Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
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How Doctors Die
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· Score: 1
Insurance companies were required to be non-profits. I think we have Reagan to thank for the wonders of the for-profit free-market entering health care.
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
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· Score: 1
Last week the nurses at a hospital near here went out on a one day strike. Their issue, they were being asked to contribute about $1200 a year to their health care costs the way everyone else working there does. Whenever a reporter asked, they would say it was about patient care and that they were striking for their patients. "Strikes are a last resort, but nurses will only strike if they want to make sure that patients have safe care every day." They had a one day strike a couple months ago and one of the replacement nurses accidentally (probably) killed a patient. Oops. The nurses strike typically two or three times a year until the hospitals cave to their demands.
The average nurse's salary without overtime at those facilities: $138,000. Maximum non-overtime nurse's salary: $291,000. The median family income in the area: $46,000. The nurses don't see a connection between their salaries and increased health care costs. The doctors, of course, are independent contractors that set their own charges. You can be sure that they wouldn't be happy if a nurse could make as much as a doctor, so I'd guess $300,000 is the low end of their range.
Why is this blog with unsupported claims on /.?
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How Doctors Die
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure why this article is even on Slashdot. Is there any evidence supporting this contention that physicians get less care, or is this just a doctor telling us how much better doctors are than everyone else and how we should strive to be like doctors. I've known two doctors who died of cancer in their forties and both went kicking and screaming, taking every last shot medicine would allow and some that had no shot in working and would at best provide days of painful life in a hospital bed. Two isn't a statistically significant sample, but it's more of a sample than Ken Murray gives us.
I think it's likely that Dr. Murray is just making things up in hopes that his patients will chose to die quicker than they currently do.
I'm not sure why this article is even on Slashdot. Is there any evidence supporting this contention that physicians get less care, or is this just a doctor telling us how much better doctors are than everyone else and how we should strive to be like doctors. I've known two doctors who died of cancer in their forties and both went kicking and screaming, taking every last shot medicine would allow and some that had no shot in working and would at best provide days of painful life in a hospital bed. Two isn't a statistically significant sample, but it's more of a sample than Ken Murray gives us.
I think it's likely that Dr. Murray is just making things up in hopes that his patients will chose to die quicker than they currently do.
Does free software count as a very expensive gadget? I know many form of R&D that use existing gadgets based on sound technology. Just because it's never been done before doesn't mean you need a $50M laser to do it.
A because of the lack of oversight in the DOD, questionable research gets done. But I'm not going to say that's entirely a bad thing. NSF and NASA are open to Congressional questioning about every dollar. Some Congressman is going to use important research to win political points if there's anything unusual about it. (The most famous recent case being "Effects of Major Oil Spills on the Multibillion Dollar Gulf Shrimp Industry", which is known to imbeciles as "Shrimp on a Treadmill") If someone at the Naval Research Lab or the Army Research Lab is doing the exact same thing, you'll never hear about it. The downside it there are ventures that don't have a chance in hell of working or finding anything new that get funded.
But as a researcher, if I were trying to launch a climate research instrument, for example, I'd probably be looking for opportunities on military spacecraft rather than NASA spacecraft. If a 4-star General goes to the Hill and tells Congress we need to be prepared for the strategic implications of global warming, they listen intently. If the NASA administrator says the same thing, they'll tell him we can't possibly know anything about the climate, and then cancel the project to make sure.
If you are going to link to an article as a means of making a point, it's often best to read the article. The one you link to shows that the space pen was developed by a private company at their own expense. There was never a government demand for one. Although, once one was available the government was happy to purchase them at a reasonable cost.
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Should the medical profession community be forced to absoborb the insane cost of education only then be forced to accept a salary they themselves do not want? Perhaps you feel they should be like monks or other holy men and not live for material wealth?
I absorbed similar cost and took years longer in my education in order to earn one third what a doctor makes. I did it because it's what I wanted to do. There's nothing about cost or training time that entitles you to a high salary. The salaries in medicine are high because the medical profession controls the number of doctors that are trained each year. That number is kept artificially low. If a public university wants to start a medical school, it's other medical schools that will lobby against it. It harms their ability to keep costs high while they reject most of the capable applicants.
If your doctor went into medicine to make money, do you really want that guy to be your doctor? I'd rather have one that wants to be a doctor and doesn't give a damn about the money.
It wasn't false advertising, because the Judge reported that the consoles that Sony provided to every member of his family following the extensive "private discovery" phase at the Thai resort (with unlimited beer and hookers) work as advertised.
