The trouble is, in your market solution, you, as somebody who is probably not a doctor, much less a specialist in whatever you're being tested for, now need to answer questions like: 1. Are the tests medically necessary or useful? 2. Does the lab that you're going to have a reputation for speed, skill, and accuracy? 3. Are the lower-priced labs cheaper because they can do things more efficiently, or because they cut corners that should not be cut? 4. Is there a much cheaper test that's not quite as accurate but probably good enough? 5. What's the maximum I'd be willing to pay to evaluate whatever is being tested, even if it means I die from failure to receive proper care?
If you're a techie of some variety, here's the analogies that explain the problem: Trusting your evaluation of medical procedures and clinics makes about as much sense as trusting the VP of marketing's evaluation of relational databases. Trusting your doctor's evaluation of medical procedures (in a fee-for-service for-profit model like we mostly have in the US) makes about as much sense as trusting a car salesman's evaluation of the car he's trying to sell you, because he has every incentive to make you buy it. And trusting your insurance company's evaluation of those same medical procedures makes about as much sense as trusting, well, an insurance company on anything, because they have every incentive to not pay for it (but still collect your premiums of course).
Ergo, you need some other person or group of people with the know-how to evaluate them, and they need to have no financial stake in it so they can evaluate fairly.
The health care market cannot function the same way as the market for, say, broccoli (to meet Scalia on his home ground, which Obama's Solicitor General utterly failed to do).
Here are some of the reasons why: - If you choose not to buy broccoli, there are plenty of viable substitute goods, like spinach or kale or cauliflower. Whereas if you choose not to buy health care when you need it, you die (unless the Christian Scientists are right). - If you're buying broccoli, you can reasonably judge what you're getting. In health care, all you really know if you're buying it is that you're sick and that this pill seems to make you better. For everything else, you're relying on the expert advice of somebody who is motivated to sell you more of his product. - If you get really bad broccoli, you can return it to the store. If you get really bad health care, you're dead and can't do anything. - In really bad situations, patients have no ability to evaluate their options, because they're too sick or injured to do so. - There are frequently giant barriers to switching providers. At the least expensive, you're looking at an ambulance ride from one hospital to the next.
What this all adds up to is that what you need in order to curb costs in health care is a panel of experts with no financial stake who are in charge of figuring out which procedures are useful and cost-effective. In other words, a "death panel".
Let me make your argument a different way, now tell me what the difference was: (A) Smith borrowed the keys to Johnson's car, went to a locksmith and made a copy, gave Johnson his keys back as promised, and then sold the key to a guy who stole everything in the car. (B) Jones sat down in front of a photograph by Johnson hanging in the gallery and took a photograph of it that looked essentially identical, and developed that photo of a photo in large prints for his wall and his friends.
There's plainly a legal and moral difference between what Smith did and what Jones did, even though both Smith and Jones took nothing directly from Johnson.
The police station's camera really doesn't tell us much (both sides are claiming it as evidence) and the eyewitness reports are... meh.
Yes they do - they tell us that George Zimmerman and his lawyer lied when they claimed that Zimmerman was badly hurt by Martin. Zimmerman claimed that Martin had broken his nose and smashed his head against the sidewalk. Neither injury could have even come close to fully healing between the time of the fight and the time the video was taken, there's no record of ER care, both those injuries would be plainly visible (they bleed like crazy), and neither injury is evident in the video footage.
Regardless of what happened, it gives every indication of George Zimmerman being an unreliable and self-serving witness.
You can volunteer that kind of information all you like, the key thing is that as an interviewer I can't ask for it. And I can't base my judgment on whether to hire you on that either - not only is that illegal, it's bad business to do so, because you might get a good family man who's lousy at the job or fail to hire a top performer because he likes to smoke pot on the weekends.
In some states, it can also be an issue because asking about their family life will cause you to discover that the guy your interviewing has a husband, which could lead to specific job discrimination issues.
