Imagine 1985 heard 2015 would have AIDS cures, gay marriage and a black president | Hacker News Reader

Imagine 1985 heard 2015 would have AIDS cures, gay marriage and a black president

9 pointschrisyeh8 comments

If you took your DeLorean back in time to 1985, and you told someone, "In the year 2015, we'll have an effective treatment for AIDS, gay marriage will be the law of the land, and a black man will be president," your interlocutor would probably assume that you live in a perfect Star Trek future, where all racism and discrimination have been made obsolete. After all, you even have a portable, handheld supercomputer that can diagnose health issues. Two things are undoubtedly true: 1) The world CAN change. 2) We still have much to do.

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Cure for AIDS? Is this Hyperbole or was there some news I missed?

"Effective treatment" rather than "cure".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_of_HIV/AIDS

The results of antiretroviral drugs have been astonishing, and most people with a new HIV diagnosis for whom multidrug antiretroviral therapy is available (and who comply with it) will never expect to develop AIDS symptoms.

"Effective treatment" is in the body of the post, while "cure" is in the title, and is misleading.

agree, nowadays HIV infection is a kind of chronic condition, far removed from what it used to be

We've spent a fortune on AIDS research in the past 30 years. Why wouldn't we expect to have treatments?

http://blogs.poz.com/peter/assets_c/2009/03/NIH_AIDS_Researc...

We could do so much more research for all diseases. Personally, in 1985, I would have expected cancer, AIDS, and many other major disease to all be cured by now. It's actually depressing how much work remains.

I had to conserve characters--that 80 character limit is hard!

"black president"

I'm not sure why this is even relevant. I don't care who is president (ethnicity,gender etc), as long as they can run the country. Focusing just on race is part of the problem. We need to be focusing on the best person for the job.

It would still have been surprising in 1985.

Gallup has been tracking people's willingness to vote for members of various demographic groups since 1937 (!).

http://www.gallup.com/poll/3979/americans-today-much-more-ac...

http://www.gallup.com/poll/155285/atheists-muslims-bias-pres...

http://www.gallup.com/poll/183713/socialist-presidential-can...

They've changed the questions in the survey somewhat over time. (I'd love to see all of the historical data in this survey.)

If you think that any of these things is irrelevant to someone's being president, and you think the poll is accurate (so people don't overstate or understate their opposition to having presidents with particular characteristics), these are probably the numbers that you should be worried about if you hope people will focus on the "best person for the job". After all, lots of people in each year have told Gallup that they would be moved by these factors -- many of which you may see as irrelevant.

79% in 1987 was probably high enough to win. Jesse Jackson ran in 1984 so it wasn't a foreign idea. I'm sure a well-spoken Harvard graduate could have won then too.

"The willingness to vote for a black for president was at 37% in 1958, when Gallup first included the category in its survey tests. That number rose through the 1960s and into the 1970s, although, as recently as 1987, only 79% of Americans said they would vote for a black person for president. By 1997 that number had risen to 93%, and it is now at 95%."

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