🚨 Problem Overview

Everyone You Love Is Dying While We Build Skynet

Here’s a fun fact: While you’re reading this sentence, approximately 3 people just died from preventable diseases. By the time you finish this paragraph, that number will be 12. Don’t worry though—we just spent enough money on a single fighter jet to have saved all of them for the next century.

Welcome to Earth, where we’ve mastered the art of doing everything backwards.

The Daily Holocaust Nobody Talks About

Every single day, 150,000 humans die. That’s fifty September 11th attacks. Every. Single. Day.

But instead of treating this like the emergency it is, we’ve decided the real threat is that someone, somewhere, might have slightly different colored skin or worship a slightly different imaginary friend. So naturally, we spend $2.7 trillion annually on elaborate machines designed to make the dying happen faster.

Your body, meanwhile, is conducting its own personal 9/11 right now. Cancer cells are multiplying. Your telomeres are shortening. Your joints are turning into gravel. Your brain is deleting memories like a drunk person cleaning their phone.

You’re essentially a meat computer running Windows 95, and instead of installing updates, we’re investing in bigger hammers to hit each other with.

The NIH: A Trillion Dollar Participation Trophy

Since 1970, the National Institutes of Health has spent over $1 trillion (adjusted for inflation, because even failure gets more expensive over time).

Diseases completely eradicated by the NIH: Zero.

Smallpox? That was the WHO in 1980, and even they just got lucky that cowpox happened to work. The NIH’s greatest achievement is creating 200 committees to decide which of your diseases don’t matter. Spoiler: It’s probably yours.

They’ve turned medical research into a grant-writing competition where the prize is more grant-writing. It’s like a pyramid scheme, except instead of essential oils, everyone’s selling false hope and PowerPoint presentations.

The FDA: Making Medicine 82X More Expensive

The Food and Drug Administration has achieved something remarkable: They’ve made medicine 82 times more expensive and 1,000 times slower, all while claiming it’s for your safety.

It’s like having a lifeguard who checks if the life preserver meets federal specifications while you drown. But don’t worry—in 17 years, after $2.6 billion in trials, they might approve something that could have saved you.

Currently, 95% of diseases have ZERO FDA-approved treatments. If you have a rare disease, the FDA’s official position is essentially: “Have you tried not having that disease?”

The Oxford RECOVERY trial proved you could test treatments for $500 per patient. The FDA-regulated system results in trial costs of $41,000. That’s not a rounding error. That’s systemic sabotage with a government seal of approval.

The War Budget: Humanity’s Death Wish Retirement Fund

We spend $2.7 trillion every year on things specifically designed to make humans die.

This includes:

  • Nuclear weapons (because one apocalypse isn’t enough, we need backup apocalypses)
  • Fighter jets that cost more than hospitals
  • Submarines that could fund cancer research for decades
  • Whatever the hell a “Space Force” does

The Pentagon alone has lost—not spent, LOST—$2.5 trillion. Like a drunk person losing their keys, except the keys could have cured Alzheimer’s hundreds of times over.

Your chance of dying from terrorism: 1 in 3.6 million per year. Your chance of dying from disease: 100%.

But sure, let’s buy more tanks. I’m sure cancer will be intimidated.

The Disease Bill: $109 Trillion in Annual Suffering

While we’re burning money on bombs, disease is running a $109.1 trillion annual tab.

That’s:

We’re essentially paying $109 trillion per year to maintain human suffering at maximum capacity. It’s like running a torture chamber and billing the victims for the electricity.

Humanity’s Upside-Down Budget: A Visual Tragedy

We spend 40 times more on killing than curing. Let that sink in.

If humanity were a person, we’d be spending our entire paycheck on hiring hitmen to kill ourselves while allocating pocket change to maybe, possibly, if there’s time, buying some bandaids.

Medical research gets $68 billion globally. The military’s toilet paper budget is probably higher. One F-35 fighter jet costs more than the entire global funding for rare disease research.

This is like your house being on fire and using your water to fill a swimming pool for sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.

The Fixed Pie Reality: Why “Just Print More for Medicine” Doesn’t Work

Earth has 8 billion brains. You can’t print more.

Top talent is finite: around 40 million work on weapons, only 1 million on cures.

When the Fed prints money for war, defense contractors buy up the smartest people. Every MIT grad building missiles is NOT curing cancer.

Medical research funding went up 10X in dollars, but DOWN as a percentage of GDP.

