I've never worn contacts on the battlefield, but I have worn them in BFE, Honduras for extended periods while doing medical work, and I can say this, if you're comfortable with contacts (ie. have trained yourself out of rubbing your eyes, your eyes produce enough extra tears to keep them moist, etc) and they're even vaguely breathable (think of the ads which claim you don't have to take your contacts out at night), you can pretty much completely ignore them for days and weeks at a time with no serious issues.
Now, whether or not that holds true once you make them capable of running a display, I dunno.
In before someone justifies their piracy by saying they help with advertising.
Oh wait, only six posts as I type this and already too late.
I'm going to go ahead and abandon modding on this article, because I can't believe no one has called you on this crap.
Specifically, TFS and TFA both defend piracy by saying they help with advertising, specifically quoting people who are (massively successful) content creators, you know, the folks who are financially impacted by piracy...
Look, I can see both sides of the argument (well, in detail it's more than 2) about piracy, I can see how they both have valid points, and am unwilling to come down firmly on either side.
What I can't support is someone who is so much a zealot that they resort to this sort of attack by ignoring basic facts.
While I do wear shirts with letters and images on them, I can somewhat see where you are coming from. I don't wear shirts where the design is the corporate logo/name of the brand of apparel (Nike shirts), and have even taken to removing the large nameplate label from the back waistband of jeans I buy after purchase (rendering them much less brand identifiable).
Now me, I'll wear a t-shirt advertising for anyone, so long as it's free, if my clothing meets the minimum societal standards of modesty, what do I care?
I'll agree, though, that I'll be damned before I pay for the privilege of advertising for a company.
Speaking as someone who has experience with online learning, both as a student and a...resource specialist, shall we say? I was in the lab, and would help out as needed when kids got hung up on something. For the right kid (or adult), it's great. For me, it was great, for some of my kids, it was great, for other kids, it was pretty good, and for others it was just awful.
The first group, for whom it was great, I just set them up, showed them how to use the program and dealt with any purely technical problems that arose.
The second group, I would occasionally rephrase the material for them, when the way the material was presented either just went to fast or didn't make any sense to them, but usually no more than once every couple-few lessons, and usually it was just one particular point that didn't make sense.
The third group, I essentially retaught the entire course for, sometime multiple times, had to be present when they did the exercises to translate them into terms they could grasp, and spend quite a bit of time incentivising them and/or out and out forcing them to stay on task.
The real promise of online education is that we will achieve individualised education, the kids will learn exactly what they need to learn, in exactly the manner they need to learn it, at exactly the speed they can learn it. It's gotten a lot better over even just the last two years (The gap between now and when I last took an online course), but it's not there yet, and it's not really all that close.
I think that in probably 10-15 years, it'll be at a point where 95% of the population will do just fine with online learning, but if you try to force 100% of the students in Iowa to take it, a lot of them are going to suffer for the experience, unless they've budgeted for someone like me to be there as an instructor, which I doubt they have.
Re:I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my Da
on
How Doctors Die
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, I'm not entirely sure on that one. First, there are disputes over how to even perform CPR for maximum effectiveness, with some saying that chest compression alone produces better outcomes than a mix of chest and breathing. If the doctors aren't in agreement over what CPR should be done, and different methods are being rolled into a single line item, then the statistics for the outcome really don't mean anything useful. It tells you that *something* is ineffective, but it cannot tell you what that something is.
That's not actually quite correct. The current debate isn't about whether hands-only CPR is more effective than full CPR (It's not), the question is whether hands-only is more easily performed correctly than compressions/vents, and is, on average, going to be more effective as it gets performed in the field, add into that the fact that hands-only is easier and faster to teach, and maybe we'll have more of the population able to perform CPR, which means a decrease in time from arrest to start of CPR, which will always improve outcomes.
Second, all doctors either swear to the Hippocratic Oath or implicitly sign up to it by becoming doctors. Since the Oath is witnessed by an independent third party, it is arguably a legally-binding common law "gentleman's agreement"/"verbal contract". Technically, the Oath states that doctors should do no harm and minimizing suffering is technically doing just that. However, very few Western nations interpret things that way. If they did, assisted suicide under well-defined conditions* would be legal. It isn't because they don't. As such, doctors end up in a double bind. Do they do the clinical least harm or the legal least harm? Whichever one they do, they violate the other.
Well, here we get into bioethics, which is a tremendously involved field, but I'll just give the nickle tour of the applicable issue.
The big one is the notion of patient autonomy. The patient (or their appointed medical decision maker) gets to choose what happens, provided they are competent to do so. As a medical professional, it is my job to determine what course is most appropriate, explain it to the patient, and once they understand what's going on, what the pros, cons and risks of the treatment are, they give me consent and I do it, if they refuse consent, I find the next most appropriate thing...rinse and repeat. In cases where there are multiple courses which balance the pros/cons/risks, I present them all, and let the patient choose.
A couple of quick sidelines we need to explore here, in order to have a decent understanding of the beast.
First is consent, and the second is competency, and the two are very closely linked, so we're going to do them as one.
There are two forms of consent, implied and expressed, expressed is relatively easy, the patient says "Yes do that" or "No go away.", alternatively, actions can be interpreted as expressed consent, if I need to take someone's blood pressure, and when they see the cuff in my hand, they roll up their sleeve, that's expressed consent...this can, of course get a little murky, and is part of why I have to carry malpractice insurance, since if I do something a competent patient didn't want, even with the best of intentions and in the full faith that I had been given consent, technically, I've just committed battery.
