I won't stand for Carter slander: he was a darn good president too. What he wasn't good at, was politicking, and that was because he also was a good man, to a fault. He gave an honest answer to a question on if he had ever lusted after a woman who was not his wife, and reaped a scandal.
I just listened to a the rest is history podcast and he had a few things he was lacking and wasn’t particularly flattering but he was an upstanding citizen at the very least.
This is amazing, those things are an absolutely nasty parasite from out of a sci-fi horror movie. If you drink contaminated water with them it releases its larva into your body which burrow out of your digestive systems into your body consuming your nutrients for a year or more as it grows, then migrates towards your legs and creates debilitatingly painful blisters trying to force its way out over the course of weeks, and when you submerge the wound in water to relieve the burning pain it releases its larva into the water to infect others. Also don't try to pull it out even when its halfway out of your body or it will snap and die and give you a super nasty infection as it decays inside of you.
>Also don't try to pull it out even when its halfway out of your body or it will snap and die and give you a super nasty infection as it decays inside of you.
Pardon probably stupid question, yet i'm wondering why (under local or general anesthesia of course) it isn't possible to "drain snake" the remainder of the worm and to clean/disinfect the worm channel that way. After all we insert similar flexible stuff into blood vessels from say thigh all the way up to the heart.
As you might expect from the description -- largely passed on via contaminated water -- the guinea worm is mostly present in areas of extreme poverty. Even if such a treatment were feasible, it would be inaccessible to most of the relevant population.
Ivermectin is a very good dewormer! Most 2020 crap studies were easy to make because ivermectin was already distributed to big populations as a dewormer.
I'm the guy that every time someone calls it a good horse dewormer I reply:
"And a good human dewormer too!"
And that may be responsible for some false positives in ivermectin studies for COVID - if a patient has a parasitic infection as well as COVID, treating the parasites will improve their outcome.
Wasn't the ivermectin hypothesis based on it blocking NS3 helicase preventing double-stranded viral RNA from being unwound after replication? Paxlovid targets a few steps earlier by blocking 3CL protease that chops viral RNA into functional parts of a virus.
True. But you can't get a prescription for the human version unless you actually have worms. So if you're taking it for some other reason, you're probably getting the version for horses, which you can buy by the bucket.
People were literally buying horse dewormer when their doctors wouldn't prescribe it for them. "Influencers" were selling it. So the media were being accurate. To the extent that this made people look dumb, the intent was mostly to shame them into trying something more effective.
Well then, it's good you didn't say that then, considering that ivermectin has been on the WHO list of essential medicines since 1987 and its discoverers were awarded the 2015 Nobel Price in Physiology or Medicine for it.
Saying that something might be "finally something" that ivermectin can help with would have been embarrassing.
It would have been especially embarrassing because the link you gave gives two things ivermectin helps with. After concluding that ivermectin did not affect the guinea worms it says:
> No adverse reaction to treatment was seen. It appears that ivermectin can be used safely as mass chemotherapy against onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis in areas where guinea-worm is also endemic.
They are saying that if a patient has onchocerciasis or lymphatic filariasis it is safe to use go ahead and use ivermectin (which is the normal treatment for those) to treat those, even if the patient has guinea worms.
Anything that annihilates bed bugs is a net positive to the world. Drinking poison out of spite for those sons of the devil is well within reason. To hell with those infralings.
> It acts most strongly on glutamate-gated chloride channels, which vertebrates don't even have.
They are like little holes in the wall of the cell of worms that can be opened and closed, and ivermectin locks them in the open position. A much better and more technical explanation https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/191
I worked for the Carter Center in South Sudan for a little less than a year in 2011. It was an extraordinarily tough job and required perseverance, humility, creative problem solving, negotiation, and acceptance. Events outside our control, like civil war, made eradication even harder.
The Carter Center teams should be very proud of what they accomplished. It would’ve been nice to get it done before Jimmy passed though
Consider what you might choose to do for the public good with the 30% of your income that is taken from you in the name of the public good.
Philanthropy is a predictable outcome of an individual having met the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
Not to mention the one meal per day that many children would otherwise not eat. And sometimes the free breakfast that keeps their gnawing hunger at bay long enough for them to learn something in school.
If you've ever worked with a church you know that donation and good will is not a way to ensure anything is structurally sound. Donations always come with asterisks.
Nobody wants to make sure the roof is shingled and doesn't leak but everybody leaves money for new stained glass windows or the organ that nobody knows how to play.
> Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
Many, many fewer than you assume.
Libertarians like to make lots of good-sounding promises to justify their favored radical policy, but it's bullshit and the promises don't pan out when tested [1]. By that point, the libertarian has gotten what he wanted and moved on.
[1] Or their policy was already tried and already failed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387, leading to reforms to fix the problems that they're now mad about and want to undo.
Is there evidence that it happens? And that it serves the public good, not the personal interests of the wealthy? Do we need another $100 million given to a health program accessible only to the wealthy, or funding for public health? To a business school or art museum, or to arts programs for public schools?
Philanthropy is anti-democratic; the people don't choose what is important to support, the wealthy few do. You can see that in the relatively poor public goods in the US, which has much lower taxes relative to peers.
How would you draw the line? The common cold, tuberculosis, malaria, and hookworm are all caused by foreign bodies which enter the human body, reproduce, and cause illness; the only difference is the size of those agents (virus, bacterium, single-cell parasite, multicellular parasite).
