Yes, the salaries have finally started to rise, though, so it will probably correct itself.
Those specialties require more years in residency and fellowship, more board certifications, and have higher liability risk. Radiologists are petrified of being outsourced. Anesthesiologists are under constant battle with nursing unions to let nurses take on additional duties, and lawsuits are a big problem for them since they are involved in every surgery and almost all births. There are risks in most of these specialties that dissuade many.
I spend $30/month on T-Mobile Prepay in the US, which gives me 5GB of data, unlimited texting, and 100 minutes. Additional minutes are $0.10. I use about $10/month in extra minutes. So that's $40-45/month unsubsidized, rock-bottom in the US for a smartphone on a fast-ish network. My wife has a no-data (well, a few MB), 1200 minutes or texts plan for the same $30 and she never goes over.
I think the cheapest post-paid plans in the US run around $80/month.
Ford paid his workers well so they could afford his card.
Those were factory workers. These are retail employees. I was a retail employee. When I eventually became a manager, I had to fire these thieving bastards. They were mostly kids working for spending money, most from pretty well-off families. Some were from family friends - that is awkward as hell when you have to tell a friend that you fired their daughter. It was like babysitting, and the social dynamic was like high school. I'm soooo glad I went to college.
Remember that it's your worst employees that shape policy. Sad, but true. You'd hire better people, but there's a finite number of well-adjusted people willing to work retail, even if you pay slightly better than the place next door.
Like the aforementioned gastroenterologist making $460k/yr?
You are cherry picking a specialty. The average family practice doc starts at $120k or so and might top out near $200k if they are lucky. Pediatricians make less than that. That GI doc took extra years of residency, probably a fellowship, and has higher liability insurance. You can offer them less, and watch as Medicare patients wait in huge queues to get a endoscopy. In Canada, they make about the same amount, and they have socialized health care.
Only recently has medicine been seen as some sort of path to the top 1%.
I don't know where you get your data. A typical new family medicine doc gets a decent low $100,000s salary and has enormous debts and malpractice insurance to pay off. A pediatrician gets even less. True, there are specialties where they make a lot of money, but this is not typical. A $2500/month payment on student loans puts a pretty big dent in your take-home, and you enter the work force in your 30s, so everyone else has an 8 or 10 year head start. The hours suck, and unless you are in something like radiology or psychiatry, you have to cover weekends and evenings somehow. You need to take continuing education credits and you need to pass re-certification exams on an ongoing basis. I would never become a doctor - I'd bet that, per hour, they make less than a school teacher.
Men are increasingly abandoning medicine for more lucrative financial jobs.
Full disclosure: my wife is one of those docs with a well-paying specialty.
Even the AMA says the times are distorted, but they emphasize that the relative times are pretty good. Meaning, for the most part, a procedure that takes twice as long as another is accurately recorded as so in the data. Medicare is generally not covering providers' costs, to the point where most unsubsidized hospitals in poor areas have closed and doctors have to limit the number of Medicare patients they take. It's pretty clear that, in aggregate, doctors aren't fleecing the system. As such, the absolute numbers are pretty much meaningless and it's the relative numbers that count. If a certain type of doctor feels screwed out of some money because they don't think the ratios are correct, then let them take it up with the AMA - why would we want to get involved?
And what happens when an Aborigine has kids with a Laplander? What race is that person? How about someone from Ethiopia? Are they the same race as someone from Kenya? Because they sure look like they are crossed with people from the Middle East to me. What about people from Eastern Russia. They look kind of Chinese, but kind of Russian.
I think you'll find that race becomes much harder to pin down once you leave isolated islands in the middle of the Pacific. Even a Laplander (which I think is a slur these days) wouldn't exactly stand out in a room full of European-descended people. It's all quite arbitrary - even the term wasn't really used in it's modern way until the 1800s when early scientists tried to classify people based on traits. To my knowledge, every attempt has failed. Even genetic testing shows wide overlap between "races", with a continuum roughly tracing the human migration path. One of these other posters linked to a chart showing as much, though he for some reason took it as "proof" of race being a scientific concept.
I'm _pretty_ sure that we could devise a safe way to extract phosphorous from dead bodies. Maybe science wasn't up to that task when we "evolved", but it certainly is by now.
Also, we "evolved" bathing in our drinking water supply.
