You're trying to tell us that half of all jobs in the UK can be replaced by "smart machines"?
Just think about how many jobs you could automate away with a very simple shell script. Now think about how many jobs could be automated away with a very simple shell script and some basic robotics. The mind boggles. Also, a lot of jobs are just lost because the need for them goes away. For example, if we shift from internal combustion to electric motors, it's a fact that you won't need as many people to work on them because they are so much simpler to produce and so many of the steps can be completely automated, like motor winding — and they don't break down as much to begin with. It's simply a fact that you need less people to produce and maintain them. That's progress eliminating jobs, and not replacing them with anything.
The jobs that really could be gotten rid of with a very simple shell script and simple robotics are either already gone or still more efficiently and cheaply done by a human being. Those are the precarious ones--drive up labor costs, and suddenly it's no longer cheaper to have a person do it instead. Drive up the labor costs sufficiently, and you'll even see automation taking over jobs that automation really isn't up to replacing humans at yet, such as answering phones. (Needless to say, exactly at what point automating becomes cheaper than having humans do it varies by task and geography.)
It isn't always necessarily tedious and mind-numbing work that can be easily automated.
I can think of two obvious examples of high-skill jobs that are being automated as we speak. One is document discovery in the law profession, formerly done by lawyers and paralegals and now much more often done by software. Another is interpretation of X-rays and other medical images done by doctors.
Everything I've heard from lawyers and paralegals about document discovery is that it is tedious and mind-numbing: the mistake you are making here is thinking that 'tedious and mind-numbing' and 'high-skill jobs' are somehow mutually exclusive. It also doesn't necessarily mean that those who are having parts of their tasks taken over by machines will not welcome it as it provides more complete results than a human is capable of doing on their own and frees up time for other activities even if it does cut into total billable hours.
I knew this would be among the first posts, and it is of course complete rubbish.
Have you ever looking at how babies and young children play? They are easily led by what toys are available and what adults lead them to. That's why they tell parents to read to their children - not to torture kids by forcing them to endure things they hate, but because educators understand that leading children to learn through play is better than leaving them to their own devices.
I'd believe that a lot more if I hadn't ended up reading a lot of stuff in the family of "Unexpurgated Grimms" as a very small child simply by virtue that it was on a tall shelf which suggested it was excitingly forbidden...and I was more capable of scaling shelves than the adults around me ever suspected. (And by 'ever expected' I mean they only know because I admitted it...once I was tall enough to reach it without climbing and they'd hand me it if I asked.)
It was overall fortunate that Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights was on the bottom shelf and thus written off as probably kiddy-safe and therefore boring. (Those familiar even with their reputation should know exactly how accurate this is.)
A kid who is sufficiently interested in getting at a given toy will--regardless of parental encouragement or discouragement--make great efforts to find a way. What you're doing by reading to your child is helping associate it with 'family activity,' demonstrates that you value the skill, and also helps the child start associating the spoken word to its written counterpart.
Some of this I learned simply by studying dev psych, some of this I know because it's not fun being a gender-nonconforming kid with relatives who will refuse you things they deem gender inappropriate. I still managed to get them, and it was not always because I asked relatives who were more tolerant; I have one book I refuse to part with simply because I wanted it badly enough to spend years tracking down a copy I could afford. (I had already started following specific artists before I hit my teens, and wanted a specific artist's version of a particular children's book. Usually, copies in so-so condition sell for $50+ on Amazon.)
If you want to get all pedantic, "our Native Americans" doesn't even include the Azteks. That was someone else's Native Americans. They pretty much went extinct because they used up their resources. We still have some Maya, though. They're still around, they just don't have their massive culture any more.
In the area we now consider to be the continental US, the tribes' behavior pretty much matched the landscape. The desert tribes would as soon kill you as give you water. The tribes who lived where there was plenty were considerably more generous... much to their detriment.
That depends on how much you bother poking into the history. I live in one of those areas where there's plenty--and the archaeological record shows that there was at least one tribe that just poof'd mostly before Columbus showed up...
Of course, each region had its own peculiarities. A few preferred cultural genocides, for example, because while they're bothered by the other tribe's existence they see no reason to waste otherwise perfectly good human resources. (The Indian Schools, in some ways, were merely innovations of scale.)
It's an interesting question to what extent most tribes' tendency to not be thrilled about archaeology is due to the fact it'd find these sorts of things out--the only reason there was much enthusiasm for investigating the sites of the tribe I mention above? There's actually survivors of it to this day, and they wanted the digs done because this was the only physical evidence that had survived their neighbors' precolumbian efforts. (The general feeling among Europeans historically about their existence seems to have been a resounding "You guys exist?" Given that they were our region's moundbuilders, and the mounds are how we find their sites, I suspect their reactions to that were pretty priceless. "White man thinks mounds just build themselves.")
Likely the two-year period was picked also because that's how long they feel it will need to be since you were employed by them for them to be able to just cheerfully inform any court attempting to get their aid in subpoenaing you that it is now entirely the court's problem and not theirs.
I was talking about the total cost, included ground. Usually I don't need to be so explicit to be understood.
If you are, we're probably talking about house built by the lot's owner working alone using mostly scavenged materials--which means it was built illegally, is in violation of so many building and housing codes that it might be easier to work out which ones it managed somehow to miss, and...well, probably the land has something direly wrong with it because the land sold for only ~$100,000. Odds are it's something like they're hoping you'll miss that they're selling you a toxic waste dump and the legal obligation to clean it.
Why not set it up a la carte? See what public services people feel are worth paying their money for? It might actually get more rational public spending by pushing people to think about just where whatever public service they think would be cool and nifty to have will come from, especially since for things like 'community pool' you could have the trigger not be 'majority' but 'sufficient funding.'
Because people are idiots.
[...]
Likewise, if I don't pay for social security, and I don't have savings, that means I'm poor in old age. Which makes it more likely I'll go robbing stores for food or begging on the street. Is that a better outcome for society - to have homeless or higher petty crime just for people who fail to plan?
You do realize that I'm figuring that the odds of social security surviving long enough to pay me and most others of Gen Y & above a single penny is so low as to qualify as a sadistic joke, right? If a non-government organization tried running social security it'd be shut down because it's a Ponzi scheme--the original assumption was that the population would keep climbing and life expectancy would be stable, given that the odds of you living long enough to see your first social security check when it was set up started pretty bad and dropped towards laughable for the poor.