The brain drain is real: Raytheon pays $150K, NIH pays $55K. Guess where geniuses go.

The only solution: Change the ratio, not the total. Switzerland proves it works—they spend 0.7% on defense and have $93K GDP per capita.

Your Democracy Is Theater (And Not Even Good Theater)

Princeton University studied American democracy and discovered something hilarious: It doesn’t exist.

The correlation between what the public wants and what becomes policy? Zero percent.

The correlation between what economic elites want and what becomes policy? 78 percent.

You have as much influence on government policy as you do on the weather. Actually, less—at least you can seed clouds.

Your “representative” has 750,000 constituents. Your share of their attention is 0.00013%. They spend 70% of their time fundraising, not that it matters since they vote however their donors tell them to.

They pass omnibus bills—2,000 pages voted on at 2 AM that nobody reads. The budget is 10,000 decisions you’ll never influence.

Democracy is basically a suggestion box that goes straight into a shredder operated by someone who owns a weapons factory.

Direct democracy also fails. California proved it with 50 ballot propositions creating information overload and random voting. Special interests still write the propositions.

Regulatory Capture: The Foxes Bought the Henhouse (And Turned It Into a Slaughterhouse)

Every regulatory agency is run by the industry it’s supposed to regulate. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature.

  • The FDA is run by ex-pharma executives who make drugs more expensive
  • The DoD is run by future defense contractors who need enemies to exist
  • The NIH is run by grant recipients who need diseases to study, not cure

It’s like putting vampires in charge of the blood bank and then acting surprised when everyone’s anemic.

The revolving door spins so fast it could power a small city. Regulators who play ball see 400% salary increases when they switch sides. Those who don’t play ball don’t get to play at all.

Why the System Can’t Be Reformed (It’s Working As Designed)

FDA delays mean pharma profits. Seventeen years of patent monopoly is the point, not a bug.

Military spending creates defense contractor wealth. That’s the entire business model.

Disease continuing means healthcare profits. The $4.9 trillion industry needs you sick.

Every “failure” is someone’s success story. The system isn’t broken—it’s working perfectly for the people who designed it.

Genetic Slavery: We’re Meat Robots for Our Genes

Here’s the cosmic joke: We’re using Stone Age brains to manage Space Age weapons.

Our ancestors needed to quickly identify threats, form tribes, and fight other tribes over resources. Fast-forward 200,000 years, and we’re doing the exact same thing, except now the rocks are nuclear and the tribes have flags.

We’re literally too stupid to stop killing ourselves. Our monkey brains are optimized for surviving on the savanna, not managing global civilization. We see different tribes and immediately think “enemy” instead of “potential customer for our clinical trials.”

Evolution gave us the tools to build nuclear weapons but not the wisdom to not use them. It’s like giving a toddler a flamethrower and being surprised when everything’s on fire.

The Bottom Line: You Can Fix This

Every single problem listed here is a choice. Not a law of nature. Not an inevitability. A choice.

We choose to spend $2.7 trillion on weapons while 150,000 people die daily from curable diseases.

We choose to let 200 bureaucrats decide which diseases matter while millions suffer from the ones that don’t.

We choose to make medicine 82 times more expensive than necessary because paperwork is more important than people.

We choose to let our democracy be a puppet show where the strings are made of money and pulled by defense contractors.

We choose to let fear of extremely unlikely threats justify ignoring the 100% certain threat of disease and death.

The good news? You can choose differently.

The bad news? You probably won’t, because there’s something good on Netflix and choosing is hard.

But just in case you’re tired of living in a world where we’re all marching toward preventable death while arguing about which flag to wave, here’s how you fix it. It’s absurdly simple. It’s mathematically proven. It’s economically profitable.

The $120.5T Death Toilet

When you add up the total societal cost of war (direct spending, destruction, casualties) and the economic burden of disease, humanity is flushing $120.5 trillion down the toilet every single year. That’s more than the entire global GDP.

To put it another way: if humanity’s entire ~$100 Trillion global economy was a family’s $100,000 annual income, here’s how our priorities would look:

  • Healthcare (treating symptoms): $8,200
  • Military (home defense): $2,700
  • Medical research (finding cures): $68

We spend 1,772 times more money causing or mopping up death than preventing it. It’s like trying to mop up the ocean instead of turning off the faucet.

Continue to Part II: The Theory (Why Markets Work and Democracy Doesn’t)

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