Donorcycles: Motorcycle Helmet Laws and the Supply of Organ Donors
the PMC and harvesting organs of alienated people, name a better duo
When my girlfriend was in the hospital last summer with kidney failure one of the nurses told about how every time she saw someone on a motorcycle she just saw two donor kidneys riding around. Those things are murder machines and are often driven by inexperienced PMC's with a midlife crisis and an inflated sense of their own abilities.
I get it, but I also wanna point out how the danger in motorcycling is - for the most part - coming from cars and the inattentive drivers steering them
all the more reason to avoid
cars are the devil be around them as little as possible and have the safest equipment manageable
also dont speed through intersections is the most likely way to get you killed
yeah ok but by that logic you should just buy a bigger SUV than your neighbor
which also sucks
afaik the environmental impact of an EV suv vs an EV non-suv is negligible cause theyre all made of plastic or some lightweight chemical satanic ritual these days so anything that gets you up off the ground a bit more ups your survivability
My dad was never very vocally strict or scaremongering with me as a kid, but the two things he made absolutely clear weren’t acceptable for me at any age were:
- Playing with fireworks
- Owning a motorcycle
He very clearly described how he had friends that either died or were disabled by both. To his credit, neither have an appeal to me to this day, and he fostered my love of trains.
Same.
When he was a teen my dad stole and crashed his dad's motorcycle. He then proceeded to hide a pretty serious wound for weeks so he wouldn't get caught. Needless to say, he's always been very vocal against motorcycles.
Although, the real reason I'm against them is my own experiences driving. People are fucking lunatics and will not keep you safe on the road. I don't truly feel safe in a car, why would I expose myself on a fucking bike?
time to move to vietnam, the safest place for motorcycles in the world, as pretty much everyone there drives motorcycles. highest ownership of motorcycles in the world per capita
70% of deaths for motorcycles are on interstates / primary roadways as well. if youre on backroads and avoid the interstate you have a pretty normal chance of survival in any country
Two-cycle engines are monstrously polluting. I wouldn't want to breathe that every day.
Cars don't see you on the road. They'll change lanes into your lane without a second thought and sideswipe you off your bike. Hope you bought the $1000 bike armor that will stop your skin from being eroded away as you slide for hundreds of feet on the asphalt. Won't save you from the broken bones you get on impact, nor being run over by the other car that was following you too closely.
this is such a dim view of motorcycling. it's true that cars are a danger when you're riding, especially in the US but why do we have to fearmonger about bikes? anybody who rides knows the risk, whether they are wearing a full race suit or flip flops and a tank top. everybody manages their own risk taking and aversion in life. i would personally recommend wearing leathers, boots, gloves and a helmet, but just because things can go wrong i don't understand the extreme jump to "oh you want a bike? you're gonna die." if people want to ride, i encourage them to try it–in the safest way possible. people die in cars too but we just accept that. just because bikes are riskier doesn't mean there isn't anything to gained from the experience and if you're smart and careful plenty of people ride their whole lives without an incident.
I used to road bicycle a lot. I bought a motorcycle after I turned thirty because I figured I had my stupider years behind me. Now I won't even consider road bicycling, it feels way way riskier than being able to move at the speed of traffic and wearing protective armor. If you're a careful rider, wear gear, take an MSF course, and never ride drunk your risk is pretty low.
At a previous job I had I was in the break room and two guys, one about 18 and the other 40, were talking about motorcycles. The young guy was saying how he really wanted one and how they were cool and fast, and the older guy was kind of talking him out of it or at least being cautious about them.
Once they finish up the young guy leaves the room and the other guy turns to me and says "with that attitude about bikes he will end up dead within a year of owning one" and he walked away.
Counterpoint: If I had a motorcycle it'd be easier to pick up my fellow gays.
Also, fuck opt-in organ donor nonsense. You're dead? Your organs aren't destroyed or unusable? They should be donated. What are you going to do, complain about it? You're dead.
Yeah I get that - my local hospital's blood donation program keeps the blood for patients rather than selling it for research, i switched to donating there so that the people who are already getting fucked over by our shitass healthcare system don't end up dying from lack of blood. I'm O neg so i get hounded for my blood a lot. and if i'm dead idrc if someone makes a profit putting my kidneys in another person to save their life, at least they went to good use.
I’m O neg so i get hounded for my blood a lot
random question, have you ever had an ulcer? and what is your diet like?
No, but it seems like it's only a matter of time considering how bad my acid reflex can get. Diet's super inconsistent but decent rn. How come?
