There was a recent Wall Street Journal story about this (behind a paywall, so screw them). Texas made its public colleges put every faculty member into a spreadsheet to show how much value he or she produces. A history professor got a very bad rating. Science and engineering professors scored much higher.
Gerard Piel, who created the modern Scientific American, was a history major. He arguably did more for science education in the U.S. than anybody else.
The indians are doing a very good job at my company. They are extremely competent
That's right. The Indians, Chinese, other immigrants (Russians, etc.) are very good. I like them.
What I don't like is having to compete with them in a zero-sum game. I don't like having to go into debt for the rest of my life to get an education.
Give me a European-style social welfare system, and you can hire all the immigrants you want.
In Germany, unemployment benefits are so high that a layoff is a vacation. They can relax and get more training so they'll be worth more when the recession finally ends. And as I understand it the education system is mostly free.
(And please, no right-wing wackos telling me, "It's not free, the taxpayers pay for it.")
It is true that skills in the medical device business are highly specialized, and often trained in-house. There's also a particular culture in the medical industry -- the cost of cutting corners and not following the rules is so catastrophic that people are more likely to avoid risk.
I know medical writers who write the regulatory documents for FDA approvals. Most of them are trained in-house. A headhunter told me that there are 500 people in the country doing that kind of work, and every company steals employees from the others.
When hiring is at will, they don't have to give you an excuse for not hiring you.
Yes, but this is not hiring at will. They're documenting that they tried and failed to hire U.S. citizens, in order to meet the administrative requirements for hiring H1-Bs. If you can prove it's not bona fide employee search, then you can prove they're breaking the law.
It's not easy to prove, but something like that Cohen & Grigsby video, or similarly incriminating emails, could prove it.
Even when they are caught red-handed, I'm not sure what happens next. I don't think you can force the employer to hire you. I imagine the INS might be able to fine the employer (though not as much as the damages for downloading music). If it's fraud they might be able to send the employer to jail, but there's a very high evidence standard to convict someone of a crime.
They might be prosecuted by an honest federal attorney, and tried before an honest judge. Stranger things have happened.
Well, maybe not.
The ICE is busy deporting Mexican college students who have been in this country since they were 5 years old.
>>>Surgeons in the U.S. have a financial incentive to operate; they get paid by the operation.
False.
US surgeons get paid a flat yearly salary just the same as UK surgeons. But don't let the "facts" get in the way of your 5-minute hate towards all things American.
What's your source for that?
In this country most physician payments are fee for service. I've talked to surgeons extensively. When the talk turns to finances, they tell me they get paid by the operation, unless they're working for the VA, Menninger Clinic, Kaiser-Permanente, or a few other exceptions.
Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics and teaches economics at Princeton University, understand Social Security and Ponzi schemes better than you do.
No, the peer review covers the significance and interpretation of the numbers as well.
In my experience, the right wing think tanks are more likely to lie and misapply statistics than the left wing think tanks.
Maybe that's my bias because I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page every day.
But during the Bush Administration, Science magazine had editorials by previously nonpartisan scientists who said that they've seen distortion of science by Republicans and Democrats, but it was never as bad as this.
It's not a fraud or ponzi scheme. It's a pension plan. Governments and private companies have been funding plans like this for 150 years.
Ronald Reagan did break down the lockbox and mingled Social Security revenue with general revenue, but unless the government defaults on its internal loans, the money is still there.
When children work to support their parents' Social Security, that's what economists call a generational transfer. There's nothing wrong or deceptive about that; tax systems do it all the time. Another generational transfer is your parents' payments for your education, which goes in the other direction.
My point is that it is easy to lie with statistics -- or to misapply them.
A common misconception.
Peer-reviewed publications require data to be submitted according to certain rules, because those rules make it difficult to lie with statistics.
The infant mortality statistics have been thoroughly reviewed. Their strengths and weaknesses are well known.
It's also well known that doctors who take the hardest cases have the worst outcomes.