Part of this was the way the dogs were being used - instead of agents pawing through everybody's bag, there were mostly just hanging around waiting to see if the dog reacted to something. In other words, assuming those dogs were trained appropriately, at the very least, they're doing something that is only going to find bombs (or possibly drugs), and not dig into my person, papers, and effects. I grant you, there's no real reason for it, but it's not as stupid, unconstitutional, and expensive as what's going on in airports, and is no less effective.
So have I, including being willing to spend about 5 days and a not-insignificant amount of money to travel from Ohio to California by rail. Which I consider to be a small price to pay for not having my rights trampled.
Especially because rail travel is rather fun if you do it right. Sleeper cars are basically moving hotel rooms, meals are included, and you can hide in your room or try chatting in the lounge depending on your willingness to get to know complete strangers. I've met some interesting people on trains, including a nun in a spiritual crisis, a guy who was a well-known campaign adviser in Texas, some ardent Tea Partiers, Boy Scouts heading back from hiking trips, etc. And you also get a real sense of how big the United States really is, and all the variety of landscapes in it - I was thinking of Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" along much of the ride.
Of course, the TSA now is trying to get into the business of searching rail passengers and creating highway checkpoints so that those of us who don't want to be searched without probable cause can't avoid it. I don't mind seeing bomb-sniffing dogs in major rail stations, because that makes some sense. But what doesn't make sense is trying to take away any object that could be lethal - as George Carlin pointed out, you probably could beat a guy to death with the Sunday New York Times.
1. Not showing up is often an indication that they have no leg to stand on. 2. The Australian government has lots of ways to collect, the simplest being that if the defendant does any business in Australia the government can simply seize assets up to the amount of the judgment. If that isn't an option, they probably have agreements with other countries to collect judgments.
So it's not meaningless - they lost their case, and have to pay.
See, that's too nice a response. Now, I'll grant you that I've never had to face these kinds of questions, because I'm a fairly young straight white guy who can look reasonably square and business-y when I need to, but I do know people who have, and this is my advice to them.
The correct answer to that question is "So you are aware, that question is illegal under current US employment law." You can then choose whether you want to take a hard line, and follow it up with either "Even though you can't use it in your hiring decisions, I'm mostly of _____ ancestry." or "If you absolutely insist on knowing this information, I see no reason to continue this interview, and will report you to the EEOC."
I don't mind any of the regulations discussed in the article.
I keep my interview questions focused entirely on whether the person will do a good job. That's what I really care about, not whether the person has a wife and kids, whether they're Irish or Turkish or Chinese, or what religion they are. I'm hiring the person to code, or answer phones, or clean the bathroom, not choosing them to be my best buddy. I like many of my coworkers and subordinates and bosses personally, but when it comes down to it it's a business relationship, not a personal relationship, and I have no problem hiring somebody I personally dislike if they're going to be profitable for the company to hire.
Here's the difference in questions between a legal interview and an illegal interview. Ok: "I see you've worked in C++ on a variety of platforms. Did you ever use Qt, and if so what did you think its good and bad points were?" "This job involves moving boxes weighing about 50 pounds to upper shelves. Would you be able to do that?" (obviously, only if that is what the job involves) "This job requires that you work on Sunday mornings. Will that work for you?" (again, only if you actually need them to work on Sunday mornings) "What's your approach to prioritizing tasks when multiple people come by with urgent requests?" "Are you legally allowed to work in the United States?"
Not OK: "Do you like hip-hop?" (noticing the candidate is black, for a position not in the music industry) "How many kids do you have?" "Are you married?" "Could I get a recommendation from your pastor?" (unless you're hiring for a religious institution) "Are you currently on any medications?"
Notice that the first set is all about the economic transaction - I'm considering hiring you to do XYZ, I need to make sure you can do XYZ. The second set is all about things that have nothing to do with whether they can do XYZ.
It's very difficult to prove such things beyond a reasonable doubt. Convincing a jury by preponderance of the evidence (which is all you need to do in a civil matter like most employment law), though, is a different matter. And convincing a company that you can convince a jury is possibly even easier.
