Vegas Sculptor’s Blog

I once heard a comedian say that there comes a day when you should stop expecting people to make a big deal about your birthday. That day, according to the comedian, comes about the age of 16.

So it is without much fanfare that I celebrate another year today. I don’t expect much in the way of celebration, the folks at work are taking me to lunch, my wife will fix a special dinner, my daughters will have cards.

Much more significant to me is the realization that there are more birthdays behind me now than ahead of me. Even if I live to be 102 like my grandmother did, I’m more than half way now.

But what if I’m only just getting started? What if someday I look back and lament how young my grandmother was when she died?

If Dr.Aubrey de Grey is correct, that just might happen. According to theories de Grey has been working on, those of us living today could well live to be 200, 300, even 1000 years old.

Dr. de Grey, who earned his degree from Cambridge, is the author of several books. His first book dealing with aging, The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, argued that damage to the mitochondria is a significant contributor to aging. He suggested that learning to repair this damage could increase lifespan.

With his latest book, Ending Aging, Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging In Our Lifetime, de Grey claims that aging is not a natural process that we have to accept as inevitable. He goes so far as to call aging a disease. A disease that can and should be treated and cured.

He suggests that there are seven types of cell damage that lead to the secondary effects we see as aging. By reversing the cell damage the body could revert back to a healthy, vigorous state that could only be described as youth. The seven types of cell damage are;

1) Changes to the nuclear DNA which result in cancer
2) Mitochondrial mutations which can affect the cells ability to function properly
3) Intracellular junk. Atherosclerosis, macular degeneration and all kinds of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s disease) are associated with this problem.
4) Extracellular junk. The amyloid plaque seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients is one example.
5) Cell Loss. Cells dying faster than they are replaced. Causes the heart to become weaker, Parkinson’s disease, etc.
6) Cell senescence: Cells are no longer able to divide, but also do not die and let others divide. Type 2 diabetes is caused by this.
7) Extracellular crosslinks: Can cause tissue to lose its elasticity and cause problems including arterioscerosis and presbyopia

Now Dr. de Grey doesn’t try to suggest that all these problems can be solved in the next few years. He does, however, think that within the next decade progress will be made that will extend lifespan by 30 years. Within that 30 years, developments will extend our lives in such a way that lifespan extension will outpace our aging allowing us to live virtually forever.

To view a video of Dr. de Grey presenting this subject you can go here.

In the video Dr. de Grey addresses some of the problems associated with life extension such as overpopulation. But do you see other problems with this? If you have the chance to live 100, 200, or even 1000 more years wouldn’t you want to? If we have the ability to prevent the debilitating diseases that lead to poor health and eventually death, don’t we have a moral obligation to try to do so?

By the way, before you dismiss Dr. de Grey as some sort of crackpot, consider this, in July 2005, the MIT Technology Review challenged scientists to disprove de Grey’s claims, offering a $20,000 prize (half the prize money was put up by de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation) to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that “SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate.” So far the prize has gone unclaimed.

Now, I wonder how I’ll put 900 more candles on my cake!

Like a large portion of the population, I’m an Ebayer. I don’t remember exactly how long ago I bought my first item on Ebay, but I know I’ve been selling there, off and on, for about 8 years now.

I use Ebay like most people use yard sales. I sometimes surf around until I find something I like and buy it. Other times I round up a bunch of stuff I have laying around and sell it. I might sell nothing for a year, only to sell 20 things in one month.

I also use PayPal. If you are going to buy on Ebay, having a PayPal account makes life so much easier. You can pay as soon as the auction closes thereby assuring the fastest possible delivery. You also have a record of your payment, and some rights of recovery, if the transaction should go bad.

If you are a seller, having PayPal makes collecting your money so much faster and easier that it is almost a necessity. There are a lot of buyers, like me, who prefer to pay with PayPal.

It’s been a while since I sold anything, so I’m not sure when Ebay, and PayPal, became so unfriendly toward the small time seller.

My wife recently decided that she wanted to start selling. I showed her how to do a simple listing using Ebay’s listing tools. I showed her how to photograph her item, upload the image, create a good description, and most importantly how to create an eye catching title.

The auction ran for the standard 7 days. About day 5 she got her first bid. About day 6 the listing suddenly disappeared!

I checked my email and discovered that Ebay had cancelled the listing because I had used the term “Like New” to describe a product that had been removed from its original packaging and set on the counter for a week before being put away to be sold. To me this constituted “Like New”, however Ebay claims this phrase is “Keyword Spamming” and rather than warn me to change the title, they canceled the listing. I can only hope they notified the bidder!

In searching the Ebay Forums I was able to determine that I was not the only person this has happened to. I also found that the rule about using “Like New” is also not documented in Ebay’s rules. For fun you might want to search Ebay and see how many items are listed as “Like New”. There were over 1200 when I did my search, so we can see that Ebay doesn’t enforce it’s rules very well, or very equitably.

I was quite upset by their action, and having seen Ebay’s fees rise year after year while their customer service has steadily declined, I decided to complain. I filled out a complain form but of course Ebay doesn’t answer their email anymore, I suspect they don’t even read it.

But live and learn! My next assignment was to set up PayPal on my wife’s Etsy account. Etsy is a new, to me, place where people can sell handmade products. When I say “people” I suspect what I am really saying is, “People who are sick and tired of Ebay’s crap!”.

To my amazement, I discovered that PayPal now only allows you 5 transactions a month! What this means is that if I want to sell 10 things on Ebay, I can’t offer PayPal as an option for fear that everyone would want to pay that way.

But don’t worry, PayPal has taken a page from Ebay and for only $30 a month I can sell as much as I want! Is this really an option for the average small time seller? I can’t afford to pay $30 a month when I might go a year without selling anything using PayPal.

Is there any place where a small time player like me can sell anymore? Is there an online payment option for someone like me?

I don’t know when the enormous greed of the average American corporation will end, no time soon I suspect. In the meantime, forget about using Ebay and PayPal unless this is your full time job. You might want to let them know how you feel about their greed by not using their services anymore.