Many people had problems with the machines checking Kerry when they wanted to vote for Bush:
In Sandoval County, three Rio Rancho residents said they had a similar problem, with opposite results.
Pot calling kettle black? You claim one-sidedness, yet state that "many" people had the opposite problem. In what world does the number "3" constitute many? A "few" or maybe stretching the point to say "several". "Many" may be a relative term, but it's disingenuous to use it to describe a total of 3 voters in a whole county.
The AMA does everything in its considerable power to restrict the number of new doctors trained every year, to keep the competition way down.
If the AMA is truly trying to restrict the number of physicians being trained, then it must be filled with complete idiots. The US has by far the highest physician per capita ratio in the world IIRC. So take your pick. All the physicians in the country are brain dead, or your conspiracy theory is really just that -- a theory, and not a very well-supported one.
Curiously, the last two people I know who died died from complications caused from medical treatments, no the diseases they had. One had horrible asthma and the medications destroyed her kidneys (IIRC), and the other's liver went after she was aggressively treated for cancer. The medical industry easily made hundreds of thousands of dollars on these two when they realized that they were going to die anyway. Sick shit.
It's curious, but not really indicative of anything. You do realize that the mortality from severe asthma used to be very high before the advent of modern medicine, right? It's not unreasonable to surmise that the patient in question would have been dead long before without asthma treatment.
Cancer treatments are in general pretty toxic, because it's hard to tell healthy growing tissue from cancerous tissue from a pharmaceutical standpoint. Those risks and benefits are part of the decision the patient makes when they decide to embark on chemotherapy. It sounds like you're trying to blame medicine for their deaths, which isn't really fair. Now if one of them had the wrong leg amputated, or something like that, then that's a different story.
without lawyers putting doctors out of business medical care is efficient and effective. think about that.
You're just wrong. Lawyers are putting very few doctors out of business. They're hurting the insurance companies pretty hard and making malpractice insurance more costly for all of us, for sure. But no physician that I know of in this country (and I know a lot of them) is starving because of malpractice claims.
Before the current lottery in malpractice claims became all the rage, medicine was controlled largely by physicians from the 1970's and previous. There wasn't much about that system that was efficient and effective. Just 30-some odd years ago, but it was the dark ages in medicine, with so many medications and procedures used simply out of habit, and very little accountability, either legally or financially. Physicians did all sorts of things that we now know is not only useless, but harmful. Lots of people died unnecessarily. It was an age where the public had greater trust in their doctors and didn't question that everything was done correctly. If they only knew. Now they do.
Back in the day (as my older colleagues still say), you could basically bill the moon for even simple cases and get paid in full. The leaders of organized medicine failed to keep its house in order, and they hold some of the responsibility for the malpractice and billing messes we find ourselves in now. Not all of the responsibility by a long shot, to be sure, but the medical societies are far from blameless.
I'm an emergency physician, and my impression from various studies I've read is that malpractice insurance costs are a significant but relatively small portion of the increase in healthcare costs in this country over the last couple decades. Don't get me wrong, the dramatic rise in insurance premiums is absolutely killing many of us, many of us seeing premiums rise from a couple tens of thousands (or less) to over a hundred thousand (and in some cases over $200,000) a year in a matter of a few years. While it impacts my life and indirectly those of my patients, it's not the primary cause of the increase in health care costs in the US.
One major cause is in the demographics. America (as is most of Western Europe as well) is getting older on the average, and old people cost a lot more to treat than younger people. That's only going to get worse over the next 30 years, and it's going to get far, far worse. Medicare is going to collapse under the promises it made decades ago, and nobody in Washington has the balls to do anything about it for fear of angering the AARP. The end result is that the system will come close to collapse under trillion dollars of debt, and it will have to be made up out of emergency tax increases on those of us younger than baby boomers and our children. I predict we'll see the Medicare tax go from it's already high levels to over 25% or even 30% of your income within my lifetime. The cowards in Washington DC are simply allowing this to happen.