Basic training of anybody doing any kind of interviewing is to generally avoid questions like "So, what church do you go to?" or even things like "Do you have any kids?", because asking any of those questions and then not hiring somebody is a good way to get your company into legal hot water. So instead, you ask questions like "What Linux distributions are you familiar with, and what did you like or dislike about them?", or other things that a relevant to the job.
The point is, that if the bandaid works for a period of more than about 24 hours, management will immediately decide that you need to work on something else, forget that you told them that this wasn't really the right thing to do, and your bandaid will be in place forever.
Have you considered the possibility that professors are politically liberal because their research leads to conclusions consistent with liberalism, rather than the other way around?
For instance, there's substantial evidence (collected from court records and state corrections departments) that black criminal defendants receive substantially harsher sentences than white defendants convicted of the same crime. And that's something that's a politically controversial conclusion, with those believing that there's a racial difference in sentencing generally being described as 'liberal'. Now, if an honest academic is working in the field of criminal sentencing, would you not expect them to hold the position matching the evidence? And is the issue of whether that position is 'liberal' or 'conservative' kind of beside the point?
The point is, that we don't have to trust in science, if we make use of the technologies that have come out of that science.
I mean, we can certainly test that if you throw a rock into the air, it comes back down.
But any time you make use of a technology, you're testing the science behind the technology and demanding that it work well enough so the technology will function. If you boot a computer, order for the microchip to function it needs electricity to behave in a certain way around semiconductors, which means the quantum physics has to be reasonably close to accurate. Same story with taking medication - you're testing, by taking the medication, whether the science is good enough that the medication will do what scientists think it will do (and sometimes finding the scientists were wrong). And every time you start up your car you're testing that the chemistry that makes an internal combustion engine work does in fact work the way we think it is.
The idea behind the joke was that there were well-known conservative positions at the time Colbert said it which specifically countered by reality. For instance, conservatives were proudly proclaiming that Iraq had chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States and that the Bush tax cuts increased revenue.
How many "temporary fixes" have your employers twisted into permanent ones?
Hence one of my laws of IT: There ain't no such thing as a "temporary solution" - if it works, it becomes permanent. If it doesn't work, it's not a solution.
Re:what bothered me about that article
on
Parlez-vous Python?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Somebody with an educational understanding of my field can masquerade as somebody with the training and experience to do the job. Ergo, he appears to be a competitor to the manager who wants to keep his labor costs down, regardless of what that does to quality. For the obligatory car analogy, a Yugo can kinda sorta do the same job as a Toyota, so somebody who doesn't understand cars could easily confuse the two and thus set their price expectations for the Toyota based on the price of the Yugo.
Re:what bothered me about that article
on
Parlez-vous Python?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
i think more coders is a GOOD thing. a planet of coders: what we could do!
If I were acting as a rational self-interested economic actor, though, the last thing I'd want is more competition, because that reduces the value of my skillset.
Spoken like somebody who appears at least to be in the racially privileged group, and doesn't have friends outside of that group. If you or somebody you knew well were vaguely Arab looking, the racism is not something you can cope with.
Also, there's an obvious Equal Protection problem.
I'm surprised you don't mention the #1 tool in the arsenel of the FBI and other corrupt agencies: blackmail. There's some well-documented cases of the FBI doing just that to public figures (e.g. Martin Luther King), and there's probably more that didn't get made public.
The best part about blackmail is that unlike other techniques (like agent provacateurs), the only people that know about what's going on are people that desperately don't want the public to know what's going on. So, if, for instance, they had some dirt on a congressman on the committee that decides FBI funding, there's virtually no chance that the congressman will call a press conference and announce what the FBI is up to, because the FBI will simply release all the information about what the congressman is up to.
The UN won't defend a country it doesn't recognize.
In other words, the UN won't defend anybody from the USA, Russia, China, the UK, or France, or an ally of one of those powers, unless there's some complex diplomatic maneuvering like what happened at the beginning of the Korean War.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is, in your market solution, you, as somebody who is probably not a doctor, much less a specialist in whatever you're being tested for, now need to answer questions like:
1. Are the tests medically necessary or useful?
2. Does the lab that you're going to have a reputation for speed, skill, and accuracy?
3. Are the lower-priced labs cheaper because they can do things more efficiently, or because they cut corners that should not be cut?
