Yes, it's a steal at $800... but could I get it without the stuffed raccoon?

bongy

bongy

Yes, No, and Excellent, in that order.

bongy

And in that chicken, there was some coke, e-i-e-i-o...

bongy

This came up about a year ago, and I ran a regression analysis of return of tax dollar on voting, controlling for geographic size, population, and density. That's probably a better way of doing it than with a binomial test, since you take account of parametric differences in spending returns, and not just whether the return is greater or less than 1:1. Long story short, there is a very robust correlation, and it's not explained by basic differences in population or geography. About a quarter of the variance in return on federal spending is explained by voting patterns. Which is pretty huge.

bongy

Wait, the liberals are the bad guys in Australia?

bongy

I suppose I should have used <joke> tags, but your point is well taken.

bongy

Does it have more than one chord? Cause I'll only listen to it if it has more than one chord.

bongy

Could just be regression to the mean. Climate tends to change almost everywhere. In a place that's not particularly wet or dry, the change can mean either more wetness or more dryness. In a place that's already extremely wet, odds are that random perturbations helped make it that wet in the first place, so any change is liable to make it less wet (i.e., error cancels out in the long term). So it's not clear that this is particularly surprising.

bongy

That's not fair! Rizzuto's not a word! He's a baseball player!

bongy

That's a lot of work trying to make Murdoch's statement seem fiendishly clever, but after reading all that, I'm still gonna go with (a) last gasp of a Luddite.

bongy

This is a nice example of base rate neglect. The reality is that, in any large economy--and certainly in the global economy--a large number of companies are going to have serious layoffs in any given two-week period. That's true even in the best of economic times. What we'd really need to know is how this type of layoff activity stacks up against "normal" periods during other economic cycles. Without a quantitative comparison of that sort, these types of observations are not really helpful.

bongy

Actually, it's pretty brilliant. What it does is where there's a bank transaction, and the interests are computed in the thousands a day in fractions of a cent, which it usually rounds off. What this does is it takes those remainders and puts it into an account.

That's the beauty of it. Each withdrawal is a fraction of a percent. That's too small to notice. Take a few million withdrawals a day, space it out over a few years, that's 700 billion dollars.

bongy

Ok, look. I'm going to respond to you one last time, since you seem to be under the impression someone owe you something. I'm not in the least apologetic for anything I've said, for reasons that'll shortly become clear. But I'm willing to indulge you one last time. So let's review your "evidence" piece by piece.

Initial denial letter, page 1. The most obvious thing that stands out about this letter is that we can't see the whole page. Why not? Maybe it's because it doesn't fit in the picture; but then, that could be easily remedied by taking a second picture (and I'm sure we'd all appreciate it if you did that). Or maybe it's because it's clear from the context that what the cropped part of the letter says is that any information you've provided does not indicate that you need GH supplementation. Basically, Aetna is saying that you haven't sent them any documentation to show that (a) your GH response is low enough to warrant supplementation and (b) your lack of GH impairs your quality of life. Now, I know you'd like for us to believe your story that this means they're tools of the devil and are out to screw you over. But the reality is that, as you yourself have pointed out, HGH is widely abused and plenty of people try to con doctors and insurance companies into paying for it when they don't need it. I don't doubt that Aetna does in fact engage in shady practices and routinely screws people over; but I don't see how their refusal to pay for a drug that is widely abused among adults and genuinely indicated in a tiny, tiny proportion of cases without supporting documentation in any way reflects poorly on them. Perhaps you'd care to share the information you sent them, since they clearly indicate they received something from you.
Second page. I confess I'm amazed you actually went to the trouble of circling the clause where you think they invited you to sue them. I do hope you realize that this is boilerplate legalese they are required to include by law. You're not special; this isn't their way of mocking you and telling you they think you're a joke. I'm quite sure that a phrase like this is present on virtually all denial letters. Is this really what you were referring to when you said in the original thread that they "wrote me a letter saying my only recourse was to sue them"? Really? And you think showing us what they actually said (or didn't say, since it is, after all, attached to every denial) makes you seem like less of a liar? This is evidence of Aetna mocking and threatening you? Why don't you show us the letter in its entirety, without convenient cropping, and with the documentation you sent them that led them to conclude you don't have excessively low blood levels and marked functional impairment? That might be more convincing.
The box of GH. Ok. I'm happy to concede that this suggests you've probably taken GH at least once before. No objections there. But then, I never suggested you hadn't taken GH. What I objected to was the notion that you were dying of some terrible disease because your insurance refused to cover life-saving medication that you otherwise couldn't afford. I stand by that assertion completely, and I think the "evidence" you've kindly provided here only makes that clearer.
The prescription label. This really is the smoking gun. Why you would actually want to post this is beyond me, because it falsifies a number of claims you've made. First, let's observe that this is a 6 mg box and not a 15 mg box. It's awfully convenient for you to now all of a sudden claim that your dose went up just after this, but that you can't find the 15 mg box anywhere. Considering you claim to have been on and off the drug for years, with "miraculous" results, it beggars the imagination to think that a 0.3 mg daily dose worked wonderfully for so long, and all of a sudden in July '09, you had an epiphany and realized that really only a 15 mg dose would do, and that the miraculous 0.3 mg dose hadn't been cutting it after all. Again, I hope you realize this comes off as one more ridiculous just-so story.