Explain to me how you can have a "scientific" classification system that can't classify the President of the United States. Go ahead, let me know how you classify him and the scientific basis by which you made that choice.
No one disputes there are features common to people from various places, but ignoring the gradual nature of the change across geography just so you can lump them into buckets called "race" is not very scientific - it's arbitrary. And completely useless once people started getting on ships, let alone airplanes.
All you have to do is CYA. Lay out the tradeoffs in a meeting, make people agree in writing, and move on with life. Sure you'll take heat when a drive drops off the network - that's your job to fix it. But you can always say, look, give me xxx dollars and I can make this problem 10x less likely going forward. They will probably agree that you all made the right tradeoff decision the first time, or they will have to agree that you need more money.
If your place of employment is not rational, then you will probably get blamed for the dead USB drive anyway.
That can be said about any tax. The poor are always going to be paying a tax indirectly. At least with simple, transparent taxes you don't get crazy loopholes that only the rich take advantage of.
Replying to my own post... I thought about it a bit more, and you could probably hurl raw materials or durable parts up to space with this and then use on-orbit lasers to correct its final orbit. At that point, you can scoop it up and put it where you need it.
Someone still has to patch (and test) the application to keep it up to date.
A lot of the virtualization that my IT department is doing involves moving legacy boxes running ancient applications over to new servers. They are taking these 10 year old boxes running Windows 2000 and moving them into VMs as the hardware starts to die. In other words, the applications and OSes weren't being maintained before, and the VMs won't be maintained either. I'm not in IT, so don't flame me:)
It's probably not a single factor. Cost (gas, wear and tear, etc) and commute time probably combine on one side against cost-of-living and quality of life on the other. At some point, you look at what your car is costing you in dollars and time and emit a "fuck that" and move. On the other side, you watch each of your neighbors' houses get broken into and see your schools declining and emit a "fuck that" and move, putting up with a bit more of a commute. The balance is probably a little bit different for each person, but can probably be described nicely with statistical correlations...
If downtown houses were as large and cheap as those 40 miles away, then nobody would sprawl.
This probably depends on your city. I'm in Philly, where downtown housing is plentiful and cheap, but the schools suck hard. People like me live just outside the city limits so that we don't have to put our kids in private school. Once you are in the suburbs, you are correct - housing is cheaper further out.
I suggest changing the way we fund schools to address this, though funding is hardly the biggest problem that Philly schools face. Someone needs to fire every single person in the district and start fresh. I'd say nuke the whole thing, but the kids would probably get caught up in that.:)
The other problem from my perspective as a user is archiving. My IT department will archive files for 7 years, but I have no way to search the archives so I just keep it all on the network drive. I can't believe that there isn't and index-then-archive service out there. Now that I type this, it seems absurd, and my IT department must just not know about it.
Anyway, the result is that I use many gigabytes worth of network storage with data that is really old and probably useless unless we get named in a patent suit.
The problem is that a TB of enterprise class storage (and backup) isn't $100.
It's this attitude that has a bunch of crappy USB drives sitting on so many of my co-workers desks.
That same drive could be sitting in the data center, where it could get backed up. Sure it wouldn't be as reliable as enterprise class stuff, but it's a lot better than it sitting on someone's desk where it can be swiped or lost in a disaster. You could set up a FreeBSD zfs system for a couple hundred dollars plus time that would serve dozens of these guys. It could back up to another such system at another site. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a damn sight better than what they have now. Just so all parties know the risks involved, it's all good.
Fantastic. Now under your scientific racial classification system, classify Obama without depending on knowledge about his ancestry. Classify someone with ancestors from India, Africa, and Europe. Also, it sounds like your scientific classification system needs to change over time... 10,000 years ago your chart would have looked quite different. Even on your existing chart, the definitions seem, to me, arbitrary. The Middle East plot blends into the Europe series, which in turn blends into the Central and South Asia series. The Central and South Asia series seems to have three or four distinct blobs, yet all are colored the same. Oceania has 2 distinct blobs. Africa seems to have 3 or 4 distinct blobs.
While this chart is very useful to see human migration patterns, I don't see much benefit in classifying people in a non-arbitrary way. If anything, it reinforces my original point.
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Yes, the salaries have finally started to rise, though, so it will probably correct itself.
