I love this analogy - I've been talking about "The Citizen Kane Effect" for years, although my take is slightly different from yours. The premise is that groundbreaking work looks banal in retrospect, and Citizen Kane is the perfect example. Everything in that movie was a fairly radical departure from the movies that came before it (the acting, the lenses, the camera position, its use of point-of-view, etc), and it changed everything that came after.
Because of that, when modern audiences watch it, they don't see anything new or interesting or groundbreaking - it just looks like a normal movie. We've absorbed all the lessons it taught us, it's become the new normal. The same thing happens in all forms of art - watch Hill St Blues or (especially) Peyton place for TV examples, or see the work of Andy Warhol, or read Tropic of Cancer - I could go on.
This leads to a bit of a disconnect when parents try to get their kids interested in whatever blew their minds when they were young, because whatever it was is no longer likely to be mind-blowing. The pace of change has increased, which just magnifies this effect.
Anyhow, sorry for the tangent, I was just very excited to see the reference.
I'm a little baffled by the premise here - are you claiming that the First Amendment protects robocalling by politicians because it's political speech, but doesn't protect robocalls from the Jehovah's Witnesses or Planned Parenthood? Not that I've ben robocalled by either of those groups, but why not? If it's Amazon robocalling to tell me about a sale, is that the part of the spectrum where the problem is? How about the American Nazi party robocalling me to tell me about their beliefs and an upcoming rally? Please help me understand why carving out an exception for my senator to robocall me is protected, but these other forms of free speech are not.
[Disclaimer - I would be happier to hear from Amazon than from the Nazis, these are examples, not my wishes.]
I think the interesting question here isn't whether these people have the right to express their opinions and to gather peacefully, it's where we draw the line between those rights - and the use of my property to do so. I don't see how politicians have any particular claim to cross that line, other than the fact that they're the ones making the rules and exempting themselves. In my reading, this has little to nothing to do with the Constitution, despite your claims.
"Ozark" is surprisingly good on Netflix. It got mediocre reviews, but it was very well-done and different, and fun to watch, and engaging. Great acting. Great writing. Kind of like HBO used to be. Second season is under production, we're looking forward to it.
...and unfortunately, the science isn't nearly as compelling as we had hoped it would be, when it comes to the health benefits of low glycemic index diets...
This is pretty correct, although it's only the glucose component of most sugars that causes insulin release. Sucrose ("sugar") is half glucose, half fructose. The fructose is processed in the liver before it can enter the bloodstream, where it is stored as glycogen and triglycerides. These come with their own problems, but insulin release is not one of them.
I agree with the overall premise, but there's a detail in here that's worth arguing about. There was essentially no diabetes in third world countries at all until they adopted Western style diets with high sugars. Even then, it was usually the aristocratic class in these countries that developed diabetes, as they were the first to adopt our diets. The US and other Western countries have led the way in diet-related diseases, we don't give ourselves nearly enough credit...
Although rabbits can eat and digest meat, they are herbivores by nature. Forcing them to eat meat probably leads to conclusions that cannot easily be generalized to humans.
The best expert in the left wing structure of drosophila melanogaster has so refined their study that they tend to be almost infantile in all other aspects of life.
My experience has been that expertise is a skill, and it can be generalized. Becoming an expert in something doesn't narrow your ability to function in the world, it expands it.
Of course, you need to dedicate ridiculous amounts of time and energy in a field to truly become expert, but that process teaches you critical things that are not related to the subject at hand - how to learn, how to synthesize information, how to recognize underlying patterns, how to generalize a premise, how to focus a general concept to a specific case, how to determine the quality of information, how to work with people in other fields who may have information that you need to re-code for your specialty, etc. These skills make you a higher-quality human, not a pointy-headed cloistered misfit.
