This pig heart transplant could arguably be a similar example? The patient was guaranteed to die without it, so there were a lot fewer ethical issues than on a more ‘promising’ patient. He ended up living two months before dying of heart failure, but it hasn’t yet been published if that’s because the donor heart failed or if the rest of his body was too far gone to support it.
One news article about his death described the patient as:
David Bennett, 57, wasn’t the most gracious heart recipient, nor was he perhaps the most likeable, given that in his youth, he had gone to prison for stabbing a man seven times.
So he possibly fits the “testing on some arseholes” criteria, too.
TOKYO, JAPAN - Troubled Production Of Return of Gojira Faces More Delays
Sony Pictures Entertainment announced today that their live-action production of Return of Gojira, co-developed with Summerion Multimedia, has been delayed again as negotiations with the film’s lead have again broken down over his “unreasonable demands”.
“We cannot supply any actor, however important to the movie, with a radioactive hot spring on set. Even the costs of manufacturing a lead-lined onsen would be prohibitive, not to mention the cost to decontaminate the water after use,” stated a representative of the filmmaker.
Gojira has claimed to suffer from a strained spine since the incident in April in which he ate a North Korean missile submarine during a beach party (see our earlier article, “I Was At A Family Barbecue,” Says Heroic Kaiju), and finds frequent hot soaks essential. In response to the filmmaker’s comments, he observed that he has had a radiation onsen built at his home for a “quite reasonable cost”, and believes Sony’s attitude to stem from “a bias against nucleo-megalo-saurian Nihonjin”.
A representative of the Japanese government was unavailable for comment at press time, citing the unfortunate inability of anyone to even at that time, a condition which he regretted was unlikely to abate in the near future.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK-First All-Imperial Opera Performance At the Met
The New York Metropolitan Opera, in conjunction with the Grand Imperial Star Troupe, will be putting on The Cosmos Of Glories for a seven-week run in the PC+12 season.
“To describe this an an ‘epic’ production is a major understatement,” Peter Gelb, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera would state during the press conference. “This show will be the first that will fully incorporate all of the technical improvements in the Metropolitan Opera House installed in PC+9 and the show will be fully done to Imperial standards.”
This will be the third fully Imperial opera to be performed on Earth, with the first being A Silent Love being performed at the La Scala opera house in Milan, Italy in PC+7 and Courser at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina in PC+8. The Metropolitan Opera will provide a full translation track in both English, Italian, and Imperial for both mesh-compatable and augmented-reality equipment audience members.
“So, how is patient 377186 going?”
“Biological reconstruction has been going well, but it’s the memories and consciousness that’s the issue. The dementia turned their brain into Swiss cheese and we’re lucky to even get eleven percent reconstruction on them.”
“Damn. What about external records?”
“Patient’s family turns out to have had a lot of Super-8, VHS, and DVDs of them. That, and we got legal authorization to do a records trawl. Good news is that we got a lot of paper. Bad news is that the OCR is choking on some of it occasionally.”
“Got a reconstruction estimate so far?”
“Maybe sixty-five percent, seventy if we’re lucky.”
“Seventy is a lot better than eleven percent. If I can do anything to help, let me know.”
Actually, I just had a thought on this subject, namely that most ISPs and VPNs will give you up if you’re convicted of a crime (I think).
(That, and JK Rowling is starting to sue people that are insulting her online for libel that she can hit with good charges.)
So, rather than just kill people, prove libel and start working your way up the chain. Then sue the little scrote into oblivion for libel, complete with chain of custody.
Dying is easy. You really want to hurt someone, beat them up with lawyers. That’s even worse.
(I’d still like to keep 4Chan the way it is…because weaponized autism needs a place to work itself out mostly harmlessly.)
First off, if the people targeted by these places could afford an army of expensive lawyers to go after these assholes, they already have that option. And -
Second, cynical as I am about human nature,
You really want to hurt someone
not everyone targeted by an asshole wants to become an equal and opposite asshole instead of just making them go away. Especially since it involves having to think about the asshole.