The other big cause American health care costs so much IMNSHO is simply that it's a "for profit" system. "For profit" means that somebody is making money above and beyond the basic costs of providing the care. Look at the stock price graphs of the major hospital mangement companies, HMOs, and pharmaceutical companies. Every single point of increase in that stock price reflects a huge profit above and beyond the basic costs of providing health care. A lot of the increase in costs is going into investors pockets (including mine since I have held shares in pharmaceutical companies in the past, though not currently).
The supposed benefit behind the idea of the US system of private health care is that the profits are more than offset by the benefits of 1) competitition between different providers, and 2) increased efficiency and decreased corruption as compared to a governmental system. For various reasons, these benefits have not panned out.
Re: #1 -- Competition exists only to a certain extent between providers. The problem in health care is that the end-consumer of health care (who is insured) is relatively price-insensitive to the actual costs and bills generated from their care. Once they hit their deductible they don't care what it costs at all. The newest and most expensive thing must be the best, so we'll all go for the most costly stuff around. Supply and demand for physicians also doesn't quite follow the simple economic principles we all know and love. One or two interesting studies done some time ago (I don't have the references handy) found that physicians basically create their own demand. Even in areas supposedly "saturated" with doctors, adding more doesn't decrease the prices, it just creates more demand.
Re: #2 -- Increased efficiency is sometimes seen in private hospitals over public ones, but having worked in both I can't say that it's a big difference. Since there's little price sensitivity, why bother ever lowering your prices? Jack up the bills and buy more expensive toys! Efficiency is further decreased in American hospitals by the absolutely amazing explosion in the number of administrative (non-patient care) staff to do the paperwork, file the claims to a slew of governmental and private insurance companies, twiddle their thumbs, or whatever. American hospital CEOs make far more than their European counterparts, and they have much larger highly paid staff than in Europe. I've never worked in a hospital where the hospital CEO made less than two or three times what I do, even if they manage the hospital
I might start listening to more NPR too, since I've had bad luck listening to their Internet broadcasts.
Check out KCRWs webcasts on iTunes. I believe they're also listed on Shoutcast, but in any case you can get to the webcast from their web site at http://www.kcrw.com . They broadcast three streams:
1) Simulcast of the radio station
2) All music
3) All news
Best public radio station I've ever listened to of the major cities I've lived in, including Dallas, Austin, Tampa Bay, SF, and now LA.
Soros is interested in one thing only and that is himself and his wealth.
I don't see how this follows. Bush's tax cuts have certainly made Soros several tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars richer. Despite this, Soros is wholeheartedly against the incumbent for ideological reasons, i.e. he feels Bush is doing the wrong thing for America. You're contradicting yourself.
Looks kinda heavy (what's its weight?) with somewhat inadequate support/stand. When it falls (and, say, the screen breaks) do they cover it w/ warranty?
<sarcasm>
Yeah, you're right the company that brought you the Apple ][, all-in-one original Mac and Mac OS, iron-stable G5 towers, iPods, the remarkably stable desklamp iMac probably didn't put any thought at all into designing and testing the stability of their new all-in-one computer.
The Gateway is bulky and ungainly in comparison. It's not the same design, aside from being an all-in-one LCD computer. The iMac's board, hard drive, optical drive, ports, and power supply all fit behind the lcd within a 2 inch thick case. The Gateway and the also-mentioned Monorail have what are basically thin desktop cases under the lcd screen. Those designs are really nothing more than thin desktop cases with an LCD mounted on top.
This is a true all-in-one, even more so than the previous iMac. I was never particularly enamoured of the desklamp iMac, but this is both elegant and conservative enough to be found on a business desktop.
Design-wise, it's in keeping with the home line with the white minimalist aesthetic. It matches the iBook and iPod well. The brushed aluminum stand gives it a design relationship with the G5 towers. At this size, it looks like the perfect dorm-room computer (as long as you lock it down!). The 17 inch version weighs in at a light 18.5 pounds and only 6.8 inches deep.
