Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

Pretty impressive work. I always wondered what all those correspondents do that news organisations employ all over the world. I guess that's one of those things.

    Local man embezzles $20,000 meant to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine.

Some people seem to exist in a bubble where they believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them or their loved ones, so paying to improve society has no benefit to themselves.

You mean what's happening right now in US healthcare?

Rather, crony capitalism with no real competition (cartelisation in the absence of strong regulation). This invariably leads to Imperialism ... We see this with BiGTech today and the phenomena of "digital imperialism".

Market economy. Capitalism is a name for the bad thing-- "the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others". Those who argue for a market economy usually claim that with their rule, it won't be accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, with them assuring us that there will be free markets and competition.

Both actual capitalism, i.e. the bad thing, and this which can plausible be argued to be well-functioning market economies, are is often stabilized by adding elements of communism to the system-- publicly funded education, healthcare etc. This is one of the reasons why I as a vaguely socialism-influenced whatever I can reasonably be said to be see communism, i.e. a system characterized by the distribution principle "to each according to his need" as less revolutionary than the socialism distribution principle "to each according to his contribution". Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.

Whether or not non-productive individuals who don't do any work can own the means of production and reap the majority of the economic surplus from it is somewhat tangential to the question of who pays for whose healthcare.

There are plenty of capitalist nations that provide public healthcare on a large spectrum of coverage and quality.

Capitalism is the reason those treatments exist in the first place. I don't see many cutting-edge cancer treatments coming out of Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.

With Universal Health Insurance as all other developed countries do

LLMs have found your post and ...

You're absolutely right.

And plane crashes are always caused by gravity.

There are more than 200 known types of cancer, and most are very fundamental and serious. It's not something which can be easily prevented or even fixed by just taking some pill or eating different. Yet, progress has been very phenomenal over the decades. Cancer can be cured to some degree, people can survive, but progress goes type by type.

That doesn't seem at all right, even misleading, cancer survivability has significantly improved

Progress in cancer treatment has been incredible

Just one example, prostate cancer today has a 90+% 10 year survival rate, in 1970 that was 25%

According to this US government site, 5-year survival rates across all cancer sites have improved from 50% to 75% between 1974 and 2017. (For men it started at more like 40%).

That’s not utterly transformative but I wouldn’t call it negligible either.

https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival

Untold trillions have been spent fighting wars and yet the cause of war hasn't been solved.

Because doctors are too cowardly to do what needs to be done.

Replace the body.

The only fatal cancer in 2026 should be brain cancer.

Oh, they know that. It's very lucrative. At this point it's scams all the way up to the US presidential cryptocurrency.

However it's also a tricky business to be the adjudicator of what is and isn't a scam. You're going to have to deal with a lot of complaints from "legitimate businessmen".

The tech world knows this. They are raking in money off of these scams. People with a rudimentary moral compass leave, those without stay, which makes it even less likely that industry will self-sanitize. The rest of society, out of survival instinct if nothing else, will have to force it to stop anti-social and fraudulent practices. Same as many other industries.

I'm waiting for the non-tech world to wake up and hold companies that act as willing accomplices liable for the crimes they tolerate on their platforms.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Does clicking on the ad cost the spammer a lot of money

see Meta, which is operating like a crime syndicate, leveraging higher fees on scammers "to discourage" them, retaining their impact on supply side auction prices and well knowing many don't pay with their own credit cards.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampan...

That's so Meta.

The argument is that scams based on exploiting goodness causes a lot more harm compared to the ones based on exploiting greed. Because it trains people that doing good deeds is not worth it (they might be scammed.) And even if the rate of such scams are low, just reading about them makes people afraid of potential consequences of doing good deeds. So I absolutely agree that such scams should have very harsh punishments, because they do not only have immediate consequences, but they degrade trust in our society.

The jury pronounces the sentence. What do you think sways the jurors - legalese complexity or straight up morality?

What is the definition of right and wrong if NOT a moral one?

I always donate to the random homeless people stopping me on the street. Doesn't really matter to me what they do with it, whatever keeps them warm.

I've worked with an organisation that was on the receiving end of a popular charity, and they definitely got something (new playground equipment for disabled children). Can't say how efficient the charity was, but there are definitely charities that don't keep all the money for themselves.

Why should somebody donate to somebody else's luxuries if they could spend it on their own luxuries?

Anyway, yes, direct donation is always better, be it to some random guy down on his luck in the street (unless they have just missed their bus and need ticket money for the next one and so for 3 years in the same bus station) or to some trusted person/group who actually does deliver the stuff to the area. Way too many random NGOs have popped up in Europe promising to do good things, just transfer money to their bank account and they will take care of it all for you.

Do you believe all countries should automatically extradiate every person any other country demands? Or that there should be a limit on such process?