Implied consent isn't nearly as clear cut as that. Implied consent is used when a patient for one reason or another is not capable of giving consent, it could be because they're unconcious (obviously not going to be telling me to go ahead), they're a child (You're not legally competent until you're 18, or a variety of rare loopholes), they're confused and disorientated (If you don't know where you are, you surely can't understand medical procedures) or they're in the midst of a psychiatric emergency (If you think I'm a giant talking turtle, you're not going to understand medical procedures.). In the care of implied c
1) I do actually have a tremendously high tolerance for stress, though not inexhaustible, fortunately, the one time I got really fucked up by something at work, I had the next day off so I could come to grips with it, but that's largely irrelevant because of:
2) Being a medic is certainly more stressful than being a security guard, but it's not nearly as stressful as most people think. Largely because of:
2a) Most of the time, we're not running big traumas or codes, usually we're running little old ladies with difficulty breathing...because they have pneumonia that's gone undetected by the nursing home for 2 weeks.
2b) Even when we do run a hard call, most of the time, it's not that stressful, because I have a different outlook than most people do. Indeed, if you can't get that outlook, then you need another job. Let's take an extreme case example, cardiac arrests. Personally, I'm currently running about 33% on my saves, that is, patients that I ran a code on and got them back. What that means though, is 2 out of every 3 people I"ve run a code on are dead. But that's okay, CPR, even with all the drugs and fancy equipment that I bring to the party, is a last ditch effort. These people were already dead, we're attempting to bring them back to life, if we win, then I'll walk on clouds for a while, if we lose, then hell, they were already dead, let's get the ambulance cleaned up and be ready for the next one. In fact, I'm actually so far above the average that I'm a statistical outlier (Though I think that might have something to do with the fact that I give very good compressions, one day I want to run a study to investigate that.).
2c) We actually have quite a bit of downtime. We're staffed to the level that we could be needed, rather than the level that we will be needed, and since predicting the number of times someone will call 911 is difficult, to say the least, I get to sit on my ass quite a bit. The way I've explained it in the past is this "EMS is the only job where not only could I sleep on the job, but they give me a bed to do it in."
This is perhaps more of an answer than you were expecting, but I think it's important that people understand the reality that lies behind the flashing lights and sirens.
I'm not wholly disagreeing with you, but I would like to present an alternative view.
I'm a paramedic, and I love my job, I mean, really love it. Unfortunately, I make crap money (Though that's somewhat alleviated by the fact that I'm not salaried and tend to work an average of about 60 hours a week.)
After taking a job as an EMT-Basic because I figured it would be a good study job, I dropped out of university in my junior year of a dual EE/ME because I realized that I liked engineering, but I loved EMS.
I had to do a great deal of soul searching over that decision, since at the peak of my career as a medic, I'll most likely be making less than I would my first year out with a EE/ME, but I went ahead and did it.
I knew that I'd made the right decision about 6 months later, when after working for 3 months, with a grand total of 5 days off, I got 2 days off in a row. The first day was great, I slept in, went to a movie, got drunk, generally had a ball. Then the second day...at about 11AM, I was bored, I wanted to go to work.
The point I'm trying to make is that while you're correct in your paradigm, there are others.
> authors like J.K Rowling (who IMO don't contribute to the advancement of knowledge)
Right. Because there's nothing to be gained from getting kids to enjoy reading. It's not like they'll carry that forward later into life.
That's an indirect contribution, which would be ineligible for government funds. Write a few grants and see how well such logic translates into funding (which is GP's point about the current system).
First off, I don't think that was the (G)GP's point, I think it was just blasting popular fiction authors...for the sake of this comment, though, I'm going to go ahead and grant the argument.
I, personally, read the Harry Potter books, they weren't the greatest thing ever, but they killed a week or so of my reading time in an enjoyable manner. Let's go a little further, though, I read about two chapters of the first twilight book, and threw my hands up in despair...even a little further, I refuse to participate in Facebook, I think it's a mindless waste of time that degrades every possible measure of intelligence. (It might show that I'm a bit of a misanthrope, here...)
However, having said that, until last week (I was a stop-gap contract employee from the get-go), I ran a learning center in Honduras which, amoung other things, had the goal of improving literacy amoung the local children. While I was working there, I did everything in my power to encourage the children to read those books, and to use face book...given my personal opinions, you might ask "why?", but that's simple, it has nothing to do with enhancing the enjoyment of reading, but rather with the promotion of literacy.
Like anything else, the only way to get good at reading is to do it. Anything that make children want to read it improves their literacy. In the same vein, I never could understand why anyone would object to children reading comic books...if they want to read, get out of the way and help them.
Now, I wasn't dependent on government grants to do my works, but rather was dependent on private donations (For everything from my salary to the money to pay the electric bill), which is arguably either a harder or easier way to raise money...largely, I think, depending on which way you've most recently tried to raise money.
Oh, and lest you think that the value of this sort of thing is wholly involved in the children being the product of a fifth-rate education like they receive here, a fair percentage of the kids who I went to HS with in the states couldn't read without moving their lips...and an lamentably non-trivial percentage of them literally couldn't read anything past the 3rd grade level at all.
Someone who is literate is much more likely to, if not make a positive contribution to society, at least not make a negative contribution than someone who is illiterate.
Why would you ever oppose anything that improves literacy?
Why not just buy a pre-paid phone in the other country when you get there? Having a phone for each state in the US would be annoying, especially in the north-east, but how often do cross planet-spanning bodies of water? Is it really so frequent that it matters?
For some people, yes.
I won't even pretend that I'm a typical use case, but I am a person who, after three years of living abroad is staring down having to return to the states for a year or two (protip: The only way to pay off first-world student loans is to have a first world paycheck), however I have absolutely no intention of spending more than three years in the states before I move away again, and if I can possibly wrangle it, it'll only be 1 year.
Unfortunately, my fancy-shmancy smartphone was stolen 3 days(![in the three years since, I"ve not had a single other thing stolen from me.]) after I got here. I've always assumed that when I returned to the states, I would siphon off a bit of the money left over from paying off my debts to buy a new smartphone, and since my goal is to kick off the dust of the states as soon as possible, GSM is my only real choice.