It is true that it's easy to lie and misapply statistics in non-peer-reviewed publications, like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, or in white papers from (mostly) right-wing think tanks, or blogs. That's the kind of thing you get when you do a Google search for "infant mortality". But if you go to the major peer-reviewed journals, statistical weaknesses are acknowledged and actual lies are rare.
If you go to the Wikipedia article on "Infant mortality," it will give you links to the U.N. statistics on infant mortality. That's the best data available.
Most public health experts say that infant mortality is the best index of a country's health care and social support system. They sometimes have data for perinatal mortality. If you used perinatal mortality, you'd get the same results. If you broke it down by any of the factors you mention, I think you'd get the same results.
In any case, the U.K. seems to have a lower infant mortality rate than the U.S.
Since there are about 4 million births a year in the U.S., and about 2,000 so-called partial birth abortions a year, then including intact dilation and extraction would raise the U.S. infant mortality rate by 0.05%, from say 6.26% to 6.31, still behind Cuba (5.82%) and the European Union.
I've talked to American and British surgeons at lectures and read their articles.
One of the questions they always deal with is whether an operation will do more harm than good. That comes before they even get to the cost calculations.
A lot of major cardiovascular procedures have a surgical death rate of 3% or more. You don't want to take a 1/33 risk of death unless it's going to lower your subsequent risk of dying substantially more than that.
There are lots of people in their 60s who couldn't survive major surgery. They have poor function in their lungs, kidneys, or heart. They have pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes.
The New England Journal of Medicine just had an essay by an oncologist about a patient with untreatable metastatic bladder cancer disseminated to the liver. He said, "I'm not afraid of dying. We all have to go sometime, and I've had a good life." His sister had chemotherapy, and he didn't want to go through that. Then his son showed up at the next visit, insisted on aggressive treatment, and talked his father into it. The father had chemotherapy, declined rapidly, and died painfully in a few days. If his son hadn't insisted on chemotherapy, the father could have spent one more Christmas with his family. Doctors have lots of stories like that.
Surgeons in the U.S. have a financial incentive to operate; they get paid by the operation. Surgeons in the UK (if they work on salary for a government hospital) don't have that incentive. But they do have hospital administrators monitoring their surgery for death rates, appropriateness, etc.
In case you haven't noticed, seniors in the U.S. are on Medicare. Medicare funding decisions are made by expert panels of doctors, who decide whether a treatment is appropriate based on its effectiveness and safety, not cost.
There is a conservative meme, "Please, Senator, keep the government out of my Medicare." Actually, if you look at the facts, federally-run health care is usually pretty good, compared to the private alternatives. The problems come with state-run Medicaid, which many states refuse to fund at efficient levels, because of the anti-tax movement. It's the anti-tax voters who are telling people to curl up and die.
Unless you have a secure income for life of at least $100,000 a year, you'd probably be better off living in one of the more affluent European social democracies.
The free trade agreements let Europeans send products and services to the U.S. to compete with us. But they ignore the other part of free trade -- mobility of labor.
Any citizen of a European Union country has the right to work in any other European Union country. And if an Irishman goes to France, French employers can't discriminate against him because he can't speak French all that well.
In the Scandinavian countries, they've eliminated poverty.
If you were to draw a distribution of income, the people who comprise the bottom 2/5 in income in the U.S. don't exist in for example Sweden. Their income distribution looks like our income distribution for the top 3/5, except I don't think their wealthiest 10% is as wealthy as ours.
People in the bottom 2/5 who are making, say, $12,000 a year in the U.S. really suffer. They can't afford health care, housing, food, or other necessities of life, unless they fall into one of the capricious government subsidy programs.
People in the bottom 1/5 in Sweden are still making $55,000 a year. They can afford all the necessities of a modest but comfortable life, and the government pays for many of them, such as health care, education, day care, and a lot of housing. And the people in the top 1/5 are only making $150-200,000.
Yes, it's mathematically necessary that *somebody* has to be at the bottom of any distribution. But I'd rather be in the bottom 1/5 in Sweden with an income of $55,000 than in the bottom 2/5 in the U.S. with an income of $12,000.
