Yeah, but you have to be a really low-volume caller to use 30 minutes a year...
I'm pretty slim on minutes usage, around 60 a month, but that's hardcore. Still, it's by far the best prepaid plan around, and if you don't use free nights/weekends it's the cheapest plan period for people using less than 300-400 minutes/mo. I'm sure that's why they don't advertise the hell out of it; it would take away a lot of their customers that are on plans...
FYI, and I have no financial interest in this, T-mobile has a prepaid setup where $100 up front gets you 1000 minutes that are valid for a year. That's service for just over $8/mo. Comes with free access to CNN. ABC, and ESPN headlines too.
Better still, a shotgun with birdshot. Hard to miss, and the pellets are small enough that they will embed in walls rather than go through them and accidentally kill the neighbor's kid.
I'm generally more supportive of the employer position than most people here on/., but isn't this a perfect example of somebody with a good idea managing to get its true market value? If your company depends - severely - on one person, you'd better make damned sure that they are happy and (very) well-paid.
No, not govt jobs. Those pay crap. "Contractor" is gov-speak for "consultant". Usually, like consultants, former employees of the org they do work for. Like consultants, well-paid for expertise.
The level of historical and political sophistication on/. is appalling. I expect and excuse this stuff from high school freshmen, not from educated adults.
Whose comments, exactly, did you think you were reading?
Actually we do; at my hospital we do between five and fifteen a day, three days a week. Great for intractable depression, bipolar disorder, even acute mania (like the guy transferred in from the state mental hospital who had been drinking urine and eating feces for a week... had to hit him with a tranquilizer dart - aka 300 mg of ketamine). The difference between now and then is that we put people under general anesthesia and paralyze them temporarily so they don't wake up with broken bones.
OT, but since it gets a lot of crap about being this awful, wasteful drug: Viagra, the drug whose development has been financed by older men who want to have sex, routinely helps keep very sick little children alive by reducing the blood pressure in their pulmonary circulation.
it's not like medicine got any better in the last 30 years
Bzzt. Wrong. Endoscopic surgery. Cardiac stents. Infinitely better drugs. Colonoscopy. Go back to 1977 and have a stroke, a heart attack, a major car wreck, testicular cancer - hell, go back then and have chronic stomach ulcers. The treatment for those used to be a partial resection of the stomach through an open incision. Now, it's a course of antibiotics. Those were just the examples that occurred to me over the course of five minutes. There are a lot more.
Presumably his wife, like mine, hates having to use several remotes and curses his name every time she tries to watch a DVD when he's not there. Of course, I wired it, and I maintain it, so...
Lots of things go into prescribing decisions. Consider: the first drug of a new class works, works beautifully - but has an iffy side effect profile and has to be taken three times a day. One thing they drilled into our heads in medical school is that people generally do not take drugs more than twice a day, because memories aren't that good unless you either have someone else giving them to you (i.e., you're in a hospital or nursing home) or you have a very strong incentive to remember (e.g., anti-HIV cocktails). High blood pressure generally doesn't make you feel bad, so you don't always remember to take your meds, and they only produce those lovely decreases in heart disease if you take them correctly.
Fast-forward a bit. The first drug is now generic, but there's another one (still on patent for another five years) that has a much lower rate of side effects and only has to be taken once a day (and is therefore more likely to be taken correctly). Which do you prescribe? What about the case where the patient pays the full price of the drugs and is on a fixed income? Do you prescribe the older, cheaper drug, knowing they will be more likely to take it, or the newer, "best" drug, knowing that all the studies showing a drop in heart attacks were done with it?
Compare non-narcotic drugs for (some types of) chronic pain: the first, a good drug that has now gone generic; the second, a great drug with a much better efficacy and bioavailability. Which do you prescribe for your patients? Do you always start with the cheaper one and move up when it doesn't work, knowing that giving it a fair shake takes a few months of gradually increasing doses while your patient lives with pain, or do you just skip it and prescribe the more expensive one for those who can afford it?
I've left out specific drug names so as to avoid advertising anything; they're not important in describing the situation, and if you work in medicine, you can probably guess which ones I'm talking about.