There are so many layers of people siphoning their take that it's become almost absurd. More and more money gets pumped into the health care system, and physicians get paid less and less every year. We're one of the few industries in which an annual salary decrease is expected. It's insurers, more than anyone else - but also administrators, EMR vendors, pharma, device manufacturers, and government bureaucrats. And most of these industries have very effective lobbyists (unlike docs, who have the impotent and uninterested AMA), "representatives" (aka "salespeople") scurrying to & from doctor's offices, and aggressive direct-to-consumer advertising. All of the corporations involved in these activities are "people," of course, and operating completely within the law. Your healthcare dollars do very little to support your doctor - they are funding the medical industrial complex, which pushes the EMR for their own ends, not for the benefit of doctors or patients. I'm a cardiologist, and I can tell you from daily experience that the current practice of medicine has become an unbelievable slog, and EMRs are a large part of that - but the whole culture has become corporatized, to the detriment of the people it's supposed to serve. Hopefully the pendulum starts to swing back at some point, but I'm not holding my breath, and I wonder if it will be too little too late when it does.
Please provide a citation for evidence of the benefit of the electronic medical record. I'm a cardiologist, and these have dramatically worsened the quality of care from our perspective; this is a fairly universal feeling among doctors, I believe. I have yet to see any evidence of the benefit - if you have some, please share. The potential benefits, which is what you describe, are still just that, and there are no documented benefits that outweigh the misery the current system inflicts.
Mod parent up - insightful. I'm a cardiologist, and while I'm making more money than a Wal-Mart greeter, the days of doctors getting rich, and the days of hospitals making a profit, are essentially over, despite the large numbers thrown around. The costs associated with providing high-level, subspecialty medical and surgical care are enormous, and the reimbursement is continually declining. Congress continually nibbles away at the margins, dictating the rules of the game, and then acts shocked when the rules they implement don't result in free care.
The time and money that I've spent in training has value. The specific skills I have as a result of that time and money are significant, and useful to many people. I'm happy to use my skills to help people - it has intrinsic reward. However, the current climate requires that I do so 10 hours a day, plus nights, plus weekends, always with a smile, every 15 minutes, and job satisfaction has mostly gone the way of the dodo.
4 years of college. 4 years of medical school. 3 years of residency training. 3 years of cardiology fellowship training (gastroenterology, the example from the article, is also a 3 year fellowship). College & med school leave most of us with >$200k of debt. Residency and fellowship pay essentially minimum wage when you account for the insane hours, all the while collecting interest on our college and med school debt. I didn't have kids until I was in my late 30's because we didn't think it was fair to raise them without seeing their father.
We all have this same conversation when discussing the issue of money in medicine. In the beginning, there was a binary relationship - patient, doctor. The doctor provided services, the patient provided cash. These facts haven't changed, except now the care provided is better, the patient spends much more, the doctor gets paid much less, and everyone else in the system siphons away the money without the hours or the liability we incur.
In any event, you're not paying for 15 minutes of colonoscopy time, you're paying for the 14 years of training necessary for the doctor to do the colonoscopy.
Not to mention the cost of the colonoscope and its upkeep, the techs, the sedatives and management of their associated risks, the endoscopy suite constructed and maintained to restrictive code standards, cleaning of the endoscopy suite between each case, archiving and storage of the images, time to interpret and create a report from the colonoscopy, conversations with the patient, the patient's family, the patient's primary physician, time lost from providing other services (office and hospital visits - people are always clamoring for more availability), the enormous billing apparatus, a significant cut to the insurance company, maintenance of certification & credentialing (which requires many hours a year away from the office in a hotel conference room watching Powerpoint slides, at great expense), etc.
I'm a cardiologist in real life, when I'm not lurking here, and this is not correct. I've taken call in 4 different systems, and in none of them was there ever a "backup" person. If the person on-call isn't reachable, either patients try again later, go to the ER, or die. FWIW, I don't go to movies when I'm on call (typical call would be one night out of 4, and one weekend out of 4 so not a tragedy). I also didn't bring my kids to restaurants until they were old enough to behave (and we left if they didn't behave). I used to smoke, and I never smoked by the only entrance or exit from a building. I'm completely comfortable asking people to stop talking and using their phone in movies, and I find I need to do that frequently. I'm jealous that there are apparently places where people don't confuse the movie theater with their living room.