Those specialties require more years in residency and fellowship, more board certifications, and have higher liability risk. Radiologists are petrified of being outsourced. Anesthesiologists are under constant battle with nursing unions to let nurses take on additional duties, and lawsuits are a big problem for them since they are involved in every surgery and almost all births. There are risks in most of these specialties that dissuade many.
I spend $30/month on T-Mobile Prepay in the US, which gives me 5GB of data, unlimited texting, and 100 minutes. Additional minutes are $0.10. I use about $10/month in extra minutes. So that's $40-45/month unsubsidized, rock-bottom in the US for a smartphone on a fast-ish network. My wife has a no-data (well, a few MB), 1200 minutes or texts plan for the same $30 and she never goes over.
I think the cheapest post-paid plans in the US run around $80/month.
My Samsung Exhibit 4g was $200.
I don't buy those new, either. I'm not poor, but $600 is an expensive toy.
You could certainly refuse the search... once.
Ford paid his workers well so they could afford his card.
Those were factory workers. These are retail employees. I was a retail employee. When I eventually became a manager, I had to fire these thieving bastards. They were mostly kids working for spending money, most from pretty well-off families. Some were from family friends - that is awkward as hell when you have to tell a friend that you fired their daughter. It was like babysitting, and the social dynamic was like high school. I'm soooo glad I went to college.
Remember that it's your worst employees that shape policy. Sad, but true. You'd hire better people, but there's a finite number of well-adjusted people willing to work retail, even if you pay slightly better than the place next door.
Like the aforementioned gastroenterologist making $460k/yr?
You are cherry picking a specialty. The average family practice doc starts at $120k or so and might top out near $200k if they are lucky. Pediatricians make less than that. That GI doc took extra years of residency, probably a fellowship, and has higher liability insurance. You can offer them less, and watch as Medicare patients wait in huge queues to get a endoscopy. In Canada, they make about the same amount, and they have socialized health care.
Only recently has medicine been seen as some sort of path to the top 1%.
I don't know where you get your data. A typical new family medicine doc gets a decent low $100,000s salary and has enormous debts and malpractice insurance to pay off. A pediatrician gets even less. True, there are specialties where they make a lot of money, but this is not typical. A $2500/month payment on student loans puts a pretty big dent in your take-home, and you enter the work force in your 30s, so everyone else has an 8 or 10 year head start. The hours suck, and unless you are in something like radiology or psychiatry, you have to cover weekends and evenings somehow. You need to take continuing education credits and you need to pass re-certification exams on an ongoing basis. I would never become a doctor - I'd bet that, per hour, they make less than a school teacher.
Men are increasingly abandoning medicine for more lucrative financial jobs.
Full disclosure: my wife is one of those docs with a well-paying specialty.
Even the AMA says the times are distorted, but they emphasize that the relative times are pretty good. Meaning, for the most part, a procedure that takes twice as long as another is accurately recorded as so in the data. Medicare is generally not covering providers' costs, to the point where most unsubsidized hospitals in poor areas have closed and doctors have to limit the number of Medicare patients they take. It's pretty clear that, in aggregate, doctors aren't fleecing the system. As such, the absolute numbers are pretty much meaningless and it's the relative numbers that count. If a certain type of doctor feels screwed out of some money because they don't think the ratios are correct, then let them take it up with the AMA - why would we want to get involved?
Full disclosure: my wife is a doc.
Maybe it's just late, but you lost me! :)
And what happens when an Aborigine has kids with a Laplander? What race is that person? How about someone from Ethiopia? Are they the same race as someone from Kenya? Because they sure look like they are crossed with people from the Middle East to me. What about people from Eastern Russia. They look kind of Chinese, but kind of Russian.
I think you'll find that race becomes much harder to pin down once you leave isolated islands in the middle of the Pacific. Even a Laplander (which I think is a slur these days) wouldn't exactly stand out in a room full of European-descended people. It's all quite arbitrary - even the term wasn't really used in it's modern way until the 1800s when early scientists tried to classify people based on traits. To my knowledge, every attempt has failed. Even genetic testing shows wide overlap between "races", with a continuum roughly tracing the human migration path. One of these other posters linked to a chart showing as much, though he for some reason took it as "proof" of race being a scientific concept.
I'm _pretty_ sure that we could devise a safe way to extract phosphorous from dead bodies. Maybe science wasn't up to that task when we "evolved", but it certainly is by now.
Also, we "evolved" bathing in our drinking water supply.