4. Is there a much cheaper test that's not quite as accurate but probably good enough?
5. What's the maximum I'd be willing to pay to evaluate whatever is being tested, even if it means I die from failure to receive proper care?
If you're a techie of some variety, here's the analogies that explain the problem: Trusting your evaluation of medical procedures and clinics makes about as much sense as trusting the VP of marketing's evaluation of relational databases. Trusting your doctor's evaluation of medical procedures (in a fee-for-service for-profit model like we mostly have in the US) makes about as much sense as trusting a car salesman's evaluation of the car he's trying to sell you, because he has every incentive to make you buy it. And trusting your insurance company's evaluation of those same medical procedures makes about as much sense as trusting, well, an insurance company on anything, because they have every incentive to not pay for it (but still collect your premiums of course).
Ergo, you need some other person or group of people with the know-how to evaluate them, and they need to have no financial stake in it so they can evaluate fairly.
The health care market cannot function the same way as the market for, say, broccoli (to meet Scalia on his home ground, which Obama's Solicitor General utterly failed to do).
Here are some of the reasons why:
- If you choose not to buy broccoli, there are plenty of viable substitute goods, like spinach or kale or cauliflower. Whereas if you choose not to buy health care when you need it, you die (unless the Christian Scientists are right).
- If you're buying broccoli, you can reasonably judge what you're getting. In health care, all you really know if you're buying it is that you're sick and that this pill seems to make you better. For everything else, you're relying on the expert advice of somebody who is motivated to sell you more of his product.
- If you get really bad broccoli, you can return it to the store. If you get really bad health care, you're dead and can't do anything.
- In really bad situations, patients have no ability to evaluate their options, because they're too sick or injured to do so.
- There are frequently giant barriers to switching providers. At the least expensive, you're looking at an ambulance ride from one hospital to the next.
What this all adds up to is that what you need in order to curb costs in health care is a panel of experts with no financial stake who are in charge of figuring out which procedures are useful and cost-effective. In other words, a "death panel".
Perhaps we're spending at least half our health care dollars on people who are seriously sick or injured. The horror!
Let me make your argument a different way, now tell me what the difference was:
(A) Smith borrowed the keys to Johnson's car, went to a locksmith and made a copy, gave Johnson his keys back as promised, and then sold the key to a guy who stole everything in the car.
(B) Jones sat down in front of a photograph by Johnson hanging in the gallery and took a photograph of it that looked essentially identical, and developed that photo of a photo in large prints for his wall and his friends.
There's plainly a legal and moral difference between what Smith did and what Jones did, even though both Smith and Jones took nothing directly from Johnson.
The police station's camera really doesn't tell us much (both sides are claiming it as evidence) and the eyewitness reports are... meh.
Yes they do - they tell us that George Zimmerman and his lawyer lied when they claimed that Zimmerman was badly hurt by Martin. Zimmerman claimed that Martin had broken his nose and smashed his head against the sidewalk. Neither injury could have even come close to fully healing between the time of the fight and the time the video was taken, there's no record of ER care, both those injuries would be plainly visible (they bleed like crazy), and neither injury is evident in the video footage.
Regardless of what happened, it gives every indication of George Zimmerman being an unreliable and self-serving witness.
You can volunteer that kind of information all you like, the key thing is that as an interviewer I can't ask for it. And I can't base my judgment on whether to hire you on that either - not only is that illegal, it's bad business to do so, because you might get a good family man who's lousy at the job or fail to hire a top performer because he likes to smoke pot on the weekends.
In some states, it can also be an issue because asking about their family life will cause you to discover that the guy your interviewing has a husband, which could lead to specific job discrimination issues.