Still, let's set that aside and pretend this is legit. This is evidence that, at least at one point in time, Dr. Kelly Wirfel saw fit to prescribe you a daily dose of 0.3 mg of GH. This 6 mg box was supposed to last you 20 days. Now, even if we suppose that you really did get a subsequent prescription for 15 mg, which frankly seems unlikely, this totally invalidates your claim that you can't afford at least some GH. I pointed out repeatedly that a man who claims to be dying for lack of 15 mg of a drug wouldn't be sitting there taking nothing; he'd be paying for whatever amount he could afford. GH has a roughly linear dose-response curve. By your own account, you're capable of paying for the 6 mg dose (and if you aren't, then I suspect it's because you don't really make 100k).

And look, the fact that you continue to contradict yourself and tell more lies isn't helping your case. Your original post stated that you couldn't afford the medication, which you seem pretty assured cost $8,000/month, and you went to all sorts of trouble to explain how you knew this and what the doses were and how other people had no clue what it costs even though they kept pointing you to sources. Well, now we find out that you actually "honestly don't know how much it costs in 2009". How is this possible? Could you really be ignorant of the fact that if you have a legitimate prescription in your hand, walk into a pharmacy, and say "I would like to fill this prescription", they are obligated to fill your prescription unless they think it is fraudulent or (in some states) have moral objection? They can, of course, tell you that your insurance won't cover it; at which point everyone in the world buy you would immediately say "well how much would it be out of pocket?" The fact that you don't have any clue what it costs really only affirms the fact that you clearly never actually walked into a pharmacy with that prescription to fill the drug. Let me repeat that: The idea that you wouldn't actually have any clue how much HGH costs after writing a long post complaining that you couldn't afford it when it has been prescribed to you and you have filled the same drug before is completely ludicrous. Do you not understand how ridiculous your responses make you look? Don't you see that every time you answer a question, you contradict your story several more times?

As to what the truth of the matters really is, I don't know. Frankly, I don't really care; any sympathy I had for you initially quickly evaporated when it became clear you were lying through your teeth about dying. But if I had to guess, I'd say it's something like this: you have a condition that is, at the very least, alleviated by taking GH. Whether it rises to the level of requiring GH, I doubt. That you are not actually dying for lack of supplemental GH I am quite certain, for all of the aforementioned reasons. But at one point you had a prescription for 6 mg of GH. Then you lost your job, or changed your job, and lost your insurance. Now you have new insurance. It turns out your new insurance won't cover GH unless you meet certain requirements. As far as we can tell, you don't appear to meet these requirements, because despite your claims that there is no detectable level of GH in your bloodstream, Aetna doesn't seem to be under that impression. While I'm sure Aetna would find many excuses to deny you care, I very much doubt that they would outright lie about your levels. But let's set that aside. Let's say you can't get Aetna to cover your drugs. You're left in a position where you're quite capable of paying for the 6 mg dose that was working very well for you for a long time, but don't seem willing to do that. Nor do you seem willing to go to the trouble of crossing the Mexican border, or doing any number of other things that other people suggest. Despite the fact that you claim this drug will save your life and that you're in horrible suffering. Well, that's a lie, plain and simple. There is no other explanation for it.