BTW, have you ever played an instrument. 2 hours solid on a guitar would leave your fingers shredded, 4 hours you wont feel them for a week (by solid I mean practically no breaks, playing hard for 55 minutes an hour). I have a lot of respect for people who can do this.
I was a music major in college, and 6-8 hours a day on your instrument, between practicing and rehearsing, wasn't particularly out of the ordinary. Not sure where the destructive guitar meme comes from, but for anyone who plays regularly, finger shredding just isn't an issue. If I remember correctly, Bruce Springsteen just did a 4 hour show, and I'm pretty sure there were no finger-related hospitalizations necessary afterwards.
Why the Soulskill hating? I've been here a few years, and it seems that every once in a while, this editor or that editor is deemed an incompetent moron by some sort of acclamation, and I have never been able to find any rhyme or reason to it. Other than essentially saying "I don't like Soulskill," this comment doesn't really add anything to the conversation.
There is a Visual Basic for smartphones (compiles to iPhone and Android) - NS Basic. I've been using their stuff for 10 years (when they did the same thing for the Palm platform), and they're quite good.
I recently had to make a similar change - from being in training to becoming one of two cardiologists running a private office, which means I'm responsible for employees.
Making technical decisions is the easy part - managing people is the hard part. You're simply treated differently when you have the ability to make decisions that can change people's livelihood and lives. The best resources I found on this were "Getting to Yes" and "Getting Past No," both touchy-feely pop-style books, but both with semi-useful information in them.
Friends gave me management books, like "The Essential Drucker" and a subscription to the Harvard Business Review - I found all this stuff to be almost useless. I've found that if I spend a few minutes every once in a while checking in with people, and trying to listen to the answers, that things work out well.
Sorry to re-post - all the carriage returns were stripped. I forgot to add HTML. It reads better with some whitespace.
I'm going to try to to untangle some if the above...
Some guy somewhere once said that you need to drink 8 glasses of water a day to maintain health. Turns out to be nonsense. For those of us with intact thirst centers in the brain (pretty much everyone reading this, for example), drinking when you are thirsty is all you need. Your body will tell you when you need more liquid by using the thirst mechanism. There are exceptions, as there is a lag before thirst is triggered, so on a hot day when you're exercising aggressively, you can get "dehydrated" and not get thirsty in time to do anything about it, but this is rare, and recent evidence tells us that hydrating aggressively, even in marathons, is overkill.
The jumble of hyponatremia, hypernatremia, hypertonic, hypotonic, hypovolemia, hypervolemia, isotonia, etc is maybe worth clearing up, although this will be interesting to precisely nobody. Some of the concepts are almost right.
"hyper" = too much, "hypo" = too little, "iso" = equal.
"volume" is the quantity of fluid (any fluid, technically) in the system.
"natr*" = sodium in the system.
"-emia" = in the blood.
"tonia" = concentration.
So, hypovolemia = low volume of fluid in the blood (hypo, vol, emia) Isotonia = equal concentration (in the medical context, meaning concentrations of a solute equivalent to those found naturally in blood). If you drink excessive fluids over an extended time, you overwhelm the kidneys' ability to maintain normal sodium concentrations in the blood, and you end up with hyponatremia. Drinking excessive fluids is usually called "psychogenic polydipsia," which is med-speak for drinking too much water because your brain is bad. The hyponatremia is potentially fatal, and often causes confusion, among other symptoms. Note that it does not cause (at least immediately) hypovolemia - the quantity of fluid in the system is adequate or high, it's the composition of that fluid that's troublesome.
In this case, one could say that the composition of the blood is hypotonic - there are fewer solutes (particularly sodium) in the blood than normal. This is treated by limiting fluids (reducing solvent, and allowing the kidneys to recover and restore balance), &/or by increasing sodium intake. Pepperoni pizza is a great solution (not kidding - my favorite nephrology professor used to prescribe exactly that). Hypertonic saline is reserved for emergencies. The blood is usually about 0.9% sodium, so a 3x concentrated version of that - typically 3% saline - can be given parenterally (via IV [intravenous], for those of us scoring at home). This is a dangerous treatment, as the brain is susceptible to dangerous/fatal swelling if hyponatremia is corrected too quickly ("cerebropontine myelinolysis," if I remember correctly - I'm a cardiologist, and I haven't thought about this stuff in a long time).