The most amazing space-saving feature is that it holds it's own power supply in that thin enclosure, so no ugly power bricks sitting on your desk or floor. If I didn't already have a dual 2.5Ghz G5 coming, this would look pretty attractive.
Eventually, I may just re-rip my entire collection and start over with a different codec.
That's exactly what I did. I had started to encode my CD collection to vorbis, but gave it up after I realized hardware support was going to suck. I ended up encoding the collection in FLAC, then batch encoded all the FLAC files to LAME APS. This gives me the flexibility to use any portable player, in my case it ended up being iPod and iTunes.
Do you really think anyone beyond apple fan-boys will actualy base their choice of player on the interface?
It seems to be that millions of people "beyond apple fan-boys" already have, considering the ipod is by far the most popular portable mp3 player in the world. This is despite the fact that there are alternatives with more capacity and battery life than ipods. The interface is the distinguishing feature.
Would you buy a car that you had to steer with two buttons rather than a wheel? If not, why not?
That said pdf is EVIL INCARNATE a simple 15 page document suddenly becomes a 4 meg monstrosity trying to be a 'book' in a medium where it's inapropriate.
Umm... the linked pdf weighs in at a whopping 75KB. While more than the equivalent HTML, most of us are on high-speed lines now and the difference is negligible.
Perhaps this is a little off topic, but can someone explain to me why there is such a huge price discrepency between standard 4:3 televisions and standard widescreen televisions?
I don't know about Australia, but in the US widescreen TVs are pretty much all high definition, which costs more to manufacture for a variety of reasons (including lower volume and therefore fewer economies of scale).
A more entertaining solution to the "whistleblower"'s problem would have been to replace his bosses version of Solitaire with one that looks identical, but only deals non-winnable hands.
According to my research I am far from being in the minority with respect to most of my complaints.
I'm sorry you had so many problems with your surgery, but I highly doubt that you are "far from being in the minority" with most of your complaints. Are you trying to say that most of your problems are experienced by considerably more than 50% of LASIK patients? If you have hard research that shows otherwise, please supply them. Otherwise, don't overstate the known risks of a procedure based on your single bad experience.
Any surgery has it's risks, so in that respect it is something of a crapshoot. You just have to review what you expect to get out of it, what the known risks are, and decide if that's a risk worth taking.
It's kind of like Gotham city, or the city in which Spawn lives, they are both kind-of but not really New York City. Same victorian high rises, more rain, no sun ever etc...
IIRC, Gotham is supposed to be Philadelphia. Metropolis is supposed to correspond to NYC.
Nothing in the article mentions the feasability of getting a decently sized counterweight at the top of the elevator. All plans I've heard of require at least some sort of asteroid...and if you're talking politics, people are going to be afraid of dragging a rock into Earth orbit that could smash into the planet a.la if something went awry.
We've got so much damned space junk at various orbits (old satellites, star wars-type platforms, pieces of ISS, etc.) that we could just tow a bunch of that crap together and build an anchor out of that, couldn't we?
Honestly, the life of an Apple product is a lot longer than a typical windows PC. I still use my Powermac 9500 (running 10.3.4) but I have retired my 600Mhz Pentium III.
I'm typing this on a machine at work containing a Pentium Pro, Windows 95, and 32 MB of RAM, and a 2 GB hard drive. I don't necessarily think Apple's hardware is more durable (though I have some myself), but that PC people upgrade more often because upgrades are more frequent and more available.
Re:Well, there's lots of ways of looking at it....
on
A New Look For Firefox
·
· Score: 1
Now the negatives:
1)On Linux and Windows, this will look out of place and won't go down well with people who like a consistent look and feel.
How many people running windows have winamp, musicmatch, shareaza, dc++, etc. on their machine and running almost constantly? Where's the consistency? People on windows generally don't care much about consistency in their desktop look and feel.
Don't even get me started on UI consistency on Linux apps....
No wonder that the majority has chosen to speak Mandarin.