We're in full agreement that people are idiots, but I'd like to point out that not all cultures even organize emergency services and care of the elderly/disabled the same way--and some of them really are rather healthier in many ways because of the issues involved in making things Somebody Else's Problem.
And that's the real problem - that's why we collectively pay into emergency services - sure it'll be very unlikely to happen to *me*, but you know, I'd rather spend my days and later years in life not worrying about all the old seniors who decided to live it big when they made money and not save up who might come and rob me, or to just be able to go out and enjoy parks without tent cities of same.
Congrats, you just covered why emergency services definitely need paying for--though you still have the question of why exactly I should trust Social Security to stick around, since whatever I pay into it now is going right out the door now. It's not an investment scheme, it's not a lockbox, and if anybody but the government tried running it then it'd be very, very illegal.
Even today, a significant chunk of the population lives paycheck to paycheck - miss one and there's a good chance they'll be out on the street, likely raising the local crime rate all so they could feed their kid (and we all pay for it - increased prices, increased policing/jail/courts/etc). There's a good chunk of people not living
And yes, there's a good chunk of people not paying income taxes - but they're both rich AND poor. But they're paying taxes in other ways - state taxes, sales taxes, etc. They're not getting a free ride.
Which also suggests a way to cover the emergency services, because part of the entire issue here is that if you're living from paycheck to paycheck, then the more of that very same paycheck you can take home the better. You could probably get fewer people living from paycheck to paycheck that way, if nothing else.
As you said, people are idiots; why give them a blank check? Even threatening them with an a la carte system and making them argue for why any given part needs to be in place would help. (Especially since some of the differences between cultures which consider, say, care of the elderly the problem of their kin vs the problem of the government are interesting--particularly in the differences in what the outcomes tend to be when it is viewed as your problem to deal with as opposed to a nebulous governmental one.)
Really, I figure that people are such idiots that giving a
Probably because it's trying to avoid ambiguity with computers reading the texts eventually. This doesn't really answer the question, given that it might have been more sensible to set it so glyphs with the same meaning shared a code point, and you treated any variations as alternate forms of it, which is something the Unicode standard seems to have already though I've no idea how well it works nor how well-supported it is.
If the lawsuit was badly written, this ruling makes a lot more sense and becomes rather inevitable. If you were filing on behalf of everybody then the judge is perfectly correct--and this is a mistake on the part of the lawyers filing suit. If you are filing only on behalf of the people whom you yourselves represent--which I suspect can be done with an opening for people to join in--then the judge's reasoning for dismissing the lawsuit is flawed and probably can be appealed.
In each direction there's an important precedent to consider: it's just as bad as to unquestioningly accept a small percentage's claim of the right to represent the greater body of people as it is to require those filing to know the full extent of harm done, especially before discovery.
Regardless of your feelings about this suit, eventually either problem will turn up in a way you will not like.
Why not set it up a la carte? See what public services people feel are worth paying their money for?
Because most people are ignorant idiots; they don't know what they need to know to make an intelligent decision, and even if they did, they still couldn't make one. Everyone would choose to spend their money on saving puppies and putting homeless people in jail for littering and nobody would choose to spend their money on infrastructure.
That's precisely because they're insulated from it: The source of funding for infrastructure is something they don't think about, nor do they tend to think of what forms & kinds of infrastructure will have the best bang-for-buck. They're used to voting for politicians who promise to spend money on your "saving puppies and putting homeless people in jail for littering," and both doing things efficiently and paying for doing this is always Somebody Else's Problem.
This would make it no longer somebody else's problem and control for at least some of the effects of diffusion of responsibility, and the problem is likely to be both self-limiting and self-correcting as people start earmarking their money for infrastructure that they consider important.
Knowing some of the issues for the homeless, though, your second example of what you expect money to be given to brings up a major problem with assuming our current system does terribly much to avoid defunding important infrastructure. We defunded the mental health infrastructure, because suddenly we had these magic pills that 'cured' people, and people didn't like mental hospitals. The thing is, those pills don't cure--they can get people to where they're only needing a very bare minimum of support, but a lot of these conditions are pretty much permanent. (Some of the research actually points towards the theory that at least some are more accurately described not as psychological illnesses but as neurological illnesses that happen to have psychological symptoms.) If we're going to end up having the only way somebody can get treatment and shelter be getting themselves in jail, the absolute least we could do is minimize the costs to society and them by not forcing them to commit a serious crime.
Or, y'know, we could fund having the infrastructure rebuilt, except right now that's not likely to happen because you'd have to convince a majority of people, as opposed to 'enough people to toss in enough money.'
Tell you what, never use our roads, our internet, our many other public services ever again. Shut yourself up in your private property hermitage, dig a well because you aren't allowed to use water that came from a river the government diverted for our benefit. We'll work out a list of products you can never use because they resulted from government backed research. Then.. yeah you can quit paying taxes then. We'll let you.
Why not set it up a la carte? See what public services people feel are worth paying their money for? It might actually get more rational public spending by pushing people to think about just where whatever public service they think would be cool and nifty to have will come from, especially since for things like 'community pool' you could have the trigger not be 'majority' but 'sufficient funding.'
It's very easy to vote for funding things such as a library, but my experience is that you're not going to be told where the money is actually going to be found. Yes, alright, sometimes you get told that they're going to issue bonds but I've gotten to watch politicians--some of whom are now nationally-known--give every reason to believe that they don't understand how bonds actually work. You sell them for money now and look confused when people want to redeem them at maturity because...apparently they were just supposed to turn into money somehow? It's hard to tell. (It got rather hard for the city and county this was in to get people to vote for bonds, because even the college students who weren't likely to be there long enough to see whatever it was built caught on.)
But are you ok with them submitting and getting paid for claims for that fictitious person?
Claims have to be submitted through a medical office, which checks your ID. Besides, if you want to submit false claims, you can do that as easily for a real person as a fictitious person. The only difference is that the real person will have much less difficulty cashing the checks. Banks also check IDs.
Sorry, but I just don't see the point in getting an insurance policy for a non-existent person.
Offhand, if you're running this scheme for money then the doctor is in on it--one of the problems with traditional Medicare/Medicaid fraud is that the patient is an actual, real person who can be asked if you performed the procedures you billed for. As you might notice, this is a real thing and none of the problems you've mentioned should exist--the doctor is cashing the checks, the doctor is generating the false claims.