So you don't think it would work to have a single-payer system like Canada, which costs about half of what the U.S. system costs per capita, and delivers equivalent health care?
Too bad, I guess we'll have to struggle with an economically inefficient private insurance-based system.
(BTW, it's a common misconception that you can walk into an emergency room and get treatment, even if you can't afford it. Emergency rooms are only required to assess your condition and, if it really is an emergency, to stabilize your condition, after which they can kick you out the door, as they often do. So if you're dying from an exacerbation of asthma, they can give you emergency oxygen and steroids until you can breathe again, but they don't have any obligation to provide you with a month's worth of asthma drugs. So you can die of an exacerbation of asthma tomorrow. If you're eligible for Medicaid, they'll treat you, but in some states it's impossible to get Medicaid if you have enough income to live on, and many people have died waiting for Medicaid. One of the few benefits of the Obama health reform is that it will make it easier for people to get Medicaid.)
Actually, Ralph Nader said that, apart from foreign policy, the Democratic part is farther right than Richard Nixon.
I think he's right. Nixon's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was non-partisan but promoted a lot of ideas that we would consider liberal.
One Nixon/Moynihan proposal was the guaranteed annual income. We would fold the welfare system into the income tax system. If you earned over a certain amount, you would pay taxes. If you earned under a certain amount, you would get "negative taxes." It was a good idea, but to avoid negative incentives, it would have been expensive.
If the guaranteed annual income had gone through, we would have eliminated poverty. We would have had the economic distribution of Finland.
If it can bring an antibody into the cell that's very interesting, even if they've only demonstrated it in cell culture. Let me know when they try it on a mouse.
Contrary to the article, I always thought that there are other mechanisms that can kill viruses inside the cell, particularly siRNAs could also kill viruses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_interfering_RNA
WSJ was a unique newspaper. They were publishing unbiased, reliable, useful news, which is why so many people (including me) were willing to pay any reasonable price for it, certainly $150 a year. I don't think you say that about any other Murdoch publication (and I'm not sure you can say that about the WSJ any more). I'm not going to pay $150 a year (or anything) for right-wing propaganda.
The WSJ's news was as objective as humanly possible. Their news department had an independence from the advertising department and the publisher's personal causes that was legendary. The far right editorial page was a useful cover for reporters who were free to tell it like it is. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,956896,00.html
For example, when General Motors threatened to withdraw all their advertising from the WSJ if they printed a story GM didn't like, the WSJ told GM to go fuck themselves. It was a long time, after GM finally came crawling back, before the WSJ let them advertise again.
The New York Times in contrast used to print puff pieces on for example the auto industry, because they were big advertisers, and the publisher used to promote his or her pet causes all the time. See Gay Talese's "The Kingdom and the Power" or Robert Moses' "The Power Broker."
Rupert Murdoch was willing to tell any lie, break any promise, or betray any trust to get a reputation for integrity. That's how he bought the WSJ.
Unfortunately, since Murdoch bought it, not only the integrity but the quality has gone down. In my reading, they don't always give both sides of the story they way they used to, doesn't always have the depth it used to, and now has a Republican tilt. According to the NYT, one of Murdoch's new editors in the Washington bureau was cutting out paragraphs that were favorable to Democrats and unfavorable to Republicans. You want me to pay for that?
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a great idea.
Instead of making college free like other countries, let's raise the cost of going to college so high that nobody can afford it.
Instead, we'll let them take out loans that will put them in debt for the rest of their lives.
We'll make the interest rates so high that they'll never be able to pay it off.
And to stop them from going bankrupt like businessmen or anybody else who is overwhelmed by debt, we'll make it illegal for them to go bankrupt.
(Note to self: Don't forget to underpay science teachers and destroy teachers' unions.)
There was a recent Wall Street Journal story about this (behind a paywall, so screw them). Texas made its public colleges put every faculty member into a spreadsheet to show how much value he or she produces. A history professor got a very bad rating. Science and engineering professors scored much higher.
Gerard Piel, who created the modern Scientific American, was a history major. He arguably did more for science education in the U.S. than anybody else.