If you think that Mandarin is somehow a more precise language than English, then you've obviously never spoken Mandarin. Mandarin (and the rest of the Chinese dialects that I know of) is a notoriously imprecise language. Much of the meaning in conversational Chinese is contextual, and the number of homonyms among common words is astounding.
Slashdot Mirror
Pot calling kettle black? You claim one-sidedness, yet state that "many" people had the opposite problem. In what world does the number "3" constitute many? A "few" or maybe stretching the point to say "several". "Many" may be a relative term, but it's disingenuous to use it to describe a total of 3 voters in a whole county.
If the AMA is truly trying to restrict the number of physicians being trained, then it must be filled with complete idiots. The US has by far the highest physician per capita ratio in the world IIRC. So take your pick. All the physicians in the country are brain dead, or your conspiracy theory is really just that -- a theory, and not a very well-supported one.
It's curious, but not really indicative of anything. You do realize that the mortality from severe asthma used to be very high before the advent of modern medicine, right? It's not unreasonable to surmise that the patient in question would have been dead long before without asthma treatment.
Cancer treatments are in general pretty toxic, because it's hard to tell healthy growing tissue from cancerous tissue from a pharmaceutical standpoint. Those risks and benefits are part of the decision the patient makes when they decide to embark on chemotherapy. It sounds like you're trying to blame medicine for their deaths, which isn't really fair. Now if one of them had the wrong leg amputated, or something like that, then that's a different story.
You're just wrong. Lawyers are putting very few doctors out of business. They're hurting the insurance companies pretty hard and making malpractice insurance more costly for all of us, for sure. But no physician that I know of in this country (and I know a lot of them) is starving because of malpractice claims.
Before the current lottery in malpractice claims became all the rage, medicine was controlled largely by physicians from the 1970's and previous. There wasn't much about that system that was efficient and effective. Just 30-some odd years ago, but it was the dark ages in medicine, with so many medications and procedures used simply out of habit, and very little accountability, either legally or financially. Physicians did all sorts of things that we now know is not only useless, but harmful. Lots of people died unnecessarily. It was an age where the public had greater trust in their doctors and didn't question that everything was done correctly. If they only knew. Now they do.
Back in the day (as my older colleagues still say), you could basically bill the moon for even simple cases and get paid in full. The leaders of organized medicine failed to keep its house in order, and they hold some of the responsibility for the malpractice and billing messes we find ourselves in now. Not all of the responsibility by a long shot, to be sure, but the medical societies are far from blameless.
One major cause is in the demographics. America (as is most of Western Europe as well) is getting older on the average, and old people cost a lot more to treat than younger people. That's only going to get worse over the next 30 years, and it's going to get far, far worse. Medicare is going to collapse under the promises it made decades ago, and nobody in Washington has the balls to do anything about it for fear of angering the AARP. The end result is that the system will come close to collapse under trillion dollars of debt, and it will have to be made up out of emergency tax increases on those of us younger than baby boomers and our children. I predict we'll see the Medicare tax go from it's already high levels to over 25% or even 30% of your income within my lifetime. The cowards in Washington DC are simply allowing this to happen.
The other big cause American health care costs so much IMNSHO is simply that it's a "for profit" system. "For profit" means that somebody is making money above and beyond the basic costs of providing the care. Look at the stock price graphs of the major hospital mangement companies, HMOs, and pharmaceutical companies. Every single point of increase in that stock price reflects a huge profit above and beyond the basic costs of providing health care. A lot of the increase in costs is going into investors pockets (including mine since I have held shares in pharmaceutical companies in the past, though not currently).
The supposed benefit behind the idea of the US system of private health care is that the profits are more than offset by the benefits of 1) competitition between different providers, and 2) increased efficiency and decreased corruption as compared to a governmental system. For various reasons, these benefits have not panned out.