To summarize this long-winded diatribe, let me point out the bottom line, which is that, even on the most charitable reading (which I'm hardly inclined to give you at this point), you come off as a dirty liar. You lied about some combination of (a) dying, (b) making 100k/year, (c) not being able to afford the medication out of pocket, (d) being rejected by Aetna for spurious reasons and told that your only recourse was to sue, (d) not being able to move to a different state because your inability to tolerate cold weather is apparently worse than dying, (e) requiring a massive dose of GH, (f) having undetectable levels of GH in your bloodstream, (g) being on GH supplementation from age 2 to 18 and "longer than any other human on the planet", (h) being famous among endocrinologists, (i) knowing how much your medication cost when you clearly don't... and so on. Really, this is just a partial list; I'm sure if I went back over everything you said again I'd find many more hyperbolic and just plain false statements. The fact is, your story is completely inconsistent. At best, you lied about several of these things. But given that we know you lied, and that we know you have a track record for lying, it seems like the reasonable position to hold is that you've lied about most if not everything.

Now, I've said all I have to say about this; I just don't have any more time to waste on your persistent trolling. You're free to reply and plead your case as you see fit, of course. I wish you the best of luck in trying to change people's minds, though having seen the way you operate, I suspect you're only going to make things worse for yourself the longer you go on this way.

bongy

Wood drastically... Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth. You got that from Vickers. "Work in Essex County", page 98, right? Yeah, I read that too. Were you going to plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you, is that your thing, you come onto reddit, you read some obscure passage, and then pretend, you pawn it off as your own, as your own idea just to impress some redditors and embarrass wilse? You see, the sad thing about a guy like you is that in 50 years, you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped a 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have gotten for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.

bongy

Look. Here's how it works. You told a story that seems implausible at best and flat out fraudulent at worst. You ignored practical suggestions from people as to how you could go about obtaining the drug you claim you need, repeatedly coming up with obscure reasons why you, a person who claims to be dying, couldn't go to the trouble of jumping through a few minor hoops.

I came along and pointed out some gaping holes in your story. You had (and continue to have) every opportunity to respond to the concerns point-by-point. You could, for example, explain why a man who claims to be slowly dying in excruciating agony yet makes six figures and purports to have a set of very marketable skills would refuse to move somewhere where he could get health care on the grounds that it's too cold. You could explain why you don't take even a little bit of HGH, even though you can surely afford a partial dose on your large salary. You could furnish us with the correspondence you claim you received from the insurance companies, drug companies, and Medicare. You could provide references that affirm your status as a wonderboy of HGH care in the 1980s. There are many, many other things you could do that would help convince Reddit that your story is sound. But you haven't done any of that.

What you have done is resort to the same ploy you started with: beg for sympathy and claim it's all a big misunderstanding, and that people like the insurance companies and your ex-girlfriend (if she ever was that) and your "old nemesis" are out to get you. Well it doesn't work that way. If you're going to make implausible claims, you should be willing to back them up when people ask for support. It's not as though anyone's asking you to furnish videotaped interviews with the doctors who treated you when you were three years old; all people want is some basic defense of some patently absurd parts of your story, and some material evidence that supports your claims. Honestly, if your story is true, I don't see why this would be a problem. Of course, if it's not true (which it clearly isn't), you really have no leg to stand on, and can't furnish any corroborating evidence, which would explain your current behavior.

As to the notion that I'm libeling you: spare me. What I did was link to (a) your own posts, in which you make crazy claims about things that have happened to you; (b) your blog, in which you make crazy claims about things that have happened to you; (c) other people's websites, which reproduce crazy things you've said about things that have happened to you; and (d) reproductions of emails you've sent that very clearly show you demanding money for a service you have no ability to provide. If you want to try your luck in courts, I wish you luck. But as I'm sure you recognize, you will have a hard time getting a lawyer to stop laughing long enough to take your case. It's not libel when someone points to things that you have said and that you have admitted to doing as evidence that you have some mental health problems. But if you feel strongly that you've been wronged, perhaps you should consider suing yourself for libel.

