It's amazing to me how common bias is in the healthcare field.
After reading Gary Taubes' "Why We Get Fat" and another piece he wrote for Science on the politics of salt research (http://garytaubes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/science-political-science-of-salt1.pdf) it seems clear to me that there are a lot of well-placed individuals, who in spite of a solid science background aren't willing to give up long-held beliefs, even when the scientific studies they championed don't prove their theories.
In fact, the more ambiguous the results the more they tend to push the results as if they were definitive in favor of the researcher's viewpoints.
While this is bad for science generally, in healthcare its particularly disturbing because you have people whose reputations and careers are tied to opinions that can't be scientifically validated or worse -- are invalidated -- and yet they continue to be voices for health policies which are at best ineffective and at worst dangerous.
Why? That just encourages them to move more and more of their operations overseas because they can't stay competitive if the US charges them 28% but their competitors pay a fraction of that elsewhere.
We should pass a law that says that a corporation based in the US keeping more than N% of profits overseas is "not a US corporation" and thus ineligible for copyright or patent enforcement claims within the U.S., ineligible for H-1b or other guest worker visas, and the Departments of State and Defense will not protect or advocate on their behalf with foreign governments.
Don't want to pay the fucking freight for the benefits of being based in America? Fuck right off then, perhaps you can rely on the diplomatic, military or civil court services of the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands or wherever you're hiding your money. They'll surely enforce your patent claims, lean on the Chinese when they steal your designs or make sure your product doesn't get hijacked in international waters.
I like food too much to live off tofu and carrots.
The kneejerk-reflex "good for you" diet which is low in fat and high in carbohydrates is not only not good for you, it will make you accumulate MORE fat and give you less energy.
What you want is a fatty steak with a tab of butter on it and a green salad with anchovies and a high fat salad dressing without added sugar (Newman's Own Caesar is pretty good). No white food.
Women's fashion is designed to appeal to women, not to men, so whether you or I find any of the current crop of concentration camp victims posing as models attractive or not is rather pointless to the fashion industry.
Ironically, women as a group are as much a victim of the current obesity epidemic as men are. I find it curious that the rise of waifish, anorexically thin models parallels the so-called obesity epidemic. It almost seems like the heavier women get, the more the fashion industry taunts them with thinner and thinner models, preying on a growing sense of inadequacy as women get heavier and heavier.
The so-called fashion industry I think also has also gone kind of off the deep end with an aesthetic that, frankly, seems to turn women into prepubescent girls, with so much emphasis being put on small size and slimness to point of lacking any secondary sex characteristics.
As someone who had high blood pressure and triglycerides and was put on medications for both, I will tell you that the kind of monitoring the doctor did was minimal and could easily be replaced.
My "monitoring" was a couple of lipid panels run by the lab in his office, which could easily be outsourced to any place with lab techs who can draw blood. The rest of the monitoring was me taking my own damn blood pressure and charting the results in Excel.
The doctor's value was near zero as far as I can tell, and less than zero if you add in the work I did changing my diet and losing a bunch of weight (all of which I did in spite of his advice), which lowered my blood pressure and totally altered my lipid profile.
IMHO, what's needed is a new, "basic doctor" type degree that has the power to prescribe most meds and monitor most medical conditions but doesn't 8-10 years of education and training costing the GDP of a small country.
We have a doctor "shortage" because it costs $250k to become a doctor, the people who actually get the degree specialize where the easy money is (high level of non-insurance reimbursed business which is paid in cash, up front, no on call hours, etc, like dermatology) and nobody wants to practice in high-voume, low-margin areas like being a GP.
I want to know what Facebook's share of the loot was and how Facebook profited from this.
Why does it seem like the small government imposed fine was small intentionally so that the larger part of the penalty could be a settlement with Facebook?
Which in my mind smells like Facebook profiting on their own complaint, which is a pretty sweet deal when you can complain to the government about somebody gaming your system (and hence, depriving you of a cut) and then get the government to basically recover your lost profits for you.