When I saw the merger proposal, I feared for my sanity, having had AT&T as my service provider before, I dreaded having to use them again. I've followed this story closely and have crowed triumph at every story that suggested it wouldn't happen...I'll admit it, I did a little happy dance when I saw this story pop up in my rss feed.
That makes more sense than what I got out of it. Doesn't change my basic point, but it means that the point I was replying to wasn't the point he was trying to make. He was just railing against the trend towards automation.
Oh, and I knew he wasn't talking about emergency workers in the sense of the word as it applies to me, but I was trying to draw the parallel as best I could.
The corollary to that that I live by is that "Anyone who does a job I wouldn't do, deserves my respect.".
I worked as a temp on a construction job once. After a week, I quit. I couldn't take it, my back and knees were killing me, not to mention I was bored out of my mind. I will never work construction again, I'd rather flip burgers for less money, but despite the fact that I've since found my niche in a semi-professional field, I still respect those that work as unskilled construction labor...those poor bastards.
Honestly, I couldn't quite parse your entire comment, let alone this particular bit, but taking my best guess as to what you meant by this statement, I felt the need to respond.
I am a paramedic, almost the very definition of an emergency worker (though firefighters might come closer to the mark), we are staffed to the level that actuarial types say we can reasonably be expected to be needed. Note the emphasis. When I worked in the states, I spent roughly 25-50% of my time doing a) shit all and b) nothing...watching TV, surfing the web, etc.
What I'm getting at, though, is that emergencies happen, and they cost a lot of money when they do, though that cost can be mitigated by having someone properly prepared to meet the emergency.
While I personally have no aptitude for that particular sort of number-crunching, I can respect it, and if the actuarial types are doing their jobs right, even if I spend 99.9% of my time sitting with my thumb up my ass, in that last 0.1% of the time, having me, a trained and prepared emergency responder able to cope with the emergency saves the company (or in my case, the government/society at large) enough money to justify my salary for the other 99.9% of the time.
Oh, crap, I missed PR. Sorry about that, been a rather long day, I'm not quite all here.
Anyhow, let's address that real quick: Obviously, charities live and die by the donations they receive, and the donations the receive are dependent on their public awareness. If spending 500 dollars on a website gets you 5k in donations, or 500k on a TV commercial campaign gets you 5 million, then it's money well spent. Let's expand that a bit and say that if you spend 500 bucks on a website, and you get 501 dollars in donations, you're still ahead. Having said all that, let me go ahead and quote John Wanamaker: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.".
I have 10 mod points, and I really wanted to use them on this post, but I think that you've said somethings that really need addressing.
Before I go any further, I would like to admit right now that there are bad charities out there. One leaps to mind that we saw move in here about 2 years ago. It purported to be "thinking about the children", yet near as I can tell, the only charitable thing it ever did was spend about 5k to throw a christmas party for the kids (admittedly, they did that twice, bringing us to a total charitable contribution of 10k). Meanwhile, the head of this charity lived in a 750k USD house and drove a 90k USD car. Scams happen, I won't say that they don't.
Next, a bit of background: I'm a paramedic, I have lived and worked for various NPOs in Honduras for the past three years. I tend to tell people that I volunteer down here, and while in the strictest sense, that's not true, in effect, it is. I make about 1/5 of what I could earn if I were working in the states (and if you know anything about EMS payscales, that's saying something.).
So let's examine your four objections:
1) Staff Salaries: As I said above, I make about 20% of what I could reasonably expect to make if I were working in the states. Theoretically, then, I should be able to work up there 20% of the time, then volunteer down here the other 80% of the time. Realistically, though, even supposing that I could find an employer willing to do that (Highly unlikely, in my field, though not, perhaps, impossible),, there's a big difference around here between the trust you get from the community from being someone who lives here full time and someone who comes in to spend some time volunteering, and no matter how skewed the numbers as far as how much time you spend where, you'll always be seen in that light. Around here, I'm known by those I work with as "El gringo grande" (I'm 6'8), but that's a term of endearment, rather than the more common "El gringo" that I see applied to many people who come here repeatedly. with the best of intentions.
2) Travel: I've actually never been offered travel reimbursements, though I've had to turn down a couple of offers because I couldn't afford the travel costs. Now it's entirely possible that those charities found someone else to fill the role who could afford them, and could do it as well or better than I could, but frankly, and without a hint of egotism (no, really!), I'm very good at what I do, not only the actual meat and bones of responding to emergencies, but also in integrating myself into a community and educating without being patronizing. That last is a surprisingly hard task, I've met very few who can do it, and none who are better at it than me in my particular bailiwick...though I will say I've met two who are better at doing it in medicine in general.
3) Perks: Again, I've never been offered any perks (aside form the medivac service I worked with offering my free coverage should I need their services), however unlike the above, it's never prevented me from taking a position, but then I'm healthy, young (28), and single. There are, I imagine, plenty of other people who couldn't take such a position without some assurance of health coverage, some sort of retirement or education for their kids.
4) Finally, and in some ways the biggest point: "fees". First off, let's call a spade a spade, they're bribes. Having said that, though, bribes are important to actually getting shit done in most of the world. I've paid bribes, and I'll almost certainly pay more, but that's just the cost of doing business. Corruption has to be viewed with a certain amount of pragmatism. You're kidding yourself if you think that it doesn't exist in whatever (presumably, though I could be wrong) developed nation you live in, it's just that around here it's right up front where you can keep an eye on it. And really, it's cheaper and easier, too. If I want to do something around here, I slip a couple hundred bucks to someone in the health ministry, and away
Yes, absolutely. I was speaking specifically about the high-tension line on a car, but you're right, it's not a bad idea to make sure people understand that distinction.
As the saying goes, "Volts jolt, mill(iamp)s kill".
