Readit News > Also electric cars get killed on the depreciation curve.
Do we know what fraction? If most American children have access to healthcare–a claim I'm sceptical of–then I'm not seeing an urgent problem that has to be solved by the healthcare system.
They'd still have to pay for Medicare, but it knocks 12.4% off their estimated taxes for consulting.
If they're single, then the math is different. 24% for single people starts at just over $100k and runs to about $200k so they may have to pay those taxes. It's always frustrating when people whine about taxes but giving insufficient information to evaluate their complaint.
I don't live in a costal state, but when I do consulting work typically at charity rates alongside my standard full-time job, I have to pay 24% federal tax, 15.3% FICA, and 7.85% state tax. I am already taxed whenever I want to help anyone at 47.15%. That's before the required tax structures and consulting for doing all the invoicing legally. God himself only wanted 10%, so it seems a government playing God is awfully expensive.
You can't raise taxes any further before I'm done, and I don't think I'm alone, businesses and consultants are already crushed in taxes. I have to bill $40K to hopefully take home $20K; at which point, is it even worth my time? But if I don't consult because it isn't worth it, are small businesses suddenly going to afford an agency or a dedicated software developer? Of course not, so their growth is handicapped, and I wonder what the effects of that tax-wise are.
This is a strange thing to say. If you do something normal, and you end up in a normal state, why would that be a moral failing? There's no such thing as "overeating". Different people eat different amounts. The same person eats different amounts at different times.
> (From that perspective:)a miracle cure that allows someone to stop being fat is like an indulgence (in the Roman Catholic sense). It’s a cheat, a shortcut that allows the unworthy to reach a state they do not deserve.
This is incoherent. If you believe that being fat is a sin, but that the things you do that make you fat are not sins, then a miracle cure that makes you thin removes the only sin you were committing. You can't be unworthy if you're not fat. In order for a miracle cure to be "cheating", it is necessary that the sin is in the behavior and not the result.
People with Down syndrome are much more likely to die from untreated and unmonitored infections than other people.
Children with Down syndrome are much more likely than other children to develop leukemia
Children with Down syndrome are more likely to have epilepsy [...] Almost half of people with Down syndrome who are older than age 50 have epilepsy.
And from this paper[2]:
Clinical research and longitudinal studies consistently estimate the lifetime risk of dementia in people with Down syndrome to be over 90%. Dementia is rare before the age of 40 years, but its incidence and prevalence exponentially increase thereafter, reaching 88–100% in persons with Down syndrome older than 65 years. [...] In a longitudinal study of adults with Down syndrome, dementia was the proximate cause of death in 70% of cases.
Saying they can have extreme health issues does not seem excessive given the above IMHO.
[1]: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/down/conditioninfo/a...
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/11/408906/survivors-childhood...
Aside from that, it is actually hard to paint an accurate picture of today with historical data for people with Down Syndrome as the childhood Trisomy 21 strategies have improved and been implemented in the past 20-30 years. 60 years ago kids with Trisomy 21 were moved into institutions. Kids 30 years ago got some basic treatments to keep them alive. Now kids get all kinds of screenings for hearing, vision, thyroid, heart conditions before problems develop. Turns out it's very difficult to grow, learn and thrive when your thyroid doesn't work, or your cardiovascular system wasn't circulating enough oxygen.
There are more struggles for sure, including intellectual disabilities, but many more kids are doing significantly better than their past generations. It costs more, is more work, but like the parent poster said, my experience certainly isn't extreme. We go to more doctor's appointments, have IEP meetings, and she's in speech therapy. She's generally been pretty healthy, happy and very active.
It was scary when she was born. We were given a pamphlet with a list of things similar to your first link. The reality though is she's more likely to have those than the general population, but some of those things are very rare. 100x very rare is still rare. Having all of those issues would be even more rare. The greater point though is that any kid can have those issues too.
The epilepsy link seems to conflict with what I've seen. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31391451/https://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk/about-downs-syndrome/healt...
Both of those put it closer to 10% sometime in their life, with about half of those at birth.
The way people with trisomia function in society is also a product of our nurturing culture. It's only recently, when such people started living longer lives thanks to advances in medical science, that their intellectual development gained more attention and it was revealed that they can actually be more independent than commonly believed.
That being said it all requires a huge amount of effort and if a person with trisomia has siblings, they're very likely to be deprived of attention. Additionally, if they're a first child, they're the only one due to this. That is what makes it a net negative.
Are you saying people don't have more kids after having a first kid with Trisomy 21?