Now, you can also use this so somebody with fake ID--something that exists, and I'm not sure how anybody could not know this--can go and get procedures using the fake person's insurance and on the fake person's records. This could be done for reasons ranging from "the doctor's reports would out you for the disability fraud you're doing" to "you do not want your abusive spouse finding out you're a touch pregnant."
Sure, but they weren't exactly out there to write scientific journals.
A lot of it looked to be up there in the area of pilot studies, and those generally don't get written up in journals--some you may not hear about outside of the specific sub-sub-field and/or grant process, since the entire point of a pilot study is...well...can we scientifically test this this way?
Sometimes it gets weird, because you might have a pretty sound theory and planned methodology, but the pilot study demonstrates that something is missing before it's ready for a scientific journal.
They might get talked about between researchers, and sometimes you'll hear about it if it's known that you're trying to do a bit of research which somebody else tried but had die in the pilot study, which can be helpful since obviously it'd not have turned up when you did the lit search. It's worth noting as well that on occasion, what happened is that things went wrong in absurd and clearly impossible ways--think along the lines of trying to deal with 'code does not compile unless Alice is physically in the building; all other possible factors eliminated' to get some idea how strange and annoying this can go.
Funny, I keep anything I need to access quickly that isn't worth securing on my lock screen--that is to say, when locked my phone is an excellent clock and I can see if I want to bother checking now any messages since it displays the number and what service it came in through. I want to be able to let people see my lock screen, if nothing else because it has a picture of one of a cute hamster.
Anything else? Because I use my pattern so often I don't even need to wake up, and I don't need to unlock my phone to answer calls--if my phone gets lost I want to be able to call it, and if somebody's found it I want them able to answer! (You have to unlock the phone to actually call anyone.)
Or asked one of the library staff to do so. That was what I had to do, because that was the only way at the stacks; the unlucky librarian sent off on the quest for it told me she had to sit on the lid of the photocopier so it'd work. (Thankfully the paper was definitely one I needed, otherwise I'd have felt rather guilty for putting her through so much trouble.)
That depends on why you're trying to read older results--for example, I once overheard a rather interesting conversation by a grad student whose main question was "Why was this line of research abandoned?" I never did find out, but it is a good question and seems a reason to have a serious journal dedicated to recording such things when there was a good reason. A Journal of Strange Results, perhaps, covering those experiments that somehow managed to do something else entirely instead of disprove or prove the hypothesis. (Given the number of times I've had experiments in the lab just not go anywhere near as expected, I'm sure you'd not have too much trouble doing it as an annual publication at least, and it likely would function well as a place for discussing what may cause an experiment to go awry--which would help improve procedures and possibly improve the speed at which methodology flaws & limits are detected.)
You might not even have to keep it secret if you choose a service that allows you to upload a copy that everybody can attach comments to--of course you had to share a copy, how else could this work online? You certainly can't easily manage to point out which part of the paper you're discussing easily otherwise, and in quite a few cases the original authors taking part in a virtual discussion would be of a great amount of use to all parties.
After all, while my experiment ran pretty well in my nice near-sea-level lab in a nice temperate climate, I might want to find out how well it goes at, say, a higher altitude or in a tropical climate, or maybe just closer or farther from the equator. It will be vastly easier and more efficient to pull this off if I take advantage of the internet to help colleagues who happen to have those environments handy replicate my work.
And, well, so what if they happen to not be able to afford journal access? At worst, all that's needed is no proof existing that I knew otherwise; the copy was, after all, uploaded so we could discuss it in detail more easily, and I simply thought they'd read more than the abstract.
Ugh. Academic research, paid for by a grant, needs to be peer reviewed (author pays for this) and published (pay again) and is then inaccessible to non-subscribers, unless you can find a library wealthy enough to have a subscription, which may still deny you access if you're not a member of the community they serve.
Here we are in the 21st century, with gigabits flowing freely through the Intertubes, and the dissemination of scientific articles is stuck in the mid-20th century, and sinking fast (costs going up, number of library subscriptions decreasing) and Elsevier trying to gain control of as many journals as possible.
Anyone else see a problem with this? A major overhaul seems way past due.
Setting up a large virtual library that offers individual memberships cheaply with some method for those who can't afford even a low fee to get their memberships covered, which basically splits the cost over as many people as possible of paying for those subscriptions, would do it. The ultimate aim ought to be to eventually eliminate that middle-man and have them owning & underwriting the peer-reviewing and publication process as directly as possible, but that would take much longer than just organizing a library that anybody, anywhere in the world, has some level of access to. (Payment to get published within the network might also be handled by distribution, but it'd have to be done carefully to ensure that those who are tempted to abuse the system are discouraged, and if that doesn't work they at least bear more of the cost.)
Nope, I've never owned any Samsung phones actually. I've owned Blackberries and currently own an LG--I may look at Blackberry again, eventually, since while I won't miss the OS one bit but the hardware...how can I not miss having reception where nobody else, even on the same network, had any?
I'm pretty happy with both my previous and current phones' GPS, but really every single GPS device I've used--even borrowed ones--have had idiosyncrasies which ensured that I learned very well to only rely upon it when I'd never been in the area before or when what I really needed was to know how bad the traffic was/how long I should expect the trip to take. 'Most of the time' isn't quite good enough to rely upon it exclusively.
Because it's such a failure in every other country that's tried it?
You need to get out and travel more
I probably have gotten out and spent more time in other countries than you have--and I tend to keep up with how well it actually goes. In the countries that have tried it, it's worked out best when they've already successfully gotten rid of most of their ethnic minorities and have a collectivist culture, things that certainly cannot be said for the US--and this basically means that if there's any reason why you might not take too well to the local standard, even if you're in a First World country it might be a very healthy idea to only accept the care that's required in order to get an airline willing to let you hop a plane out.
In fact, the country I spent the most time in required anybody staying as long as I was to have some kind of health insurance as part of the conditions of having a visa, and the one I ended up with basically would cover anything minor of the 'can be treated in-office' type and for anything more significant its plan was to get me stabilized in country and then return me to my home country. It was actually one of the countries where the socialized healthcare system works pretty well--the culture is very much one where being a burden to others is shameful, and practically nobody outside of the country even realizes that their ethnic minorities exist no less care about 'em. (The side effect that many of these groups seem to bear a significant amount of the human cost is, from what I can tell, more accident than malevolence.)
The US is very individualist and very ethnically diverse...and the elite ruling class is pretty WASPy and not very good at science in my experience. They're more mid-and-higher management in mindset: if they want science-y things to be done, they'll hire specialists, and then proceed to ignore them, especially if they don't say what they want to hear and/or something they can't mangle into what they want to hear.
