Two Ministry of Justice workers are in hot water for describing a researcher as a “bitch” in an online conversation.
Academic and author Barbara Sumner made a number of Official Information Act requests as part of her PhD research into the systems around adoption. Then, in October last year, she asked for all correspondence mentioning her by name.
“Because I had felt all along that there was a resistance to everything I sent in and you know, just the sort of snottiness, I guess, of some of the responses that came in that request. I wanted to understand how they were treating me throughout the process.”
One page of the response stood out among more than 100 others. A November 2022 Teams conversation between two staffers, whose names were redacted, complained about Sumner’s latest request.
They described it as “a waste of time” and said it “should have been refused on the ground of substantial collation” or that the ministry should “charge her for it and get a contractor”.
“our ministerial services team sucks cuz they wouldnt let us refuse, and helen didnt push back hard [sic],” one worker wrote.
"but also shes a bitch for wanting everything. does she think govt just has unlimited resources for this type of crap lol.
“like theres no public interest in our emails back and forward.”
Yeah I’m not going to let it get between me and takeaways ha ha.
Seriously though as well as being a single data point it was self-reported and I noticed it changed depending on the interlocuter - from memory they told the local paper that the secret is going to church.
I’m pretty sure the real secret behind living a really long time is some combination of genetics and statistics (as in, if you have a 0.0001% chance of living that long, if you apply this to 8B people then you get 8,000 of these people).
Definitely. Something like 2/3 of cancer is luck for example.
Our immune system is constantly euthanising cancerous cells because they happen all the time. To “get” cancer, it has to miss the cell and let it grow to be noticeable. Lots of (bad) luck involved!
However, I’d be carefully putting numbers on it. There’s not really a difference between cancer appearing to be luck vs we don’t understand the risk factors. I’d guess that 2/3 luck would become 1/3 over the next 50 or 100 years as we understand risk factors better. Also I’m not really sure how you quantify the amount of luck when risk factors increase the chances, rather that directly causing it. In that sense you could say cancer is 100% luck.
A doctor once pointed out to me that every time there is cell replenishment, there’s a possibility of cancer. 😶
I’m recuperating from a journey at the moment and too lazy to battle the newly terible search engine capabilities to find the articles I got the number from but as I understand it cancer scientists were pointing out that around 60- something percent of cancers in the body cannot be accounted for by environmental factors (diet, pollutants etc) once you control for those risk factors. Obviously it varies by cancer type, but this was the general estimate.
I think you’re right that knowledge will increase but I think chance is worth bearing in mind because I think knowledge of external risks (and internal ones, like a bunch of missing immune cells) tends to be overstated in our thinking. Someone I knew with leukemia was the healthiest most clean living person I’ve ever met and I got so tired of people asking me what he had done to get it.
Maybe in 100 years cancer drugs will be the new paracetamol.
“Take this drug, it prevents cancer”
“How does it work?”
“We have some theories, but really we have no idea. It just does.”
That’s a cool idea!
There are so many drugs sort of like that rn. They get approved for one thing and then end up being approved for something totally different because it turns out they seem to do this other thing because reasons.
Found out the other day people are using low dose lithium of all things for cardiovascular health.
It kinda makes sense, since studies are more often “some people are getting better and we think it might be X, maybe, lets give it to 1000 people and measure against a control to see if it works” than they are “we understand the interactions in detail and based on how they interact it’s certain to cure it”.
Definitely, there’s also what I think of as the Listerine factor.
(The people who invented Listerine had no idea what to do with it. They wanted doctors to wash their hands in it, then they tried to market it as a floor cleaner. Finally they worked out they could sell it as a cure for bad breath if they called bad breath a scarier name, “halitosis”).