I've felt the shock a few times while working on the 12V side, if it's wet and you bridge from a hot line to the chassis, you can feel it. Now, it's not really painful, but it's noticeable. I suppose if you were working in a shop, it's somewhat unlikely that you'd be working on the side of the road in the rain, where as I live on a tropical island and drive clunkers, so I'm on the side of the road constantly, which might account for the disparity in our experiences.
Also, I've taken 14kV (what that particular car's coil outputted) across the tits, and again, it's not really painful, but it certainly wakes you up, and leaves the ingress/egress sites tingly for a a while. I suppose if your jerk reaction was insufficient to pull you away quickly, it might get worse. All told, I'd rate the experience worse than 110V AC, but not as bad as 220V AC.
It occurs to me, as I wrote that and thought about my experiences with electrocution, that it's a wonder I'm still alive.
I'm sorry, I guess if you're not familiar with the idiom of EMS (and to a degree, the rest of medicine), I can see how you came to the conclusion you did, it was my fault for not being more clear.
If I don't do something the patient needs, and he dies, that's a kill. If I do something the patient doesn't need and he dies, that's a kill. If I massively overdose the patient and he dies, that's a kill.
A failure to save is if I pick them up dead, and can't bring them back, despite doing everything appropriate, or if I pick them up alive but circling the drain, they die en route and I can't bring them back, despite my best efforts.
I'm actually criminally liable if I fail to take an action that (wording varies with state) "a reasonably skilled paramedic would have" which results in harm to the patient. Similairly if I do perform an action that results in harm to the patient.
As far as avoiding patients, that doesn't work either, you go where dispatch tells you to.
I dunno, I'm a paramedic, and the only metric I've ever been judged by is the number of patients I kill (Still 0!). Note, that's not the same thing as the number of patients I fail to save.
All told, I think that's a pretty fair metric to hold me up to.
I obviously don't know the police department where you live, so I could be completely off base about this.
I think that your viewpoint is a pretty common one, and rather understandable in it's way, because it's hard to appreciate all that a police force does. The vast majority of it doesn't reach public attention, usually only, as you say, the big flashy store robberies, murders and active traffic enforcement efforts. Could I recommend that you get yourself a scanner (should be able to pick one up cheap from your local radioshack), or depending on where you live, you might be able to find someone who streams it live. I think you might be surprised at how busy they are.
As for the matter of the cops sitting in the coffee shops. Here's the thing, cops are entitled to lunch breaks, too (Though not really a break, since they can be obliged to drop everything at a moment's notice and respond to a call.), but of course, since they're in uniform, it's quite easy to spot them lounging around indolently, as it were.
Again though, I don't know your specific circumstances, and while I'll defend cops in general, I'm not so dewy eyed as to imagine that there are no bad cops, and more-over, bad departments. I just think that a great many of the complaints about cops tend to spring from people not understanding the peculiarities of what they do.
Disclaimer: I'm not a cop, I've never been a cop, I never want to be a cop. I am, however, a paramedic, and as such tend to work a bit more closely with cops, and understand their job a bit better than most folks.
If their claim that the tracking is for 911 is true, then cell phone theft should be trivial for the police to act on.
While I'm not wholly unsympathetic to this viewpoint, no, not really.
The thing you've got to consider is that most police departments are in fact vastly understaffed for their workloads. Or at least for their potential workloads.
Let us assume that your nominal PD has the man power to follow up on a tip from the Cell company (And that the laws concerning warrants etc permit them to Stake definitive action on those tips.)
The cell provider advises them that stolen phone W is active on the network, and has reported it position as (X,Y,Z) corresponding to street address U. The PD rolls a unit to address U, and discovers that it's a Starbucks, with 16 customers, and 4 employees. What then?
A reasonable person would then say, well, let's call the number now associated with stolen cell phone W, the person who answers is obviously the thief (/recipient of stolen goods). The problem, though, is that the same laws that protect the tinfoil hat brigade from government intrusion protect our criminal from warrant-less search, so the cop then has to get a search warrant for our bad guy.
Let's say this is a small town, so there's no issue in identifying our baddie, the cop probably went to school with him. So he calls to dispatch, identifies the guy, dispatch calls the brass, who agrees and instructs dispatch to detail a unit to find the local judge/magistrate/justice of the peace to sign a warrant so the unit on scene can search this bad guy and prove him to have stolen property.
Great! After just over an hour, or so, we've got our criminal, right?
Well, no, not really. Now we've got to establish that a) all the procedures outlined above were followed carefully. b) This guy stole the phone, c) failing that, he willfully received stolen property.
Oh, and let us not forget d) during the hour that 1 officer was detained identifying and following the suspect (assuming he didn't spend the whole time mooching on Starbuck's WiFi while pretending to write the Great American Novel), a half hour of another officer's time in going back to base to get the paperwork, then driving out to the courthouse/judges' house/the fancy new restaurant the judge's wife really wanted to try, nothing happened that might have demanded the attention of those persons.to better effect.
What I'm getting at here is that it's non-trivial, once you consider the complexities of the situation.
Perhaps, once a national pattern of expecting such efforts from the criminal justice system is created, the rate of phone thefts will drop off to such a degree that not only will there be no additional workload on the system, but that there might even be slightly less.
How likely do you think that expectation is, though, if the process above has to be followed? And how much worse service are you willing to accept from your local police force to make it happen?
Slashdot Mirror
I've never worn contacts on the battlefield, but I have worn them in BFE, Honduras for extended periods while doing medical work, and I can say this, if you're comfortable with contacts (ie. have trained yourself out of rubbing your eyes, your eyes produce enough extra tears to keep them moist, etc) and they're even vaguely breathable (think of the ads which claim you don't have to take your contacts out at night), you can pretty much completely ignore them for days and weeks at a time with no serious issues.
Now, whether or not that holds true once you make them capable of running a display, I dunno.
In before someone justifies their piracy by saying they help with advertising.
Oh wait, only six posts as I type this and already too late.