Honestly, I suspect that setting up clinics which pay the healthcare providers a living wage--all of them, including the doctors--and offering a relatively basic menu of treatments at-cost is probably the best option in the US. Untying health insurance from employment--make it run more like a 401K, where your employer can pick up/underwrite the cost but you own the plan--would probably do a significant part of what would be left over, especially if ERs are allowed to redirect people to the underwritten clinics under the overall rubric of 'triage.' (The clinics would probably need to be considered emergency clinics and open 24/7 in order to do so, but that would make people more likely to agree to having them in place anyway.)
Accepting that part of the costs of having an ethnically diverse society and an individualistic culture will be reflected in the costs of our healthcare system would also do a lot. Of course I know that ethnicity doesn't equal even phenotype no less genotype, but until we get the costs of doing genomes down enough and the privacy laws updated, it's very often the best shortcut we've got. There's quite a few treatments that 'being of [almost always a minority] ethnic group' is a contraindication for already. Some of them we don't even necessarily know what the genes involved are, we just know where the person in whom that particular version originates from seems to have come from. This is a place where we could really improve medical outcomes for minority ethnic groups, instead of the traditional ignore-and-hope-it-goes-away. I do suspect this is due to ignorance, not maliciousness, but...it ought to be easier to distinguish the two.
While you've got some raging inaccuracies--for example, the first malpractice crisis in the US was in the 19th century (citation) and it goes about 4000 years from now (citation)--you've very accurate in the summation. The amount of technology, skill, and training--and the amount of things we can treat, no less cure--has soared.
I'd say part of what needs reform though is the fact that the costs are being shifted away from the consumer, however. The effects of moral hazards--where the costs of a risk are displaced from the person who chooses to take the risk--are pretty well-demonstrated. (See: the subprime mortgage crisis.) It doesn't help that people just suck in general at risk perception: the perceived risk of eating the Heart Attack Special daily and putting off exercise will typically be 'not enough to be cared about,' assuming the combination gets considered. Changing your lifestyle and habits is hard, after all, and if society is covering the regular costs then you may not even really feel motivated to care one bit.
Socializing costs and privatizing rewards is not a good idea, in any situation.
Where I've seen it used in actual serious medical settings, CFS basically is where they lump in people who have chronic fatigue, and...nothing that can be determined as its cause but a lot of things that we know aren't it. In some cases, depression appears to be a symptom and not the actual underlying condition, though if somebody is telling me they've got depression and fatigue I'd be checking to see if their thyroid is at all working. (Some of the issues with how thyroid function is checked mean that it can't always be ruled out with CFS, and I've seen no sign if anybody's yet done an up-and-down check--just because a gland is releasing hormones at the proper levels doesn't mean the body is 'reading' them as such, as conditions like androgen insensitivity and diabetes type II demonstrate.)
However, yeah, CFS is definitely a catch-all, and some of it can be as depressingly simple as we just didn't realize that some condition(s) could present with a different constellation of symptoms or worse still just had too many doctors insisting some particular symptom or other be present when logically it couldn't always be. (There's a few where I have seen doctors skip over even considering them because there's no family history--how, precisely, this family history is supposed to come into being is a mystery.)
But they were cagey about methodology and didn't use FDA approved analyzers.
Further proof that, far more often than not, "disruptive" means ignoring the law for as long as humanly possible while hoping that your competitors can't (or won't) follow suit.
I can't wait for "disruptive" medicine as practiced by anyone with internet access and a hyperlink to WebMD.
WebMD is much too reputable. It'd need to be a site with a lot of medical technobabble covering up the fact that the claims are utterly ludicrous, if you know what the words being bandied about and the technology and methodology, the sort of site Quackwatch would rip to entertaining shreds. I doubt the entrenched players were even worried, and if they were it certainly wasn't over the competition but splash damage once the con got publicly outed.
I'd actually be all for an data plan where instead of a data limit I get throttled instead--where I can 'drink' as much as I can at whatever speed I'm paying for, and maybe have the option of buying a block of 'chugging' if I want it for some reason. I'd rather not get hit by data overage charges just because my ISP decided to be incapable of providing stable service, and a lot of sites seem to be eager to inject data-chugging ads on their mobile versions.
My guess is that they actually introduced data caps entirely because they want to be able to hit you with the overage charges--if the issue is how much data you can manage to fit through the current pipes, then charging people for the speed would make a lot more sense. Not to mention that I'm sure you could make a killing offering 'unlimited, unthrottled' as a premium plan, at premium prices...
The fact that they're not HIPAA-covered should, really, be enough reason to not let them handle your sample
Even then the government doesn't seem to pay much attention to HIPAA given the SAFE act in New York and similar legislation in California where they presume people are automatically guilty by mass searching through health records that meets some vague criteria like if you were ever referred to a mental health specialist by your general doctor because you had trouble sleeping at night and needed something to relax.
I had an oral swab done once as part of a diagnostic lab work by my doctor so I'm sure I'm in some CODIS like database somewhere.
Having looked up the law you did provide sufficient information about, odds are incredibly good that New York and California not only aren't enforcing those provisions, but pretty much know that nobody is going to cooperate--and I doubt you've actually looked at even the Wikipedia pages, given what the SAFE act requires is given as:
Requires designated mental health professionals who believe a mental health patient made a credible threat of harming others to report the threat to a mental health director, who would then have to report serious threats to the state Department of Criminal Justice Services. A patient's gun could be taken from him or her.
The VA flat-out announced that because this violates federal law they will do no such thing--it seems to be a rather polite 'shove it up your ass' actually--and from the looks of it, New York is fully aware that if they tried to fight the VA on this, the VA can and will make sure it does get shoved, and it will be a very public example of the sans lube version because either that requirement was utterly symbolic or they somehow actually thought they could enforce it.
The only way they'll actually get mental health professionals to do that is somehow convince them that New York somehow has the authority to require you violate both the ethical rules required to keep your license and federal law...and that New York has your back when you get in hot water over having done both. While I can't check, I suspect the same situation applies in California.
I suppose that if you were insanely lucky, you might manage to skate from suffering federal consequences, but you're just not ever going to see your license again--and getting those is hard enough that, really, everybody is probably thinking what the VA said, and probably in less polite terms. Those who don't want to be caught between state law and professional standards & federal law are probably GTFOing, meaning that New York and California might have trouble with getting people who are qualified to provide mental health services. Great job, New York and California!