I've read (and no, I don't remember where) that the feedback loop between student loans and university spending is really strong and universities devote a lot of lobbying effort towards that.
It's really a form of long-term income tax used to fund university expansion.
Wasn't the migration to Facebook from MySpace more driven by Facebook's initial "exclusivity" -- you had to have a.edu email address in the early days? Plus it had a cleaner look which was more conducive to adult users vs. the chaotic MySpace.
I think historically sanctions probably work better than the credit they get. At a minimum they raise the cost of doing business since a country under sanctions has to now engage in some subterfuge to keep engaging in whatever the sanctions were supposed to change.
For severe sanctions, this can mean drastically raised costs -- Iran hasn't been stopped from pursuing its nuclear program, for example, but the few suppliers they have are probably charging the Iranians whatever they want and getting paid up front in an expensive to obtain currency or submarket-priced oil.
In Syria's case I don't think there have been serious sanctions levied against them until recently. Direct trade with the US was impossible, but there were always satellite/client state Lebanon or other Arab states who weren't subject to the sanctions. The Assads run a near monopoly on anything worthwhile in Syria, so increased wholesale costs are just that, increased wholesale costs.
As for sanctions hurting the broader cause by hindering opponents or more broadly, allowing a state to trumpet sanctions as the reason for price increases or a shitty currency that only goes so far.
For one, how effective has resistance EVER been in Syria or Iran? Short of a running guerrilla war without an outside supplier, resistance in those states has been near zero and of limited effectiveness, even now in Syria.
Secondly, when you have a secret police, censor the media and jail political opponents, your PR of "blaming" sanctions for economic problems will only get you limited support. Iranians aren't stupid and they know that a dictatorial oppressive regime that openly supports terrorism is the real problem and that state policies more in line with Jordan will get them further than state policies more in line with North Korea.
Usually the debate in the "open line of argument" about the efficacy of sanctions is between people who want to use sanctions to motivate a government versus those that want to use high explosives to motivate a government.
It's all fine and dandy to argue that economic sanctions don't work or don't achieve the desired goals in a timely fashion (cf. Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria), but what's your alternative? Armed interventon or asking nicely?
Have you even estimated how much music you would have bought had you actually been more-or-less required to buy it?
It's one thing to have built a ridiculously large music library with non-paid downloads, but if you had to pay for it, how much of that library would you actually have paid money for?
I would consider what you *would* have paid for it vs. just some estimate based on how much music you actually have, as what you would have paid for is probably 25% of what you actually have, which more closely tracks or legitimizes what amount to actual lost income for the record industry.
I'd personally love to see a data-driven study of people with large music collections and as to how much they actually listen to their library. My guess is that people with large, non-paid libraries don't listen to much of it, having acquired it because it was easy & free.
What's at stake here isn't whether his lack of a degree matters or whether this is one of those innocent embellishments.
We shouldn't let ourselves be lulled into a debate over what we think the real issues are -- the same standards and punishments should be applied to this CEO as would be applied to any other employee in the organization. There shouldn't be a double standard for this guy just because he's the CEO.
I don't completely understand it, but there seems to be a segment of society that believes that they or whatever authority they appeal to should control what/how people live or do any time something new or different comes down the pike -- just look at the story phrasing:
"...but is it really a good idea to let people run smartphone apps from their dashboard monitor? I guess for navigation you could run your favorite map-app there, but there is nothing to stop people from running other apps on their dashboard too."
Note "...to let people.." implies that some prior restraint might/should be applied, and "..nothing to stop people..." implies that there's no mechanism in place to control how people act.
Maybe this is a European submission and the submitter is used to a high level of regulation, approval and control, or one of those Americans who believes that because they think they are smarter/more logical than others that they should control others who are less smart/logical.