I'm going to go ahead and abandon modding on this article, because I can't believe no one has called you on this crap.
Specifically, TFS and TFA both defend piracy by saying they help with advertising, specifically quoting people who are (massively successful) content creators, you know, the folks who are financially impacted by piracy...
Look, I can see both sides of the argument (well, in detail it's more than 2) about piracy, I can see how they both have valid points, and am unwilling to come down firmly on either side.
What I can't support is someone who is so much a zealot that they resort to this sort of attack by ignoring basic facts.
While I do wear shirts with letters and images on them, I can somewhat see where you are coming from. I don't wear shirts where the design is the corporate logo/name of the brand of apparel (Nike shirts), and have even taken to removing the large nameplate label from the back waistband of jeans I buy after purchase (rendering them much less brand identifiable).
Now me, I'll wear a t-shirt advertising for anyone, so long as it's free, if my clothing meets the minimum societal standards of modesty, what do I care?
I'll agree, though, that I'll be damned before I pay for the privilege of advertising for a company.
That $2000 is 95% labor, which can be easily reduced in a variety of ways. At hte consumer level you arent getting battery packs cheaper.
Like moving to Honduras! I just had a timing chain replaced, Total cost: ~95USD.
Recently, I had a head-gasket replaced, and the head and valves remachined, total cost: ~185USD.
I love cheap labor prices.
I'm not the GP, but I agree with him/her.
Speaking as someone who has experience with online learning, both as a student and a...resource specialist, shall we say? I was in the lab, and would help out as needed when kids got hung up on something. For the right kid (or adult), it's great. For me, it was great, for some of my kids, it was great, for other kids, it was pretty good, and for others it was just awful.
The first group, for whom it was great, I just set them up, showed them how to use the program and dealt with any purely technical problems that arose.
The second group, I would occasionally rephrase the material for them, when the way the material was presented either just went to fast or didn't make any sense to them, but usually no more than once every couple-few lessons, and usually it was just one particular point that didn't make sense.
The third group, I essentially retaught the entire course for, sometime multiple times, had to be present when they did the exercises to translate them into terms they could grasp, and spend quite a bit of time incentivising them and/or out and out forcing them to stay on task.
The real promise of online education is that we will achieve individualised education, the kids will learn exactly what they need to learn, in exactly the manner they need to learn it, at exactly the speed they can learn it. It's gotten a lot better over even just the last two years (The gap between now and when I last took an online course), but it's not there yet, and it's not really all that close.
I think that in probably 10-15 years, it'll be at a point where 95% of the population will do just fine with online learning, but if you try to force 100% of the students in Iowa to take it, a lot of them are going to suffer for the experience, unless they've budgeted for someone like me to be there as an instructor, which I doubt they have.
Well, I'm not entirely sure on that one. First, there are disputes over how to even perform CPR for maximum effectiveness, with some saying that chest compression alone produces better outcomes than a mix of chest and breathing. If the doctors aren't in agreement over what CPR should be done, and different methods are being rolled into a single line item, then the statistics for the outcome really don't mean anything useful. It tells you that *something* is ineffective, but it cannot tell you what that something is.
That's not actually quite correct. The current debate isn't about whether hands-only CPR is more effective than full CPR (It's not), the question is whether hands-only is more easily performed correctly than compressions/vents, and is, on average, going to be more effective as it gets performed in the field, add into that the fact that hands-only is easier and faster to teach, and maybe we'll have more of the population able to perform CPR, which means a decrease in time from arrest to start of CPR, which will always improve outcomes.
Second, all doctors either swear to the Hippocratic Oath or implicitly sign up to it by becoming doctors. Since the Oath is witnessed by an independent third party, it is arguably a legally-binding common law "gentleman's agreement"/"verbal contract". Technically, the Oath states that doctors should do no harm and minimizing suffering is technically doing just that. However, very few Western nations interpret things that way. If they did, assisted suicide under well-defined conditions* would be legal. It isn't because they don't. As such, doctors end up in a double bind. Do they do the clinical least harm or the legal least harm? Whichever one they do, they violate the other.
Well, here we get into bioethics, which is a tremendously involved field, but I'll just give the nickle tour of the applicable issue.
The big one is the notion of patient autonomy. The patient (or their appointed medical decision maker) gets to choose what happens, provided they are competent to do so. As a medical professional, it is my job to determine what course is most appropriate, explain it to the patient, and once they understand what's going on, what the pros, cons and risks of the treatment are, they give me consent and I do it, if they refuse consent, I find the next most appropriate thing...rinse and repeat. In cases where there are multiple courses which balance the pros/cons/risks, I present them all, and let the patient choose.
A couple of quick sidelines we need to explore here, in order to have a decent understanding of the beast.
First is consent, and the second is competency, and the two are very closely linked, so we're going to do them as one.
There are two forms of consent, implied and expressed, expressed is relatively easy, the patient says "Yes do that" or "No go away.", alternatively, actions can be interpreted as expressed consent, if I need to take someone's blood pressure, and when they see the cuff in my hand, they roll up their sleeve, that's expressed consent...this can, of course get a little murky, and is part of why I have to carry malpractice insurance, since if I do something a competent patient didn't want, even with the best of intentions and in the full faith that I had been given consent, technically, I've just committed battery.
Implied consent isn't nearly as clear cut as that. Implied consent is used when a patient for one reason or another is not capable of giving consent, it could be because they're unconcious (obviously not going to be telling me to go ahead), they're a child (You're not legally competent until you're 18, or a variety of rare loopholes), they're confused and disorientated (If you don't know where you are, you surely can't understand medical procedures) or they're in the midst of a psychiatric emergency (If you think I'm a giant talking turtle, you're not going to understand medical procedures.). In the care of implied c
Boredom in this case all comes down to what do you want to be doing?
If you have a hobby that you enjoy more that working, then you'd rather be doing that.
If there's nothing you'd rather be doing than work, then you'll be bored.