(Remember, kiddies: federal law trumps state, and I don't think you could find a lawyer who'd want to try arguing otherwise now...)
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You're trying to tell us that half of all jobs in the UK can be replaced by "smart machines"?
Just think about how many jobs you could automate away with a very simple shell script. Now think about how many jobs could be automated away with a very simple shell script and some basic robotics. The mind boggles. Also, a lot of jobs are just lost because the need for them goes away. For example, if we shift from internal combustion to electric motors, it's a fact that you won't need as many people to work on them because they are so much simpler to produce and so many of the steps can be completely automated, like motor winding — and they don't break down as much to begin with. It's simply a fact that you need less people to produce and maintain them. That's progress eliminating jobs, and not replacing them with anything.
The jobs that really could be gotten rid of with a very simple shell script and simple robotics are either already gone or still more efficiently and cheaply done by a human being. Those are the precarious ones--drive up labor costs, and suddenly it's no longer cheaper to have a person do it instead. Drive up the labor costs sufficiently, and you'll even see automation taking over jobs that automation really isn't up to replacing humans at yet, such as answering phones. (Needless to say, exactly at what point automating becomes cheaper than having humans do it varies by task and geography.)
It isn't always necessarily tedious and mind-numbing work that can be easily automated.
I can think of two obvious examples of high-skill jobs that are being automated as we speak. One is document discovery in the law profession, formerly done by lawyers and paralegals and now much more often done by software. Another is interpretation of X-rays and other medical images done by doctors.
Everything I've heard from lawyers and paralegals about document discovery is that it is tedious and mind-numbing: the mistake you are making here is thinking that 'tedious and mind-numbing' and 'high-skill jobs' are somehow mutually exclusive. It also doesn't necessarily mean that those who are having parts of their tasks taken over by machines will not welcome it as it provides more complete results than a human is capable of doing on their own and frees up time for other activities even if it does cut into total billable hours.
I knew this would be among the first posts, and it is of course complete rubbish.
Have you ever looking at how babies and young children play? They are easily led by what toys are available and what adults lead them to. That's why they tell parents to read to their children - not to torture kids by forcing them to endure things they hate, but because educators understand that leading children to learn through play is better than leaving them to their own devices.
I'd believe that a lot more if I hadn't ended up reading a lot of stuff in the family of "Unexpurgated Grimms" as a very small child simply by virtue that it was on a tall shelf which suggested it was excitingly forbidden...and I was more capable of scaling shelves than the adults around me ever suspected. (And by 'ever expected' I mean they only know because I admitted it...once I was tall enough to reach it without climbing and they'd hand me it if I asked.)
It was overall fortunate that Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights was on the bottom shelf and thus written off as probably kiddy-safe and therefore boring. (Those familiar even with their reputation should know exactly how accurate this is.)
A kid who is sufficiently interested in getting at a given toy will--regardless of parental encouragement or discouragement--make great efforts to find a way. What you're doing by reading to your child is helping associate it with 'family activity,' demonstrates that you value the skill, and also helps the child start associating the spoken word to its written counterpart.
Some of this I learned simply by studying dev psych, some of this I know because it's not fun being a gender-nonconforming kid with relatives who will refuse you things they deem gender inappropriate. I still managed to get them, and it was not always because I asked relatives who were more tolerant; I have one book I refuse to part with simply because I wanted it badly enough to spend years tracking down a copy I could afford. (I had already started following specific artists before I hit my teens, and wanted a specific artist's version of a particular children's book. Usually, copies in so-so condition sell for $50+ on Amazon.)
If you want to get all pedantic, "our Native Americans" doesn't even include the Azteks. That was someone else's Native Americans. They pretty much went extinct because they used up their resources. We still have some Maya, though. They're still around, they just don't have their massive culture any more.
In the area we now consider to be the continental US, the tribes' behavior pretty much matched the landscape. The desert tribes would as soon kill you as give you water. The tribes who lived where there was plenty were considerably more generous... much to their detriment.
That depends on how much you bother poking into the history. I live in one of those areas where there's plenty--and the archaeological record shows that there was at least one tribe that just poof'd mostly before Columbus showed up...
Of course, each region had its own peculiarities. A few preferred cultural genocides, for example, because while they're bothered by the other tribe's existence they see no reason to waste otherwise perfectly good human resources. (The Indian Schools, in some ways, were merely innovations of scale.)
It's an interesting question to what extent most tribes' tendency to not be thrilled about archaeology is due to the fact it'd find these sorts of things out--the only reason there was much enthusiasm for investigating the sites of the tribe I mention above? There's actually survivors of it to this day, and they wanted the digs done because this was the only physical evidence that had survived their neighbors' precolumbian efforts. (The general feeling among Europeans historically about their existence seems to have been a resounding "You guys exist?" Given that they were our region's moundbuilders, and the mounds are how we find their sites, I suspect their reactions to that were pretty priceless. "White man thinks mounds just build themselves.")
Likely the two-year period was picked also because that's how long they feel it will need to be since you were employed by them for them to be able to just cheerfully inform any court attempting to get their aid in subpoenaing you that it is now entirely the court's problem and not theirs.
I was talking about the total cost, included ground. Usually I don't need to be so explicit to be understood.
If you are, we're probably talking about house built by the lot's owner working alone using mostly scavenged materials--which means it was built illegally, is in violation of so many building and housing codes that it might be easier to work out which ones it managed somehow to miss, and...well, probably the land has something direly wrong with it because the land sold for only ~$100,000. Odds are it's something like they're hoping you'll miss that they're selling you a toxic waste dump and the legal obligation to clean it.
Because people are idiots.
[...]
Likewise, if I don't pay for social security, and I don't have savings, that means I'm poor in old age. Which makes it more likely I'll go robbing stores for food or begging on the street. Is that a better outcome for society - to have homeless or higher petty crime just for people who fail to plan?
You do realize that I'm figuring that the odds of social security surviving long enough to pay me and most others of Gen Y & above a single penny is so low as to qualify as a sadistic joke, right? If a non-government organization tried running social security it'd be shut down because it's a Ponzi scheme--the original assumption was that the population would keep climbing and life expectancy would be stable, given that the odds of you living long enough to see your first social security check when it was set up started pretty bad and dropped towards laughable for the poor.
We're in full agreement that people are idiots, but I'd like to point out that not all cultures even organize emergency services and care of the elderly/disabled the same way--and some of them really are rather healthier in many ways because of the issues involved in making things Somebody Else's Problem.