I guess the same way a virus is a disease, in that a small living thing gets inside you and harms you / causes immune system reactions?
I think technically you get a parasite and then it causes a disease in reaction, but if it's a parasite you can spread it's basically fine to model it / talk about eradicating it in the same way right?
We use "disease" for maladies caused by infections (virus, bacteria), and we use "disease" for maladies caused by genetics (cancer), caused by chemicals (lung disease), and so forth. So yeah, a parasite certainly would qualify I think.
Eradication of the Guinea worm will be one of the huge milestones in the history of humankind. Just reading about them is nightmarish. In 1986 estimated 3,500,000 people had an infestation. Now we're well below 100. However eradication also needs animal cases to go to zero which are still in the hundreds.
Anyway, really great news about humanity beating one of its many terrible enemies just like the Malaria vaccine.
I mentioned in another comment how hard it is for our brains to really comprehend the orders of magnitude difference between all animal cases (~680) and the former number of human cases (3.5M).
It would take ~5000 years at the current annual rate of animal cases to match the number of human cases just 40 years ago.
That's The Great Pyramid of Giza ago time... PLUS the amount of time since Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael roamed the earth.
The cool thing is that at a few hundred, one could theoretically* round up all (known) animal cases left. That's truly incredible work getting to this point if you think about it.
* Yes, geopolitical issues, geography, and plenty of other reasons might make this somewhat impossible... but the fact that we can actively picture a few hundred animals in our brains means that it's a very attainable goal.
The eradication program works by offering cash rewards for reporting cases in areas where the worm is present. Those reports are then investigated and followed to prevent transmission and identify the source.
Clever. I wonder if the same model can be reused for other diseases.
Any individual presenting with the disease who meets all the criteria for containment is now rewarded with 500 South Sudanese pounds (SSP). The informer is given 100 SSP.
I’m not sure it is clever, because you’re bound to get an entrepreneur who infects their local school to farm rewards. It’s inevitable with these kinds of schemes.
It has been done for snakes. Nobody minds you have a snake farm and sell them to the government. Neighbors may even sell you captured mices.
On the other hand, infecting the children at the school will make everyone go to your house, probably burn it and hit you until you are rescued by the police. Did I mention the local police chief has nephew in the school?
From the article it looks like they are working on that too
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Those are bonkers (low) numbers compared to the 3.5M (human?) cases if I'm to believe the GPs comment.
It's also crazy how much Mother Theresa's quote rings true, even in reverse ("If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.") When I initially read 3.5M cases, I thought "wow, that's a lot", and somehow the 445 animal cases in Cameroon felt (at first) more real and similarly "a lot".
No comment other than interesting how our human brains work and distort how numbers "feel".
Once my rational brain kicked in, realized that's over 5,000 years for the current number of animal cases to match the former number of human cases. The future is awesome.
It was a somewhat recent discovery that there were animal reservoirs escaping detection. Carter had hoped to outlive the worm, but it was thought that the animal pools were going to make full eradication take an additional 20 years.
glancing at the wikipedia page on the topic it seems that it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite
I think the worm reproduce better in humans, so if we can cut humans the population in other animals will hopefully decrease. (And probably add a plan to identify and capture infected animals, to ensure this.)
You are right. Wikipedia write it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and that animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite
It probably helps that the worms don't care. That is, a worm whose ancestors lived in dogs can live in a human no problem and vice versa.
If you eradicate GWD in your region but, eh, not in dogs, well people in your region keep getting GWD anyway. But if you eliminate it entirely you're just done. So that's a strong incentive to ensure the latter.
Most drastic options are probably available in the afflicted countries than would be acceptable in many places that haven't had GWD for a hundred years or more. If you tell the population of rural France that military and police are going to start shooting wild animals dead as a disease control measure there will be mass protests. But in South Sudan hey, at least you aren't proposing to shoot all the members of some minority ethnic group.
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Isn't fewer than 1000 infected animals in an area that covers 6 countries pretty good? Obviously there's still work to do, but I would have expected hundreds of thousands or millions of animal cases if it was an epidemic
Few cases is good, but if there are any, the whole machinery of surveillance, treatment, and education has to be in place. As soon as we reach 0 cases for a certain amount of time, all those resources can be redirected to other neglected tropical diseases that haven't been wiped out, like onchocerciasis, loa loa, yaws, lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, and all the others. Yaws in particular is a good candidate for eradication.
Please share this with someone who doesn't know the story yet. Ingenuity alone can't save our species. We also need the will to do good. We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems. Let this be a reminder of what we are capable of.
Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
I mostly agree with what you said, but disagree on one point:
> Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
It is still possible to do good when things are bleak and there is no possible way out - just because doing good is the right thing[1]. Optimism helps a lot for morale, but is not a precondition.
1. e.g. the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine.
> the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine
Optimism doesn't necessarily mean hope. It can mean belief in an afterlife. An end to a suffering. Or gratitude for having someone else in a terrible moment.
I think OP is correct. You can't have good without optimism. Your point, which is also correct, is you can do good without hope.
The philosophical definition just opens up bigger cans of worms that can't be adequately addressed in an HN thread, and have been debated for thousands of years: what is "good"? Perhaps we need a moral framework to answer that, but then, what are morals? "You can't have good without optimism" is a declaration that has to be contextualized, and is far from universal.