Oh come now, this can't be your first introduction to the notion of "do what I say, not what I do.".
1) I do actually have a tremendously high tolerance for stress, though not inexhaustible, fortunately, the one time I got really fucked up by something at work, I had the next day off so I could come to grips with it, but that's largely irrelevant because of:
2) Being a medic is certainly more stressful than being a security guard, but it's not nearly as stressful as most people think. Largely because of:
2a) Most of the time, we're not running big traumas or codes, usually we're running little old ladies with difficulty breathing...because they have pneumonia that's gone undetected by the nursing home for 2 weeks.
2b) Even when we do run a hard call, most of the time, it's not that stressful, because I have a different outlook than most people do. Indeed, if you can't get that outlook, then you need another job. Let's take an extreme case example, cardiac arrests. Personally, I'm currently running about 33% on my saves, that is, patients that I ran a code on and got them back. What that means though, is 2 out of every 3 people I"ve run a code on are dead. But that's okay, CPR, even with all the drugs and fancy equipment that I bring to the party, is a last ditch effort. These people were already dead, we're attempting to bring them back to life, if we win, then I'll walk on clouds for a while, if we lose, then hell, they were already dead, let's get the ambulance cleaned up and be ready for the next one. In fact, I'm actually so far above the average that I'm a statistical outlier (Though I think that might have something to do with the fact that I give very good compressions, one day I want to run a study to investigate that.).
2c) We actually have quite a bit of downtime. We're staffed to the level that we could be needed, rather than the level that we will be needed, and since predicting the number of times someone will call 911 is difficult, to say the least, I get to sit on my ass quite a bit. The way I've explained it in the past is this "EMS is the only job where not only could I sleep on the job, but they give me a bed to do it in."
This is perhaps more of an answer than you were expecting, but I think it's important that people understand the reality that lies behind the flashing lights and sirens.
I'm not wholly disagreeing with you, but I would like to present an alternative view.
I'm a paramedic, and I love my job, I mean, really love it. Unfortunately, I make crap money (Though that's somewhat alleviated by the fact that I'm not salaried and tend to work an average of about 60 hours a week.)
After taking a job as an EMT-Basic because I figured it would be a good study job, I dropped out of university in my junior year of a dual EE/ME because I realized that I liked engineering, but I loved EMS.
I had to do a great deal of soul searching over that decision, since at the peak of my career as a medic, I'll most likely be making less than I would my first year out with a EE/ME, but I went ahead and did it.
I knew that I'd made the right decision about 6 months later, when after working for 3 months, with a grand total of 5 days off, I got 2 days off in a row. The first day was great, I slept in, went to a movie, got drunk, generally had a ball. Then the second day...at about 11AM, I was bored, I wanted to go to work.
The point I'm trying to make is that while you're correct in your paradigm, there are others.
> authors like J.K Rowling (who IMO don't contribute to the advancement of knowledge) Right. Because there's nothing to be gained from getting kids to enjoy reading. It's not like they'll carry that forward later into life.
That's an indirect contribution, which would be ineligible for government funds. Write a few grants and see how well such logic translates into funding (which is GP's point about the current system).
First off, I don't think that was the (G)GP's point, I think it was just blasting popular fiction authors...for the sake of this comment, though, I'm going to go ahead and grant the argument.
I, personally, read the Harry Potter books, they weren't the greatest thing ever, but they killed a week or so of my reading time in an enjoyable manner. Let's go a little further, though, I read about two chapters of the first twilight book, and threw my hands up in despair...even a little further, I refuse to participate in Facebook, I think it's a mindless waste of time that degrades every possible measure of intelligence. (It might show that I'm a bit of a misanthrope, here...)
However, having said that, until last week (I was a stop-gap contract employee from the get-go), I ran a learning center in Honduras which, amoung other things, had the goal of improving literacy amoung the local children. While I was working there, I did everything in my power to encourage the children to read those books, and to use face book...given my personal opinions, you might ask "why?", but that's simple, it has nothing to do with enhancing the enjoyment of reading, but rather with the promotion of literacy.
Like anything else, the only way to get good at reading is to do it. Anything that make children want to read it improves their literacy. In the same vein, I never could understand why anyone would object to children reading comic books...if they want to read, get out of the way and help them.
Now, I wasn't dependent on government grants to do my works, but rather was dependent on private donations (For everything from my salary to the money to pay the electric bill), which is arguably either a harder or easier way to raise money...largely, I think, depending on which way you've most recently tried to raise money.
Oh, and lest you think that the value of this sort of thing is wholly involved in the children being the product of a fifth-rate education like they receive here, a fair percentage of the kids who I went to HS with in the states couldn't read without moving their lips...and an lamentably non-trivial percentage of them literally couldn't read anything past the 3rd grade level at all.
Someone who is literate is much more likely to, if not make a positive contribution to society, at least not make a negative contribution than someone who is illiterate.
Why would you ever oppose anything that improves literacy?
Why not just buy a pre-paid phone in the other country when you get there? Having a phone for each state in the US would be annoying, especially in the north-east, but how often do cross planet-spanning bodies of water? Is it really so frequent that it matters?
For some people, yes.
I won't even pretend that I'm a typical use case, but I am a person who, after three years of living abroad is staring down having to return to the states for a year or two (protip: The only way to pay off first-world student loans is to have a first world paycheck), however I have absolutely no intention of spending more than three years in the states before I move away again, and if I can possibly wrangle it, it'll only be 1 year.
Unfortunately, my fancy-shmancy smartphone was stolen 3 days(![in the three years since, I"ve not had a single other thing stolen from me.]) after I got here. I've always assumed that when I returned to the states, I would siphon off a bit of the money left over from paying off my debts to buy a new smartphone, and since my goal is to kick off the dust of the states as soon as possible, GSM is my only real choice.
