Texas could do without it if Texans didn't have to pay federal taxes. The problem is that they're unlikely to agree, en masse, never to leave the borders of Texas again.
Well, it's not as though the feds are going to start lowering Texans' taxes in return. The balance of payments doesn't matter - the feds still get their cut.
Meh. It's probably a poor district with not terribly bright students. There are lots of those. Occasionally, miracles are worked on these places, but largely they fail through inertia. You're right that the low-level employees aren't usually due for any significant blame.
Are you dense? I already said "It's okay not to tell them who you are, or not to tell them you're a reporter." But when you start impersonating a specific, real someone else, that's wrong, and depending on circumstances may actually be a crime.
Ah, but he didn't just make up a name. He impersonated a board member of Heartland. Making up a name and asking for stuff isn't illegal. Pretending to be a specific someone else is.
But it also casts enormous doubt on the provenance of that document. You can say, with near certainty (assuming that Gleick isn't lying about not changing any documents) that all but one of the documents is a genuine Heartland document, because they were emailed to an account he controlled by a Heartland staffer. But that one document was supposedly received in the mail, with no return address, no identified author or list of recipients, not even a note to indicate why the possessor of the document was sending it to Gleick (and yet, as far as we can tell, nobody else). And it's the one that makes all the outrageous claims.
Not if you're trying to convince them to join your side, it's not. Yes, if all you want to do is trumpet "I'm right! You're wrong! Shut up, you morons!" you're free to do so, but that's going to significantly harden the other side against you.
There are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle who have little or no real opinion about global warming. They don't think about it. If they do, they're going to think of cases like this (if they're on the right) as very good examples of when someone the left did something not merely inadvisable but quite likely illegal just to advance his cause. It does not matter what opinions Heartland has previously endorsed, in their minds, because the vast majority have never heard of Heartland before this and won't remember its name in five years.
If you perceive the environmental movement as one that is run by a bunch of hippie tree-huggers, you're going to be mistrustful of anything it says. When said hippie tree-huggers talk about how the world needs to use less energy, and it needs to cost more, and why can't we look like Europe with high density and public transportation, you're going to see that goal in everything they do. So when they say "we're killing the earth with CO2, and the solution is higher gas taxes and more electric cars and no more drilling for oil" you're going to assume that since they already wanted all of those things before, you can safely ignore the first part of the statement too. Back when environmental concerns were called "conservation", there was a lot of support from hunters and fishers. When the modern environmental movement made them no longer welcome, it lost a major source of support on the right. Part of this fight is a consequence of that.
You appear to have answered your own question. Misrepresenting yourself as a specific person that you are not is generally not considered good journalistic ethics. It's okay not to tell them who you are, or not to tell them you're a reporter.
Depending on state law, it might even be a crime. I doubt that, though, since I can't imagine Gleick is dumb enough to make a confession without at least checking with a lawyer first.
As it turns out, Peter Gleick impersonated a board member of Heartland in order to get them to send him the documents after he "received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy." He goes on to say, "I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name." Source for both. I'm not up on Illinois law, but that might be a crime.
As izomiac speculates below, he has been consulted solely to provide management of blood glucose for inpatients - not to adjust their home regimens, not even to see them. Just to look at their current regimen and adjust it on a daily basis. He obviously spends a bit more time with each of them and reviewing the chart for the first encounter, but day-to-day it's two minutes each. He's not the primary doctor on any of these; he's just taking diabetic control out of the hands of family docs who are set up to manage it on an outpatient basis and taking control of it while the person is in the hospital.
While many Jews are, sub rosa, totally into ham/bacon/etc., a lot of Muslims avoid it for cultural rather than religious reasons. I've known lots of (nominally) Muslims who drank alcohol, but very few who ate pork - the Pakistanis I've known in particular regard pork the way Americans view eating cat or dog.
I'm a physician whose hospital just tried to push all orders onto electronic order entry - not just medications but diet orders, PT/OT/nursing orders, everything. It got massive pushback. Why?
Most doctors see patients at more than one hospital. Many use an electronic system at their clinic. They have to remember five or six usernames, passwords, and different ways of doing things, any one of which is likely to change at any time due to an upgrade, and some of which they may not use for months (as an example, many surgeons maintain privileges at a wide variety of hospitals to be able to suit patients - but they may not operate at a given one for two or three months at a time). The interface is often clunky. And they're SLOW. Paper is FAST.
Great example from a committee meeting last week: one endocrinologist is part of a group that has taken over management of difficult diabetic inpatients. Most of them have Medicare, or Medicaid, or nothing at all. From his perspective, he's getting paid very little for his work. On paper, he can check blood sugars, write an order, and move on to the next patient in about two minutes. On computer, the same process takes about five minutes. Thirty patients an hour versus twelve... and so he said that if he's forced to do electronic, he will just stop doing the difficult diabetic management. It's no longer worth his time.
And, as others have said, these systems are fantastically expensive, and so while there are some savings to be reaped they are mostly taken by the vendor and the increased IT expenses. And then your vendor decides to EOL your software... what do you do then? Buy their replacement product, because it's a lot cheaper to stay with the same vendor? Buy a new whole-hospital system from another vendor? We're wrestling with that now.