Part of this was the way the dogs were being used - instead of agents pawing through everybody's bag, there were mostly just hanging around waiting to see if the dog reacted to something. In other words, assuming those dogs were trained appropriately, at the very least, they're doing something that is only going to find bombs (or possibly drugs), and not dig into my person, papers, and effects. I grant you, there's no real reason for it, but it's not as stupid, unconstitutional, and expensive as what's going on in airports, and is no less effective.
So have I, including being willing to spend about 5 days and a not-insignificant amount of money to travel from Ohio to California by rail. Which I consider to be a small price to pay for not having my rights trampled.
Especially because rail travel is rather fun if you do it right. Sleeper cars are basically moving hotel rooms, meals are included, and you can hide in your room or try chatting in the lounge depending on your willingness to get to know complete strangers. I've met some interesting people on trains, including a nun in a spiritual crisis, a guy who was a well-known campaign adviser in Texas, some ardent Tea Partiers, Boy Scouts heading back from hiking trips, etc. And you also get a real sense of how big the United States really is, and all the variety of landscapes in it - I was thinking of Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" along much of the ride.
Of course, the TSA now is trying to get into the business of searching rail passengers and creating highway checkpoints so that those of us who don't want to be searched without probable cause can't avoid it. I don't mind seeing bomb-sniffing dogs in major rail stations, because that makes some sense. But what doesn't make sense is trying to take away any object that could be lethal - as George Carlin pointed out, you probably could beat a guy to death with the Sunday New York Times.
1. Not showing up is often an indication that they have no leg to stand on.
2. The Australian government has lots of ways to collect, the simplest being that if the defendant does any business in Australia the government can simply seize assets up to the amount of the judgment. If that isn't an option, they probably have agreements with other countries to collect judgments.
So it's not meaningless - they lost their case, and have to pay.
See, I've always recommended this map, also by the ACLU, that shows exactly where in the US your civil liberties are being protected properly.
See, that's too nice a response. Now, I'll grant you that I've never had to face these kinds of questions, because I'm a fairly young straight white guy who can look reasonably square and business-y when I need to, but I do know people who have, and this is my advice to them.
The correct answer to that question is "So you are aware, that question is illegal under current US employment law." You can then choose whether you want to take a hard line, and follow it up with either "Even though you can't use it in your hiring decisions, I'm mostly of _____ ancestry." or "If you absolutely insist on knowing this information, I see no reason to continue this interview, and will report you to the EEOC."
I don't mind any of the regulations discussed in the article.
I keep my interview questions focused entirely on whether the person will do a good job. That's what I really care about, not whether the person has a wife and kids, whether they're Irish or Turkish or Chinese, or what religion they are. I'm hiring the person to code, or answer phones, or clean the bathroom, not choosing them to be my best buddy. I like many of my coworkers and subordinates and bosses personally, but when it comes down to it it's a business relationship, not a personal relationship, and I have no problem hiring somebody I personally dislike if they're going to be profitable for the company to hire.
Here's the difference in questions between a legal interview and an illegal interview. Ok:
"I see you've worked in C++ on a variety of platforms. Did you ever use Qt, and if so what did you think its good and bad points were?"
"This job involves moving boxes weighing about 50 pounds to upper shelves. Would you be able to do that?" (obviously, only if that is what the job involves)
"This job requires that you work on Sunday mornings. Will that work for you?" (again, only if you actually need them to work on Sunday mornings)
"What's your approach to prioritizing tasks when multiple people come by with urgent requests?"
"Are you legally allowed to work in the United States?"
Not OK:
"Do you like hip-hop?" (noticing the candidate is black, for a position not in the music industry)
"How many kids do you have?"
"Are you married?"
"Could I get a recommendation from your pastor?" (unless you're hiring for a religious institution)
"Are you currently on any medications?"
Notice that the first set is all about the economic transaction - I'm considering hiring you to do XYZ, I need to make sure you can do XYZ. The second set is all about things that have nothing to do with whether they can do XYZ.
It's very difficult to prove such things beyond a reasonable doubt. Convincing a jury by preponderance of the evidence (which is all you need to do in a civil matter like most employment law), though, is a different matter. And convincing a company that you can convince a jury is possibly even easier.