And that's the real problem - that's why we collectively pay into emergency services - sure it'll be very unlikely to happen to *me*, but you know, I'd rather spend my days and later years in life not worrying about all the old seniors who decided to live it big when they made money and not save up who might come and rob me, or to just be able to go out and enjoy parks without tent cities of same.
Congrats, you just covered why emergency services definitely need paying for--though you still have the question of why exactly I should trust Social Security to stick around, since whatever I pay into it now is going right out the door now. It's not an investment scheme, it's not a lockbox, and if anybody but the government tried running it then it'd be very, very illegal.
Even today, a significant chunk of the population lives paycheck to paycheck - miss one and there's a good chance they'll be out on the street, likely raising the local crime rate all so they could feed their kid (and we all pay for it - increased prices, increased policing/jail/courts/etc). There's a good chunk of people not living
And yes, there's a good chunk of people not paying income taxes - but they're both rich AND poor. But they're paying taxes in other ways - state taxes, sales taxes, etc. They're not getting a free ride.
Which also suggests a way to cover the emergency services, because part of the entire issue here is that if you're living from paycheck to paycheck, then the more of that very same paycheck you can take home the better. You could probably get fewer people living from paycheck to paycheck that way, if nothing else.
As you said, people are idiots; why give them a blank check? Even threatening them with an a la carte system and making them argue for why any given part needs to be in place would help. (Especially since some of the differences between cultures which consider, say, care of the elderly the problem of their kin vs the problem of the government are interesting--particularly in the differences in what the outcomes tend to be when it is viewed as your problem to deal with as opposed to a nebulous governmental one.)
Really, I figure that people are such idiots that giving a
Probably because it's trying to avoid ambiguity with computers reading the texts eventually. This doesn't really answer the question, given that it might have been more sensible to set it so glyphs with the same meaning shared a code point, and you treated any variations as alternate forms of it, which is something the Unicode standard seems to have already though I've no idea how well it works nor how well-supported it is.
If the lawsuit was badly written, this ruling makes a lot more sense and becomes rather inevitable. If you were filing on behalf of everybody then the judge is perfectly correct--and this is a mistake on the part of the lawyers filing suit. If you are filing only on behalf of the people whom you yourselves represent--which I suspect can be done with an opening for people to join in--then the judge's reasoning for dismissing the lawsuit is flawed and probably can be appealed.
In each direction there's an important precedent to consider: it's just as bad as to unquestioningly accept a small percentage's claim of the right to represent the greater body of people as it is to require those filing to know the full extent of harm done, especially before discovery.
Regardless of your feelings about this suit, eventually either problem will turn up in a way you will not like.
Why not set it up a la carte? See what public services people feel are worth paying their money for?
Because most people are ignorant idiots; they don't know what they need to know to make an intelligent decision, and even if they did, they still couldn't make one. Everyone would choose to spend their money on saving puppies and putting homeless people in jail for littering and nobody would choose to spend their money on infrastructure.
That's precisely because they're insulated from it: The source of funding for infrastructure is something they don't think about, nor do they tend to think of what forms & kinds of infrastructure will have the best bang-for-buck. They're used to voting for politicians who promise to spend money on your "saving puppies and putting homeless people in jail for littering," and both doing things efficiently and paying for doing this is always Somebody Else's Problem.
This would make it no longer somebody else's problem and control for at least some of the effects of diffusion of responsibility, and the problem is likely to be both self-limiting and self-correcting as people start earmarking their money for infrastructure that they consider important.
Knowing some of the issues for the homeless, though, your second example of what you expect money to be given to brings up a major problem with assuming our current system does terribly much to avoid defunding important infrastructure. We defunded the mental health infrastructure, because suddenly we had these magic pills that 'cured' people, and people didn't like mental hospitals. The thing is, those pills don't cure--they can get people to where they're only needing a very bare minimum of support, but a lot of these conditions are pretty much permanent. (Some of the research actually points towards the theory that at least some are more accurately described not as psychological illnesses but as neurological illnesses that happen to have psychological symptoms.) If we're going to end up having the only way somebody can get treatment and shelter be getting themselves in jail, the absolute least we could do is minimize the costs to society and them by not forcing them to commit a serious crime.
Or, y'know, we could fund having the infrastructure rebuilt, except right now that's not likely to happen because you'd have to convince a majority of people, as opposed to 'enough people to toss in enough money.'
Tell you what, never use our roads, our internet, our many other public services ever again. Shut yourself up in your private property hermitage, dig a well because you aren't allowed to use water that came from a river the government diverted for our benefit. We'll work out a list of products you can never use because they resulted from government backed research. Then.. yeah you can quit paying taxes then. We'll let you.
Why not set it up a la carte? See what public services people feel are worth paying their money for? It might actually get more rational public spending by pushing people to think about just where whatever public service they think would be cool and nifty to have will come from, especially since for things like 'community pool' you could have the trigger not be 'majority' but 'sufficient funding.'
It's very easy to vote for funding things such as a library, but my experience is that you're not going to be told where the money is actually going to be found. Yes, alright, sometimes you get told that they're going to issue bonds but I've gotten to watch politicians--some of whom are now nationally-known--give every reason to believe that they don't understand how bonds actually work. You sell them for money now and look confused when people want to redeem them at maturity because...apparently they were just supposed to turn into money somehow? It's hard to tell. (It got rather hard for the city and county this was in to get people to vote for bonds, because even the college students who weren't likely to be there long enough to see whatever it was built caught on.)
But are you ok with them submitting and getting paid for claims for that fictitious person?
Claims have to be submitted through a medical office, which checks your ID. Besides, if you want to submit false claims, you can do that as easily for a real person as a fictitious person. The only difference is that the real person will have much less difficulty cashing the checks. Banks also check IDs.
Sorry, but I just don't see the point in getting an insurance policy for a non-existent person.
Offhand, if you're running this scheme for money then the doctor is in on it--one of the problems with traditional Medicare/Medicaid fraud is that the patient is an actual, real person who can be asked if you performed the procedures you billed for. As you might notice, this is a real thing and none of the problems you've mentioned should exist--the doctor is cashing the checks, the doctor is generating the false claims.
Now, you can also use this so somebody with fake ID--something that exists, and I'm not sure how anybody could not know this--can go and get procedures using the fake person's insurance and on the fake person's records. This could be done for reasons ranging from "the doctor's reports would out you for the disability fraud you're doing" to "you do not want your abusive spouse finding out you're a touch pregnant."
