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VELL115 karma

Would you say that different countries\labs come up with different ways to approach discovering new elements, or do labs follow somewhat standard protocol with few additions here and there?

VELL18 karma

That's a very typical experience. Communism is all about equality and it kind of worked...sort of...in some cases.

You had a job. If you didn't have a job, a job would be given to you. If you didn't want to work or did it poorly, there would be a person attached to you to supervise you and guid you. And I am not talking about shitty jobs, a job would be given based on your education and experience. The job might require you to relocate to a different city, but as my parents told me that was no doubt in their mind that there would be a job given to them once they finished their university education. Can you imagine this now?? That you don't have to worry about getting a job after all of this.

BTW education was truly free. If you pass the tests to get into university, you'd study for free. And USSR had one of the best unviersities in the world back then, so you were getting the best possible education for free with a guruantee to have a job afterwords. Sounds like a sweet deal right? I mean I can go on and on about cummunism and how it workds but overall there are certainly some upsides to that. medicine is free...and again, pretty damn good medicine as well. You were given an appartment for free after you give 20-30 years of work.

Now to the negatives. I am not going to go into politics. Obviously freedom wasn't up to the standard we have it today and I probably wouldn't advise you to speak out your mind about Communism and btw communism had to be studied by everyone in the university, so there was no escape from it. Everyone had more or less the same pay and it wasn't a very big one. About 100 rubles, enough not to worry too much about future, but I don't see you saving enough for a car. BTW all of the luxuries were out of price range or more so out of buying abilities of everyone since they were non-existing. People still joke about oranges being avalable only on New Year or candies being given out on holidays only. It's not like you didn't have money to buy them, they were just not available. That's why you see those ridicolous lines in the movies about USSR, because if anyone was selling something of value you better be there to buy it. Same with cloth...if you want anything nice, you have to buy it from people illegally getting it from other countries. My mom bought her first pair of jeans for 200 rubles (so that was 2 monthly paychecks for her). Pretty much anything imported had to be bought illegaly from people.

Noone was waiting around for rations. Everyone was fed and dressed and lived live without worrying too much about the future. People waited in line for the good stuff, which was nice to have, but noone was starving.

I guess it up to the people to decide what's better. I bet a lot of poor people would love to have a little more communism in their lives, but none of the system is perfect. There are downsides to everything, but let's not pretend like there are no upsides to it as well.

VELL12 karma

Some blood cancers, particularly B cells lymphomas can be almost completely cured with CAR-T cell therapy. That is, you go, get the treatment and go home, you are good. So there is definitely progress, that being said now that we are applying similar techniques to other cancers, it doesn't work that well. There are lot of reasons for why that is so, but it's clear that solid tumors are a whole different animal.

Immunotherapy only recently became what you might want to call mainstream and progress was actually pretty okay. I remember even 5 years ago, patients would be lucky to get a year after melanoma diagnosis, now with new immuno-modulating drugs, even a 5 year survival rate is not that uncommon.

VELL12 karma

You will not get cancer from that. In fact, you can implant this tumor onto yourself and it will be killed in seconds. It happens for the same reason you can't just take someone's heart, it will be rejected by your immune system.

Now if that person is your genetic twin...now that tumor I will definitively not be eating. While your stomach is pretty acidic place, all it takes just one tumor cell to go into your blood stream and then you can very much get the same cancer.

VELL11 karma

Yes.

Depends on their viral load and T cell count. Since most patients are on anti-viral and their lymph count is pretty high, it's actually hard to tell. HIV also usually infects fairly young people, where cancers are somewhat less common.