That's the turbolift temporal distortion field. It alters time flow inside the turbolift. That's how Captain Kirk can talk to Spock in the lift, yet still make it to the bridge before the second shot is fired.
$115k/yr is an end of career salary in many organizations. Sound like exactly why I think government review panels should be allowed to consider cost and overhead when ranking proposals. When you get a great proposal from a place that pays high salaries with 80% overhead and a really good proposal from a place that pays a bit less with 30% overhead, maybe the one with 30% overhead should get funded.
But it'll never happen, because the people who work at the funding agencies want a job at the high salary/high overhead place when they're done.
Rolling your own to the same level of quality tends to cost a lot.
That's too general of a statement.
I can build a PC to a better level of quality than Gateway for the same money that they'd charge. And then when it's done, I'll know what's in it and how to fix it if need be.
I think you're assuming you get to start with a motherboard and a power supply rather than building your own. Just the cost of designing and fabricating a PC board exceed the value of most PCs before you add components. Check out the cost of a high quality 4 or 5 output lab power supply to power it with. It's fine to say rolling your own is cheap if the expertise and the parts are available. If it's really science you probably aren't going to find either.
Asking me - as someone with a PhD in a science subject - to choose which of two particle physics experiments is more worthwhile is unlikely to get a sensible answer.
Well, when you ask a particle physicist you'll get three possible answers. 1) The one that is closest to the way I do it. 2) The one that is closest to the way everyone has always done it. 3) The one that looks for the answer that we all think is correct. The one that will not be chosen is the one that might get an interesting or unexpected answer. So write your grant applications accordingly. The only way you can justify new science to a review panel is through developing instruments applicable to a wide variety of problems.
Yes. I know that. Jim Gray was a friend of mine and I saw him a couple days before he disappeared. But even though they were our collaborators and we sent many former students in that direction, Microsoft Research was never really a funding opportunity.
You have some major overhead (100% or so?). Or you overpay. To run up $250K on an FTE, I'd need to offer a salary of $138k. I'd need authorization from the Chancellor to open a position at that level.
I'll answer the question originally posed. And I think the answer is, for the most part, no. Most of the diverse projects funded by SciFund Challenge have goals in the hundreds of dollars or in the low thousands. While there are some science project you can do for a few thousand dollars, the are the minority rather than the majority. You also have be primarily talking about projects run by people who aren't getting paid to run these projects (i.e. professors paid with tax dollars an tuition).
A more realistic scale for a small science project is two full time early career scientists, which, with benefits and overhead is going to run you $250k/yr, now add what it's going to cost to do the experiments. There's no way you are going to be able fund that on donations unless people perceive a immediate benefit to themselves.
You can probably guess from the signature, I'm a fan of SETI@home. From a couple hundred thousand SETI@home users, they manage to raise $50k/yr. That's not great for a project that costs $500k/yr to run. It could be worse. The Allen Telescope Array run by the SETI Institute (unrelated to SETI@home) costs about $1.5M/yr to operate. In their funding drive, the SETI Institute raise $200k to bring the ATA back on-line. If it's still back on-line, I don't know where the rest of the money is coming from.
In other words, no, I have no faith in the ability of "crowdfunding" to act as a stable funding source for any non-trivial science project, and even then I think much of the funding will go to people who are already funded (at least in terms of salary), and just see a means to squeeze a few extra bucks into their research programs. Except, of course, in the case of "one's a crowd". The rich in this country control most of the wealth and income. Why ask for money from the peasants? Since we're moving our economies back into the feudal model, if I were a scientist looking for funding, I would probably be searching for a wealthy patron. Chief Alchemist to the Court of Gates, perhaps?
IANAL, but my understanding is if it's just the header files that have changed, and if the header files do not contain code, but only interface definitions, then no copyright violation has occurred. That type of header file is just a list of interfaces, and a list isn't subject to copyright. Since the GPL relies on copyright being valid, the GPL can't apply to that type of header file.
If the header file contains code, then the that code is subject to copyright, and therefore the GPL, but the interface definitions are not.
Personally, I think that Google, like TiVo and most everyone else that works with the linux kernel, is trying to have it both ways, so this kind of pressure against Google is good, even though it probably won't succeed in changing anything
Under the structure of the government as defined in the Constitution, a vote for a third party usually is wasted. Our government is essentially designed as a two party system. Only in unusual circumstances is a vote for a third party of value, and even then it is probably going help in electing the person you like the least.