Not drinking enough fluid results in hypovolemia (commonly called "dehydration"). Usually the sodium levels in the blood measure high ("hypernatremia"), although it's not due to too much solute - it's due to too little solvent. The treatment is to replete fluids (volume), either with a a straw and some water, or with IV hydration. Usually 1/2 NS (saline that's hypotonic compared to normal blood, in this case 0.45%) or even normal (isotonic, 0.9%) saline.
The rest of the parent's post is mostly on target. Sorry for pedantry.
I'm going to try to to untangle some if the above...
Some guy somewhere once said that you need to drink 8 glasses of water a day to maintain health. Turns out to be nonsense. For those of us with intact thirst centers in the brain (pretty much everyone reading this, for example), drinking when you are thirsty is all you need. Your body will tell you when you need more liquid by using the thirst mechanism. There are exceptions, as there is a lag before thirst is triggered, so on a hot day when you're exercising aggressively, you can get "dehydrated" and not get thirsty in time to do anything about it, but this is rare, and recent evidence tells us that hydrating aggressively, even in marathons, is overkill.
The jumble of hyponatremia, hypernatremia, hypertonic, hypotonic, hypovolemia, hypervolemia, isotonia, etc is maybe worth clearing up, although this will be interesting to precisely nobody. Some of the concepts are almost right.
"hyper" = too much, "hypo" = too little, "iso" = equal.
"volume" is the quantity of fluid (any fluid, technically) in the system.
"natr*" = sodium in the system.
"-emia" = in the blood.
"tonia" = concentration.
So, hypovolemia = low volume of fluid in the blood (hypo, vol, emia)
Isotonia = equal concentration (in the medical context, meaning concentrations of a solute equivalent to those found naturally in blood).
If you drink excessive fluids over an extended time, you overwhelm the kidneys' ability to maintain normal sodium concentrations in the blood, and you end up with hyponatremia. Drinking excessive fluids is usually called "psychogenic polydipsia," which is med-speak for drinking too much water because your brain is bad. The hyponatremia is potentially fatal, and often causes confusion, among other symptoms. Note that it does not cause (at least immediately) hypovolemia - the quantity of fluid in the system is adequate or high, it's the composition of that fluid that's troublesome.
In this case, one could say that the composition of the blood is hypotonic - there are fewer solutes (particularly sodium) in the blood than normal. This is treated by limiting fluids (reducing solvent, and allowing the kidneys to recover and restore balance), &/or by increasing sodium intake. Pepperoni pizza is a great solution (not kidding - my favorite nephrology professor used to prescribe exactly that). Hypertonic saline is reserved for emergencies. The blood is usually about 0.9% sodium, so a 3x concentrated version of that - typically 3% saline - can be given parenterally (via IV [intravenous], for those of us scoring at home). This is a dangerous treatment, as the brain is susceptible to dangerous/fatal swelling if hyponatremia is corrected too quickly ("cerebropontine myelinolysis," if I remember correctly - I'm a cardiologist, and I haven't thought about this stuff in a long time).
Not drinking enough fluid results in hypovolemia (commonly called "dehydration"). Usually the sodium levels in the blood measure high ("hypernatremia"), although it's not due to too much solute - it's due to too little solvent. The treatment is to replete fluids (volume), either with a a straw and some water, or with IV hydration. Usually 1/2 NS (saline that's hypotonic compared to normal blood, in this case 0.45%) or even normal (isotonic, 0.9%) saline.
The rest of the parent's post is mostly on target.
Sorry for pedantry.
Do you think he's incorrect for claiming that he's likely to be more well-rounded by virtue of having studied a broad array of subjects, or do you object to him stating the truth? It seems odd to bash someone for talking about their education and its results, on a thread about - well, education and its results.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree!
Any energy policy proposal that fits on a bumper, or in a tweet, is wrong.
Somebody should put this on a bumper, or in a tweet.