[See also Pratchett’s explanation of why you should really hope you’re facing an evil man when someone has you at the wrong end of an arrow.]
Far easier and cheaper to cut a check to a budget fetcher to make the problem go away, especially when they have conveniently handed you legal permission to do so.
(As a side note -
(I’d still like to keep 4Chan the way it is…because weaponized autism needs a place to work itself out mostly harmlessly.)
My spectrumicity takes deep, deep offense to that.)
So this morning, despite my best efforts not to be a dreadful intellectual elitist before coffee, I note that the Bing homepage quiz is asking people the freezing point of water. 75% managed to answer that one correctly.
At some point, I fear, it really will be necessary to admit that commonplace levels of public stupidity can reach a “danger to themselves and others” point.
And to bring this around to a Post-Contact Hilarity thread relevant topic, and given that the locals aren’t entirely fond of the notion of turning public spaces into sharp-object-free rubber rooms, just how controversial are those “you must be smarter than this stick to ride the Empire” signs going to be?
Considering how many stories I’ve seen-in person-of this kind of stupid in action (seriously, World’s Dumbest Crooks is a show that has to cut things because nobody would believe it)…it makes me wish we weren’t so quick to let evolution cull some people.
One of the great potential mines here, it seems to me today as I do reading in the field of fintech which includes a bunch of AML regulation and compliance-fu, is the joys to come from having to deal with a financial system which is both profoundly uninterested into being turned into an arm for backdoor law enforcement and social engineering, and does not belong to a small island country that can be leaned on to play ball.
ObAdvert:
The key qualification for a career in Sovereign Liability Management is the ability to speak softly and sweetly to the oppo’s Compliance departments in manners which suggest that the extremely sketchy scheme you’re pitching is, at most, only slightly grubby, and is so in ways which simultaneously leave their asses covered and are prone to make their corporate masters money by the mucker-ton - i.e., would be very inadvisable to kill or to make too much of a fuss about - while simultaneously permitting them never to realize any of this consciously.
In short, we want the da Vincis and Michelangelos of the bullshit artist community.
Probably ending up with a repeat of that famous letter claiming that a company’s Accounts Payable function was not operating correctly, only to be informed in return that it was in fact functioning perfectly, it was just that it had a rather different idea of what its function was.
"So, last week I got to drive the first new car to come out of the combined efforts of McLaren Automotive and Specialist Ground Engineering LLC, the MV77-3C, and I have to say this.
"It isn’t a superb piece of engineering.
"It isn’t proof that, yes truly something can be better than sex even if you’re doing it right.
"It isn’t one of the best cars that I’ve ever driven.
"And, it isn’t something so wonderful that driving it is beautiful.
“It’s better than all of that. By a terrifyingly wide margin.”
-Jeremy Clarkson, Car And Driver PC+11
All Good Things, ICC US branch, all-hands meeting:
Okay, people. I have heard it said that some of you have been skipping lunch breaks and working unpaid overtime.
Do not, I repeat do not, do that.
If you want to work more, that’s fine, but make sure it’s on the clock so that we can pay you for it. I am told that this is not the norm around here, but our contracts are based on the fundamental notion that you do the job, and then you get paid.
And this company - and I - absolutely will not have it said that we did not pay our contractors for all the work they did and every last second of the time they were here.
Understood? Good. Because we will have to terminate anyone who insists on not being paid, and I would really prefer not to have to do anything quite that ridiculous.
Somewhere, there is a retail exec looking at this in utter confusion, completely unable to understand how you can make record shareholder profits and get him his six-figure yearly bonus, if you don’t exploit your workforce. After all, isn’t that the purpose of having your workforce? If they weren’t to be exploited, they would have gotten their MBAs and become executives in the company!
(My opinion on most corporate executives involves the following things-rope, tree, some assembly required.)