The ads work because I learned a lot about the new, fancy drugs from drug reps. I'm not an idiot; I know they're selling me on the idea, but just because they're paid to sell it doesn't mean it's a crap drug. There are even ads that remind you of non-pharmaceutical reasons to prescribe certain medications; one antibiotic's ads for its pediatric formuations stress its delicious strawberry flavor (which, having tasted it and the competition, I have to agree it has). How much is that worth to the mother of a screaming two-year-old with a raging ear infection?
Finally, there is the medicolegal aspect. Doctors are allowed to prescribe medications for any reason they choose. One of the oldest medications that is useful for chronic pain is also an antidepressant. Unfortunately, it can cause heart rate to rise (dangerous in patients with heart disease) and is more likely than other pain drugs to be fatal if taken in overdose. These are not insurmountable obstacles, if you carefully document your discussion of risks with your patient, but there is one more problem: it isn't FDA-approved for chronic pain, and it never will be - it's gone generic. If you found yourself in front of a jury explaining that you gave a person a medication known to have dangerous and possibly fatal side effects, and that the FDA had never approved that medication for that use - you'd better have a really good lawyer on your side, because this is the sort of tortured labyrinth of specific terminology in medical law that wreaks havoc on the general public's understanding. (Cf. "board certified", a term which, while valuable, is about credentialing rather than medical licensure.)
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! UK English cannot change! I had finally worked out the perfect sentence to describe the difference in American and British usage:
"I was so pissed I couldn't find a fag when I had that torch!"
I've always wanted to know - and you gave the opening to ask - why don't more people just go to a private dentist? It's not terribly expensive - I pay full price here in the US, and it's around $100 for full exam and cleaning.
Don't get vaccinations at your doctor's office, then. Get them at your county health department, where you'll wait a bit, but the vaccines are typically $5-10 apiece. Doesn't change the fact that an office visit for an adult is typically around $100, nor the fact that many will be willing to negotiate lower rates with you in advance if you tell them you will be paying cash up front.
You know they deserve it! Do you see any vicious warmongering on the Korean peninsula? No, just a couple of complaints from those evil Japanese about overflight of some peaceful rockets. And Ahmedinejad? He's a victim of a bunch of Westerners who are mad that the Shah got the boot.
Honestly, I think they should have gone whole-hog and given it posthumously to Saddam Hussein for his strenuous efforts to prevent war in Iraq.
Any organization that has large amounts of unpaid work that must be done will inevitably be run by people who have nothing else to do, and who correspondingly invest an enormous amount of their soul in it. Homeowners' associations, for example.
the trend is that -less- grammar and -more small-word and word-sequence is used
... as is common with pidgins and creoles. Which, effectively, English has crept toward over centuries. I would be astonished if the greater trend toward regularity in American (vs British) English were not a direct result of having enormous numbers of people who don't speak it natively in your society for hundreds of years.
It takes roughly six months for those who have been exposed to HIV to seroconvert (if they do so at all). Doubled for safety. After what happened to the industry after Ryan White and all the other hemophiliac kids of the 80s, wouldn't you?
I'm not a member of Steve's fan club, but whether or not you like Apple style, it is -definitely- a single, coherent style. Lots of companies produce the electronic equivalent of The Homer. Many competitors in the electronics arena have expended almost no effort on design, and it shows. Motorola makes some pretty cool-looking stuff - and Sony, too - but once you start to use it you realize that absolutely zero effort was put into the interface. Ever used a MiniDisc player? It has tons of buttons, but menus were still cryptic and hard to navigate. Motorola? I'm looking at my RAZR right now, and the option to change the background picture is under "Personalize", while ringtones are under "Audio". The camera function is under "My Stuff". It's a great-looking phone, but the menus are a total hash.
Could be worse; it could be LA, where on a clear day you can see the sun. (Just kidding, folks! I know that La-la Land has a much better atmosphere than it did 30 years ago. Taipei, maybe?)
No, the reasons that Americans speak one, possibly two, languages are that:
1) Speaking four languages will get you understood virtually everywhere in the hemisphere.
2) The vast majority of people will have to travel an extraordinary distance to find someone who speaks another language on a regular basis.
3) Because of 2), it's almost impossible to gain or maintain fluency in more than two languages.