By that logic, why does a college even offer classes in philosophy?
When I took philosophy, it taught me not to become an engineer.
The indians are doing a very good job at my company. They are extremely competent
That's right. The Indians, Chinese, other immigrants (Russians, etc.) are very good. I like them.
What I don't like is having to compete with them in a zero-sum game. I don't like having to go into debt for the rest of my life to get an education.
Give me a European-style social welfare system, and you can hire all the immigrants you want.
In Germany, unemployment benefits are so high that a layoff is a vacation. They can relax and get more training so they'll be worth more when the recession finally ends. And as I understand it the education system is mostly free.
(And please, no right-wing wackos telling me, "It's not free, the taxpayers pay for it.")
It is true that skills in the medical device business are highly specialized, and often trained in-house. There's also a particular culture in the medical industry -- the cost of cutting corners and not following the rules is so catastrophic that people are more likely to avoid risk.
I know medical writers who write the regulatory documents for FDA approvals. Most of them are trained in-house. A headhunter told me that there are 500 people in the country doing that kind of work, and every company steals employees from the others.
When hiring is at will, they don't have to give you an excuse for not hiring you.
Yes, but this is not hiring at will. They're documenting that they tried and failed to hire U.S. citizens, in order to meet the administrative requirements for hiring H1-Bs. If you can prove it's not bona fide employee search, then you can prove they're breaking the law.
It's not easy to prove, but something like that Cohen & Grigsby video, or similarly incriminating emails, could prove it.
Even when they are caught red-handed, I'm not sure what happens next. I don't think you can force the employer to hire you. I imagine the INS might be able to fine the employer (though not as much as the damages for downloading music). If it's fraud they might be able to send the employer to jail, but there's a very high evidence standard to convict someone of a crime.
They might be prosecuted by an honest federal attorney, and tried before an honest judge. Stranger things have happened.
Well, maybe not.
The ICE is busy deporting Mexican college students who have been in this country since they were 5 years old.
>>>Surgeons in the U.S. have a financial incentive to operate; they get paid by the operation.
False.
US surgeons get paid a flat yearly salary just the same as UK surgeons. But don't let the "facts" get in the way of your 5-minute hate towards all things American.
What's your source for that?
In this country most physician payments are fee for service. I've talked to surgeons extensively. When the talk turns to finances, they tell me they get paid by the operation, unless they're working for the VA, Menninger Clinic, Kaiser-Permanente, or a few other exceptions.
Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics and teaches economics at Princeton University, understand Social Security and Ponzi schemes better than you do.
I don't defend the Democrats either.
No, the peer review covers the significance and interpretation of the numbers as well.
In my experience, the right wing think tanks are more likely to lie and misapply statistics than the left wing think tanks.
Maybe that's my bias because I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page every day.
But during the Bush Administration, Science magazine had editorials by previously nonpartisan scientists who said that they've seen distortion of science by Republicans and Democrats, but it was never as bad as this.
It's not a fraud or ponzi scheme. It's a pension plan. Governments and private companies have been funding plans like this for 150 years.
Ronald Reagan did break down the lockbox and mingled Social Security revenue with general revenue, but unless the government defaults on its internal loans, the money is still there.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate economist, explained all this in his New York Times columns. For example http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/about-the-social-security-trust-fund/
When children work to support their parents' Social Security, that's what economists call a generational transfer. There's nothing wrong or deceptive about that; tax systems do it all the time. Another generational transfer is your parents' payments for your education, which goes in the other direction.
My point is that it is easy to lie with statistics -- or to misapply them.
A common misconception.
Peer-reviewed publications require data to be submitted according to certain rules, because those rules make it difficult to lie with statistics.
The infant mortality statistics have been thoroughly reviewed. Their strengths and weaknesses are well known.
It's also well known that doctors who take the hardest cases have the worst outcomes.
It is true that it's easy to lie and misapply statistics in non-peer-reviewed publications, like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, or in white papers from (mostly) right-wing think tanks, or blogs. That's the kind of thing you get when you do a Google search for "infant mortality". But if you go to the major peer-reviewed journals, statistical weaknesses are acknowledged and actual lies are rare.