I suspect answers couched in terms of individualism will always sound inadequate to questions that are inherently collectivist, such as why people do things "for the greater good" detrimental to their own well-being.
I had a lot of optimism as a teenager in the 80s. And maybe even more during Obama's presidency. Then 2016, 2020, 2024-2026 hit, and I'm at like -89% for optimism.
That is an argument of the pessimists and enemies of the good.
Pessimism is clearly irrational: Look at the world we live in; look what humanity has achieved since the Enlightenment, and in the last century - freedom, peace, and prosperity have swept the world. Diseases are wiped out, we visit the moon and (robotically) other planets, the Internet, etc. etc. etc.
To be pessimistic about our ability to build a better world is bizarre.
Pessimism and optimism are philosophical perspectives (dispositions) and do not necessarily have anything do with doing good or doing bad. Why do you think optimism only precipitates good things? Surely you can imagine a situation (or many) where thinking more positively about a situation than the data warrants leads to bad outcomes?
None of your examples above tie directly to an optimistic disposition. How could you possibly know the disposition of the thousands of humans involved in those endeavors? You are letting your personal disposition color your view of the world (as we all do) and mistaking this for some sort of absolute truth.
> So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
The problem is, that way of thinking is just like the "co2 footprint" - individualise responsibility from where it belongs (=the government) to individual people, and let's be real, outside of the very last action item many people don't have the time and/or the money.
At some point, we (as in: virtually all Western nations) have to acknowledge that our governments are utter dogshit and demand better. Optimism requires trust in that what you work for doesn't get senselessly destroyed the next election cycle.
Okay but also we all still live in democracies, and people are fairly obviously getting what they vote for a lot of the time.
Extrrnalising that to "the government" is to pretend you had no say, or to collectively try and pretend everyone else is with you & which they observably are not.
Edit: and before anyone responds with to me with a quip about money and corporations - money in politics buys advertising and campaigning. It doesn't buy votes directly, and when it does that's corruption and what's done about that is still largely on you the voter to set your priorities at the ballot box.
> I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.
It's not just a lack of desire (apathy). People who want to solve big, collective problems are increasingly up against groups who actively want to not solve the problems and/or make the problems worse. COVID, for example, was so much worse than it had to be, purely from people actively fighting efforts meant to contain it. Efforts to reverse or mitigate Climate Change are routinely and vigorously opposed.
For news about things that are going right, I suggest https://fixthenews.com/. You can get a free weekly email about progress in energy and the environment, national economies, health and medicine, crime etc (or pay for a longer weekly email).
When the the only thing CEOs talk about for every new technology is how many people they are going to put out of work because of it, the collective desire for new technology and progress is understandably lessened.
That you have the mental capacity/structures/language to form the thought should indicate the trajectory you're caught up within. It's disappointing that everything not's resolved during the blip you're you but even a moderately long view provides evidence for optimism.
It will rewire the hard sacrifice of limiting individual wealth to less than a billion dollars per person. Trajectory of present indicates we won't be doing that soon.
It is interesting, I wonder is it possible to get so rich and be kind, probably examples. I'm the kind poor person myself even what money I have I have given too much of it away. In which case I'm a dumbass for doing so but yeah.
His relationship with Epstein and the alleged secret dosing of his wife with antibiotics to clear an STD he gave Melinda from the escorts.
I hadn’t seen Bill’s denial of the STD claim when I made my comment and what went on there is murky according to the below. Bill denies and Melinda expresses sadness. What actually happened?
> Maybe I need to to separate the art from the artist?
Yes. We die but the consequences of our actions resonate indefinitely. Ideas make good idols and people do not. Better Родина-мать зовёт! (a statue in Stalingrad approximately "Motherland [ie Russia] calls") and Liberty, which are both definitely statues about ideas than the Lincoln Memorial for example, or even arguably the "Statue of Unity" which is named for Unity but in practice is explicitly a statue of a specific man - Sardar Patel.
In the US one can retire comfortably on $3 million without relying on Social Security. From the downvotes, it's crazy to me that people think a limit of 300 "ordinary people's" retirements is unreasonable.
I really don't think people understand how little difference there is between having $1 billion and $10 billion or even $100 billion. It makes no difference whatsoever to have that much money; they can't enjoy it.
It's always been that way. People have wanted to do things and others have said "You want to do that? Before you do this?" and so on. The US moon landing was contemporaneous with Whitey On The Moon. There are people who constantly care about things and work on incremental improvements to them that slowly collectively yield an outcome. That's just the mechanism that works.
As an example, consider the Guinea Worm Eradication Program. In theory, sheer bloodymindedness and mass effort could have yielded the majority of the initial effects for great suppression. But the application of modern technology (and I include incentive system design in this category) brings the cost down sufficiently for successful eradication.
Suppression of the disease is possible with old techniques: case maps, word of mouth reporting, logbooks. Now detection to containment is far faster because of digital technology. You can't just dump temephos on everything. You need to target application.
The transmission of data specifically is a problem that most people discount the difficulty of. As an example that more people will be able to relate to, there was a delay in the October 2025 jobs report and it was finally released without an unemployment rate. Many people didn't get why it was hard.
One viral tweet (mirrored by others) went:
> Can't we just...
> (rubs temples)
> Can't we just divide the number of unemployed workers by the work force population? Isn't that the unemployment rate?
But you don't know what those two numbers are. You need machinery to get it. The machinery has a lot of middle management. It cannot function without.