I love this analogy - I've been talking about "The Citizen Kane Effect" for years, although my take is slightly different from yours. The premise is that groundbreaking work looks banal in retrospect, and Citizen Kane is the perfect example. Everything in that movie was a fairly radical departure from the movies that came before it (the acting, the lenses, the camera position, its use of point-of-view, etc), and it changed everything that came after.
Because of that, when modern audiences watch it, they don't see anything new or interesting or groundbreaking - it just looks like a normal movie. We've absorbed all the lessons it taught us, it's become the new normal. The same thing happens in all forms of art - watch Hill St Blues or (especially) Peyton place for TV examples, or see the work of Andy Warhol, or read Tropic of Cancer - I could go on.
This leads to a bit of a disconnect when parents try to get their kids interested in whatever blew their minds when they were young, because whatever it was is no longer likely to be mind-blowing. The pace of change has increased, which just magnifies this effect.
Anyhow, sorry for the tangent, I was just very excited to see the reference.
I'm a little baffled by the premise here - are you claiming that the First Amendment protects robocalling by politicians because it's political speech, but doesn't protect robocalls from the Jehovah's Witnesses or Planned Parenthood? Not that I've ben robocalled by either of those groups, but why not? If it's Amazon robocalling to tell me about a sale, is that the part of the spectrum where the problem is? How about the American Nazi party robocalling me to tell me about their beliefs and an upcoming rally? Please help me understand why carving out an exception for my senator to robocall me is protected, but these other forms of free speech are not.
[Disclaimer - I would be happier to hear from Amazon than from the Nazis, these are examples, not my wishes.]
I think the interesting question here isn't whether these people have the right to express their opinions and to gather peacefully, it's where we draw the line between those rights - and the use of my property to do so. I don't see how politicians have any particular claim to cross that line, other than the fact that they're the ones making the rules and exempting themselves. In my reading, this has little to nothing to do with the Constitution, despite your claims.
Was it worth $50k to you? One could argue that you wouldn't be here to write this lovely tome without that surgery...
(Untreated appendicitis is definitely not always fatal, which is why it's an argument, not a fact.)
>Rule #1 of calling people out for their misuse of the English language on the internet: make sure your own house is in order first.
You want to capitalize the first word after a colon when it begins a new sentence.
Rule #1 of calling people out for their misuse of the English language on the internet: First, make sure your own house is in order.
"Ozark" is surprisingly good on Netflix. It got mediocre reviews, but it was very well-done and different, and fun to watch, and engaging. Great acting. Great writing. Kind of like HBO used to be. Second season is under production, we're looking forward to it.
...and unfortunately, the science isn't nearly as compelling as we had hoped it would be, when it comes to the health benefits of low glycemic index diets...
This is pretty correct, although it's only the glucose component of most sugars that causes insulin release. Sucrose ("sugar") is half glucose, half fructose. The fructose is processed in the liver before it can enter the bloodstream, where it is stored as glycogen and triglycerides. These come with their own problems, but insulin release is not one of them.
I agree with the overall premise, but there's a detail in here that's worth arguing about. There was essentially no diabetes in third world countries at all until they adopted Western style diets with high sugars. Even then, it was usually the aristocratic class in these countries that developed diabetes, as they were the first to adopt our diets. The US and other Western countries have led the way in diet-related diseases, we don't give ourselves nearly enough credit...
Although rabbits can eat and digest meat, they are herbivores by nature. Forcing them to eat meat probably leads to conclusions that cannot easily be generalized to humans.
I take issue with only one part of this post:
The best expert in the left wing structure of drosophila melanogaster has so refined their study that they tend to be almost infantile in all other aspects of life.
My experience has been that expertise is a skill, and it can be generalized. Becoming an expert in something doesn't narrow your ability to function in the world, it expands it.
Of course, you need to dedicate ridiculous amounts of time and energy in a field to truly become expert, but that process teaches you critical things that are not related to the subject at hand - how to learn, how to synthesize information, how to recognize underlying patterns, how to generalize a premise, how to focus a general concept to a specific case, how to determine the quality of information, how to work with people in other fields who may have information that you need to re-code for your specialty, etc. These skills make you a higher-quality human, not a pointy-headed cloistered misfit.