Oh, and for the record, I do not know you personally and had never heard of you until yesterday. I would have gladly gone on with my life never hearing of you, except it seemed quite clear that you were fraudulently taking advantage of people's goodwill and sympathy to further your own ends, which made me angry. So I took the trouble to do an hour of googling. I'm not sure why you think only someone who knew you well could accumulate "years and years" of all this information about you given that it's all in the public domain and easily accessible. (It's also kind of strange for you to admit that, no? Hard to maintain you're being libeled when you basically conceded this is all real stuff from your past.) For a world-class PHP programmer and SEO guy, you seem to have surprisingly little insight into the capacities of modern search engines. If it bothers you that any old redditor with an internet connection could uncover incidents in your past that you are ashamed of, perhaps you should worry more about keeping those incidents from happening in the first place, and less about conjuring paranoid fantasies to explain why people are out to get you after the fact.

bongy

People. This story is a hoax. Hopeseekr may or may not have a congenital condition that requires human growth hormone (probably not), but he most certainly is not dying of it, and very likely isn't sick at all. The story itself is full of holes that have already been noted in this thread. Here are a few:

Hopeseekr claims to be dying because of a lack of HGH, yet lives in Pearland, Texas, about 6 hours from the Mexican border. Mexican pharmacies, by his own admission, sells HGH at a much more affordable rate. Yet Hopeseekr would apparently rather die slowly and excruciatingly than drive to Mexico every 3 months to fill a prescription there.
He rebuffs suggestions to move to other parts of the country that have health care plans because they're too cold, and he doesn't tolerate cold well. So we can conclude that Hopeseekr prefers to die slowly in warm weather than to live indefinitely in more temperate climates.
Hopeseekr claims he can't get on Medicare because he makes too much money. Apparently he'd rather die making $100k than live making $30k.
He apparently requires 4 cc a day, which he can't afford, but apparently prefers to go entirely without the drug than to take a partial dose that he can afford.
As many people have commented, HGH does not cost $8200/month, and as locke123 points out, Hopeseekr doesn't seem to be aware of what a normal replacement dose of HGH is.

There are plenty of other holes I won't mention, not to mention a number of bizarre and narcissistic claims Hopeseekr's thrown out in response to questions from other redditors (e.g., that he is "one of the best PHP programmers in the state of Texas", has "met two of my doctors who recognized my charts because they did their doctoral theses on me", and has "been on artificial growth hormones longer than any human on the planet"). These are hardly the kinds of claims that a well-balanced individual would throw around cavalierly.

Of course, Hopeseekr isn't a well-balanced individual. He has a long history of similar histrionics. As this comment notes, he's already posted wildly implausible stories on reddit in the past. By his own admission, he once abducted a minor in the state of Ohio, spent time in jail, and is apparently now under a restraining order. His blog, now rarely maintained (and curiously, completely devoid of any reference to a life-threatening health condition) consists largely of paranoid anti-government screeds. He once tried to extort money from sites by promising to ensure that they weren't delisted from search engines--for the nominal fee of $200. He also maintains a rather creepy countdown clock at givemehope.com, which I would like to believe is innocuous, but seems much more likely to represent something morbid--like, say, the date when his restraining order expires.

Now, if you want to disregard both the holes in Hopeseekr's story and all of the characterological evidence, and prefer to believe that he's an otherwise-troubled individual who just happens to have a wildly implausible but nonetheless genuine and heartbreaking story to tell about his medical plight, fine. But recognize that the odds are not in your favor.

Just to be clear, the point of this comment isn't to discredit the idea that the US health care system is in dire straits. Quite the opposite. I'm a firm believer in the need for reform (ideally with a strong public option, and eventually, a single-payer system), and think that the fact that thousands of Americans die every year for lack of health care is an inexcusable tragedy. But that's precisely why Hopeseekr's histrionics are so offensive. They trivialize the very real suffering that many Americans are going through, offer ammunition to critics of health care reform who charge that proponents of reform are making things up, and selfishly exploit the sympathy and goodwill that redditors have been quick to offer. Hopeseekr clearly doesn't need our help; if he has any rare condition at all, it's that he's a pathological liar who just took reddit for a ride.

UPDATE: the OP responds here. My rebuttal is here.

bongy

So, just to make sure I understand what you're saying: you are under the belief that you will be dead in three years, but you don't think you would accept a job that paid 50,000 GBP because it's a bit cold and expensive. You also seem averse to moving to states like Oregon or Massachusetts that have public health plans because they're too cold. So what you're basically saying is you'd rather die a slow and agonizing death (according to you) than live out a more or less normal lifespan in chilly weather. Is that a fair assessment, or should we just chalk down this whole story as a hoax?

bongy

You make it sound like people crossing the border routinely get strip-searched. It really isn't so difficult to smuggle a few vials across the border. And as other people have pointed out, suppose you get caught, then what? There isn't a DA in the US who would decide to press charges after finding out the circumstances. And let's not forget, we're talking about a life and death situation. The idea that a person wouldn't risk a slap on the wrist (or, for that matter, even jail time) to save their life by driving a couple of hours is flatly absurd.