Quasi scientific
Sure, but they weren't exactly out there to write scientific journals.
A lot of it looked to be up there in the area of pilot studies, and those generally don't get written up in journals--some you may not hear about outside of the specific sub-sub-field and/or grant process, since the entire point of a pilot study is...well...can we scientifically test this this way?
Sometimes it gets weird, because you might have a pretty sound theory and planned methodology, but the pilot study demonstrates that something is missing before it's ready for a scientific journal.
They might get talked about between researchers, and sometimes you'll hear about it if it's known that you're trying to do a bit of research which somebody else tried but had die in the pilot study, which can be helpful since obviously it'd not have turned up when you did the lit search. It's worth noting as well that on occasion, what happened is that things went wrong in absurd and clearly impossible ways--think along the lines of trying to deal with 'code does not compile unless Alice is physically in the building; all other possible factors eliminated' to get some idea how strange and annoying this can go.
Funny, I keep anything I need to access quickly that isn't worth securing on my lock screen--that is to say, when locked my phone is an excellent clock and I can see if I want to bother checking now any messages since it displays the number and what service it came in through. I want to be able to let people see my lock screen, if nothing else because it has a picture of one of a cute hamster.
Anything else? Because I use my pattern so often I don't even need to wake up, and I don't need to unlock my phone to answer calls--if my phone gets lost I want to be able to call it, and if somebody's found it I want them able to answer! (You have to unlock the phone to actually call anyone.)
Or asked one of the library staff to do so. That was what I had to do, because that was the only way at the stacks; the unlucky librarian sent off on the quest for it told me she had to sit on the lid of the photocopier so it'd work. (Thankfully the paper was definitely one I needed, otherwise I'd have felt rather guilty for putting her through so much trouble.)
That depends on why you're trying to read older results--for example, I once overheard a rather interesting conversation by a grad student whose main question was "Why was this line of research abandoned?" I never did find out, but it is a good question and seems a reason to have a serious journal dedicated to recording such things when there was a good reason. A Journal of Strange Results, perhaps, covering those experiments that somehow managed to do something else entirely instead of disprove or prove the hypothesis. (Given the number of times I've had experiments in the lab just not go anywhere near as expected, I'm sure you'd not have too much trouble doing it as an annual publication at least, and it likely would function well as a place for discussing what may cause an experiment to go awry--which would help improve procedures and possibly improve the speed at which methodology flaws & limits are detected.)
You might not even have to keep it secret if you choose a service that allows you to upload a copy that everybody can attach comments to--of course you had to share a copy, how else could this work online? You certainly can't easily manage to point out which part of the paper you're discussing easily otherwise, and in quite a few cases the original authors taking part in a virtual discussion would be of a great amount of use to all parties.
After all, while my experiment ran pretty well in my nice near-sea-level lab in a nice temperate climate, I might want to find out how well it goes at, say, a higher altitude or in a tropical climate, or maybe just closer or farther from the equator. It will be vastly easier and more efficient to pull this off if I take advantage of the internet to help colleagues who happen to have those environments handy replicate my work.
And, well, so what if they happen to not be able to afford journal access? At worst, all that's needed is no proof existing that I knew otherwise; the copy was, after all, uploaded so we could discuss it in detail more easily, and I simply thought they'd read more than the abstract.
Ugh. Academic research, paid for by a grant, needs to be peer reviewed (author pays for this) and published (pay again) and is then inaccessible to non-subscribers, unless you can find a library wealthy enough to have a subscription, which may still deny you access if you're not a member of the community they serve.
Here we are in the 21st century, with gigabits flowing freely through the Intertubes, and the dissemination of scientific articles is stuck in the mid-20th century, and sinking fast (costs going up, number of library subscriptions decreasing) and Elsevier trying to gain control of as many journals as possible.
Anyone else see a problem with this? A major overhaul seems way past due.
Setting up a large virtual library that offers individual memberships cheaply with some method for those who can't afford even a low fee to get their memberships covered, which basically splits the cost over as many people as possible of paying for those subscriptions, would do it. The ultimate aim ought to be to eventually eliminate that middle-man and have them owning & underwriting the peer-reviewing and publication process as directly as possible, but that would take much longer than just organizing a library that anybody, anywhere in the world, has some level of access to. (Payment to get published within the network might also be handled by distribution, but it'd have to be done carefully to ensure that those who are tempted to abuse the system are discouraged, and if that doesn't work they at least bear more of the cost.)
Nope, I've never owned any Samsung phones actually. I've owned Blackberries and currently own an LG--I may look at Blackberry again, eventually, since while I won't miss the OS one bit but the hardware...how can I not miss having reception where nobody else, even on the same network, had any?
I'm pretty happy with both my previous and current phones' GPS, but really every single GPS device I've used--even borrowed ones--have had idiosyncrasies which ensured that I learned very well to only rely upon it when I'd never been in the area before or when what I really needed was to know how bad the traffic was/how long I should expect the trip to take. 'Most of the time' isn't quite good enough to rely upon it exclusively.
Because it's such a failure in every other country that's tried it?
You need to get out and travel more
I probably have gotten out and spent more time in other countries than you have--and I tend to keep up with how well it actually goes. In the countries that have tried it, it's worked out best when they've already successfully gotten rid of most of their ethnic minorities and have a collectivist culture, things that certainly cannot be said for the US--and this basically means that if there's any reason why you might not take too well to the local standard, even if you're in a First World country it might be a very healthy idea to only accept the care that's required in order to get an airline willing to let you hop a plane out.
In fact, the country I spent the most time in required anybody staying as long as I was to have some kind of health insurance as part of the conditions of having a visa, and the one I ended up with basically would cover anything minor of the 'can be treated in-office' type and for anything more significant its plan was to get me stabilized in country and then return me to my home country. It was actually one of the countries where the socialized healthcare system works pretty well--the culture is very much one where being a burden to others is shameful, and practically nobody outside of the country even realizes that their ethnic minorities exist no less care about 'em. (The side effect that many of these groups seem to bear a significant amount of the human cost is, from what I can tell, more accident than malevolence.)
The US is very individualist and very ethnically diverse...and the elite ruling class is pretty WASPy and not very good at science in my experience. They're more mid-and-higher management in mindset: if they want science-y things to be done, they'll hire specialists, and then proceed to ignore them, especially if they don't say what they want to hear and/or something they can't mangle into what they want to hear.