I think you may mean that he spelled it incorrectly. An adverb is the correct modifier for a verb. You used an adjective.
There are so many layers of people siphoning their take that it's become almost absurd. More and more money gets pumped into the health care system, and physicians get paid less and less every year. We're one of the few industries in which an annual salary decrease is expected. It's insurers, more than anyone else - but also administrators, EMR vendors, pharma, device manufacturers, and government bureaucrats. And most of these industries have very effective lobbyists (unlike docs, who have the impotent and uninterested AMA), "representatives" (aka "salespeople") scurrying to & from doctor's offices, and aggressive direct-to-consumer advertising. All of the corporations involved in these activities are "people," of course, and operating completely within the law. Your healthcare dollars do very little to support your doctor - they are funding the medical industrial complex, which pushes the EMR for their own ends, not for the benefit of doctors or patients. I'm a cardiologist, and I can tell you from daily experience that the current practice of medicine has become an unbelievable slog, and EMRs are a large part of that - but the whole culture has become corporatized, to the detriment of the people it's supposed to serve. Hopefully the pendulum starts to swing back at some point, but I'm not holding my breath, and I wonder if it will be too little too late when it does.
Please provide a citation for evidence of the benefit of the electronic medical record. I'm a cardiologist, and these have dramatically worsened the quality of care from our perspective; this is a fairly universal feeling among doctors, I believe. I have yet to see any evidence of the benefit - if you have some, please share. The potential benefits, which is what you describe, are still just that, and there are no documented benefits that outweigh the misery the current system inflicts.
The time and money that I've spent in training has value. The specific skills I have as a result of that time and money are significant, and useful to many people. I'm happy to use my skills to help people - it has intrinsic reward. However, the current climate requires that I do so 10 hours a day, plus nights, plus weekends, always with a smile, every 15 minutes, and job satisfaction has mostly gone the way of the dodo.
4 years of college. 4 years of medical school. 3 years of residency training. 3 years of cardiology fellowship training (gastroenterology, the example from the article, is also a 3 year fellowship). College & med school leave most of us with >$200k of debt. Residency and fellowship pay essentially minimum wage when you account for the insane hours, all the while collecting interest on our college and med school debt. I didn't have kids until I was in my late 30's because we didn't think it was fair to raise them without seeing their father.
We all have this same conversation when discussing the issue of money in medicine. In the beginning, there was a binary relationship - patient, doctor. The doctor provided services, the patient provided cash. These facts haven't changed, except now the care provided is better, the patient spends much more, the doctor gets paid much less, and everyone else in the system siphons away the money without the hours or the liability we incur.
In any event, you're not paying for 15 minutes of colonoscopy time, you're paying for the 14 years of training necessary for the doctor to do the colonoscopy.
Not to mention the cost of the colonoscope and its upkeep, the techs, the sedatives and management of their associated risks, the endoscopy suite constructed and maintained to restrictive code standards, cleaning of the endoscopy suite between each case, archiving and storage of the images, time to interpret and create a report from the colonoscopy, conversations with the patient, the patient's family, the patient's primary physician, time lost from providing other services (office and hospital visits - people are always clamoring for more availability), the enormous billing apparatus, a significant cut to the insurance company, maintenance of certification & credentialing (which requires many hours a year away from the office in a hotel conference room watching Powerpoint slides, at great expense), etc.
What's it worth to you?
I'm a cardiologist in real life, when I'm not lurking here, and this is not correct. I've taken call in 4 different systems, and in none of them was there ever a "backup" person. If the person on-call isn't reachable, either patients try again later, go to the ER, or die. FWIW, I don't go to movies when I'm on call (typical call would be one night out of 4, and one weekend out of 4 so not a tragedy). I also didn't bring my kids to restaurants until they were old enough to behave (and we left if they didn't behave). I used to smoke, and I never smoked by the only entrance or exit from a building. I'm completely comfortable asking people to stop talking and using their phone in movies, and I find I need to do that frequently. I'm jealous that there are apparently places where people don't confuse the movie theater with their living room.