It's all part of the new paramilitary policing strategy. There was a time when the cops showed up at least one of them knew how to deal with a dog -- just about any dog that hasn't been strictly trained by the military will go fucking nuts over two pounds of cheap hamburger. With some doggie tranquilizers or even some diphenhydramine ground into it not only will it eat, it will fall asleep after.
Now you have these steroid-driven asshats in tac gear who can't wait to kill *something*, and killing a dog is just a fun freebie they enjoy, especially since it lets them really zing the bad guy regardless of whether they get to arrest him.
The sabre-rattling could be for a number of reasons.
The first might be internal consumption -- Putin's popularity has been flagging as of late, and there's nothing like a little rally-round-the-flag to shore up support.
Another might be to try to throw the US off balance while we try to negotiate with the Chinese, where we're already in hot water over the Chen incident in addition to trying to get support on Iran, Syria and various other Sino-American issues. The US and China smiling and agreeing to squeeze with Russian client state Syria and US foil Iran is a major foreign policy loss for the Russians.
Then there's a pure PR angle -- all the news is about US/China diplomacy (especially because of Chen's escape) and Russia is prone to little man syndrome, wanting to be taken seriously and paid attention to -- nothing does that like threatening pre-emptive nuclear strikes.
My sense is that the missile defense is more about emerging Iranian missile threats to Europe, but there's always a tweak Russia angle that may be about extracting diplomatic concessions. What's ironic is the Russians fell for "Star Wars", you'd think they'd not fall for it this time.
Maybe that's the whole idea -- develop an "open" blade center scheme that will allow you to mix and match blades without the vendor lock-in that existing blade center systems have.
The gimmick often is luring employees into agreeing to an agreement that gives them N weeks of salary/benefits but makes them agree to all kinds of employer-friendly clauses like non-disparagement, binding arbitration, etc.
Many people are like "Shit, I'm losing my job and they are offering 6 weeks severance -- where do I sign?" Often times not even realizing that they may be "voluntarily" resigning and thus forfeiting unemployment compensation.
They can show you the door anytime but in most places they have to do it "for cause" in order to avoid paying you unemployment, which is actually fairly costly for an employer who is eliminating a *person* and not a position, as they will have to hire a new person for the position and train them, too, in addition to paying unemployment. The net effect is basically paying two salaries.
It's the "for cause" thing that makes it hard, you have to show that they were ignoring legitimate direction, had attendance problems or violated legal company policies and were given ample opportunity to correct their behavior.
Without cause, they can easily collect unemployment as well as hire an attorney and fish for more money based on their protected class status (ie, black, woman, older, etc) even if they have little grounds on which to pursue action. There's a lot of experienced attorneys who know how to turn a termination without cause into a quick $10k settlement. That's an easy nickel for the client, plus unemployment. I call that getting fired plus a week in Florida.
Shouldn't shareholders demand an asset auction...
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· Score: 3, Interesting
...and wind down of the company while it is still somewhat profitable? i.e., before management does all those desperate things they like to do at the end, like pay themselves huge retention bonuses and blow metric assloads of money on hail-mary projects metaphysically certain to fail, all of which buries the company in debt that will cause shareholders to receive nothing from the bankruptcy certain to result.
Given the classism of the era, you almost expect them to have enough spots for the passengers above a certain level but basically exclude the steerage and other lower classes from rescue.
Assuming the best of all possible worlds, the Analytical Engine is built and it works, what aspects of life would have been advanced by it? Whenever I hear about it, people talk about it as if it would have turned Victorian London into a Steampunk Silicon Valley and enabled great advances.
Would running programs on the difference engine have been sophisticated enough or capable of enough complexity to solve significant engineering problems that were too difficult or time consuming to solve with the by-hand mathematics of the era?
Was the system scalable enough that you could have built a bigger one capable of handing more useful/larger computations? Or shrinkable enough to make portable to use on ships or in remote locations, yet still calculate useful things?
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It's amazing to me how common bias is in the healthcare field.