Society today is a complex thing. To get insight into it you need a lot of infrastructure. The fact that we all have electric power, that roads across the country are reliable, that bridges are all up, that planes fly and trains run, is a marvel. It's a marvel enabled by all the bits that people work on, all the boring bits: yes, even procurement software. And yes, corporate law and bureaucracy. All of these things make this possible.
I think a very common thing in online forums is to look at a flowering tree and say "Oh, look at the flowers. They are so beautiful. Instead of such ugly bark and wood why don't we make more flowers?". Building the society that has the muscle to do this is part of making things like this happen.
Have you noticed you don't have Guinea Worms where you live?
It's trivial to not have this problem, the fact that a relatively large fraction of the world's population needed intervention to fix this is an indictment on our collective will.
You may have read, or at least heard about John Green's book "Everything is Tuberculosis". Treating TB is, by comparison to Guinea Worm, really hard. When medics tell John that - all being equal - nobody should die of TB because we could just fix it, they mean with like a hospital full of doctors to diagnose and prescribe treatment, pharmaceutical companies to make the drugs, stuff that looks like technology to you.
To eradicate Guinea Worm Disease you need basic clean water. I'm not talking "Wait, does this tap water meet current national standards for UV treatment?" clean water, I'm talking like, "don't drink directly out of the village pond" clean water. That's really what it takes for this to just go away on its own. The interventions are because crazily in 2026 large numbers of humans do not have ready access to clean drinking water.
This is a Western-centric and specifically Americentric viewpoint. There are plenty in the East for example who are not cynical about their ability to solve existential problems and are instead plowing ahead on solving them, such as massive investment in non-petroleum-based energy sources like solar, wind, and nuclear.
"South Korea is second from bottom on our list in terms of the proportion of people saying their country “is heading in the right direction”, with only 15% stating so. A similar sentiment is also felt about the economy. Pessimism is usually the standard for South Korea; however, their economic indicator score has been particularly low in recent times, with just 8% believing the economy is “good”."
I'm not talking about how people feel about their life or country but about the concrete actions their governments are taking to improve their quality of life. For example, they all have high speed rail, something that is essentially impossible to build in the US, whether it be due to budget, regulations or sheer political will.
Florida's Brightline contradicts that, no matter how slow California's HSR project is going. Trust in greed if nothing else. The next one to go up will be LA to Las Vegas.
Hey, let's not be defeatist. Give RFK Jr. a shot at it and we can bring it roaring back.
Thanks, Carter!
https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/
Rickover: Did you do your best? Carter: No, sir. I didn't always do my best. Rickover: Why not?
best _former_ president of all time.
I won't stand for Carter slander: he was a darn good president too. What he wasn't good at, was politicking, and that was because he also was a good man, to a fault. He gave an honest answer to a question on if he had ever lusted after a woman who was not his wife, and reaped a scandal.
He's helicopter crash away from being remembered as a daring wartime president.
I just listened to a the rest is history podcast and he had a few things he was lacking and wasn’t particularly flattering but he was an upstanding citizen at the very least.
This is amazing, those things are an absolutely nasty parasite from out of a sci-fi horror movie. If you drink contaminated water with them it releases its larva into your body which burrow out of your digestive systems into your body consuming your nutrients for a year or more as it grows, then migrates towards your legs and creates debilitatingly painful blisters trying to force its way out over the course of weeks, and when you submerge the wound in water to relieve the burning pain it releases its larva into the water to infect others. Also don't try to pull it out even when its halfway out of your body or it will snap and die and give you a super nasty infection as it decays inside of you.
>Also don't try to pull it out even when its halfway out of your body or it will snap and die and give you a super nasty infection as it decays inside of you.
Pardon probably stupid question, yet i'm wondering why (under local or general anesthesia of course) it isn't possible to "drain snake" the remainder of the worm and to clean/disinfect the worm channel that way. After all we insert similar flexible stuff into blood vessels from say thigh all the way up to the heart.
As you might expect from the description -- largely passed on via contaminated water -- the guinea worm is mostly present in areas of extreme poverty. Even if such a treatment were feasible, it would be inaccessible to most of the relevant population.
Anaphylactic shock, and possibly death, is a potential outcome from the worm breaking internally. Far too risky.
I was going to say, "finally something that ivermectin can help with!" except https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7974686/
Ivermectin is a very good dewormer! Most 2020 crap studies were easy to make because ivermectin was already distributed to big populations as a dewormer.
I'm the guy that every time someone calls it a good horse dewormer I reply: "And a good human dewormer too!"
> Ivermectin is a very good dewormer!
And that may be responsible for some false positives in ivermectin studies for COVID - if a patient has a parasitic infection as well as COVID, treating the parasites will improve their outcome.
Wasn't the ivermectin hypothesis based on it blocking NS3 helicase preventing double-stranded viral RNA from being unwound after replication? Paxlovid targets a few steps earlier by blocking 3CL protease that chops viral RNA into functional parts of a virus.
True. But you can't get a prescription for the human version unless you actually have worms. So if you're taking it for some other reason, you're probably getting the version for horses, which you can buy by the bucket.
The media knowingly repeated “horse dewormer” because it made people they don’t like look dumb.
People were literally buying horse dewormer when their doctors wouldn't prescribe it for them. "Influencers" were selling it. So the media were being accurate. To the extent that this made people look dumb, the intent was mostly to shame them into trying something more effective.