Basic training of anybody doing any kind of interviewing is to generally avoid questions like "So, what church do you go to?" or even things like "Do you have any kids?", because asking any of those questions and then not hiring somebody is a good way to get your company into legal hot water. So instead, you ask questions like "What Linux distributions are you familiar with, and what did you like or dislike about them?", or other things that a relevant to the job.
The point is, that if the bandaid works for a period of more than about 24 hours, management will immediately decide that you need to work on something else, forget that you told them that this wasn't really the right thing to do, and your bandaid will be in place forever.
One of the sillier examples of this:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Fisher_Price_Technology_Integration.aspx
Have you considered the possibility that professors are politically liberal because their research leads to conclusions consistent with liberalism, rather than the other way around?
For instance, there's substantial evidence (collected from court records and state corrections departments) that black criminal defendants receive substantially harsher sentences than white defendants convicted of the same crime. And that's something that's a politically controversial conclusion, with those believing that there's a racial difference in sentencing generally being described as 'liberal'. Now, if an honest academic is working in the field of criminal sentencing, would you not expect them to hold the position matching the evidence? And is the issue of whether that position is 'liberal' or 'conservative' kind of beside the point?
The point is, that we don't have to trust in science, if we make use of the technologies that have come out of that science.
I mean, we can certainly test that if you throw a rock into the air, it comes back down.
But any time you make use of a technology, you're testing the science behind the technology and demanding that it work well enough so the technology will function. If you boot a computer, order for the microchip to function it needs electricity to behave in a certain way around semiconductors, which means the quantum physics has to be reasonably close to accurate. Same story with taking medication - you're testing, by taking the medication, whether the science is good enough that the medication will do what scientists think it will do (and sometimes finding the scientists were wrong). And every time you start up your car you're testing that the chemistry that makes an internal combustion engine work does in fact work the way we think it is.
The idea behind the joke was that there were well-known conservative positions at the time Colbert said it which specifically countered by reality. For instance, conservatives were proudly proclaiming that Iraq had chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States and that the Bush tax cuts increased revenue.
What's the difference?
Oh, right, if you say the safe word, your partner will remove the ballgag.
How many "temporary fixes" have your employers twisted into permanent ones?
Hence one of my laws of IT: There ain't no such thing as a "temporary solution" - if it works, it becomes permanent. If it doesn't work, it's not a solution.
Somebody with an educational understanding of my field can masquerade as somebody with the training and experience to do the job. Ergo, he appears to be a competitor to the manager who wants to keep his labor costs down, regardless of what that does to quality. For the obligatory car analogy, a Yugo can kinda sorta do the same job as a Toyota, so somebody who doesn't understand cars could easily confuse the two and thus set their price expectations for the Toyota based on the price of the Yugo.
i think more coders is a GOOD thing. a planet of coders: what we could do!
If I were acting as a rational self-interested economic actor, though, the last thing I'd want is more competition, because that reduces the value of my skillset.
The racism I can cope with
Spoken like somebody who appears at least to be in the racially privileged group, and doesn't have friends outside of that group. If you or somebody you knew well were vaguely Arab looking, the racism is not something you can cope with.
Also, there's an obvious Equal Protection problem.
I'm surprised you don't mention the #1 tool in the arsenel of the FBI and other corrupt agencies: blackmail. There's some well-documented cases of the FBI doing just that to public figures (e.g. Martin Luther King), and there's probably more that didn't get made public.
The best part about blackmail is that unlike other techniques (like agent provacateurs), the only people that know about what's going on are people that desperately don't want the public to know what's going on. So, if, for instance, they had some dirt on a congressman on the committee that decides FBI funding, there's virtually no chance that the congressman will call a press conference and announce what the FBI is up to, because the FBI will simply release all the information about what the congressman is up to.
I don't use vi, I use butterflies!
The UN won't defend a country it doesn't recognize.
In other words, the UN won't defend anybody from the USA, Russia, China, the UK, or France, or an ally of one of those powers, unless there's some complex diplomatic maneuvering like what happened at the beginning of the Korean War.