After reading Gary Taubes' "Why We Get Fat" and another piece he wrote for Science on the politics of salt research (http://garytaubes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/science-political-science-of-salt1.pdf) it seems clear to me that there are a lot of well-placed individuals, who in spite of a solid science background aren't willing to give up long-held beliefs, even when the scientific studies they championed don't prove their theories.
In fact, the more ambiguous the results the more they tend to push the results as if they were definitive in favor of the researcher's viewpoints.
While this is bad for science generally, in healthcare its particularly disturbing because you have people whose reputations and careers are tied to opinions that can't be scientifically validated or worse -- are invalidated -- and yet they continue to be voices for health policies which are at best ineffective and at worst dangerous.
Why? That just encourages them to move more and more of their operations overseas because they can't stay competitive if the US charges them 28% but their competitors pay a fraction of that elsewhere.
We should pass a law that says that a corporation based in the US keeping more than N% of profits overseas is "not a US corporation" and thus ineligible for copyright or patent enforcement claims within the U.S., ineligible for H-1b or other guest worker visas, and the Departments of State and Defense will not protect or advocate on their behalf with foreign governments.
Don't want to pay the fucking freight for the benefits of being based in America? Fuck right off then, perhaps you can rely on the diplomatic, military or civil court services of the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands or wherever you're hiding your money. They'll surely enforce your patent claims, lean on the Chinese when they steal your designs or make sure your product doesn't get hijacked in international waters.
Either way, apparently there's no terrain avoidance alarm, or the one they have doesn't work.
I like food too much to live off tofu and carrots.
The kneejerk-reflex "good for you" diet which is low in fat and high in carbohydrates is not only not good for you, it will make you accumulate MORE fat and give you less energy.
What you want is a fatty steak with a tab of butter on it and a green salad with anchovies and a high fat salad dressing without added sugar (Newman's Own Caesar is pretty good). No white food.
Women's fashion is designed to appeal to women, not to men, so whether you or I find any of the current crop of concentration camp victims posing as models attractive or not is rather pointless to the fashion industry.
Ironically, women as a group are as much a victim of the current obesity epidemic as men are. I find it curious that the rise of waifish, anorexically thin models parallels the so-called obesity epidemic. It almost seems like the heavier women get, the more the fashion industry taunts them with thinner and thinner models, preying on a growing sense of inadequacy as women get heavier and heavier.
The so-called fashion industry I think also has also gone kind of off the deep end with an aesthetic that, frankly, seems to turn women into prepubescent girls, with so much emphasis being put on small size and slimness to point of lacking any secondary sex characteristics.
Those blonde shiksa with the skinny waists and the big boobs, Rachel, I can't keep my Baruch's eyes from wandering!
As someone who had high blood pressure and triglycerides and was put on medications for both, I will tell you that the kind of monitoring the doctor did was minimal and could easily be replaced.
My "monitoring" was a couple of lipid panels run by the lab in his office, which could easily be outsourced to any place with lab techs who can draw blood. The rest of the monitoring was me taking my own damn blood pressure and charting the results in Excel.
The doctor's value was near zero as far as I can tell, and less than zero if you add in the work I did changing my diet and losing a bunch of weight (all of which I did in spite of his advice), which lowered my blood pressure and totally altered my lipid profile.
IMHO, what's needed is a new, "basic doctor" type degree that has the power to prescribe most meds and monitor most medical conditions but doesn't 8-10 years of education and training costing the GDP of a small country.
We have a doctor "shortage" because it costs $250k to become a doctor, the people who actually get the degree specialize where the easy money is (high level of non-insurance reimbursed business which is paid in cash, up front, no on call hours, etc, like dermatology) and nobody wants to practice in high-voume, low-margin areas like being a GP.
I want to know what Facebook's share of the loot was and how Facebook profited from this.
Why does it seem like the small government imposed fine was small intentionally so that the larger part of the penalty could be a settlement with Facebook?
Which in my mind smells like Facebook profiting on their own complaint, which is a pretty sweet deal when you can complain to the government about somebody gaming your system (and hence, depriving you of a cut) and then get the government to basically recover your lost profits for you.