Shocked at its content? According to their website, there are only 40 people in the whole organization. I doubt there's anyone there who doesn't agree with them politically.
However, your scenario is not implausible, but turns out that the claims in the "strategy memo" that aren't supported by the other documentation are all skewed one way. (I've mentioned it in several other comments, but the strategy memo says that the Koch foundation provided $200k in funding; the actual number was $25k, and it was directed to health care research.) As I said elsewhere, it's not definitive proof - but it is suggestive to me. And it doesn't ring true. Getting teachers to stop "teaching science"? Nobody talks like that because, contrary to the conspiracy theorists' fervid belief, the deniers really do think that they are fighting against a bunch of weak mathematical models that are being used to push an anti-corporate political agenda; they don't think of themselves as an anti-science vanguard out to crush reason and truth in the world.
You're talking about the science of the matter, which is pretty simple. I'm talking about the politics of it, which is what the average person on the street remembers, and those are vastly more complicated. The average person is going to notice that they can't get high-wattage incandescent bulbs far more than they will any paper in a climate journal.
Well, some contents of the memo are almost certainly true - they're substantiated by other documents that were released. But the Koch funding level wasn't accurately described, and neither was the purpose of the Koch donation (health care, not GW). And the phrases that everyone seized on last week - like keeping teachers from "teaching science" - aren't substantiated by the other documents. All the comments about journalists aren't in the other stuff at all.
In other words, if you desperately opposed Heartland, and set out to try to make them look as bad as possible, using the other documents that were released as your only sources, you'd write something that looks almost exactly like this memo. You wouldn't put any names in, because you don't want it to be provably wrong. You'd throw in a lot of trivially true, verifiable things to give yourself a veneer of accuracy. Is that what happened here? I don't know, and the only people who know for sure are those who work at Heartland and, if it is actually faked, the faker. But I'm strongly inclined to believe that's what happened here.
Slashdot Mirror
Texas could do without it if Texans didn't have to pay federal taxes. The problem is that they're unlikely to agree, en masse, never to leave the borders of Texas again.
Well, it's not as though the feds are going to start lowering Texans' taxes in return. The balance of payments doesn't matter - the feds still get their cut.
Meh. It's probably a poor district with not terribly bright students. There are lots of those. Occasionally, miracles are worked on these places, but largely they fail through inertia. You're right that the low-level employees aren't usually due for any significant blame.
Are you dense? I already said "It's okay not to tell them who you are, or not to tell them you're a reporter." But when you start impersonating a specific, real someone else, that's wrong, and depending on circumstances may actually be a crime.
Ah, but he didn't just make up a name. He impersonated a board member of Heartland. Making up a name and asking for stuff isn't illegal. Pretending to be a specific someone else is.
But it also casts enormous doubt on the provenance of that document. You can say, with near certainty (assuming that Gleick isn't lying about not changing any documents) that all but one of the documents is a genuine Heartland document, because they were emailed to an account he controlled by a Heartland staffer. But that one document was supposedly received in the mail, with no return address, no identified author or list of recipients, not even a note to indicate why the possessor of the document was sending it to Gleick (and yet, as far as we can tell, nobody else). And it's the one that makes all the outrageous claims.
Not telling someone who you are or what you do is one thing. As long as that "someone" isn't a cop, it's almost certainly legal.
Pretending to be a real, specific person you're not in order to get private information? Yeah, that's quite likely to be illegal.
it just kind of makes sense to do so.
Not if you're trying to convince them to join your side, it's not. Yes, if all you want to do is trumpet "I'm right! You're wrong! Shut up, you morons!" you're free to do so, but that's going to significantly harden the other side against you.
There are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle who have little or no real opinion about global warming. They don't think about it. If they do, they're going to think of cases like this (if they're on the right) as very good examples of when someone the left did something not merely inadvisable but quite likely illegal just to advance his cause. It does not matter what opinions Heartland has previously endorsed, in their minds, because the vast majority have never heard of Heartland before this and won't remember its name in five years.
If you perceive the environmental movement as one that is run by a bunch of hippie tree-huggers, you're going to be mistrustful of anything it says. When said hippie tree-huggers talk about how the world needs to use less energy, and it needs to cost more, and why can't we look like Europe with high density and public transportation, you're going to see that goal in everything they do. So when they say "we're killing the earth with CO2, and the solution is higher gas taxes and more electric cars and no more drilling for oil" you're going to assume that since they already wanted all of those things before, you can safely ignore the first part of the statement too. Back when environmental concerns were called "conservation", there was a lot of support from hunters and fishers. When the modern environmental movement made them no longer welcome, it lost a major source of support on the right. Part of this fight is a consequence of that.
Oh, they violate their "ethics" all the time, I agree. That doesn't make them not violations of ethics; it just means they don't care.
You appear to have answered your own question. Misrepresenting yourself as a specific person that you are not is generally not considered good journalistic ethics. It's okay not to tell them who you are, or not to tell them you're a reporter.