> the intent was mostly to shame them
Yeah I don’t like news that does that, as opposed to giving the best information.
Well then, it's good you didn't say that then, considering that ivermectin has been on the WHO list of essential medicines since 1987 and its discoverers were awarded the 2015 Nobel Price in Physiology or Medicine for it.
Saying that something might be "finally something" that ivermectin can help with would have been embarrassing.
It would have been especially embarrassing because the link you gave gives two things ivermectin helps with. After concluding that ivermectin did not affect the guinea worms it says:
> No adverse reaction to treatment was seen. It appears that ivermectin can be used safely as mass chemotherapy against onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis in areas where guinea-worm is also endemic.
They are saying that if a patient has onchocerciasis or lymphatic filariasis it is safe to use go ahead and use ivermectin (which is the normal treatment for those) to treat those, even if the patient has guinea worms.
So good thing you didn't say it!
It also poisons any bed bugs feeding on you.
Anything that annihilates bed bugs is a net positive to the world. Drinking poison out of spite for those sons of the devil is well within reason. To hell with those infralings.
Unless you overdose, it's not poison for you. Ask your medical doctor anyway.
From https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/what-s-ivermectin
> It acts most strongly on glutamate-gated chloride channels, which vertebrates don't even have.
They are like little holes in the wall of the cell of worms that can be opened and closed, and ivermectin locks them in the open position. A much better and more technical explanation https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/191
I worked for the Carter Center in South Sudan for a little less than a year in 2011. It was an extraordinarily tough job and required perseverance, humility, creative problem solving, negotiation, and acceptance. Events outside our control, like civil war, made eradication even harder.
The Carter Center teams should be very proud of what they accomplished. It would’ve been nice to get it done before Jimmy passed though
Spread the word: "The guinea worm is on its last legs."
The free market could never accomplish something like this.
Maybe not just the free market but the Carter Center funding was 7% governments, 90% foundations, corporations and individuals. (fye 2024)
https://ia803407.us.archive.org/0/items/i-pencil-pdf-2019/I%...
We nobody could ever achieve something like this without a free market taking care of most things.
There's no such thing as the "free market". It's a foolish propaganda term to try and assign people's actions to a philosophy they don't care about.
You sound bitter that people don't subscribe to your soviet ideology.
Well people who made their fortunes beating other guys in politics or in business now want to graduate to the next hit that is beating nature.
So yes in a sense it is free market.
Especially disease eradication is beating nature in macrobiology and philantropic foundations are the optimal tool to do that.
Consider what you might choose to do for the public good with the 30% of your income that is taken from you in the name of the public good.
Philanthropy is a predictable outcome of an individual having met the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
> Consider what you might choose to do…
Emphasis on might.
Evidence suggests "a giant boat and some helicopters" is the more likely result.
I’d love to pay off my house early instead of giving 200% it’s worth to the banks in interest to hire the guys with the yachts.. Call me selfish.
And your house value doesn’t benefit from taxes? No utilities? No road? No regulations protecting you from shitty neighbors? No army keeping you safe?
Well my taxes go to roads, healthcare for people who can’t afford, schools, and the fire department. I would consider those public goods.
Not to mention the one meal per day that many children would otherwise not eat. And sometimes the free breakfast that keeps their gnawing hunger at bay long enough for them to learn something in school.
Which 30% are you talking about? Taxes? If so: From what do you build things like infrastructure?
If you've ever worked with a church you know that donation and good will is not a way to ensure anything is structurally sound. Donations always come with asterisks.
Nobody wants to make sure the roof is shingled and doesn't leak but everybody leaves money for new stained glass windows or the organ that nobody knows how to play.
> Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
Many, many fewer than you assume.
Libertarians like to make lots of good-sounding promises to justify their favored radical policy, but it's bullshit and the promises don't pan out when tested [1]. By that point, the libertarian has gotten what he wanted and moved on.
[1] Or their policy was already tried and already failed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387, leading to reforms to fix the problems that they're now mad about and want to undo.
The billionaires out there are being revealed as paedophiles quicker than they are solving world health problems.
I’d prefer not to rely on them.
Is there evidence that it happens? And that it serves the public good, not the personal interests of the wealthy? Do we need another $100 million given to a health program accessible only to the wealthy, or funding for public health? To a business school or art museum, or to arts programs for public schools?
Philanthropy is anti-democratic; the people don't choose what is important to support, the wealthy few do. You can see that in the relatively poor public goods in the US, which has much lower taxes relative to peers.
A lot less because they'd be dead from easily preventable diseases in their water supply?
Honest question here: how is a worm (parasite) considered a "disease"? I Googled this question two different ways and got two different responses.
How would you draw the line? The common cold, tuberculosis, malaria, and hookworm are all caused by foreign bodies which enter the human body, reproduce, and cause illness; the only difference is the size of those agents (virus, bacterium, single-cell parasite, multicellular parasite).
I guess the same way a virus is a disease, in that a small living thing gets inside you and harms you / causes immune system reactions?
I think technically you get a parasite and then it causes a disease in reaction, but if it's a parasite you can spread it's basically fine to model it / talk about eradicating it in the same way right?
We use "disease" for maladies caused by infections (virus, bacteria), and we use "disease" for maladies caused by genetics (cancer), caused by chemicals (lung disease), and so forth. So yeah, a parasite certainly would qualify I think.