Re: #1 -- Competition exists only to a certain extent between providers. The problem in health care is that the end-consumer of health care (who is insured) is relatively price-insensitive to the actual costs and bills generated from their care. Once they hit their deductible they don't care what it costs at all. The newest and most expensive thing must be the best, so we'll all go for the most costly stuff around. Supply and demand for physicians also doesn't quite follow the simple economic principles we all know and love. One or two interesting studies done some time ago (I don't have the references handy) found that physicians basically create their own demand. Even in areas supposedly "saturated" with doctors, adding more doesn't decrease the prices, it just creates more demand.
Re: #2 -- Increased efficiency is sometimes seen in private hospitals over public ones, but having worked in both I can't say that it's a big difference. Since there's little price sensitivity, why bother ever lowering your prices? Jack up the bills and buy more expensive toys! Efficiency is further decreased in American hospitals by the absolutely amazing explosion in the number of administrative (non-patient care) staff to do the paperwork, file the claims to a slew of governmental and private insurance companies, twiddle their thumbs, or whatever. American hospital CEOs make far more than their European counterparts, and they have much larger highly paid staff than in Europe. I've never worked in a hospital where the hospital CEO made less than two or three times what I do, even if they manage the hospital
Check out KCRWs webcasts on iTunes. I believe they're also listed on Shoutcast, but in any case you can get to the webcast from their web site at http://www.kcrw.com . They broadcast three streams:
1) Simulcast of the radio station
2) All music
3) All news
Best public radio station I've ever listened to of the major cities I've lived in, including Dallas, Austin, Tampa Bay, SF, and now LA.
I don't see how this follows. Bush's tax cuts have certainly made Soros several tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars richer. Despite this, Soros is wholeheartedly against the incumbent for ideological reasons, i.e. he feels Bush is doing the wrong thing for America. You're contradicting yourself.
It's not "2.0". It's "0.2". Way before 1.0.
This is a true all-in-one, even more so than the previous iMac. I was never particularly enamoured of the desklamp iMac, but this is both elegant and conservative enough to be found on a business desktop.
The most amazing space-saving feature is that it holds it's own power supply in that thin enclosure, so no ugly power bricks sitting on your desk or floor. If I didn't already have a dual 2.5Ghz G5 coming, this would look pretty attractive.
That's exactly what I did. I had started to encode my CD collection to vorbis, but gave it up after I realized hardware support was going to suck. I ended up encoding the collection in FLAC, then batch encoded all the FLAC files to LAME APS. This gives me the flexibility to use any portable player, in my case it ended up being iPod and iTunes.
It seems to be that millions of people "beyond apple fan-boys" already have, considering the ipod is by far the most popular portable mp3 player in the world. This is despite the fact that there are alternatives with more capacity and battery life than ipods. The interface is the distinguishing feature.
Would you buy a car that you had to steer with two buttons rather than a wheel? If not, why not?
This isn't even a rumor. It's basically one guy saying he wishes Google would start a Jabber-based messaging service. How is this front page material?
Damn, and me with no mod points. :(
Umm... the linked pdf weighs in at a whopping 75KB. While more than the equivalent HTML, most of us are on high-speed lines now and the difference is negligible.
I don't know about Australia, but in the US widescreen TVs are pretty much all high definition, which costs more to manufacture for a variety of reasons (including lower volume and therefore fewer economies of scale).
A more entertaining solution to the "whistleblower"'s problem would have been to replace his bosses version of Solitaire with one that looks identical, but only deals non-winnable hands.
Any surgery has it's risks, so in that respect it is something of a crapshoot. You just have to review what you expect to get out of it, what the known risks are, and decide if that's a risk worth taking.
IIRC, Gotham is supposed to be Philadelphia. Metropolis is supposed to correspond to NYC.
We've got so much damned space junk at various orbits (old satellites, star wars-type platforms, pieces of ISS, etc.) that we could just tow a bunch of that crap together and build an anchor out of that, couldn't we?
If you think that Mandarin is somehow a more precise language than English, then you've obviously never spoken Mandarin. Mandarin (and the rest of the Chinese dialects that I know of) is a notoriously imprecise language. Much of the meaning in conversational Chinese is contextual, and the number of homonyms among common words is astounding.
I agree. We should outlaw kids.