The African languages are often fairly closely related to one another within a confined geographic area, making it relatively easy to gain proficiency in another. English and French serve as linguae francae to Africa, allowing more long-distance communication, so people have a strong incentive to learn them. I'm picking up Spanish because my area now has a large enough Hispanic population that it's worth my while to know it. Before, it wasn't. As for cultural continuity, who the hell cares? I don't think my life in 2007 USA is likely to be greatly improved if I learn to speak Gaelic, which my dirt-poor Irish great-great-ancestors did.
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I'm pretty slim on minutes usage, around 60 a month, but that's hardcore. Still, it's by far the best prepaid plan around, and if you don't use free nights/weekends it's the cheapest plan period for people using less than 300-400 minutes/mo. I'm sure that's why they don't advertise the hell out of it; it would take away a lot of their customers that are on plans...
FYI, and I have no financial interest in this, T-mobile has a prepaid setup where $100 up front gets you 1000 minutes that are valid for a year. That's service for just over $8/mo. Comes with free access to CNN. ABC, and ESPN headlines too.
Better still, a shotgun with birdshot. Hard to miss, and the pellets are small enough that they will embed in walls rather than go through them and accidentally kill the neighbor's kid.
The thugs breaking into your property?
I'm generally more supportive of the employer position than most people here on /., but isn't this a perfect example of somebody with a good idea managing to get its true market value? If your company depends - severely - on one person, you'd better make damned sure that they are happy and (very) well-paid.
No, not govt jobs. Those pay crap. "Contractor" is gov-speak for "consultant". Usually, like consultants, former employees of the org they do work for. Like consultants, well-paid for expertise.
Whose comments, exactly, did you think you were reading?
Actually we do; at my hospital we do between five and fifteen a day, three days a week. Great for intractable depression, bipolar disorder, even acute mania (like the guy transferred in from the state mental hospital who had been drinking urine and eating feces for a week... had to hit him with a tranquilizer dart - aka 300 mg of ketamine). The difference between now and then is that we put people under general anesthesia and paralyze them temporarily so they don't wake up with broken bones.
OT, but since it gets a lot of crap about being this awful, wasteful drug: Viagra, the drug whose development has been financed by older men who want to have sex, routinely helps keep very sick little children alive by reducing the blood pressure in their pulmonary circulation.
Bzzt. Wrong. Endoscopic surgery. Cardiac stents. Infinitely better drugs. Colonoscopy. Go back to 1977 and have a stroke, a heart attack, a major car wreck, testicular cancer - hell, go back then and have chronic stomach ulcers. The treatment for those used to be a partial resection of the stomach through an open incision. Now, it's a course of antibiotics. Those were just the examples that occurred to me over the course of five minutes. There are a lot more.
Presumably his wife, like mine, hates having to use several remotes and curses his name every time she tries to watch a DVD when he's not there. Of course, I wired it, and I maintain it, so...
Fast-forward a bit. The first drug is now generic, but there's another one (still on patent for another five years) that has a much lower rate of side effects and only has to be taken once a day (and is therefore more likely to be taken correctly). Which do you prescribe? What about the case where the patient pays the full price of the drugs and is on a fixed income? Do you prescribe the older, cheaper drug, knowing they will be more likely to take it, or the newer, "best" drug, knowing that all the studies showing a drop in heart attacks were done with it?
Compare non-narcotic drugs for (some types of) chronic pain: the first, a good drug that has now gone generic; the second, a great drug with a much better efficacy and bioavailability. Which do you prescribe for your patients? Do you always start with the cheaper one and move up when it doesn't work, knowing that giving it a fair shake takes a few months of gradually increasing doses while your patient lives with pain, or do you just skip it and prescribe the more expensive one for those who can afford it?
I've left out specific drug names so as to avoid advertising anything; they're not important in describing the situation, and if you work in medicine, you can probably guess which ones I'm talking about.
The ads work because I learned a lot about the new, fancy drugs from drug reps. I'm not an idiot; I know they're selling me on the idea, but just because they're paid to sell it doesn't mean it's a crap drug. There are even ads that remind you of non-pharmaceutical reasons to prescribe certain medications; one antibiotic's ads for its pediatric formuations stress its delicious strawberry flavor (which, having tasted it and the competition, I have to agree it has). How much is that worth to the mother of a screaming two-year-old with a raging ear infection?
