It's not the "free trinkets", it's the brand awareness that influences doctors. When the company or drug logo is in front of your face all day, it's hard to forget it--it'll be the first thing you think of when considering possible products to prescribe. Why do you think most big-ticket commercials these days aren't pitching the specific advantages of a specific product, but trying to give you a good feeling about a specific brand name?
Considering how many drug advertisements are now in mainstream commercials and periodical advertisements, a doctor would have to be a hermit not to be influenced, whether or not pharmaceutical reps give him free swag. The free swag just changes *which* brand name is in his face all day long.
Except in New Orleans, where the cops have been so notoriously corrupt (and the coroner corrupt AND incompetent) for years that they have trouble getting convictions because local juries automatically disbelieve cop testimony and assume the cops planted the evidence.
I read LOTR in 4th grade. Teachers were concerned because I was reading material "inappropriate for my age level"-- it was supposed to be too hard for me to understand, and they thought my parents had pushed me into it. My mother told them if I was reading it, it was because I wanted to, and I obviously could read it or I wouldn't be reading it.
I'm sure the physically strongest of the two has no problems with that solution. Usually, that is not the kid who was being threatened with physical violence by a bully.
Bullies do like to pick on those weaker than them, which is why demonstrating forcefully that you're NOT actually weaker discourages them. Bullies (as opposed to flat-out psychopaths) don't like getting hurt back and they prefer fearful victims--so you don't have to be tough enough to beat them and their buddies, just willing to dish it out in return. If you're not afraid and are willing and able to hurt them, it stops being fun for the bully.
My father, back in a much older day (1930s), was a glasses-wearing skinny kid who got beat up a lot. He took up amateur boxing and got quite good at it (local Golden Gloves Champion when he joined the Army). He stopped getting beat up after that.
Then you and everyone else pass around word-of-mouth advertising that "this movie really sucks, it's stupider than a Uwe Bool movie", and the movie tanks at the box-office. Yeah, that would be a real clever strategy.
That's not the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, but it's pretty bad. Beyond somewhere between 4-6 hours of productive mental work per day, the brain gets tired and your attention and focus goes to hell. Most of us fill out the rest of the day with non-demanding stuff like reading e-mail, gossiping with our coworkers, surfing the Internet, doing paperwork, etc. Push people to work 10+ hours a day and I predict that (a) your best people will suddenly find a job somewhere else, and (b) those remaining will actually slow the project down because of extra bugs and other lost productivity due to mistakes. Or (c), you will ship a bug-riddled, barely-working mess more or less on schedule, like a certain game company is notorious for doing. And lets not forget (d) disgruntled, overworked programmer sells your IP to his new employer or creatively re-arranges your development servers.
Personally, I wish we'd move to either 6-hour work days or a 4 day work-week. I'd rather have the extra day off than fake working for about 10 hours of the week (that 2 hours of the day where I can't concentrate on productive work any more and do mindless crap).
The facts of this case would suggest a chilling effect on researching how to commit a crime on the Internet AND THEN GOING OUT AND COMMITTING IT. I'm not seeing the downside here....
You want big red behavioral warning flags? A really big one?
Dehumanizing other people in order to justify exterminating them is #1.
Sociopaths have caused far less evil throughout history than fanatic idealists have. Sociopaths stop at "What benefits ME, personally"; idealists can rationalize mass murder and genocide in the name of their ideals.
By the way, calling politicians you don't like "psychopaths", which you claim are inhuman monsters deserving of death, sounds just a bit over the line of reason to me.
Well, if you follow the blogs of the first-round of commentators, they dug up some local newspaper articles with her name on them. Seems she's in and out of the local small-town politics, holding various town and county positions... and has the same stupid, defensive attitude when she performs badly there, too.
Could be iron slag, too, or weathered ferrous minerals as noted above. If he's in the Tennessee area, they've got both sinkholes and old iron workings in various parts of the state--I can find old iron slag from 18th & 19th century iron furnaces just walking the creek in Montgomery Bell State Park, for instance. If you're not familiar with it, slag looks rather mysterious--half-melted, glassy, and rusty all at once.