We would need major amendment of the Constitution reshaping Congress as a parliamentary democracy and with ranked choice voting for President in order to make third parties viable.
And the problem with banking is that bankruptcy doesn't stay isolated to the bank, but usually starts a cascade failure which does major economic damage.
From the time this country was founded, until the time we came up with workable bank regulation, we averaged 17 years between national banking crises. After we regulated the banks we had one crisis in 86 years. Then when we deregulated, it took the bankers 11 years to trigger a crisis.
We know what the answer is. The banks just don't want to be told what they are allowed to do with our money. And the politicians that they own aren't going to do anything about it.
I, as a law-abiding citizen, notice the cops following me around, I'm probably going to find out why (honestly and non-confrontationally if possible).
You do realize that they are going to treat you like the dirt bag they think you are. If they're following you, or if they've put a GPS tracker on your car, you're already convicted in their minds. They're just looking for a way for the DA to convince a judge and jury.
If you were in front of the US Supreme Court and they asked you how this is fundamentally different than tracking your car through traditional police surveillance, how would you answer?
The ease of tracking causes it to become a societal ill. The police obviously don't have enough personnel to track every person using traditional surveillance. The police could easily place a GPS tracker on every car. To save them the trouble, congress could pass a law requiring that all cars have cellular GPS trackers installed and constantly transmitting location information to police. Would you want to be in the closest car to a murder scene? Wouldn't that fear be part of the definition of a police state?
Can't we come up with something better than an aircraft carrier for comparison? Does NASA have a list of comparison objects that says "400m = Aircraft Carrier"? First, aircraft carriers are about 330m x 75m x 20m. This thing is a 400m sphere, so it's a whole lot more massive. This thing would probably be a better comparison even though it's only 305m across. Anyone know any good rocks or holes on google earth that are 400m across?
The speed of light and the rate at which time passes are the same thing for an inertial reference frame, and it is a property of space. But where they are looking was never here. It was always somewhere else. I don't necessarily see why the local properties that space has had near here would necessarily be constant over a Hubble bubble. Someone should look at their distance scales vs the size of the horizon at various times.
But I'm not entirely convinced by the paper. There's always the possibility of a mistake or other flaw. More data and confirmation by others is necessary.
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Insurance companies were required to be non-profits. I think we have Reagan to thank for the wonders of the for-profit free-market entering health care.
Last week the nurses at a hospital near here went out on a one day strike. Their issue, they were being asked to contribute about $1200 a year to their health care costs the way everyone else working there does. Whenever a reporter asked, they would say it was about patient care and that they were striking for their patients. "Strikes are a last resort, but nurses will only strike if they want to make sure that patients have safe care every day." They had a one day strike a couple months ago and one of the replacement nurses accidentally (probably) killed a patient. Oops. The nurses strike typically two or three times a year until the hospitals cave to their demands.
The average nurse's salary without overtime at those facilities: $138,000. Maximum non-overtime nurse's salary: $291,000. The median family income in the area: $46,000. The nurses don't see a connection between their salaries and increased health care costs. The doctors, of course, are independent contractors that set their own charges. You can be sure that they wouldn't be happy if a nurse could make as much as a doctor, so I'd guess $300,000 is the low end of their range.
I'm not sure why this article is even on Slashdot. Is there any evidence supporting this contention that physicians get less care, or is this just a doctor telling us how much better doctors are than everyone else and how we should strive to be like doctors. I've known two doctors who died of cancer in their forties and both went kicking and screaming, taking every last shot medicine would allow and some that had no shot in working and would at best provide days of painful life in a hospital bed. Two isn't a statistically significant sample, but it's more of a sample than Ken Murray gives us.
I think it's likely that Dr. Murray is just making things up in hopes that his patients will chose to die quicker than they currently do.
I'm not sure why this article is even on Slashdot. Is there any evidence supporting this contention that physicians get less care, or is this just a doctor telling us how much better doctors are than everyone else and how we should strive to be like doctors. I've known two doctors who died of cancer in their forties and both went kicking and screaming, taking every last shot medicine would allow and some that had no shot in working and would at best provide days of painful life in a hospital bed. Two isn't a statistically significant sample, but it's more of a sample than Ken Murray gives us.
I think it's likely that Dr. Murray is just making things up in hopes that his patients will chose to die quicker than they currently do.
Does free software count as a very expensive gadget? I know many form of R&D that use existing gadgets based on sound technology. Just because it's never been done before doesn't mean you need a $50M laser to do it.