Explain to me how you can have a "scientific" classification system that can't classify the President of the United States. Go ahead, let me know how you classify him and the scientific basis by which you made that choice.
No one disputes there are features common to people from various places, but ignoring the gradual nature of the change across geography just so you can lump them into buckets called "race" is not very scientific - it's arbitrary. And completely useless once people started getting on ships, let alone airplanes.
All you have to do is CYA. Lay out the tradeoffs in a meeting, make people agree in writing, and move on with life. Sure you'll take heat when a drive drops off the network - that's your job to fix it. But you can always say, look, give me xxx dollars and I can make this problem 10x less likely going forward. They will probably agree that you all made the right tradeoff decision the first time, or they will have to agree that you need more money.
If your place of employment is not rational, then you will probably get blamed for the dead USB drive anyway.
That can be said about any tax. The poor are always going to be paying a tax indirectly. At least with simple, transparent taxes you don't get crazy loopholes that only the rich take advantage of.
Contractors pay income tax. Done and done.
So does Walmart, but we still have them collect the sales tax.
Replying to my own post... I thought about it a bit more, and you could probably hurl raw materials or durable parts up to space with this and then use on-orbit lasers to correct its final orbit. At that point, you can scoop it up and put it where you need it.
That's my read. It's probably possible to make a rocket that can survive this treatment, but it isn't going to be easy!
Yup - care to enlighten me?
Someone still has to patch (and test) the application to keep it up to date.
A lot of the virtualization that my IT department is doing involves moving legacy boxes running ancient applications over to new servers. They are taking these 10 year old boxes running Windows 2000 and moving them into VMs as the hardware starts to die. In other words, the applications and OSes weren't being maintained before, and the VMs won't be maintained either. I'm not in IT, so don't flame me :)
It's probably not a single factor. Cost (gas, wear and tear, etc) and commute time probably combine on one side against cost-of-living and quality of life on the other. At some point, you look at what your car is costing you in dollars and time and emit a "fuck that" and move. On the other side, you watch each of your neighbors' houses get broken into and see your schools declining and emit a "fuck that" and move, putting up with a bit more of a commute. The balance is probably a little bit different for each person, but can probably be described nicely with statistical correlations...
If downtown houses were as large and cheap as those 40 miles away, then nobody would sprawl.
This probably depends on your city. I'm in Philly, where downtown housing is plentiful and cheap, but the schools suck hard. People like me live just outside the city limits so that we don't have to put our kids in private school. Once you are in the suburbs, you are correct - housing is cheaper further out.
I suggest changing the way we fund schools to address this, though funding is hardly the biggest problem that Philly schools face. Someone needs to fire every single person in the district and start fresh. I'd say nuke the whole thing, but the kids would probably get caught up in that. :)
The other problem from my perspective as a user is archiving. My IT department will archive files for 7 years, but I have no way to search the archives so I just keep it all on the network drive. I can't believe that there isn't and index-then-archive service out there. Now that I type this, it seems absurd, and my IT department must just not know about it.
Anyway, the result is that I use many gigabytes worth of network storage with data that is really old and probably useless unless we get named in a patent suit.
The problem is that a TB of enterprise class storage (and backup) isn't $100.
It's this attitude that has a bunch of crappy USB drives sitting on so many of my co-workers desks.
That same drive could be sitting in the data center, where it could get backed up. Sure it wouldn't be as reliable as enterprise class stuff, but it's a lot better than it sitting on someone's desk where it can be swiped or lost in a disaster. You could set up a FreeBSD zfs system for a couple hundred dollars plus time that would serve dozens of these guys. It could back up to another such system at another site. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a damn sight better than what they have now. Just so all parties know the risks involved, it's all good.
Fantastic. Now under your scientific racial classification system, classify Obama without depending on knowledge about his ancestry. Classify someone with ancestors from India, Africa, and Europe. Also, it sounds like your scientific classification system needs to change over time... 10,000 years ago your chart would have looked quite different. Even on your existing chart, the definitions seem, to me, arbitrary. The Middle East plot blends into the Europe series, which in turn blends into the Central and South Asia series. The Central and South Asia series seems to have three or four distinct blobs, yet all are colored the same. Oceania has 2 distinct blobs. Africa seems to have 3 or 4 distinct blobs.
While this chart is very useful to see human migration patterns, I don't see much benefit in classifying people in a non-arbitrary way. If anything, it reinforces my original point.