When I saw the merger proposal, I feared for my sanity, having had AT&T as my service provider before, I dreaded having to use them again. I've followed this story closely and have crowed triumph at every story that suggested it wouldn't happen...I'll admit it, I did a little happy dance when I saw this story pop up in my rss feed.
That makes more sense than what I got out of it. Doesn't change my basic point, but it means that the point I was replying to wasn't the point he was trying to make. He was just railing against the trend towards automation.
Oh, and I knew he wasn't talking about emergency workers in the sense of the word as it applies to me, but I was trying to draw the parallel as best I could.
The corollary to that that I live by is that "Anyone who does a job I wouldn't do, deserves my respect.".
I worked as a temp on a construction job once. After a week, I quit. I couldn't take it, my back and knees were killing me, not to mention I was bored out of my mind. I will never work construction again, I'd rather flip burgers for less money, but despite the fact that I've since found my niche in a semi-professional field, I still respect those that work as unskilled construction labor...those poor bastards.
"mostly useless emergency supervisors".
Honestly, I couldn't quite parse your entire comment, let alone this particular bit, but taking my best guess as to what you meant by this statement, I felt the need to respond.
I am a paramedic, almost the very definition of an emergency worker (though firefighters might come closer to the mark), we are staffed to the level that actuarial types say we can reasonably be expected to be needed. Note the emphasis. When I worked in the states, I spent roughly 25-50% of my time doing a) shit all and b) nothing...watching TV, surfing the web, etc.
What I'm getting at, though, is that emergencies happen, and they cost a lot of money when they do, though that cost can be mitigated by having someone properly prepared to meet the emergency.
While I personally have no aptitude for that particular sort of number-crunching, I can respect it, and if the actuarial types are doing their jobs right, even if I spend 99.9% of my time sitting with my thumb up my ass, in that last 0.1% of the time, having me, a trained and prepared emergency responder able to cope with the emergency saves the company (or in my case, the government/society at large) enough money to justify my salary for the other 99.9% of the time.
Emergency personnel aren't "mostly useless", we're "(sometimes) mostly idle", there's a difference.
Oh, crap, I missed PR. Sorry about that, been a rather long day, I'm not quite all here.
Anyhow, let's address that real quick: Obviously, charities live and die by the donations they receive, and the donations the receive are dependent on their public awareness. If spending 500 dollars on a website gets you 5k in donations, or 500k on a TV commercial campaign gets you 5 million, then it's money well spent. Let's expand that a bit and say that if you spend 500 bucks on a website, and you get 501 dollars in donations, you're still ahead. Having said all that, let me go ahead and quote John Wanamaker: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.".
I have 10 mod points, and I really wanted to use them on this post, but I think that you've said somethings that really need addressing.
Before I go any further, I would like to admit right now that there are bad charities out there. One leaps to mind that we saw move in here about 2 years ago. It purported to be "thinking about the children", yet near as I can tell, the only charitable thing it ever did was spend about 5k to throw a christmas party for the kids (admittedly, they did that twice, bringing us to a total charitable contribution of 10k). Meanwhile, the head of this charity lived in a 750k USD house and drove a 90k USD car. Scams happen, I won't say that they don't.
Next, a bit of background: I'm a paramedic, I have lived and worked for various NPOs in Honduras for the past three years. I tend to tell people that I volunteer down here, and while in the strictest sense, that's not true, in effect, it is. I make about 1/5 of what I could earn if I were working in the states (and if you know anything about EMS payscales, that's saying something.).
So let's examine your four objections:
1) Staff Salaries: As I said above, I make about 20% of what I could reasonably expect to make if I were working in the states. Theoretically, then, I should be able to work up there 20% of the time, then volunteer down here the other 80% of the time. Realistically, though, even supposing that I could find an employer willing to do that (Highly unlikely, in my field, though not, perhaps, impossible),, there's a big difference around here between the trust you get from the community from being someone who lives here full time and someone who comes in to spend some time volunteering, and no matter how skewed the numbers as far as how much time you spend where, you'll always be seen in that light. Around here, I'm known by those I work with as "El gringo grande" (I'm 6'8), but that's a term of endearment, rather than the more common "El gringo" that I see applied to many people who come here repeatedly. with the best of intentions.
2) Travel: I've actually never been offered travel reimbursements, though I've had to turn down a couple of offers because I couldn't afford the travel costs. Now it's entirely possible that those charities found someone else to fill the role who could afford them, and could do it as well or better than I could, but frankly, and without a hint of egotism (no, really!), I'm very good at what I do, not only the actual meat and bones of responding to emergencies, but also in integrating myself into a community and educating without being patronizing. That last is a surprisingly hard task, I've met very few who can do it, and none who are better at it than me in my particular bailiwick...though I will say I've met two who are better at doing it in medicine in general.
3) Perks: Again, I've never been offered any perks (aside form the medivac service I worked with offering my free coverage should I need their services), however unlike the above, it's never prevented me from taking a position, but then I'm healthy, young (28), and single. There are, I imagine, plenty of other people who couldn't take such a position without some assurance of health coverage, some sort of retirement or education for their kids.
4) Finally, and in some ways the biggest point: "fees". First off, let's call a spade a spade, they're bribes. Having said that, though, bribes are important to actually getting shit done in most of the world. I've paid bribes, and I'll almost certainly pay more, but that's just the cost of doing business. Corruption has to be viewed with a certain amount of pragmatism. You're kidding yourself if you think that it doesn't exist in whatever (presumably, though I could be wrong) developed nation you live in, it's just that around here it's right up front where you can keep an eye on it. And really, it's cheaper and easier, too. If I want to do something around here, I slip a couple hundred bucks to someone in the health ministry, and away
Yes, absolutely. I was speaking specifically about the high-tension line on a car, but you're right, it's not a bad idea to make sure people understand that distinction.
As the saying goes, "Volts jolt, mill(iamp)s kill".
I dunno about that.