I don't understand your point.
If you go to the Wikipedia article on "Infant mortality," it will give you links to the U.N. statistics on infant mortality. That's the best data available.
Most public health experts say that infant mortality is the best index of a country's health care and social support system. They sometimes have data for perinatal mortality. If you used perinatal mortality, you'd get the same results. If you broke it down by any of the factors you mention, I think you'd get the same results.
In any case, the U.K. seems to have a lower infant mortality rate than the U.S.
Since there are about 4 million births a year in the U.S., and about 2,000 so-called partial birth abortions a year, then including intact dilation and extraction would raise the U.S. infant mortality rate by 0.05%, from say 6.26% to 6.31, still behind Cuba (5.82%) and the European Union.
I wonder if this data would change anyone's mind about the benefits of health care reform...
No. Facts and data don't seem to be playing any role at all when it comes to that topic.
Would some TV attack commercials help?
I've talked to American and British surgeons at lectures and read their articles.
One of the questions they always deal with is whether an operation will do more harm than good. That comes before they even get to the cost calculations.
A lot of major cardiovascular procedures have a surgical death rate of 3% or more. You don't want to take a 1/33 risk of death unless it's going to lower your subsequent risk of dying substantially more than that.
There are lots of people in their 60s who couldn't survive major surgery. They have poor function in their lungs, kidneys, or heart. They have pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes.
The New England Journal of Medicine just had an essay by an oncologist about a patient with untreatable metastatic bladder cancer disseminated to the liver. He said, "I'm not afraid of dying. We all have to go sometime, and I've had a good life." His sister had chemotherapy, and he didn't want to go through that. Then his son showed up at the next visit, insisted on aggressive treatment, and talked his father into it. The father had chemotherapy, declined rapidly, and died painfully in a few days. If his son hadn't insisted on chemotherapy, the father could have spent one more Christmas with his family. Doctors have lots of stories like that.
Surgeons in the U.S. have a financial incentive to operate; they get paid by the operation. Surgeons in the UK (if they work on salary for a government hospital) don't have that incentive. But they do have hospital administrators monitoring their surgery for death rates, appropriateness, etc.
In case you haven't noticed, seniors in the U.S. are on Medicare. Medicare funding decisions are made by expert panels of doctors, who decide whether a treatment is appropriate based on its effectiveness and safety, not cost.
There is a conservative meme, "Please, Senator, keep the government out of my Medicare." Actually, if you look at the facts, federally-run health care is usually pretty good, compared to the private alternatives. The problems come with state-run Medicaid, which many states refuse to fund at efficient levels, because of the anti-tax movement. It's the anti-tax voters who are telling people to curl up and die.
Careful there. The US delivers more babies that are premature, which skews the stats.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/11/06/0216207/Americans-Less-Healthy-But-Outlive-Brits#
One of the things infant mortality reflects is premature delivery.
If you have large numbers of premature infants, then there's something wrong with the health care system.
Unless you have a secure income for life of at least $100,000 a year, you'd probably be better off living in one of the more affluent European social democracies.
The free trade agreements let Europeans send products and services to the U.S. to compete with us. But they ignore the other part of free trade -- mobility of labor.
Any citizen of a European Union country has the right to work in any other European Union country. And if an Irishman goes to France, French employers can't discriminate against him because he can't speak French all that well.
A common conservative misconception.
In the Scandinavian countries, they've eliminated poverty.
If you were to draw a distribution of income, the people who comprise the bottom 2/5 in income in the U.S. don't exist in for example Sweden. Their income distribution looks like our income distribution for the top 3/5, except I don't think their wealthiest 10% is as wealthy as ours.
People in the bottom 2/5 who are making, say, $12,000 a year in the U.S. really suffer. They can't afford health care, housing, food, or other necessities of life, unless they fall into one of the capricious government subsidy programs.