Finally, there is the medicolegal aspect. Doctors are allowed to prescribe medications for any reason they choose. One of the oldest medications that is useful for chronic pain is also an antidepressant. Unfortunately, it can cause heart rate to rise (dangerous in patients with heart disease) and is more likely than other pain drugs to be fatal if taken in overdose. These are not insurmountable obstacles, if you carefully document your discussion of risks with your patient, but there is one more problem: it isn't FDA-approved for chronic pain, and it never will be - it's gone generic. If you found yourself in front of a jury explaining that you gave a person a medication known to have dangerous and possibly fatal side effects, and that the FDA had never approved that medication for that use - you'd better have a really good lawyer on your side, because this is the sort of tortured labyrinth of specific terminology in medical law that wreaks havoc on the general public's understanding. (Cf. "board certified", a term which, while valuable, is about credentialing rather than medical licensure.)
"I was so pissed I couldn't find a fag when I had that torch!"
I wasn't fooled this time; I've long ago learned to read links before clicking. But still funny.
OT, that's really an asshole .sig, but it is pretty funny...
What, so the shots can't get out?
I've always wanted to know - and you gave the opening to ask - why don't more people just go to a private dentist? It's not terribly expensive - I pay full price here in the US, and it's around $100 for full exam and cleaning.
Don't get vaccinations at your doctor's office, then. Get them at your county health department, where you'll wait a bit, but the vaccines are typically $5-10 apiece. Doesn't change the fact that an office visit for an adult is typically around $100, nor the fact that many will be willing to negotiate lower rates with you in advance if you tell them you will be paying cash up front.
Honestly, I think they should have gone whole-hog and given it posthumously to Saddam Hussein for his strenuous efforts to prevent war in Iraq.
Any organization that has large amounts of unpaid work that must be done will inevitably be run by people who have nothing else to do, and who correspondingly invest an enormous amount of their soul in it. Homeowners' associations, for example.
... as is common with pidgins and creoles. Which, effectively, English has crept toward over centuries. I would be astonished if the greater trend toward regularity in American (vs British) English were not a direct result of having enormous numbers of people who don't speak it natively in your society for hundreds of years.
It takes roughly six months for those who have been exposed to HIV to seroconvert (if they do so at all). Doubled for safety. After what happened to the industry after Ryan White and all the other hemophiliac kids of the 80s, wouldn't you?
I'm not a member of Steve's fan club, but whether or not you like Apple style, it is -definitely- a single, coherent style. Lots of companies produce the electronic equivalent of The Homer. Many competitors in the electronics arena have expended almost no effort on design, and it shows. Motorola makes some pretty cool-looking stuff - and Sony, too - but once you start to use it you realize that absolutely zero effort was put into the interface. Ever used a MiniDisc player? It has tons of buttons, but menus were still cryptic and hard to navigate. Motorola? I'm looking at my RAZR right now, and the option to change the background picture is under "Personalize", while ringtones are under "Audio". The camera function is under "My Stuff". It's a great-looking phone, but the menus are a total hash.
Could be worse; it could be LA, where on a clear day you can see the sun. (Just kidding, folks! I know that La-la Land has a much better atmosphere than it did 30 years ago. Taipei, maybe?)
1) Speaking four languages will get you understood virtually everywhere in the hemisphere.
2) The vast majority of people will have to travel an extraordinary distance to find someone who speaks another language on a regular basis.
3) Because of 2), it's almost impossible to gain or maintain fluency in more than two languages.
The African languages are often fairly closely related to one another within a confined geographic area, making it relatively easy to gain proficiency in another. English and French serve as linguae francae to Africa, allowing more long-distance communication, so people have a strong incentive to learn them. I'm picking up Spanish because my area now has a large enough Hispanic population that it's worth my while to know it. Before, it wasn't. As for cultural continuity, who the hell cares? I don't think my life in 2007 USA is likely to be greatly improved if I learn to speak Gaelic, which my dirt-poor Irish great-great-ancestors did.