It appears that NICE have rejected the use of Nexavar, on cost grounds, for patients suffering from liver cancer. It’s already been rejected by Scotland (NICE only covers England and Wales). This type of problem is inevitable and likely to get worse because there is no unlimited supply of money. Nexavar does not cure liver cancer but may extend a patients life by up to 6 months.

However, if you have the choice, given limited funding, what would you prefer to do? You could extend someone’s life for 6 months or cure someone and extend their life by 10 years. It’s a terrible choice to have to make but as people live longer it’s one we will have to address more and more.

Of course, if we had unlimited funds the issue would not arise. Sadly, we don’t. Money truly is at the root of this problem. We could suggest that too few people have accumulated too much wealth. In fact, around 2% of the population own 50% of the wealth or, put another way 98% of the population have low wages. But, it’s been said that if you distributed all the wealth evenly today it would take very little time to end up back in the hands of the wealthy. That’s what they are good at after all, getting wealthy.

No, the distribution of wealth is not the problem, it’s the fact that we still need money at all. Think about it, if money was not an issue thousands of problems would disappear overnight. No drugs would be too expensive; there would be no fat cats and no banker’s bonuses. Poverty and starvation would disappear and all could contribute to a Utopian future.

Sounds great? Problem is it’s greed that motivates many people and with no money to lust after there would be no reason to work. Society would no doubt break down and we would return to the Stone Age from which we would eventually emerge and simply make the same mistakes over again!

I don’t have an answer for this but until society figures out how to get on without money, be self-motivated without being ‘coin-operated’ and work towards common, global goals we will never move forward.

Yesterday, David Page popped up after a long absence, at least from my perspective. David used to be a colleague and I count him as a friend so I was interested to learn he’s moved to France (the Limousin) and is making a living as a photographer. He is also well on the way to being self-sufficient.

So congratulations, David, it’s a fantastic part of the World and here’s a link to his website should you be in the Limousin and fancy some pictures doing. Irritatingly, they are considerably better than my own modest efforts

Well, with 100,000 new cases last week what else can we do? Now, about those 100,000 new cases, these are confirmed. For all we know there could have been 10 times that among people who just got on with it rather than surfing or asking the call centre for advice.

Oh, the new call centre? That’ll be the one staffed from the job centre with such wide-ranging personal experience as window cleaning, drug addiction and alcohol problems (allegedly)!

So, got flu symptoms? Go to bed, take a couple of paracetamols, drink plenty of fluids (not alcohol!). If you’re a man, you probably have a hangover so get off your arse and go to work.

Seriously, unless you are in a high-risk group like asthmatics daily using an inhaler you may not even know you have it and it’s unlikely to be dangerous even if you do. Happily, swine flu is one thing oldies like me will probably be immune to

You can get sound advice here at the NHS web-site. In the meantime, most people just have an acute case of ‘sicki-itis’ otherwise known as ‘bone-idle, couldn’t give a toss syndrome’ which can be cured by a swift kick up the arse. Obviously, only after a risk assessment and due consideration of their ethnicity, human rights and whatever else it is that gets in the way of doing something sensible these days…oink, oink.

If that’s the case then there’s the problem…

Let’s just clear up one thing about the weekend property development stuff, it’s not glamorous like on the telly! I come back home on Sunday night with a hairstyle that looks like a whole jar of styling gel has been applied. In reality, it’s two days of up in the loft under the floor and being splattered by the plasterer.

I don’t know how Sarah Beeny manages to look so good, I look like something the cat dragged in

It’s mid-morning Friday and I’ve moved the easy sites to a server I’ve set up at my house now it’s time for the hard ones. What’s a hard one? It’s one that has a database back-end that stores all the pages and stuff.

Two hours later…

That’s this blog moved and it turned out to be not so hard, more time-consuming. So onto another.

Another two hours later…

This one’s proving a little more difficult and I’ve got a headache!

An hour later…

I don’t know why but it works now so I’m off home. I’ll do the last one next week.

Selling on Ebay is going well too although I can’t see how some people make any money. For example, I have trade cards and accounts with a range of distributors and I can’t buy a lot of this stuff for the price it’s selling at. They must be buying it by the pallet load (or there’s a lot of  ‘stock shrinkage’ about)!

All the servers are at the office of course and there’s not going to be an office shortly so where oh where can we move to? Given the object of the exercise is to reduce costs coughing up for an Internet host at whatever per month won’t be well received!

The other problem is that I’m not sure how to move a WordPress blog having never done it before…

What’s it got to do with cards?

And, why is the advert so crap?

I asked some younger people and they didn’t get it either.

Sorry people, should have gone to Specsavers!