Honestly, I suspect that setting up clinics which pay the healthcare providers a living wage--all of them, including the doctors--and offering a relatively basic menu of treatments at-cost is probably the best option in the US. Untying health insurance from employment--make it run more like a 401K, where your employer can pick up/underwrite the cost but you own the plan--would probably do a significant part of what would be left over, especially if ERs are allowed to redirect people to the underwritten clinics under the overall rubric of 'triage.' (The clinics would probably need to be considered emergency clinics and open 24/7 in order to do so, but that would make people more likely to agree to having them in place anyway.)
Accepting that part of the costs of having an ethnically diverse society and an individualistic culture will be reflected in the costs of our healthcare system would also do a lot. Of course I know that ethnicity doesn't equal even phenotype no less genotype, but until we get the costs of doing genomes down enough and the privacy laws updated, it's very often the best shortcut we've got. There's quite a few treatments that 'being of [almost always a minority] ethnic group' is a contraindication for already. Some of them we don't even necessarily know what the genes involved are, we just know where the person in whom that particular version originates from seems to have come from. This is a place where we could really improve medical outcomes for minority ethnic groups, instead of the traditional ignore-and-hope-it-goes-away. I do suspect this is due to ignorance, not maliciousness, but...it ought to be easier to distinguish the two.
While you've got some raging inaccuracies--for example, the first malpractice crisis in the US was in the 19th century (citation) and it goes about 4000 years from now (citation)--you've very accurate in the summation. The amount of technology, skill, and training--and the amount of things we can treat, no less cure--has soared.
I'd say part of what needs reform though is the fact that the costs are being shifted away from the consumer, however. The effects of moral hazards--where the costs of a risk are displaced from the person who chooses to take the risk--are pretty well-demonstrated. (See: the subprime mortgage crisis.) It doesn't help that people just suck in general at risk perception: the perceived risk of eating the Heart Attack Special daily and putting off exercise will typically be 'not enough to be cared about,' assuming the combination gets considered. Changing your lifestyle and habits is hard, after all, and if society is covering the regular costs then you may not even really feel motivated to care one bit.
Socializing costs and privatizing rewards is not a good idea, in any situation.
Where I've seen it used in actual serious medical settings, CFS basically is where they lump in people who have chronic fatigue, and...nothing that can be determined as its cause but a lot of things that we know aren't it. In some cases, depression appears to be a symptom and not the actual underlying condition, though if somebody is telling me they've got depression and fatigue I'd be checking to see if their thyroid is at all working. (Some of the issues with how thyroid function is checked mean that it can't always be ruled out with CFS, and I've seen no sign if anybody's yet done an up-and-down check--just because a gland is releasing hormones at the proper levels doesn't mean the body is 'reading' them as such, as conditions like androgen insensitivity and diabetes type II demonstrate.)
However, yeah, CFS is definitely a catch-all, and some of it can be as depressingly simple as we just didn't realize that some condition(s) could present with a different constellation of symptoms or worse still just had too many doctors insisting some particular symptom or other be present when logically it couldn't always be. (There's a few where I have seen doctors skip over even considering them because there's no family history--how, precisely, this family history is supposed to come into being is a mystery.)
Further proof that, far more often than not, "disruptive" means ignoring the law for as long as humanly possible while hoping that your competitors can't (or won't) follow suit.
I can't wait for "disruptive" medicine as practiced by anyone with internet access and a hyperlink to WebMD.
WebMD is much too reputable. It'd need to be a site with a lot of medical technobabble covering up the fact that the claims are utterly ludicrous, if you know what the words being bandied about and the technology and methodology, the sort of site Quackwatch would rip to entertaining shreds. I doubt the entrenched players were even worried, and if they were it certainly wasn't over the competition but splash damage once the con got publicly outed.
I'd actually be all for an data plan where instead of a data limit I get throttled instead--where I can 'drink' as much as I can at whatever speed I'm paying for, and maybe have the option of buying a block of 'chugging' if I want it for some reason. I'd rather not get hit by data overage charges just because my ISP decided to be incapable of providing stable service, and a lot of sites seem to be eager to inject data-chugging ads on their mobile versions.
My guess is that they actually introduced data caps entirely because they want to be able to hit you with the overage charges--if the issue is how much data you can manage to fit through the current pipes, then charging people for the speed would make a lot more sense. Not to mention that I'm sure you could make a killing offering 'unlimited, unthrottled' as a premium plan, at premium prices...
The fact that they're not HIPAA-covered should, really, be enough reason to not let them handle your sample
Even then the government doesn't seem to pay much attention to HIPAA given the SAFE act in New York and similar legislation in California where they presume people are automatically guilty by mass searching through health records that meets some vague criteria like if you were ever referred to a mental health specialist by your general doctor because you had trouble sleeping at night and needed something to relax.
I had an oral swab done once as part of a diagnostic lab work by my doctor so I'm sure I'm in some CODIS like database somewhere.
Having looked up the law you did provide sufficient information about, odds are incredibly good that New York and California not only aren't enforcing those provisions, but pretty much know that nobody is going to cooperate--and I doubt you've actually looked at even the Wikipedia pages, given what the SAFE act requires is given as:
Requires designated mental health professionals who believe a mental health patient made a credible threat of harming others to report the threat to a mental health director, who would then have to report serious threats to the state Department of Criminal Justice Services. A patient's gun could be taken from him or her.
The VA flat-out announced that because this violates federal law they will do no such thing--it seems to be a rather polite 'shove it up your ass' actually--and from the looks of it, New York is fully aware that if they tried to fight the VA on this, the VA can and will make sure it does get shoved, and it will be a very public example of the sans lube version because either that requirement was utterly symbolic or they somehow actually thought they could enforce it.
The only way they'll actually get mental health professionals to do that is somehow convince them that New York somehow has the authority to require you violate both the ethical rules required to keep your license and federal law...and that New York has your back when you get in hot water over having done both. While I can't check, I suspect the same situation applies in California.
I suppose that if you were insanely lucky, you might manage to skate from suffering federal consequences, but you're just not ever going to see your license again--and getting those is hard enough that, really, everybody is probably thinking what the VA said, and probably in less polite terms. Those who don't want to be caught between state law and professional standards & federal law are probably GTFOing, meaning that New York and California might have trouble with getting people who are qualified to provide mental health services. Great job, New York and California!
(Remember, kiddies: federal law trumps state, and I don't think you could find a lawyer who'd want to try arguing otherwise now...)