The CDC and NIH undoubtedly do great work, but they are one model and thus a single point of failure.

I'd much rather see dozens of more or less eccentric billionaires put money into other things and other ways of organizing and incentivizing research and problem solving.

I’m not exactly sure why everyone middle class and above wouldn’t want to pay a little more for more medical research. We’ll all likely benefit. The ”let’s just tax the rich” is only going to get us so far.

I personally prefer a small financial transaction tax.

The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).

The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of total individual income taxes.

The top 1% was 1.4 million returns in 2016. The top 50% is 140.9 million returns.

How much is "fair"?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-...

But that's not how it works for the top of that tier once you're living primarily off complicated capital gains and financial instruments, and it's disingenuous IMO to lump this all together.

Even my conservative (mostly) tax-hating friends are not happy seeing occasional individuals pay 5% or less, which they do, through a variety of tax loopholes and shelters. And because of this, the richest Americans, the top 0.001%, on average, pay at a lower rate than the rest of the 1%.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldurkheimer/2018/03/01/0-...

I keep reading people talking about billionaires "hoarding" their money, as if it was just sitting in a vault like Scrooge McDuck and not being reinvested in countless businesses, while only a small percentage is going towards their 'luxury' lifestyle (which they also assume goes all into useless flashy cars and fashion like lower-tier wealthy celebrities they see on TV who also frequently happen to end up broke... for some reason).

We should tax that consumption, not the investments the return value and therefore jobs, technology, science, etc to society). Or focus on the far wealthier corporations who pay no direct tax through various financial trickery and/or incentives to off-shore it instead of keeping it locally to spend (although most still pay tons in taxes through other means).

a consumption tax would also penalize transactions that might decrease environmental impact e.g. solar panels, or of tools used in the construction of a composting toilet, those being easy, obvious examples.

It hits the corporates and rich where they actually care (passive gains), while not increasing the tax load of anyone's income (active renumeration).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes

But isn’t that why aging rich people dream of immortality? It’s the cure to the “disease” they have.

I guess it just boils down to the simple fact that most people are pretty selfish.

That's a big if. We've spent millions of year evolving to last long enough to reproduce and care for our young. Beyond that, our bodies break down in all sorts of ways ("aging"), and "curing" all of them seems unlikely. Shortening telomeres, reduced muscle and bone mass, slower metabolism, macular degeneration, worn cartilage, arterial plaque...

The ultimately smart thing to do would be to make our current 80 or so years of life as healthy as possible.

So if we could strike at the root cause, and heal DNA damage, then we wouldn't have to worry about cancer, and we would be able to turn cell division up and become more youthful. Or alternatively if we could develop better cancer cures, we could turn cell division up and deal with problems as they arise.

Now DNA damage isn't the only thing we would have to fix. For instance some poisons and junk cannot be eliminated by the body and stay with us permanently. We would need to find ways to clean them up.

It is not. It is tuned to pefection. You are _made_ to die, it is builtin, it is a feature. Notice how from 0 to 20 you don't "age", you just get stronger and better. How? Some species are considered young in their 40s.

You consume enough nutrients and energy to constantly fix yourself. You won't. Why? You need to die for evolution to work. Just die already.

A counterargument is that past generations lived too rarely to the point of natural death ("Intrinsic senescence") to experience selective pressure. I feel the burden of proof is in showing this.

An interesting discussion is whether or how an encoded trait that's negatively selected for is different than one that was never factored into the equation.

But again, it’s just perspective I guess. I don’t care when some rich dude buys a basketball team. If this is how they want to spend their money then go nuts.

I hope to god I am not alive in 100 years. The earth is going to be absolute shit by then.

I have 0 interest in living longer than is “natural.” Honestly I don’t even want to live that long! I mean what’s the point, live longer to just barely keep getting by and keep working as long as possible?

Honestly, IMHO your stance borders with depression, please get that checked.

For example, we could continue development of nuclear technology and solar arrays. Both of these technologies are guaranteed to be a success (the principle is proven) and offer solutions to most of our energy-related problems. We need to push harder! And I'm sure we can do it. Cultured meat and vertical farming is going to help solving our environmental crisis and will free significant space for new and old population.

As a mortal, I'm all for it!