A because of the lack of oversight in the DOD, questionable research gets done. But I'm not going to say that's entirely a bad thing. NSF and NASA are open to Congressional questioning about every dollar. Some Congressman is going to use important research to win political points if there's anything unusual about it. (The most famous recent case being "Effects of Major Oil Spills on the Multibillion Dollar Gulf Shrimp Industry", which is known to imbeciles as "Shrimp on a Treadmill") If someone at the Naval Research Lab or the Army Research Lab is doing the exact same thing, you'll never hear about it. The downside it there are ventures that don't have a chance in hell of working or finding anything new that get funded.
But as a researcher, if I were trying to launch a climate research instrument, for example, I'd probably be looking for opportunities on military spacecraft rather than NASA spacecraft. If a 4-star General goes to the Hill and tells Congress we need to be prepared for the strategic implications of global warming, they listen intently. If the NASA administrator says the same thing, they'll tell him we can't possibly know anything about the climate, and then cancel the project to make sure.
If you are going to link to an article as a means of making a point, it's often best to read the article. The one you link to shows that the space pen was developed by a private company at their own expense. There was never a government demand for one. Although, once one was available the government was happy to purchase them at a reasonable cost.
Should the medical profession community be forced to absoborb the insane cost of education only then be forced to accept a salary they themselves do not want? Perhaps you feel they should be like monks or other holy men and not live for material wealth?
I absorbed similar cost and took years longer in my education in order to earn one third what a doctor makes. I did it because it's what I wanted to do. There's nothing about cost or training time that entitles you to a high salary. The salaries in medicine are high because the medical profession controls the number of doctors that are trained each year. That number is kept artificially low. If a public university wants to start a medical school, it's other medical schools that will lobby against it. It harms their ability to keep costs high while they reject most of the capable applicants.
If your doctor went into medicine to make money, do you really want that guy to be your doctor? I'd rather have one that wants to be a doctor and doesn't give a damn about the money.
You don't get arrested for casually flipping the bird. You get arrested for taunting a police officer with it.
It wasn't false advertising, because the Judge reported that the consoles that Sony provided to every member of his family following the extensive "private discovery" phase at the Thai resort (with unlimited beer and hookers) work as advertised.
How much did the USAF have to pay Sony for that?
That's the turbolift temporal distortion field. It alters time flow inside the turbolift. That's how Captain Kirk can talk to Spock in the lift, yet still make it to the bridge before the second shot is fired.
$115k/yr is an end of career salary in many organizations. Sound like exactly why I think government review panels should be allowed to consider cost and overhead when ranking proposals. When you get a great proposal from a place that pays high salaries with 80% overhead and a really good proposal from a place that pays a bit less with 30% overhead, maybe the one with 30% overhead should get funded.
But it'll never happen, because the people who work at the funding agencies want a job at the high salary/high overhead place when they're done.
That's too general of a statement.
I can build a PC to a better level of quality than Gateway for the same money that they'd charge. And then when it's done, I'll know what's in it and how to fix it if need be.
I think you're assuming you get to start with a motherboard and a power supply rather than building your own. Just the cost of designing and fabricating a PC board exceed the value of most PCs before you add components. Check out the cost of a high quality 4 or 5 output lab power supply to power it with. It's fine to say rolling your own is cheap if the expertise and the parts are available. If it's really science you probably aren't going to find either.
Asking me - as someone with a PhD in a science subject - to choose which of two particle physics experiments is more worthwhile is unlikely to get a sensible answer.
Well, when you ask a particle physicist you'll get three possible answers. 1) The one that is closest to the way I do it. 2) The one that is closest to the way everyone has always done it. 3) The one that looks for the answer that we all think is correct. The one that will not be chosen is the one that might get an interesting or unexpected answer. So write your grant applications accordingly. The only way you can justify new science to a review panel is through developing instruments applicable to a wide variety of problems.
Yes. I know that. Jim Gray was a friend of mine and I saw him a couple days before he disappeared. But even though they were our collaborators and we sent many former students in that direction, Microsoft Research was never really a funding opportunity.
You have some major overhead (100% or so?). Or you overpay. To run up $250K on an FTE, I'd need to offer a salary of $138k. I'd need authorization from the Chancellor to open a position at that level.