I've read (and no, I don't remember where) that the feedback loop between student loans and university spending is really strong and universities devote a lot of lobbying effort towards that.
It's really a form of long-term income tax used to fund university expansion.
Wasn't the migration to Facebook from MySpace more driven by Facebook's initial "exclusivity" -- you had to have a .edu email address in the early days? Plus it had a cleaner look which was more conducive to adult users vs. the chaotic MySpace.
I think historically sanctions probably work better than the credit they get. At a minimum they raise the cost of doing business since a country under sanctions has to now engage in some subterfuge to keep engaging in whatever the sanctions were supposed to change.
For severe sanctions, this can mean drastically raised costs -- Iran hasn't been stopped from pursuing its nuclear program, for example, but the few suppliers they have are probably charging the Iranians whatever they want and getting paid up front in an expensive to obtain currency or submarket-priced oil.
In Syria's case I don't think there have been serious sanctions levied against them until recently. Direct trade with the US was impossible, but there were always satellite/client state Lebanon or other Arab states who weren't subject to the sanctions. The Assads run a near monopoly on anything worthwhile in Syria, so increased wholesale costs are just that, increased wholesale costs.
As for sanctions hurting the broader cause by hindering opponents or more broadly, allowing a state to trumpet sanctions as the reason for price increases or a shitty currency that only goes so far.
For one, how effective has resistance EVER been in Syria or Iran? Short of a running guerrilla war without an outside supplier, resistance in those states has been near zero and of limited effectiveness, even now in Syria.
Secondly, when you have a secret police, censor the media and jail political opponents, your PR of "blaming" sanctions for economic problems will only get you limited support. Iranians aren't stupid and they know that a dictatorial oppressive regime that openly supports terrorism is the real problem and that state policies more in line with Jordan will get them further than state policies more in line with North Korea.
Usually the debate in the "open line of argument" about the efficacy of sanctions is between people who want to use sanctions to motivate a government versus those that want to use high explosives to motivate a government.
It's all fine and dandy to argue that economic sanctions don't work or don't achieve the desired goals in a timely fashion (cf. Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria), but what's your alternative? Armed interventon or asking nicely?
Have you even estimated how much music you would have bought had you actually been more-or-less required to buy it?
It's one thing to have built a ridiculously large music library with non-paid downloads, but if you had to pay for it, how much of that library would you actually have paid money for?
I would consider what you *would* have paid for it vs. just some estimate based on how much music you actually have, as what you would have paid for is probably 25% of what you actually have, which more closely tracks or legitimizes what amount to actual lost income for the record industry.
I'd personally love to see a data-driven study of people with large music collections and as to how much they actually listen to their library. My guess is that people with large, non-paid libraries don't listen to much of it, having acquired it because it was easy & free.
What's at stake here isn't whether his lack of a degree matters or whether this is one of those innocent embellishments.
We shouldn't let ourselves be lulled into a debate over what we think the real issues are -- the same standards and punishments should be applied to this CEO as would be applied to any other employee in the organization. There shouldn't be a double standard for this guy just because he's the CEO.
I don't completely understand it, but there seems to be a segment of society that believes that they or whatever authority they appeal to should control what/how people live or do any time something new or different comes down the pike -- just look at the story phrasing:
"...but is it really a good idea to let people run smartphone apps from their dashboard monitor? I guess for navigation you could run your favorite map-app there, but there is nothing to stop people from running other apps on their dashboard too."
Note "...to let people.." implies that some prior restraint might/should be applied, and "..nothing to stop people..." implies that there's no mechanism in place to control how people act.
Maybe this is a European submission and the submitter is used to a high level of regulation, approval and control, or one of those Americans who believes that because they think they are smarter/more logical than others that they should control others who are less smart/logical.
The problem is you've been tricked to think that people who actually voted for the TSA aren't extremists.