Yeah that’s a hella specific question and now I’m curious what kind of cool crank shit they’re going to reply with.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3497328/#b22-ijms-13-13308
type Os have more stomach acid and higher ulcer rates (but lower stomach cancer rates)
Huh, that's neat! Didn't realize that my blood type was a factor in all my stomach problems lol
We have an opt-out system here, I opted out. I just don't feel comfortable with it. Just out of curiosity, do you all think everyone should have a rationally sound argument for opting out?
Yeah you should have a pretty good reason for opting out. Some religious beliefs don't like organ donation.
But to me it seems a selfish decision to opt out. You aren't using the organs anymore, you don't need them.
There are children on the waiting list who are going to die if they don't get organs.
Thousands of people die every year just in the US because they are waiting for kidneys
Because we have an opt-out system, the vast majority of people choose to donate their organs. About 73% of people will donate their organs. As opposed to the US, where only about 54% decide to donate. I think there's a meaningful difference between those circumstances.
Not to mention that "only 3 in 1,000 people die in a way that allows for deceased organ donation". Which makes the chance of me personally being responsible for someone not being able to be helped very small.
So the problem is more a matter of how people die than how many people donate.
It's your own body. If there is any sphere of the world in which having a non-rational/a-rational position on is totally valid, it's your own body imo
it's not yours, yes - but it is you - or, it will have been you.
Organs aren't simple possessions to be utilized, they are what constitute you. Sure, you can look at the utility function of a bit of human tissue shaped into an organ and decide that it may better serve someone else at a point where you are no longer - but that decision should be your own conscious decision, in my humble opinion.I'm a donor myself, but I find it questionable to try and guilt or otherwise coerce or even worse, rationalize people into donating.
my ghost will write a sternly worded letter about how its creepy that im inside of someone while theyre inside of someone who is potentially inside of another person and it will certainly be received
The Premature Burial by Edgar Allen Poe. Just kidding - the issue is that organ harvesting has to come from a body where the organs aren't without oxygen for extended periods of time, because once they are deprived of oxygen they are useless. This means a good chunk come from brain dead (NIH) donors, which is determined somewhat ad hoc.
Currently, there are no specific protocols in place for this, and there are notable variations in the management strategies implemented across different transplant centers.
A potential organ donor is defined by the presence of either brain death or a catastrophic and irreversible brain injury that leads to fulfilling the brain death criteria...Evaluation of brain death should be considered in patients who have suffered a massive, irreversible brain injury with identifiable causes
The issue here being that sometimes people recover after brain death (Medscape) but we don't know because they're immediately harvested (same source) and the determination of brain death is, again, ad hoc:
there is no way of knowing how many people recover from brain death because they are usually quickly removed from life support or become organ donors
Recently, however...some experts (question) whether brain-dead patients are truly dead and more families (have a right) to legally fight a loved one's brain death diagnosis
You’re dead.
He rubs his hands together at all the money he could make now via the organs. And all the money he could make later once he gets his AI-Brain tech to work.
The hurdle is the annoying waiting for the traditional metrics used to measure death. If only he could get the body a day or two ahead. Better organs. Better brains. He'll find loopholes. Or make his own.
He laughs to himself. He wonders if Bezos he thinking the same thing. Of course he is - Musk says to himself.
harvesting organs of alienated people
Every organ unharvested is socially murdering the potential recipient. In my ideal society, donations would be opt-out and only for some actual reason like a medical disqualification. There's no reason children should die just so some selfish hog can be buried with their kidneys like a pharaoh. Let me drive around in one of those Chinese vans like it's an ice cream truck.
in my ideal society there's no reason to enforce 'actual reasons', because people wouldn't want to opt out to begin with :shrug-outta-hecks:
That'd be even better, but if social responsibility can't be taught it can at least be enforced. They can sign their opt-out paperwork on the back of a kid who needs a transplant instead of a table.
That sounds amazing, let hogs see that there is a real person they're hurting.
Eh, agree to disagree I guess. I don't think you can enforce - or teach - social responsibility, you can only hope to cultivate it in people. Naturally, there's enough there already, and if it weren't for capital beating it out of us, beginning at an early age, I'm sure there would be enough organs to go around overall - and people who wanted to keep theirs, for whatever reason, could chose to do so without some kid going empty.
I think this take kind of ignores communal and collective ways to enforce social responsibility, like redistribution systems and customs intended to keep people from thinking they're more important than the community. They're not very common in the individualism-poisoned West, but they're very common in indigenous communities that make collective life the first and foremost thing, at least until they're either genocided or westernized out of existence. We should try to understand them and learn from them when thinking of our "ideal" worlds, too.