BTW, have you ever played an instrument. 2 hours solid on a guitar would leave your fingers shredded, 4 hours you wont feel them for a week (by solid I mean practically no breaks, playing hard for 55 minutes an hour). I have a lot of respect for people who can do this.
I was a music major in college, and 6-8 hours a day on your instrument, between practicing and rehearsing, wasn't particularly out of the ordinary. Not sure where the destructive guitar meme comes from, but for anyone who plays regularly, finger shredding just isn't an issue. If I remember correctly, Bruce Springsteen just did a 4 hour show, and I'm pretty sure there were no finger-related hospitalizations necessary afterwards.
Why the Soulskill hating? I've been here a few years, and it seems that every once in a while, this editor or that editor is deemed an incompetent moron by some sort of acclamation, and I have never been able to find any rhyme or reason to it. Other than essentially saying "I don't like Soulskill," this comment doesn't really add anything to the conversation.
There is a Visual Basic for smartphones (compiles to iPhone and Android) - NS Basic. I've been using their stuff for 10 years (when they did the same thing for the Palm platform), and they're quite good.
I recently had to make a similar change - from being in training to becoming one of two cardiologists running a private office, which means I'm responsible for employees.
Making technical decisions is the easy part - managing people is the hard part. You're simply treated differently when you have the ability to make decisions that can change people's livelihood and lives. The best resources I found on this were "Getting to Yes" and "Getting Past No," both touchy-feely pop-style books, but both with semi-useful information in them.
Friends gave me management books, like "The Essential Drucker" and a subscription to the Harvard Business Review - I found all this stuff to be almost useless. I've found that if I spend a few minutes every once in a while checking in with people, and trying to listen to the answers, that things work out well.
good luck...
Sorry to re-post - all the carriage returns were stripped. I forgot to add HTML. It reads better with some whitespace.
I'm going to try to to untangle some if the above...
Some guy somewhere once said that you need to drink 8 glasses of water a day to maintain health. Turns out to be nonsense. For those of us with intact thirst centers in the brain (pretty much everyone reading this, for example), drinking when you are thirsty is all you need. Your body will tell you when you need more liquid by using the thirst mechanism. There are exceptions, as there is a lag before thirst is triggered, so on a hot day when you're exercising aggressively, you can get "dehydrated" and not get thirsty in time to do anything about it, but this is rare, and recent evidence tells us that hydrating aggressively, even in marathons, is overkill.
The jumble of hyponatremia, hypernatremia, hypertonic, hypotonic, hypovolemia, hypervolemia, isotonia, etc is maybe worth clearing up, although this will be interesting to precisely nobody. Some of the concepts are almost right.
"hyper" = too much, "hypo" = too little, "iso" = equal.
"volume" is the quantity of fluid (any fluid, technically) in the system.
"natr*" = sodium in the system.
"-emia" = in the blood.
"tonia" = concentration.
So, hypovolemia = low volume of fluid in the blood (hypo, vol, emia) Isotonia = equal concentration (in the medical context, meaning concentrations of a solute equivalent to those found naturally in blood). If you drink excessive fluids over an extended time, you overwhelm the kidneys' ability to maintain normal sodium concentrations in the blood, and you end up with hyponatremia. Drinking excessive fluids is usually called "psychogenic polydipsia," which is med-speak for drinking too much water because your brain is bad. The hyponatremia is potentially fatal, and often causes confusion, among other symptoms. Note that it does not cause (at least immediately) hypovolemia - the quantity of fluid in the system is adequate or high, it's the composition of that fluid that's troublesome.
In this case, one could say that the composition of the blood is hypotonic - there are fewer solutes (particularly sodium) in the blood than normal. This is treated by limiting fluids (reducing solvent, and allowing the kidneys to recover and restore balance), &/or by increasing sodium intake. Pepperoni pizza is a great solution (not kidding - my favorite nephrology professor used to prescribe exactly that). Hypertonic saline is reserved for emergencies. The blood is usually about 0.9% sodium, so a 3x concentrated version of that - typically 3% saline - can be given parenterally (via IV [intravenous], for those of us scoring at home). This is a dangerous treatment, as the brain is susceptible to dangerous/fatal swelling if hyponatremia is corrected too quickly ("cerebropontine myelinolysis," if I remember correctly - I'm a cardiologist, and I haven't thought about this stuff in a long time).