Eradication of the Guinea worm will be one of the huge milestones in the history of humankind. Just reading about them is nightmarish. In 1986 estimated 3,500,000 people had an infestation. Now we're well below 100. However eradication also needs animal cases to go to zero which are still in the hundreds.
Anyway, really great news about humanity beating one of its many terrible enemies just like the Malaria vaccine.
I mentioned in another comment how hard it is for our brains to really comprehend the orders of magnitude difference between all animal cases (~680) and the former number of human cases (3.5M).
It would take ~5000 years at the current annual rate of animal cases to match the number of human cases just 40 years ago.
That's The Great Pyramid of Giza ago time... PLUS the amount of time since Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael roamed the earth.
The cool thing is that at a few hundred, one could theoretically* round up all (known) animal cases left. That's truly incredible work getting to this point if you think about it.
* Yes, geopolitical issues, geography, and plenty of other reasons might make this somewhat impossible... but the fact that we can actively picture a few hundred animals in our brains means that it's a very attainable goal.
The eradication program works by offering cash rewards for reporting cases in areas where the worm is present. Those reports are then investigated and followed to prevent transmission and identify the source.
Clever. I wonder if the same model can be reused for other diseases.
An example:
https://www.who.int/news/item/11-04-2014-south-sudan-introdu...
Any individual presenting with the disease who meets all the criteria for containment is now rewarded with 500 South Sudanese pounds (SSP). The informer is given 100 SSP.
I’m not sure it is clever, because you’re bound to get an entrepreneur who infects their local school to farm rewards. It’s inevitable with these kinds of schemes.
It has been done for snakes. Nobody minds you have a snake farm and sell them to the government. Neighbors may even sell you captured mices.
On the other hand, infecting the children at the school will make everyone go to your house, probably burn it and hit you until you are rescued by the police. Did I mention the local police chief has nephew in the school?
Somehow it seems to have worked here. There's probably a bit more to the secret sauce.
You then create a bigger bounty to identify the entrepreneurs, and now it's bounties all the way down.
500 SSP is about 4 USD. If you have the ability to come up with the scheme, you can do better with pretty much anything else.
The decrease from 3.5 million cases to only 15 is impressive but I don't see how we can eradicate zoonoses
From the article it looks like they are working on that too
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Those are bonkers (low) numbers compared to the 3.5M (human?) cases if I'm to believe the GPs comment.
It's also crazy how much Mother Theresa's quote rings true, even in reverse ("If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.") When I initially read 3.5M cases, I thought "wow, that's a lot", and somehow the 445 animal cases in Cameroon felt (at first) more real and similarly "a lot".
No comment other than interesting how our human brains work and distort how numbers "feel".
Once my rational brain kicked in, realized that's over 5,000 years for the current number of animal cases to match the former number of human cases. The future is awesome.
If you halve the cases every year you'll eradicate it in a generation.
It was a somewhat recent discovery that there were animal reservoirs escaping detection. Carter had hoped to outlive the worm, but it was thought that the animal pools were going to make full eradication take an additional 20 years.
But the question would be how many more go undetected in those animals. (I.e if wild animals carry it, how accurate are these numbers).
glancing at the wikipedia page on the topic it seems that it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite
I think the worm reproduce better in humans, so if we can cut humans the population in other animals will hopefully decrease. (And probably add a plan to identify and capture infected animals, to ensure this.)
You are right. Wikipedia write it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and that animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite
It probably helps that the worms don't care. That is, a worm whose ancestors lived in dogs can live in a human no problem and vice versa.
If you eradicate GWD in your region but, eh, not in dogs, well people in your region keep getting GWD anyway. But if you eliminate it entirely you're just done. So that's a strong incentive to ensure the latter.
Most drastic options are probably available in the afflicted countries than would be acceptable in many places that haven't had GWD for a hundred years or more. If you tell the population of rural France that military and police are going to start shooting wild animals dead as a disease control measure there will be mass protests. But in South Sudan hey, at least you aren't proposing to shoot all the members of some minority ethnic group.
>In 2024, there were just 15 cases, and, according to the provisional tally for 2025, the number is down to just 10.
Sounds like there is still some way to go:
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Isn't fewer than 1000 infected animals in an area that covers 6 countries pretty good? Obviously there's still work to do, but I would have expected hundreds of thousands or millions of animal cases if it was an epidemic
Few cases is good, but if there are any, the whole machinery of surveillance, treatment, and education has to be in place. As soon as we reach 0 cases for a certain amount of time, all those resources can be redirected to other neglected tropical diseases that haven't been wiped out, like onchocerciasis, loa loa, yaws, lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, and all the others. Yaws in particular is a good candidate for eradication.
Take THAT, God! ;-)
It's a peculiarity of the 21st century that the people most likely to blame God for human events are, in fact, atheists.
Where in this thread is someone blaming god for anything? Who in this is atheist? What?
You seem very confused. Try reading the comment I replied to and then understanding the context.
RFK Jr: “Not so fast”
This cracked me up...
> only 10 cases in 2025
10 _known_ cases
True, but given the symptoms, you'd think anyone infected would report it. So there's probably some unknown ones, but probably not a huge number.
Please share this with someone who doesn't know the story yet. Ingenuity alone can't save our species. We also need the will to do good. We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems. Let this be a reminder of what we are capable of.
> We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems.
I have no doubt that we can create a really miraculous future. I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.
Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
I mostly agree with what you said, but disagree on one point:
> Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
It is still possible to do good when things are bleak and there is no possible way out - just because doing good is the right thing[1]. Optimism helps a lot for morale, but is not a precondition.
1. e.g. the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine.
> the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine
Optimism doesn't necessarily mean hope. It can mean belief in an afterlife. An end to a suffering. Or gratitude for having someone else in a terrible moment.
I think OP is correct. You can't have good without optimism. Your point, which is also correct, is you can do good without hope.
From the Oxford dictionary:
op·ti·mism (noun): hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something.
The term has a philosophical heritage way richer than a dictionary one liner. I’m using one that makes OP’s statement make sense.
The philosophical definition just opens up bigger cans of worms that can't be adequately addressed in an HN thread, and have been debated for thousands of years: what is "good"? Perhaps we need a moral framework to answer that, but then, what are morals? "You can't have good without optimism" is a declaration that has to be contextualized, and is far from universal.
I suspect answers couched in terms of individualism will always sound inadequate to questions that are inherently collectivist, such as why people do things "for the greater good" detrimental to their own well-being.
I had a lot of optimism as a teenager in the 80s. And maybe even more during Obama's presidency. Then 2016, 2020, 2024-2026 hit, and I'm at like -89% for optimism.
Wouldn't say optimism is irrational. There are good things happening in the world in spite of all the bad things in the world.
Pessimism that leads to a self fulfilling prophecy is irrational, but you still need a win. A win is fuel.
Choosing a belief that is more desirable than the most likely case, is by definition irrational, and can be called optimistic.
Choosing a belief that is less desirable than the most likely, is equally irrational, clearly pessimistic, and often self-fulfilling.
So the ideal belief system is irrational (optimistic) but only to a chosen and realistic extent.
Somewhere between Pollyanna and Eeyore, but more P than E. And as irrational psychologies go, moderate-P is by far the more successful of the two.
> Cultivating optimism is the first step
I agree with this, and I recognize it as the good intentions behind faith communities.
People are (statistically) terrible at creating optimism on a blank canvas. They need narratives and common points of understanding.
And then the other side of human nature gets to take its swing at the mass of optimistic people with a shared belief system. :)
You do not need optimism to do good. It helps motivate, but its not required.
> Optimism is irrational
That is an argument of the pessimists and enemies of the good.
Pessimism is clearly irrational: Look at the world we live in; look what humanity has achieved since the Enlightenment, and in the last century - freedom, peace, and prosperity have swept the world. Diseases are wiped out, we visit the moon and (robotically) other planets, the Internet, etc. etc. etc.
To be pessimistic about our ability to build a better world is bizarre.
Pessimism and optimism are philosophical perspectives (dispositions) and do not necessarily have anything do with doing good or doing bad. Why do you think optimism only precipitates good things? Surely you can imagine a situation (or many) where thinking more positively about a situation than the data warrants leads to bad outcomes?
> Surely you can imagine a situation (or many) where thinking more positively about a situation than the data warrants leads to bad outcomes?
We're not talking about hypotheticals - we can always construct hypotheticals that yield the answer we desire - but the real world.
None of your examples above tie directly to an optimistic disposition. How could you possibly know the disposition of the thousands of humans involved in those endeavors? You are letting your personal disposition color your view of the world (as we all do) and mistaking this for some sort of absolute truth.
> So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
The problem is, that way of thinking is just like the "co2 footprint" - individualise responsibility from where it belongs (=the government) to individual people, and let's be real, outside of the very last action item many people don't have the time and/or the money.
At some point, we (as in: virtually all Western nations) have to acknowledge that our governments are utter dogshit and demand better. Optimism requires trust in that what you work for doesn't get senselessly destroyed the next election cycle.
Okay but also we all still live in democracies, and people are fairly obviously getting what they vote for a lot of the time.
Extrrnalising that to "the government" is to pretend you had no say, or to collectively try and pretend everyone else is with you & which they observably are not.
Edit: and before anyone responds with to me with a quip about money and corporations - money in politics buys advertising and campaigning. It doesn't buy votes directly, and when it does that's corruption and what's done about that is still largely on you the voter to set your priorities at the ballot box.
> I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.
It's not just a lack of desire (apathy). People who want to solve big, collective problems are increasingly up against groups who actively want to not solve the problems and/or make the problems worse. COVID, for example, was so much worse than it had to be, purely from people actively fighting efforts meant to contain it. Efforts to reverse or mitigate Climate Change are routinely and vigorously opposed.
For news about things that are going right, I suggest https://fixthenews.com/. You can get a free weekly email about progress in energy and the environment, national economies, health and medicine, crime etc (or pay for a longer weekly email).
As they say, pessimists sound smart, optimists get things done (and make money along the way, if that is the goal).
When the the only thing CEOs talk about for every new technology is how many people they are going to put out of work because of it, the collective desire for new technology and progress is understandably lessened.
That you have the mental capacity/structures/language to form the thought should indicate the trajectory you're caught up within. It's disappointing that everything not's resolved during the blip you're you but even a moderately long view provides evidence for optimism.
It will rewire the hard sacrifice of limiting individual wealth to less than a billion dollars per person. Trajectory of present indicates we won't be doing that soon.
It would be interesting to know what portion of people disagree with your suggested cap, and why.
It is interesting, I wonder is it possible to get so rich and be kind, probably examples. I'm the kind poor person myself even what money I have I have given too much of it away. In which case I'm a dumbass for doing so but yeah.