Depending on state law, it might even be a crime. I doubt that, though, since I can't imagine Gleick is dumb enough to make a confession without at least checking with a lawyer first.
As it turns out, Peter Gleick impersonated a board member of Heartland in order to get them to send him the documents after he "received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy." He goes on to say, "I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name." Source for both. I'm not up on Illinois law, but that might be a crime.
Birdshot has a very low terminal velocity when falling. Unless you're deliberately aiming low, it's not going to hurt anything.
Now you have 100 people to support, instead of one. Depending on his cost structure, that might be a losing proposition.
As izomiac speculates below, he has been consulted solely to provide management of blood glucose for inpatients - not to adjust their home regimens, not even to see them. Just to look at their current regimen and adjust it on a daily basis. He obviously spends a bit more time with each of them and reviewing the chart for the first encounter, but day-to-day it's two minutes each. He's not the primary doctor on any of these; he's just taking diabetic control out of the hands of family docs who are set up to manage it on an outpatient basis and taking control of it while the person is in the hospital.
Meh, they've as good as verified the others. And the others don't really tell too much that's scandalous.
Now I'm going to be thinking of the cow from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe all day.
While many Jews are, sub rosa, totally into ham/bacon/etc., a lot of Muslims avoid it for cultural rather than religious reasons. I've known lots of (nominally) Muslims who drank alcohol, but very few who ate pork - the Pakistanis I've known in particular regard pork the way Americans view eating cat or dog.
The tetanus shot would be tracked as a quality measure rather than a med error, but yes, that's actually how most of this stuff works.
At least in my state, you must hand write prescriptions for controlled substances on a fraud-resistant pad (the sort that can't be photocopied).
Morally, yes. Financially, no.
I'm a physician whose hospital just tried to push all orders onto electronic order entry - not just medications but diet orders, PT/OT/nursing orders, everything. It got massive pushback. Why?
Most doctors see patients at more than one hospital. Many use an electronic system at their clinic. They have to remember five or six usernames, passwords, and different ways of doing things, any one of which is likely to change at any time due to an upgrade, and some of which they may not use for months (as an example, many surgeons maintain privileges at a wide variety of hospitals to be able to suit patients - but they may not operate at a given one for two or three months at a time). The interface is often clunky. And they're SLOW. Paper is FAST.
Great example from a committee meeting last week: one endocrinologist is part of a group that has taken over management of difficult diabetic inpatients. Most of them have Medicare, or Medicaid, or nothing at all. From his perspective, he's getting paid very little for his work. On paper, he can check blood sugars, write an order, and move on to the next patient in about two minutes. On computer, the same process takes about five minutes. Thirty patients an hour versus twelve... and so he said that if he's forced to do electronic, he will just stop doing the difficult diabetic management. It's no longer worth his time.
And, as others have said, these systems are fantastically expensive, and so while there are some savings to be reaped they are mostly taken by the vendor and the increased IT expenses. And then your vendor decides to EOL your software... what do you do then? Buy their replacement product, because it's a lot cheaper to stay with the same vendor? Buy a new whole-hospital system from another vendor? We're wrestling with that now.
Shocked at its content? According to their website, there are only 40 people in the whole organization. I doubt there's anyone there who doesn't agree with them politically.
However, your scenario is not implausible, but turns out that the claims in the "strategy memo" that aren't supported by the other documentation are all skewed one way. (I've mentioned it in several other comments, but the strategy memo says that the Koch foundation provided $200k in funding; the actual number was $25k, and it was directed to health care research.) As I said elsewhere, it's not definitive proof - but it is suggestive to me. And it doesn't ring true. Getting teachers to stop "teaching science"? Nobody talks like that because, contrary to the conspiracy theorists' fervid belief, the deniers really do think that they are fighting against a bunch of weak mathematical models that are being used to push an anti-corporate political agenda; they don't think of themselves as an anti-science vanguard out to crush reason and truth in the world.
No, but I have driven there and recall the same effect.
You're talking about the science of the matter, which is pretty simple. I'm talking about the politics of it, which is what the average person on the street remembers, and those are vastly more complicated. The average person is going to notice that they can't get high-wattage incandescent bulbs far more than they will any paper in a climate journal.
Well, some contents of the memo are almost certainly true - they're substantiated by other documents that were released. But the Koch funding level wasn't accurately described, and neither was the purpose of the Koch donation (health care, not GW). And the phrases that everyone seized on last week - like keeping teachers from "teaching science" - aren't substantiated by the other documents. All the comments about journalists aren't in the other stuff at all.
In other words, if you desperately opposed Heartland, and set out to try to make them look as bad as possible, using the other documents that were released as your only sources, you'd write something that looks almost exactly like this memo. You wouldn't put any names in, because you don't want it to be provably wrong. You'd throw in a lot of trivially true, verifiable things to give yourself a veneer of accuracy. Is that what happened here? I don't know, and the only people who know for sure are those who work at Heartland and, if it is actually faked, the faker. But I'm strongly inclined to believe that's what happened here.
I have sockpuppets now? Rock on!