I've felt the shock a few times while working on the 12V side, if it's wet and you bridge from a hot line to the chassis, you can feel it. Now, it's not really painful, but it's noticeable. I suppose if you were working in a shop, it's somewhat unlikely that you'd be working on the side of the road in the rain, where as I live on a tropical island and drive clunkers, so I'm on the side of the road constantly, which might account for the disparity in our experiences.
Also, I've taken 14kV (what that particular car's coil outputted) across the tits, and again, it's not really painful, but it certainly wakes you up, and leaves the ingress/egress sites tingly for a a while. I suppose if your jerk reaction was insufficient to pull you away quickly, it might get worse. All told, I'd rate the experience worse than 110V AC, but not as bad as 220V AC.
It occurs to me, as I wrote that and thought about my experiences with electrocution, that it's a wonder I'm still alive.
I'm sorry, I guess if you're not familiar with the idiom of EMS (and to a degree, the rest of medicine), I can see how you came to the conclusion you did, it was my fault for not being more clear.
If I don't do something the patient needs, and he dies, that's a kill. If I do something the patient doesn't need and he dies, that's a kill. If I massively overdose the patient and he dies, that's a kill.
A failure to save is if I pick them up dead, and can't bring them back, despite doing everything appropriate, or if I pick them up alive but circling the drain, they die en route and I can't bring them back, despite my best efforts.
I'm actually criminally liable if I fail to take an action that (wording varies with state) "a reasonably skilled paramedic would have" which results in harm to the patient. Similairly if I do perform an action that results in harm to the patient.
As far as avoiding patients, that doesn't work either, you go where dispatch tells you to.
I dunno, I'm a paramedic, and the only metric I've ever been judged by is the number of patients I kill (Still 0!). Note, that's not the same thing as the number of patients I fail to save.
All told, I think that's a pretty fair metric to hold me up to.
In Japan they no longer have the honor they once had in their leadership so the responsible ones do not kill themselves anymore
I call bullshit.
Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that suicide is the honorable response to a fuck-up?
The fuck it is. The honorable response to a fuck-up is devoting your life to cleaning it up, until either you fix it or you die of natural causes.
Suicide is a coward's way out, it passes the problem to the next guy and somehow through the power of death magically absolves you of your sin.
China's government got the brilliant idea that overpopulation would be a great economic boon.
I'm sorry, what?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
[Citation needed]
I obviously don't know the police department where you live, so I could be completely off base about this.
I think that your viewpoint is a pretty common one, and rather understandable in it's way, because it's hard to appreciate all that a police force does. The vast majority of it doesn't reach public attention, usually only, as you say, the big flashy store robberies, murders and active traffic enforcement efforts. Could I recommend that you get yourself a scanner (should be able to pick one up cheap from your local radioshack), or depending on where you live, you might be able to find someone who streams it live. I think you might be surprised at how busy they are.
As for the matter of the cops sitting in the coffee shops. Here's the thing, cops are entitled to lunch breaks, too (Though not really a break, since they can be obliged to drop everything at a moment's notice and respond to a call.), but of course, since they're in uniform, it's quite easy to spot them lounging around indolently, as it were.
Again though, I don't know your specific circumstances, and while I'll defend cops in general, I'm not so dewy eyed as to imagine that there are no bad cops, and more-over, bad departments. I just think that a great many of the complaints about cops tend to spring from people not understanding the peculiarities of what they do.
Disclaimer: I'm not a cop, I've never been a cop, I never want to be a cop. I am, however, a paramedic, and as such tend to work a bit more closely with cops, and understand their job a bit better than most folks.
If their claim that the tracking is for 911 is true, then cell phone theft should be trivial for the police to act on.
While I'm not wholly unsympathetic to this viewpoint, no, not really.
The thing you've got to consider is that most police departments are in fact vastly understaffed for their workloads. Or at least for their potential workloads.
Let us assume that your nominal PD has the man power to follow up on a tip from the Cell company (And that the laws concerning warrants etc permit them to Stake definitive action on those tips.)
The cell provider advises them that stolen phone W is active on the network, and has reported it position as (X,Y,Z) corresponding to street address U. The PD rolls a unit to address U, and discovers that it's a Starbucks, with 16 customers, and 4 employees. What then?
A reasonable person would then say, well, let's call the number now associated with stolen cell phone W, the person who answers is obviously the thief (/recipient of stolen goods). The problem, though, is that the same laws that protect the tinfoil hat brigade from government intrusion protect our criminal from warrant-less search, so the cop then has to get a search warrant for our bad guy.
Let's say this is a small town, so there's no issue in identifying our baddie, the cop probably went to school with him. So he calls to dispatch, identifies the guy, dispatch calls the brass, who agrees and instructs dispatch to detail a unit to find the local judge/magistrate/justice of the peace to sign a warrant so the unit on scene can search this bad guy and prove him to have stolen property.
Great! After just over an hour, or so, we've got our criminal, right?
Well, no, not really. Now we've got to establish that a) all the procedures outlined above were followed carefully. b) This guy stole the phone, c) failing that, he willfully received stolen property.
Oh, and let us not forget d) during the hour that 1 officer was detained identifying and following the suspect (assuming he didn't spend the whole time mooching on Starbuck's WiFi while pretending to write the Great American Novel), a half hour of another officer's time in going back to base to get the paperwork, then driving out to the courthouse/judges' house/the fancy new restaurant the judge's wife really wanted to try, nothing happened that might have demanded the attention of those persons.to better effect.
What I'm getting at here is that it's non-trivial, once you consider the complexities of the situation.
Perhaps, once a national pattern of expecting such efforts from the criminal justice system is created, the rate of phone thefts will drop off to such a degree that not only will there be no additional workload on the system, but that there might even be slightly less.
How likely do you think that expectation is, though, if the process above has to be followed? And how much worse service are you willing to accept from your local police force to make it happen?