Not drinking enough fluid results in hypovolemia (commonly called "dehydration"). Usually the sodium levels in the blood measure high ("hypernatremia"), although it's not due to too much solute - it's due to too little solvent. The treatment is to replete fluids (volume), either with a a straw and some water, or with IV hydration. Usually 1/2 NS (saline that's hypotonic compared to normal blood, in this case 0.45%) or even normal (isotonic, 0.9%) saline.
The rest of the parent's post is mostly on target. Sorry for pedantry.
I'm going to try to to untangle some if the above... Some guy somewhere once said that you need to drink 8 glasses of water a day to maintain health. Turns out to be nonsense. For those of us with intact thirst centers in the brain (pretty much everyone reading this, for example), drinking when you are thirsty is all you need. Your body will tell you when you need more liquid by using the thirst mechanism. There are exceptions, as there is a lag before thirst is triggered, so on a hot day when you're exercising aggressively, you can get "dehydrated" and not get thirsty in time to do anything about it, but this is rare, and recent evidence tells us that hydrating aggressively, even in marathons, is overkill. The jumble of hyponatremia, hypernatremia, hypertonic, hypotonic, hypovolemia, hypervolemia, isotonia, etc is maybe worth clearing up, although this will be interesting to precisely nobody. Some of the concepts are almost right. "hyper" = too much, "hypo" = too little, "iso" = equal. "volume" is the quantity of fluid (any fluid, technically) in the system. "natr*" = sodium in the system. "-emia" = in the blood. "tonia" = concentration. So, hypovolemia = low volume of fluid in the blood (hypo, vol, emia) Isotonia = equal concentration (in the medical context, meaning concentrations of a solute equivalent to those found naturally in blood). If you drink excessive fluids over an extended time, you overwhelm the kidneys' ability to maintain normal sodium concentrations in the blood, and you end up with hyponatremia. Drinking excessive fluids is usually called "psychogenic polydipsia," which is med-speak for drinking too much water because your brain is bad. The hyponatremia is potentially fatal, and often causes confusion, among other symptoms. Note that it does not cause (at least immediately) hypovolemia - the quantity of fluid in the system is adequate or high, it's the composition of that fluid that's troublesome. In this case, one could say that the composition of the blood is hypotonic - there are fewer solutes (particularly sodium) in the blood than normal. This is treated by limiting fluids (reducing solvent, and allowing the kidneys to recover and restore balance), &/or by increasing sodium intake. Pepperoni pizza is a great solution (not kidding - my favorite nephrology professor used to prescribe exactly that). Hypertonic saline is reserved for emergencies. The blood is usually about 0.9% sodium, so a 3x concentrated version of that - typically 3% saline - can be given parenterally (via IV [intravenous], for those of us scoring at home). This is a dangerous treatment, as the brain is susceptible to dangerous/fatal swelling if hyponatremia is corrected too quickly ("cerebropontine myelinolysis," if I remember correctly - I'm a cardiologist, and I haven't thought about this stuff in a long time). Not drinking enough fluid results in hypovolemia (commonly called "dehydration"). Usually the sodium levels in the blood measure high ("hypernatremia"), although it's not due to too much solute - it's due to too little solvent. The treatment is to replete fluids (volume), either with a a straw and some water, or with IV hydration. Usually 1/2 NS (saline that's hypotonic compared to normal blood, in this case 0.45%) or even normal (isotonic, 0.9%) saline. The rest of the parent's post is mostly on target. Sorry for pedantry.
Mod parent up!!!!
Do you think he's incorrect for claiming that he's likely to be more well-rounded by virtue of having studied a broad array of subjects, or do you object to him stating the truth? It seems odd to bash someone for talking about their education and its results, on a thread about - well, education and its results.