Or you send out your resume and interview while you still have a job, so you don't have the pressure of "unemployed and still have to pay rent" making you desperate to take anything that comes along....
Hmm, if that's a certain small American R&D office in San Jose of a certain large Japanese consumer electronics firm, I think I worked there a couple of years ago, though not on the Java; I worked on the low-level embedded OS code and drivers.
Do they still have fresh bagels on Friday mornings?
Everquest isn't like that anymore. Mercenaries, Defiant armor, Tutorial zone, NO MORE CORPSE RUNS... it's far easier to level up than it used to be. Also, there's a gazillion zones, so you rarely have to kill the same mob twice if you don't want to.
I have not played FFXI or FFXIV, but I play Everquest 1. Except for graphics, it sounds like this game would fail next to today's EQ1. (EQ has been quietly evolving over time, picking up useful features from other games. It's not the game you or your parents played in 1999).
Their Market area with retainers sounds as retarded as EQ's Bazaar (I have to keep to a character logged-in to sell stuff? WTF?), but at least EQ's bazaar has a good solid Search function. EQ also was one of the first MMORPGs to introduced custom UIs; for a game not to have a customizable UI isn't promising. Even EVE lets me change color schemes and scale fonts! (EVE also has a menu-happy interface, but it works in EVE, possibly because all the click-delve is handled client side.)
Nah, we're used to Internet Atheists engaging in 1st grade insults. "You believe in the Tooth Fairy/Old Man in the Sky/etc, nah-nah-nah!" is not worth getting excited about.
Actual intelligent debate might be interesting, except that it's an undebatable topic.
Actually, no. You are not required to obey an uncontitutional law; it is established principle that the moment a law is stricken down as unconstitutional, it becomes "null and void", as if it had never been passed. You cannot be punished for violating a law that does not exist, so any penalties that were applied have to be reversed, any convictions nullified, etc.
Of course, if the law you are not obeying ISN'T struck down as being unconstitutional, you could be screwed. It also sucks being the test case, too, since they can't give you back the lifespan wasted. But, in principle, you do not and should not have to obey an unconstitutional law.
Knowing Transformers fans, this means that Ford, Audi and GM all got product placement? Because Trans-fans think ALL giant robots and their vehicle modes are cool. They don't discriminate by faction, in my experience.
The real divide is between jet geeks and car geeks.;-)
Let me guess, you founded a new company that outcompeted your old one and drove them out of business? Or you married his ex-wife after the messy divorce, after she got all the money?
Or he might be ex-Navy/ex-Army/other ex-military. I had a polite vocabulary *before* my 4-year enlistment in the good old U.S.N. Now I have to make a conscious effort NOT to "swear like a sailor". It's a cultural thing, and has been since humans started organizing militias.
There's a name for it: Defensive Driving. Assume the other drivers on the road are all idiots and be ready for them to do stupid, unlikely things. It works.
It encourages you to do things like maintain situational awareness ("The cars a mile up the highway are all backed up in a jam. Maybe I should slow down"), maintain proper separation ("The guy ahead of me may suddenly have to brake for a deer bounding across the road" -- has happened to me), keep a safety margin on your speed ("Wheee, hydroplaning is fun!"), don't coast in someone's blind spot ("That semi wants to change lanes NOW, and he doesn't know I'm here. Oops"), DON'T assume the guy looking your way before pulling out on the road actually sees you (I smashed a car up making that mistake, once), etc.
If you're over worked and can't handle the job, take a day off. But people don't for all sorts of reasons. They need the cash is one of the biggest reasons. So lets think about this from the bigger picture. Personal responsibility is everyone's own responsibility. We as people need to know how to say when we need a break or help. Then and only then can the industries really see where the flaws are in their systems to begin to provide better support to those individuals.
You seem a trifle naive about the work conditions on some jobs. People have to eat and pay the rent, so if telling the boss they can't do the job at the pace they're required to is likely to get them fired or "let go" for underperformance ("not a team player" is another classic), they'll just keep their mouths shut and work around the problem. They may be rushed, they make take shortcuts, they may dump the entire mail shipment in a ravine and mark it as delivered, but they will do what it takes for them to survive. Or, they may just snap one day.