bongy

I hate to cast aspersions on people complaining about the US health care system, because it clearly is well and truly fucked. But this story is either an outright hoax, or the OP is delusional. First, as a number of other people in this thread have pointed out, HGH doesn't cost that much. Second, even if HGH did cost that much, it's not as though the medication is all or nothing. Surely if the OP requires "4 cc a day, or $4200 for a 2 week supply", he could be taking 1 cc a day, 2 cc a day, or however much he could afford. If you make $100,000, and need HGH to stay alive, there is no fucking way you would be sitting around complaining that you aren't on your medication because you can't afford it. You would be taking as much as you can, and complaining that it's not enough. Which, judging by the responses below to people's questions, is not what the OP is claiming.

Third, as a couple of other comments have pointed out, it's ridiculously easy to drive across the Mexican border, fill some prescriptions, and drive back. Rinse and repeat every 3 or 6 months. As people have pointed out, there isn't a DA in the country who would press these charges. The idea that the OP is sitting around waiting to die without even making an effort to fill prescriptions in Mexico is ludicrous. He's also managed to ignore pretty much all of the comments that suggest this course of action, while replying in great sordid detail to the ones that suggest moving to the UK or Canada or some such solution.

Fourth, "I have been on artificial growth hormones longer than any human on the planet". Enough said. Really? I mean, really? Forgetting the fact that it's unlikely you'd even know that even if it were true, what are the odds of an otherwise-implausible story having this additional little detail? Come on.

Fifth, and in the same vein, "I have met two of my doctors who recognized my charts because they did their doctoral theses on me." That's odd. I wasn't aware MDs earn doctorates, or write doctoral theses, or make a habit of writing them on case studies, let alone two separate doctors writing nonexistent dissertations for nonexistent medical doctorates on the same remarkable case. (I'm aware some countries require theses, and a select few prestigious US universities do, but it's certainly not the norm!) Of course, if this were true, one would expect the OP to be able to produce a relevant article or two in the peer-reviewed literature, no? It's not as though it would give his identity away; case studies are anonymous. But I see nothing of the sort.

Sixth, the OP is "one of the best PHP programmers in the state of Texas"? Really? I suppose this might be true, but how would a person know that? And if it were true, wouldn't said PHP programmer be gainfully employed and/or able to provide some evidence of previous work for clients (if freelancing)? [Edit: I see the OP is one of the authors of xMule. That provides at least some credibility, if not evidence of six-figure earnings.]

Seventh, the OP is dying in Texas, but his cold intolerance keeps him from moving somewhere where he could actually live, and, given appropriate medication, presumably deal with said intolerance? Really? Doesn't Oregon have heating? Can a man who earns $100k/year not afford central air and a warm overcoat?

You get the picture. The story is ridiculous, and this doesn't even touch on its medical details, which I imagine are equally implausible. But not being a medical doctor (I haven't written my doctoral thesis yet), I'm not in a position to dispute those.

The sad thing about this is there are enough real cases of people dying because the US health care system fucked them over that one doesn't need to make up new ones. This story just draws attention away from people who need real sympathy and help. When it turns out to be a hoax later, people on the other side of the ball get to sneer and point out how supporters of reform have to make shit up to get their point across. It's a waste of space, and should be downvoted into oblivion. The OP certainly doesn't need earnest advice from people about where in the world to move and how to go about illegally obtaining a drug he probably doesn't need to begin with.

bongy

So basically, we have one fiendishly clever yet passive-aggressive chimp who'd rather stick it to the evil researchers by giving them the cold shoulder than play along with their simple testing games and earn lots of delicious bananas. Right.

bongy

Come now... Alan Greenspan's already fessed up to overlooking a small flaw in the way the world works. He may have got all up in our economy and messed it up pretty bad, but he did say he was sorry. Sort of. Can't we all hold hands and move on?

bongy

Personnel at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, report extracting 52 foreign objects that 10 teenage girls deliberately embedded in their arms, hands, feet, ankles and necks over the last three years, including needles, staples, wood, stone, glass, pencil lead and a crayon.

I'm not sure 10 cases over 3 years really passes for a "new teen affliction", but it's a safe bet that it's about to become so in the wake of this article. Way to go, Tribune.

Four-Year Club	Inciteful Link 2009-10-28
Best Comment 2009-10-28

bongy

TROPHY CASE

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