession. I rather take the risk of having a hard time during a recession than having a hard time my whole life though.
This suggests that the cost of living adjusted salaries of today is half of what they were in 1960s if two people need to work now versus when only one needed to.
Also immigrating to a country with good social benefits does not solve the need to take care of elders and relatives , which would not benefit from the social system of the country to which you would immigrate
> This suggests that the cost of living adjusted salaries of today is half of what they were in 1960s if two people need to work now versus when only one needed to.
It's that, or people's "needs" (wants really) just got inflated over time.
I recently had a conversation with a friend regarding this and we came to the conclusion that there is a balance with wealth. For us, the more important factor was freedom, and having enough money to facilitate whatever that definition of freedom is for you.
That really depends on your personality. There's a lot of things where objective value is hard to determine, and depends purely on your subjective feelings. Two people with narcissistic and schizoid personalities could have completely different experiences with fame: one could feel inspired and happy by the recognition, while the other would get anxious and depressed.
In the end, learn who you are and what's comfortable for you, before listening to anyone else's advice.
> Scientists also developed a way of "carbon dating" mutations. They showed that more than a fifth of them occurred years or even decades before a cancer is found.
> He added: "Unlocking these patterns means it should now be possible to develop new diagnostic tests, that pick up signs of cancer much earlier."
The journalist probably pressed this last point, because it can't possibly be true in a practical sense. Even if you can detect these changes early on in cells, we can't possibly test every cell in the body for mutations on e.g. a yearly basis, right?
We'll hold on now. If we assume that mutations tend to cluster around cells exposed to particular carcinogens, and assume there is some number N>≈5 mutations required, in theory we could look for cases where many cells present with x% of the necessary mutations. And it becomes much easier to detect because you presumably have many cells which mutate stochastically together.
You are describing a cervical smear test - target cells more likely to be mutated - assume that if you find problem cells in your test ( after you have destroyed during the test ) that there are similar ones still left in the body ( not because they were mutated together - but because they are related - one cell inherited a mutation from another ).
So sure. That's done already and having a test which detects 'precancerous' based on genetics might be useful. One of the problems at the moment is the treatment is often almost as bad as the cure - so you might only be able to step up frequency of the tests.
The problem with this approach is only certain bits of the body are easily accessible in this way - that's why people like the ctDNA tests - but they have their own challenges.
Another non-destructive way would be imaging - either thermal ( cancer cells are more active and so hotter than normal ), or using some sort of labelling markers - however can't see a way to target arbitrary early genetic mutations with this.
Even if you could, it does not help if there isn't a good treatment.
That's why screening for some cancers (e.g. breast and prostate) is controversial.
First of all you might get false positives or negatives. False positives can harm patients since they get worried and might even get treatment for a disease they don't have.
Secondly even if the screening gives a valid result: In some cases (like mentioned before PC and BC) that does not mean the patients live any longer than the ones who where not screened.
There's a 5-year survival time metric which makes screening look very positive.
Let's say you and a friend have a cancer that will kill you in 10 years, no matter what. If you get screened after 4 years, you'll have a 100% 5-year surivival rate (so screening is celebrated as a success: more screening!).
However, you won't live a second longer than your friend. You will be worried though and might get treatment with serious side effects.
That's why the mortality rate is IMO an actually much more interesting metric.
The study does a poor job of helping an individual asking a similar but different question: Is it worthwhile for me to pay out of pocket for a colonoscopy?
The latter question is very important in a system that isn't single-payer and so this has sparked a lot of debate in e.g the US.