People in the bottom 1/5 in Sweden are still making $55,000 a year. They can afford all the necessities of a modest but comfortable life, and the government pays for many of them, such as health care, education, day care, and a lot of housing. And the people in the top 1/5 are only making $150-200,000.
Yes, it's mathematically necessary that *somebody* has to be at the bottom of any distribution. But I'd rather be in the bottom 1/5 in Sweden with an income of $55,000 than in the bottom 2/5 in the U.S. with an income of $12,000.
That's right. Milton Friedman advocated a negative income tax. I forgot.
So you don't think it would work to have a single-payer system like Canada, which costs about half of what the U.S. system costs per capita, and delivers equivalent health care?
Too bad, I guess we'll have to struggle with an economically inefficient private insurance-based system.
(BTW, it's a common misconception that you can walk into an emergency room and get treatment, even if you can't afford it. Emergency rooms are only required to assess your condition and, if it really is an emergency, to stabilize your condition, after which they can kick you out the door, as they often do. So if you're dying from an exacerbation of asthma, they can give you emergency oxygen and steroids until you can breathe again, but they don't have any obligation to provide you with a month's worth of asthma drugs. So you can die of an exacerbation of asthma tomorrow. If you're eligible for Medicaid, they'll treat you, but in some states it's impossible to get Medicaid if you have enough income to live on, and many people have died waiting for Medicaid. One of the few benefits of the Obama health reform is that it will make it easier for people to get Medicaid.)
Actually, Ralph Nader said that, apart from foreign policy, the Democratic part is farther right than Richard Nixon.
I think he's right. Nixon's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was non-partisan but promoted a lot of ideas that we would consider liberal.
One Nixon/Moynihan proposal was the guaranteed annual income. We would fold the welfare system into the income tax system. If you earned over a certain amount, you would pay taxes. If you earned under a certain amount, you would get "negative taxes." It was a good idea, but to avoid negative incentives, it would have been expensive.
If the guaranteed annual income had gone through, we would have eliminated poverty. We would have had the economic distribution of Finland.
As Adam Smith said, those who benefit more from society should contribute proportionately more of their income to the running of society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_of_nations#Book_IV:_Of_Systems_of_political_Economy
The protein is TRIM21, hitherto known only to readers of Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM21
If it can bring an antibody into the cell that's very interesting, even if they've only demonstrated it in cell culture. Let me know when they try it on a mouse.
Contrary to the article, I always thought that there are other mechanisms that can kill viruses inside the cell, particularly siRNAs could also kill viruses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_interfering_RNA
WSJ was a unique newspaper. They were publishing unbiased, reliable, useful news, which is why so many people (including me) were willing to pay any reasonable price for it, certainly $150 a year. I don't think you say that about any other Murdoch publication (and I'm not sure you can say that about the WSJ any more). I'm not going to pay $150 a year (or anything) for right-wing propaganda.
The WSJ's news was as objective as humanly possible. Their news department had an independence from the advertising department and the publisher's personal causes that was legendary. The far right editorial page was a useful cover for reporters who were free to tell it like it is. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,956896,00.html
For example, when General Motors threatened to withdraw all their advertising from the WSJ if they printed a story GM didn't like, the WSJ told GM to go fuck themselves. It was a long time, after GM finally came crawling back, before the WSJ let them advertise again.
The New York Times in contrast used to print puff pieces on for example the auto industry, because they were big advertisers, and the publisher used to promote his or her pet causes all the time. See Gay Talese's "The Kingdom and the Power" or Robert Moses' "The Power Broker."
Rupert Murdoch was willing to tell any lie, break any promise, or betray any trust to get a reputation for integrity. That's how he bought the WSJ.
Unfortunately, since Murdoch bought it, not only the integrity but the quality has gone down. In my reading, they don't always give both sides of the story they way they used to, doesn't always have the depth it used to, and now has a Republican tilt. According to the NYT, one of Murdoch's new editors in the Washington bureau was cutting out paragraphs that were favorable to Democrats and unfavorable to Republicans. You want me to pay for that?
There's a Polish expression, "The fat got thin and the thin died."