I'll answer the question originally posed. And I think the answer is, for the most part, no. Most of the diverse projects funded by SciFund Challenge have goals in the hundreds of dollars or in the low thousands. While there are some science project you can do for a few thousand dollars, the are the minority rather than the majority. You also have be primarily talking about projects run by people who aren't getting paid to run these projects (i.e. professors paid with tax dollars an tuition). A more realistic scale for a small science project is two full time early career scientists, which, with benefits and overhead is going to run you $250k/yr, now add what it's going to cost to do the experiments. There's no way you are going to be able fund that on donations unless people perceive a immediate benefit to themselves.
You can probably guess from the signature, I'm a fan of SETI@home. From a couple hundred thousand SETI@home users, they manage to raise $50k/yr. That's not great for a project that costs $500k/yr to run. It could be worse. The Allen Telescope Array run by the SETI Institute (unrelated to SETI@home) costs about $1.5M/yr to operate. In their funding drive, the SETI Institute raise $200k to bring the ATA back on-line. If it's still back on-line, I don't know where the rest of the money is coming from.
In other words, no, I have no faith in the ability of "crowdfunding" to act as a stable funding source for any non-trivial science project, and even then I think much of the funding will go to people who are already funded (at least in terms of salary), and just see a means to squeeze a few extra bucks into their research programs. Except, of course, in the case of "one's a crowd". The rich in this country control most of the wealth and income. Why ask for money from the peasants? Since we're moving our economies back into the feudal model, if I were a scientist looking for funding, I would probably be searching for a wealthy patron. Chief Alchemist to the Court of Gates, perhaps?
IANAL, but my understanding is if it's just the header files that have changed, and if the header files do not contain code, but only interface definitions, then no copyright violation has occurred. That type of header file is just a list of interfaces, and a list isn't subject to copyright. Since the GPL relies on copyright being valid, the GPL can't apply to that type of header file.
If the header file contains code, then the that code is subject to copyright, and therefore the GPL, but the interface definitions are not.
Personally, I think that Google, like TiVo and most everyone else that works with the linux kernel, is trying to have it both ways, so this kind of pressure against Google is good, even though it probably won't succeed in changing anything
.
In a real free market system, fraud wouldn't be illegal. Laws against fraud would be government interference in the market.
Under the structure of the government as defined in the Constitution, a vote for a third party usually is wasted. Our government is essentially designed as a two party system. Only in unusual circumstances is a vote for a third party of value, and even then it is probably going help in electing the person you like the least. We would need major amendment of the Constitution reshaping Congress as a parliamentary democracy and with ranked choice voting for President in order to make third parties viable.
And the problem with banking is that bankruptcy doesn't stay isolated to the bank, but usually starts a cascade failure which does major economic damage.
From the time this country was founded, until the time we came up with workable bank regulation, we averaged 17 years between national banking crises. After we regulated the banks we had one crisis in 86 years. Then when we deregulated, it took the bankers 11 years to trigger a crisis.
We know what the answer is. The banks just don't want to be told what they are allowed to do with our money. And the politicians that they own aren't going to do anything about it.
I, as a law-abiding citizen, notice the cops following me around, I'm probably going to find out why (honestly and non-confrontationally if possible).
You do realize that they are going to treat you like the dirt bag they think you are. If they're following you, or if they've put a GPS tracker on your car, you're already convicted in their minds. They're just looking for a way for the DA to convince a judge and jury.
If you were in front of the US Supreme Court and they asked you how this is fundamentally different than tracking your car through traditional police surveillance, how would you answer?
The ease of tracking causes it to become a societal ill. The police obviously don't have enough personnel to track every person using traditional surveillance. The police could easily place a GPS tracker on every car. To save them the trouble, congress could pass a law requiring that all cars have cellular GPS trackers installed and constantly transmitting location information to police. Would you want to be in the closest car to a murder scene? Wouldn't that fear be part of the definition of a police state?
Can't we come up with something better than an aircraft carrier for comparison? Does NASA have a list of comparison objects that says "400m = Aircraft Carrier"? First, aircraft carriers are about 330m x 75m x 20m. This thing is a 400m sphere, so it's a whole lot more massive. This thing would probably be a better comparison even though it's only 305m across. Anyone know any good rocks or holes on google earth that are 400m across?
The speed of light and the rate at which time passes are the same thing for an inertial reference frame, and it is a property of space. But where they are looking was never here. It was always somewhere else. I don't necessarily see why the local properties that space has had near here would necessarily be constant over a Hubble bubble. Someone should look at their distance scales vs the size of the horizon at various times.
But I'm not entirely convinced by the paper. There's always the possibility of a mistake or other flaw. More data and confirmation by others is necessary.