The Gates Foundation used to be something that gave me hope. The recent revelations have coloured that.
Maybe I need to to separate the art from the artist?
> > The Gates Foundation used to be something that gave me hope. The recent revelations have coloured that.
What revelations? That the guy at the helm of the Gates Foundation uses escorts?
Next thing you're gonna lose faith in Lady Gaga because she doesn't write her own songs...
> What revelations
His relationship with Epstein and the alleged secret dosing of his wife with antibiotics to clear an STD he gave Melinda from the escorts.
I hadn’t seen Bill’s denial of the STD claim when I made my comment and what went on there is murky according to the below. Bill denies and Melinda expresses sadness. What actually happened?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/04/business/melinda-bill-gat...
Yeah... I still listen to Drake for ex
> Maybe I need to to separate the art from the artist?
Yes. We die but the consequences of our actions resonate indefinitely. Ideas make good idols and people do not. Better Родина-мать зовёт! (a statue in Stalingrad approximately "Motherland [ie Russia] calls") and Liberty, which are both definitely statues about ideas than the Lincoln Memorial for example, or even arguably the "Statue of Unity" which is named for Unity but in practice is explicitly a statue of a specific man - Sardar Patel.
I like this comment, as it both supports The Gates Foundation and condemns Bill Gates.
I would at the very least index it to inflation.
In the US one can retire comfortably on $3 million without relying on Social Security. From the downvotes, it's crazy to me that people think a limit of 300 "ordinary people's" retirements is unreasonable.
I really don't think people understand how little difference there is between having $1 billion and $10 billion or even $100 billion. It makes no difference whatsoever to have that much money; they can't enjoy it.
It's always been that way. People have wanted to do things and others have said "You want to do that? Before you do this?" and so on. The US moon landing was contemporaneous with Whitey On The Moon. There are people who constantly care about things and work on incremental improvements to them that slowly collectively yield an outcome. That's just the mechanism that works.
As an example, consider the Guinea Worm Eradication Program. In theory, sheer bloodymindedness and mass effort could have yielded the majority of the initial effects for great suppression. But the application of modern technology (and I include incentive system design in this category) brings the cost down sufficiently for successful eradication.
Suppression of the disease is possible with old techniques: case maps, word of mouth reporting, logbooks. Now detection to containment is far faster because of digital technology. You can't just dump temephos on everything. You need to target application.
The transmission of data specifically is a problem that most people discount the difficulty of. As an example that more people will be able to relate to, there was a delay in the October 2025 jobs report and it was finally released without an unemployment rate. Many people didn't get why it was hard.
One viral tweet (mirrored by others) went:
> Can't we just...
> (rubs temples)
> Can't we just divide the number of unemployed workers by the work force population? Isn't that the unemployment rate?
But you don't know what those two numbers are. You need machinery to get it. The machinery has a lot of middle management. It cannot function without.
Society today is a complex thing. To get insight into it you need a lot of infrastructure. The fact that we all have electric power, that roads across the country are reliable, that bridges are all up, that planes fly and trains run, is a marvel. It's a marvel enabled by all the bits that people work on, all the boring bits: yes, even procurement software. And yes, corporate law and bureaucracy. All of these things make this possible.
I think a very common thing in online forums is to look at a flowering tree and say "Oh, look at the flowers. They are so beautiful. Instead of such ugly bark and wood why don't we make more flowers?". Building the society that has the muscle to do this is part of making things like this happen.
Have you noticed you don't have Guinea Worms where you live?
It's trivial to not have this problem, the fact that a relatively large fraction of the world's population needed intervention to fix this is an indictment on our collective will.
You may have read, or at least heard about John Green's book "Everything is Tuberculosis". Treating TB is, by comparison to Guinea Worm, really hard. When medics tell John that - all being equal - nobody should die of TB because we could just fix it, they mean with like a hospital full of doctors to diagnose and prescribe treatment, pharmaceutical companies to make the drugs, stuff that looks like technology to you.
To eradicate Guinea Worm Disease you need basic clean water. I'm not talking "Wait, does this tap water meet current national standards for UV treatment?" clean water, I'm talking like, "don't drink directly out of the village pond" clean water. That's really what it takes for this to just go away on its own. The interventions are because crazily in 2026 large numbers of humans do not have ready access to clean drinking water.
This is a Western-centric and specifically Americentric viewpoint. There are plenty in the East for example who are not cynical about their ability to solve existential problems and are instead plowing ahead on solving them, such as massive investment in non-petroleum-based energy sources like solar, wind, and nuclear.
Pessimism is not a uniquely American viewpoint.
"South Korea is second from bottom on our list in terms of the proportion of people saying their country “is heading in the right direction”, with only 15% stating so. A similar sentiment is also felt about the economy. Pessimism is usually the standard for South Korea; however, their economic indicator score has been particularly low in recent times, with just 8% believing the economy is “good”."
https://www.ipsos.com/en-ch/what-worries-world-may-2025?utm_...
I'm not talking about how people feel about their life or country but about the concrete actions their governments are taking to improve their quality of life. For example, they all have high speed rail, something that is essentially impossible to build in the US, whether it be due to budget, regulations or sheer political will.
Florida's Brightline contradicts that, no matter how slow California's HSR project is going. Trust in greed if nothing else. The next one to go up will be LA to Las Vegas.