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posted by takyon on Tuesday March 26 2019, @04:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the News dept.

Mike Crawford Is Dead, Contributed to Mac System 7.5.X and Activist

Some of you might know him on the west coast. He worked for Apple fixing/debugging System 7.5.X and attended Cal Tech. He was an activist for the mentally ill and homeless. He was openly bisexual and open about his schizoaffective disorder. His Facebook page.

I had helped him with his project Soggy Jobs which is unfinished. It was his project he needed a business model for.

He was on CNN about the taking away of tax credit from software engineers.

His website is here.

He was a member here at Hacker News.

He had serious physical illnesses that made him suffer and he took his own life.

I was an online friend of his, and I too suffer from schizoaffective disorder.

His wish was not to be forgotten to be remembered through his works. To at least have a Wikipedia article written on him or some other Wiki. Wikipedia named him non-notable about ten years ago. But if you met him, he'd always show you respect and even if he disagreed with you he was nice about it.

takyon: Here is MDC's last post on Warp Life, and Last Will And Testament. User page. Twitter.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2019, @06:56PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2019, @06:56PM (#820225)

    MDC would not have been able to get disability. Thanks to various laws cracking down on disability, it is very hard to get it for the conditions that I am aware of his having. Short of a crooked P.C.P., diagnosing doctor or repeated holds, mental conditions like his are very difficult to get disability for. The reason it is that they are easier to fake, the moral failing fallacy of mental disease, the catch-22 of partial disability, and SSD representatives are less likely to take the cases due to economic motivations. Plus, when you apply for disability, it can take months for your lump-sum to come, plus you lose a huge chunk to your representative, so many don't bother as it isn't worth the hassle. PLUS, SSD is not as much as you would think especially given his employment history, and you don't even qualify if you don't have the equivalent of 10 paid-in years.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 26 2019, @07:09PM (8 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday March 26 2019, @07:09PM (#820232)

    And it's stuff like this that makes me think that universal health care and universal basic income would save lives. I didn't always agree with MDC, but I never wanted this kind of end to his story, and I have to think that getting the pills he needed to control his illnesses would have made the difference.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday March 26 2019, @09:41PM (6 children)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 26 2019, @09:41PM (#820339)

      He fell thru the cracks... if he was a little crazier he'd have been taken care of like a coma patient, or a little more connected to reality and he'd have been able to fill out his paperwork keeping medicare and his mind drugs.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 26 2019, @11:50PM (5 children)

        by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday March 26 2019, @11:50PM (#820404)

        That's the advantage of "universal": There are no cracks to slip through.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
        • (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday March 27 2019, @12:28AM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday March 27 2019, @12:28AM (#820418) Journal
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Wednesday March 27 2019, @05:24AM (2 children)

          by dry (223) on Wednesday March 27 2019, @05:24AM (#820494) Journal

          Here in BC, you still have to register, pay a monthly fee or prove that you're low income (tax returns) to be covered. I'd assume that it is similar in most places though we're the only Canadian Province where people have to pay, about $70 a month for a working single person making over $35,000 a year IIRC. Drugs also aren't generally covered either though MDC may have been eligible for a Provincial disability check, and drug coverage, depending on his income. I doubt that he would have had a problem having a Dr sign off though who knows.

          • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Wednesday March 27 2019, @02:32PM (1 child)

            by Sulla (5173) on Wednesday March 27 2019, @02:32PM (#820658) Journal

            Oregon's program before the affordable care act was better than that. Income requirements were somewhere around less than 40k/year, no monthly expense, and drug coverage. Big downside was that if you got too expensive the state would refuse to pay for treatment but offer to cover assisted suicide, this happened to a woman who was going through cancer her second time. After the ACA passed the paperwork got 10x worse, cheapest plans are several hundred a month, a deductible, bad drug coverage, less treatment coverage. To my understanding MDChad a hard time getting the paperwork filed. Last I heard on that he was working with someone helping him get it done, that mush have fallen through.

            --
            Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
            • (Score: 2) by dry on Thursday March 28 2019, @06:06AM

              by dry (223) on Thursday March 28 2019, @06:06AM (#821198) Journal

              That coverage was only for low income people? Must have still left a lot of people without coverage unless they paid for insurance and I don't hear too many good things about the American medical insurance industry.
              As for the ACA, it seems to have helped quite a few people and screwed quite a few too. The whole thing seems foreign to me as the most I've really had to worry about is paying for the occasional medications and as I've been healthy, there hasn't been much of that. Generally that $70 is taken out of the paycheck so most people don't notice it much and it is going away next year. I'm actually covered by the federal government due to my wife so haven't had to pay in a long time and she and my son gets full coverage, even glasses, dental as well as drugs.
              Never heard of anyone getting pressured for assisted suicide, at that it sounds quite hard to qualify, despite what our Supreme Court ordered. There is some triage that will happen if your case is pretty hopeless though generally you will get treatment, especially if life threatening. Worst is elective types of surgeries where you can be waiting too long for a new knee.
              As for the type of treatment that MDC needed, that seems harder and harder to get, besides some drugs. I think part of the problem is mental illness is invisible. You see someone with a broken leg and are understanding, someone who acts weirdly, not so much.

        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 27 2019, @01:53PM

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 27 2019, @01:53PM (#820629)

          An individual program that doesn't require active sane cooperation would be a first for any government program, like, ever. Other than prison. And maybe the draft.

          Its kinda like free state ID cards to support voter ID at the election polls; supposedly low agency people can't afford free, and have no time to visit an office every ten years to renew. This is claimed to be too high of a hurdle thus "proving" voter ID laws are bad.

          Changing which giant organization sends bills to the other giant organization, isn't going to directly help people who can't interface with any organization, regardless which it is, because they're crazy. You do have an indirect argument that saving money on accounting COULD lead, in theory, to more money for mental health issues, so I don't entirely disagree with you, only maybe 90% disagree.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 01 2019, @04:29PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 01 2019, @04:29PM (#823129)

      universal health care and universal basic income would save lives.

      That is an undeniable fact.

      What is incredible is the straight face with which politicians argue against them, and the uproarious applause they receive from certain sectors of the population in response to basically saying: "Let our own citizens suffer and die."

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]