In a bad economy, where jobs are hard to find and there's a hundred people who'd love to have your job, you are not going to tell your boss you need a break or can't keep up the pace.
Ideally, nurses aren't working 12- and 14-hour shifts back-to-back because of critical understaffing and/or cost-cutting, and aren't responsible for about 2-3 times as many patients per nurse as they ought to be. Ideally, said nurses aren't fatigued and stressed to hell and gone. Ideally, no one ever makes a mistake when they are exhausted, rushed, and stressed. Ideally, if anyone makes a mistake, it will be completely innocuous and won't kill or maim anyone or cause massive property damage.
Unfortunately, I don't live in that ideal world, and neither do any nurses I know of. That doesn't make them "purely incompetent"; it makes them human beings living in the real world.
Based on this NY Times article, the current state of things in the medical devices world is fucking retarded! In the electronics world, we carefully make incompatible devices with incompatible plugs, and/or use color coding for similar plugs (keyboard/mouse and microphone/speaker/line-in come to mind). Apparently making sure customers don't fry their home electronics is more important than making sure patients don't die. Apparently the medical devices industry hasn't heard of something like "industry standards". How bloody hard is it to get together with your industry standards organization and publish a standard that says all IV tubes have a plug type A, all air tubes have plug type B, etc?? This is basic industrial and safety engineering--it's not rocket science.
You are aware that the Pacific Northwest is not the only lumber and pulpwood producing area on the planet? You did see the part where I described conditions in the Deep South of the U.S, right? Down here, pulpwood is farmed, not clearcut from public lands.
Ditto here on customer pre-sort reducing participation. Local trash collection requires us to sort out recyclables ourselves (unpaid labor), and then has the effrontery to charge us MORE on our sewer & water bill for recycling. Uh, no, thanks. I may have to pay the count-imposed recycling fee, but I'm not going to give them my free labor on top of it.
It was nice of them to give me that pretty blue recycling bin, though. It makes a good storage container in my attic.
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It's not the "free trinkets", it's the brand awareness that influences doctors. When the company or drug logo is in front of your face all day, it's hard to forget it--it'll be the first thing you think of when considering possible products to prescribe. Why do you think most big-ticket commercials these days aren't pitching the specific advantages of a specific product, but trying to give you a good feeling about a specific brand name?
Considering how many drug advertisements are now in mainstream commercials and periodical advertisements, a doctor would have to be a hermit not to be influenced, whether or not pharmaceutical reps give him free swag. The free swag just changes *which* brand name is in his face all day long.
Except in New Orleans, where the cops have been so notoriously corrupt (and the coroner corrupt AND incompetent) for years that they have trouble getting convictions because local juries automatically disbelieve cop testimony and assume the cops planted the evidence.
I read LOTR in 4th grade. Teachers were concerned because I was reading material "inappropriate for my age level"-- it was supposed to be too hard for me to understand, and they thought my parents had pushed me into it. My mother told them if I was reading it, it was because I wanted to, and I obviously could read it or I wouldn't be reading it.
I'm sure the physically strongest of the two has no problems with that solution. Usually, that is not the kid who was being threatened with physical violence by a bully.
Bullies do like to pick on those weaker than them, which is why demonstrating forcefully that you're NOT actually weaker discourages them. Bullies (as opposed to flat-out psychopaths) don't like getting hurt back and they prefer fearful victims--so you don't have to be tough enough to beat them and their buddies, just willing to dish it out in return. If you're not afraid and are willing and able to hurt them, it stops being fun for the bully.
My father, back in a much older day (1930s), was a glasses-wearing skinny kid who got beat up a lot. He took up amateur boxing and got quite good at it (local Golden Gloves Champion when he joined the Army). He stopped getting beat up after that.
Last time I looked, dead people didn't have publicity rights, nor can they be libeled. Is this an English thing?
Then you and everyone else pass around word-of-mouth advertising that "this movie really sucks, it's stupider than a Uwe Bool movie", and the movie tanks at the box-office. Yeah, that would be a real clever strategy.