Yea, that's exactly what I was getting at, actually; to collectively produce a culture where it's just the normal thing to do. At that point, there's no need to 'enforce' it, since it simply reproduces itself.
Gotcha, no problem. It is easy to fall into the trap of the "noble savage" though. These kinds of societies have these enforcement mechanisms because there is a tension between the individual and the collective, so by way of customs they try to nip it in the bud, with varying degrees of success. People are capable of much more generosity and community than what capitalism allows them to, but societies are still self-sustaining, and collectively desirable behaviors don't just spring out of the blue: they are maintained by the society promoting them and discouraging any behaviors that run counter to the collective.
I'm with you, I just wouldn't really call custom and social practice enforcement, I guess. The force in enforcement evokes, for me, notions of state violence - and while that's certainly not the only way to think about enforcement, especially when it comes to notion such as reinforcement... I just prefer different vocabulary, I figure
Oh I see! Sorry, I guess I didn't catch what you meant. I suppose that to me enforcement has more of an "active" connotation, so when you were talking about having desirable collective behaviors without enforcement, my mind just jumped at the notion of "everything will seamlessly work out and no one will have selfish ideas of try to fuck other people over if we all just agree that that is wrong", which is one that I find often, so I wanted to point out that even in collectivist societies, there's still a bit of an "active" reminder of the importance of the collective, in what I guess I see as societal "enforcement".
Anyway, thanks for clearing it out, and I hope I made my point clear too. Cheers!
all good, I think I got your point. If anything, if that state of 'seamless working out' can exist, it certainly won't be brought about seamlessly, without friction or struggle - and it will need continual, collective, internal reinforcement to persist.
anyways, good talk. Cheers!
Two features of this association suggest that it is causal: first, nearly all of it is concentrated among men, who account for over 90 percent of all motorcyclist deaths
Dudes rock
when I die put my organs in some PMC natsec ghoul, I have trained them to purposefully fail if they detect excess liberalism in the bloodstream.
I have trained them to purposefully fail if they detect excess liberalism in the bloodstream.
Then how are you here posting
Motorcycle helmets are like the coolest looking part of riding a motorcycle lmao.
reminds me of a joke
"I'm sorry, but you are going to need a heart transplant and I'm afraid the waiting list is very long"
"Isn't there anything that can be done?"
"Well, it is raining, so let's hope someone doesn't wear their helmet"lifted truck dudes can't see pedestrians for shit either, since they need to sit 3 feet above everyone else at all times or they'll feel like a little person
all this talk of donorcycles and shit. i ride, my life isn't worth less than a car driver. sure, it's more dangerous, but life is dangerous and i choose to make my own decisions about where i draw that line. i agree about having to opt out of organ donation being ideal and it saddens me the attitude people have towards people who ride, saying they will end up donating organs instead of just… everybody who dies and has in tact organs? the worst motorcycle accident i ever witnessed was 100% the fault of an SUV who nearly killed 2 riders and yet THEY are the donorcycles? no, they're victims of an infrastructure that is wildly unsafe and alienated. bikes might be a luxury in the US but bikes are much more efficient and a better solution than cars any day of the week, (i'd still prefer trains) so really fuck cars, if anything.
The long standing dark joke in ERs and some specialties is that motorcyclists are donor mobiles, donors on wheels, etc. It's totally an ego thing too, wearing a helmet is 'uncool'.
wearing a helmet is ‘uncool’
How is this uncool? It's literally one of the coolest things related to motorcycles.
.5/10 on the :jesse-wtf: scale
Written incredibly coherently but randomly dropping in a 2011 study from an economics journal is a real "what?" Moment. C
That's why at hospitals they call them "donorcycles."
Healthy young men for the most part, with head injuries that make them excellent candidates for organ harvesting. Why do you think there was such a big push for organ donor status on drivers licenses?
"But they'll just let you die if you're in a serious accident to harvest your organs!" I so WISH this were true. My personal greatest fear is being maimed in an accident but surviving in a crippled state unable to kill myself. If I'm ever that seriously hurt, please just take all my organs. But the reality is, this is just an urban myth with no factual basis.
Yeah, it's one of the dumber conspiracy theories out there. ER trauma surgeons are incentivized to only care about one thing: the survival rate of their patients. Keeping this score up as high as possible is EVERYTHING for their career. Why would they risk it to save some random other person unassigned to them? The boards that oversee transplant waiting lists operate independently from the hospitals themselves.
Like most American accusations, the one of supposed Chinese harvesting of organs in hospitals is projection too.