It's all part of the new paramilitary policing strategy. There was a time when the cops showed up at least one of them knew how to deal with a dog -- just about any dog that hasn't been strictly trained by the military will go fucking nuts over two pounds of cheap hamburger. With some doggie tranquilizers or even some diphenhydramine ground into it not only will it eat, it will fall asleep after.
Now you have these steroid-driven asshats in tac gear who can't wait to kill *something*, and killing a dog is just a fun freebie they enjoy, especially since it lets them really zing the bad guy regardless of whether they get to arrest him.
The sabre-rattling could be for a number of reasons.
The first might be internal consumption -- Putin's popularity has been flagging as of late, and there's nothing like a little rally-round-the-flag to shore up support.
Another might be to try to throw the US off balance while we try to negotiate with the Chinese, where we're already in hot water over the Chen incident in addition to trying to get support on Iran, Syria and various other Sino-American issues. The US and China smiling and agreeing to squeeze with Russian client state Syria and US foil Iran is a major foreign policy loss for the Russians.
Then there's a pure PR angle -- all the news is about US/China diplomacy (especially because of Chen's escape) and Russia is prone to little man syndrome, wanting to be taken seriously and paid attention to -- nothing does that like threatening pre-emptive nuclear strikes.
My sense is that the missile defense is more about emerging Iranian missile threats to Europe, but there's always a tweak Russia angle that may be about extracting diplomatic concessions. What's ironic is the Russians fell for "Star Wars", you'd think they'd not fall for it this time.
Maybe that's the whole idea -- develop an "open" blade center scheme that will allow you to mix and match blades without the vendor lock-in that existing blade center systems have.
The gimmick often is luring employees into agreeing to an agreement that gives them N weeks of salary/benefits but makes them agree to all kinds of employer-friendly clauses like non-disparagement, binding arbitration, etc.
Many people are like "Shit, I'm losing my job and they are offering 6 weeks severance -- where do I sign?" Often times not even realizing that they may be "voluntarily" resigning and thus forfeiting unemployment compensation.
They can show you the door anytime but in most places they have to do it "for cause" in order to avoid paying you unemployment, which is actually fairly costly for an employer who is eliminating a *person* and not a position, as they will have to hire a new person for the position and train them, too, in addition to paying unemployment. The net effect is basically paying two salaries.
It's the "for cause" thing that makes it hard, you have to show that they were ignoring legitimate direction, had attendance problems or violated legal company policies and were given ample opportunity to correct their behavior.
Without cause, they can easily collect unemployment as well as hire an attorney and fish for more money based on their protected class status (ie, black, woman, older, etc) even if they have little grounds on which to pursue action. There's a lot of experienced attorneys who know how to turn a termination without cause into a quick $10k settlement. That's an easy nickel for the client, plus unemployment. I call that getting fired plus a week in Florida.
...and wind down of the company while it is still somewhat profitable? i.e., before management does all those desperate things they like to do at the end, like pay themselves huge retention bonuses and blow metric assloads of money on hail-mary projects metaphysically certain to fail, all of which buries the company in debt that will cause shareholders to receive nothing from the bankruptcy certain to result.
...to use the lifeboats?
Given the classism of the era, you almost expect them to have enough spots for the passengers above a certain level but basically exclude the steerage and other lower classes from rescue.
Assuming the best of all possible worlds, the Analytical Engine is built and it works, what aspects of life would have been advanced by it? Whenever I hear about it, people talk about it as if it would have turned Victorian London into a Steampunk Silicon Valley and enabled great advances.
Would running programs on the difference engine have been sophisticated enough or capable of enough complexity to solve significant engineering problems that were too difficult or time consuming to solve with the by-hand mathematics of the era?
Was the system scalable enough that you could have built a bigger one capable of handing more useful/larger computations? Or shrinkable enough to make portable to use on ships or in remote locations, yet still calculate useful things?
The Royal Navy already had rum, sodomy and the lash -- weren't these all that were needed for a successful Navy?