That's not the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, but it's pretty bad. Beyond somewhere between 4-6 hours of productive mental work per day, the brain gets tired and your attention and focus goes to hell. Most of us fill out the rest of the day with non-demanding stuff like reading e-mail, gossiping with our coworkers, surfing the Internet, doing paperwork, etc. Push people to work 10+ hours a day and I predict that (a) your best people will suddenly find a job somewhere else, and (b) those remaining will actually slow the project down because of extra bugs and other lost productivity due to mistakes. Or (c), you will ship a bug-riddled, barely-working mess more or less on schedule, like a certain game company is notorious for doing. And lets not forget (d) disgruntled, overworked programmer sells your IP to his new employer or creatively re-arranges your development servers.
Personally, I wish we'd move to either 6-hour work days or a 4 day work-week. I'd rather have the extra day off than fake working for about 10 hours of the week (that 2 hours of the day where I can't concentrate on productive work any more and do mindless crap).
The facts of this case would suggest a chilling effect on researching how to commit a crime on the Internet AND THEN GOING OUT AND COMMITTING IT. I'm not seeing the downside here....
You want big red behavioral warning flags? A really big one?
Dehumanizing other people in order to justify exterminating them is #1.
Sociopaths have caused far less evil throughout history than fanatic idealists have. Sociopaths stop at "What benefits ME, personally"; idealists can rationalize mass murder and genocide in the name of their ideals.
By the way, calling politicians you don't like "psychopaths", which you claim are inhuman monsters deserving of death, sounds just a bit over the line of reason to me.
Well, if you follow the blogs of the first-round of commentators, they dug up some local newspaper articles with her name on them. Seems she's in and out of the local small-town politics, holding various town and county positions... and has the same stupid, defensive attitude when she performs badly there, too.
Could be iron slag, too, or weathered ferrous minerals as noted above. If he's in the Tennessee area, they've got both sinkholes and old iron workings in various parts of the state--I can find old iron slag from 18th & 19th century iron furnaces just walking the creek in Montgomery Bell State Park, for instance. If you're not familiar with it, slag looks rather mysterious--half-melted, glassy, and rusty all at once.
Or you send out your resume and interview while you still have a job, so you don't have the pressure of "unemployed and still have to pay rent" making you desperate to take anything that comes along....
Hmm, if that's a certain small American R&D office in San Jose of a certain large Japanese consumer electronics firm, I think I worked there a couple of years ago, though not on the Java; I worked on the low-level embedded OS code and drivers.
Do they still have fresh bagels on Friday mornings?
Everquest isn't like that anymore. Mercenaries, Defiant armor, Tutorial zone, NO MORE CORPSE RUNS... it's far easier to level up than it used to be. Also, there's a gazillion zones, so you rarely have to kill the same mob twice if you don't want to.
I have not played FFXI or FFXIV, but I play Everquest 1. Except for graphics , it sounds like this game would fail next to today's EQ1. (EQ has been quietly evolving over time, picking up useful features from other games. It's not the game you or your parents played in 1999).
Their Market area with retainers sounds as retarded as EQ's Bazaar (I have to keep to a character logged-in to sell stuff? WTF?), but at least EQ's bazaar has a good solid Search function. EQ also was one of the first MMORPGs to introduced custom UIs; for a game not to have a customizable UI isn't promising. Even EVE lets me change color schemes and scale fonts! (EVE also has a menu-happy interface, but it works in EVE, possibly because all the click-delve is handled client side.)
Nah, we're used to Internet Atheists engaging in 1st grade insults. "You believe in the Tooth Fairy/Old Man in the Sky/etc, nah-nah-nah!" is not worth getting excited about.
Actual intelligent debate might be interesting, except that it's an undebatable topic.
Actually, no. You are not required to obey an uncontitutional law; it is established principle that the moment a law is stricken down as unconstitutional, it becomes "null and void", as if it had never been passed. You cannot be punished for violating a law that does not exist, so any penalties that were applied have to be reversed, any convictions nullified, etc.
Of course, if the law you are not obeying ISN'T struck down as being unconstitutional, you could be screwed. It also sucks being the test case, too, since they can't give you back the lifespan wasted. But, in principle, you do not and should not have to obey an unconstitutional law.
Knowing Transformers fans, this means that Ford, Audi and GM all got product placement? Because Trans-fans think ALL giant robots and their vehicle modes are cool. They don't discriminate by faction, in my experience.
The real divide is between jet geeks and car geeks. ;-)
Let me guess, you founded a new company that outcompeted your old one and drove them out of business? Or you married his ex-wife after the messy divorce, after she got all the money?
Dang, I could have a lot of fun with this.
Or he might be ex-Navy/ex-Army/other ex-military. I had a polite vocabulary *before* my 4-year enlistment in the good old U.S.N. Now I have to make a conscious effort NOT to "swear like a sailor". It's a cultural thing, and has been since humans started organizing militias.
There's a name for it: Defensive Driving. Assume the other drivers on the road are all idiots and be ready for them to do stupid, unlikely things. It works.
It encourages you to do things like maintain situational awareness ("The cars a mile up the highway are all backed up in a jam. Maybe I should slow down"), maintain proper separation ("The guy ahead of me may suddenly have to brake for a deer bounding across the road" -- has happened to me), keep a safety margin on your speed ("Wheee, hydroplaning is fun!"), don't coast in someone's blind spot ("That semi wants to change lanes NOW, and he doesn't know I'm here. Oops"), DON'T assume the guy looking your way before pulling out on the road actually sees you (I smashed a car up making that mistake, once), etc.
If you're over worked and can't handle the job, take a day off. But people don't for all sorts of reasons. They need the cash is one of the biggest reasons. So lets think about this from the bigger picture. Personal responsibility is everyone's own responsibility. We as people need to know how to say when we need a break or help. Then and only then can the industries really see where the flaws are in their systems to begin to provide better support to those individuals.
You seem a trifle naive about the work conditions on some jobs. People have to eat and pay the rent, so if telling the boss they can't do the job at the pace they're required to is likely to get them fired or "let go" for underperformance ("not a team player" is another classic), they'll just keep their mouths shut and work around the problem. They may be rushed, they make take shortcuts, they may dump the entire mail shipment in a ravine and mark it as delivered, but they will do what it takes for them to survive. Or, they may just snap one day.
In a bad economy, where jobs are hard to find and there's a hundred people who'd love to have your job, you are not going to tell your boss you need a break or can't keep up the pace.
Ideally, nurses aren't working 12- and 14-hour shifts back-to-back because of critical understaffing and/or cost-cutting, and aren't responsible for about 2-3 times as many patients per nurse as they ought to be. Ideally, said nurses aren't fatigued and stressed to hell and gone. Ideally, no one ever makes a mistake when they are exhausted, rushed, and stressed. Ideally, if anyone makes a mistake, it will be completely innocuous and won't kill or maim anyone or cause massive property damage.
Unfortunately, I don't live in that ideal world, and neither do any nurses I know of. That doesn't make them "purely incompetent"; it makes them human beings living in the real world.
Based on this NY Times article, the current state of things in the medical devices world is fucking retarded! In the electronics world, we carefully make incompatible devices with incompatible plugs, and/or use color coding for similar plugs (keyboard/mouse and microphone/speaker/line-in come to mind). Apparently making sure customers don't fry their home electronics is more important than making sure patients don't die. Apparently the medical devices industry hasn't heard of something like "industry standards". How bloody hard is it to get together with your industry standards organization and publish a standard that says all IV tubes have a plug type A, all air tubes have plug type B, etc?? This is basic industrial and safety engineering--it's not rocket science.
You are aware that the Pacific Northwest is not the only lumber and pulpwood producing area on the planet? You did see the part where I described conditions in the Deep South of the U.S, right? Down here, pulpwood is farmed, not clearcut from public lands.
Ditto here on customer pre-sort reducing participation. Local trash collection requires us to sort out recyclables ourselves (unpaid labor), and then has the effrontery to charge us MORE on our sewer & water bill for recycling. Uh, no, thanks. I may have to pay the count-imposed recycling fee, but I'm not going to give them my free labor on top of it.
It was nice of them to give me that pretty blue recycling bin, though. It makes a good storage container in my attic.