Since tobacco kills 400,000 Americans every year, and I forget how many millions worldwide, I don't get very upset about a drug like cocaine or heroin which kills only about 20,000 Americans a year.
Washington State is a (poorly run) nanny state. I work at UW. This past month, in order to qualify for a $125 "wellness incentive" on my health insurance next year, I had to fill out a "well-being assessment" that, among other things, asked me multiple questions regarding whether I felt "empowered" at work. Based on my answers, one of the suggested activities I could do for credit (in addition to the more reasonable "eat five fruits and vegetables" and "walk at least 35,000 steps a week") was "meet with a mentor". Yeah, you guys can't even agree on a budget but you can spend money developing an overly-simplistic computerized system to pretend you're actually caring for your employees...
I wouldn't blame the nanny state for wellness incentives. That started out from the HR departments of the big corporations, as a way to cut health costs. I remember reading about that in BusinessWeek in the 1980s. More recently, I've seen studies of wellness incentives in the New England Journal of Medicine. They vary between being totally useless and having a small effect. Science doesn't know enough about diet to tell you that eating specific foods will improve your health (and cut your employer's health care costs).
(Do you want to have fun? Ask your employer to show you the publications in the peer-reviewed literature to support those "suggestions.")
To speak to the nursing, the greater problem presented in that industry tends to be that there are more practicing male MDs than female MDs with females being weeded out and eventually going into nursing. So, it gets spun from "not enough males in nursing" to "women get forced out of MDs and over-saturate nursing".
The route to medical school and nursing school are completely different. They draw different people.
Medical school is a much more intensive course, with more years of clinical training. Most medical students that I know come from upper-class families, where their parents could send them to top K-12 and undergraduate schools, and as we know, family income is the factor most strongly associated with school performance. I know doctors who didn't have loans because their parents could pay their tuition and expenses in cash.
Nursing school is shorter and less intense. Nurses are more often working-class. It's less expensive (that is, more attainable) and the payback time on your investment is shorter. It's less competitive. It's also easier to take time off from your career and come back. It's less of a career commitment.
Most nurses I meet are pretty smart. Nurses catch doctors in mistakes. Some of them manage departments, go into research, get PhDs, MBAs, law degrees, etc. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to manage an operating room?) But it's a different career track.
Why does nobody ever worry about boys under-representation on things, like Nursing ?
I mean, I know the reason why there are disparities between genders in certain fields, and it isn't representative of some hidden misogynist agenda of the HeMan Woman's Haters Club. The fact is, that there are Gender Attractions to certain kinds of work, and why can't we just leave it at that.
Men and Women tend to be different.
Actually, back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was some discussion in the nursing profession about the overabundance of women. One of the nursing associations had a logo with a stylized design of a nurse, that looked female. After some discussion, they changed the design to make it more androgynous. But the ratio of male to female nurses hasn't changed much.
I would hypothesize that there was a strong movement to move women into more desirable male occupations. But there was no corresponding movement to move men into more desirable female occupations, like nursing. I don't remember any men suing a nursing school or hospital for not giving equal opportunity to men.
Another occupation that was female-dominated and highly-paid was secretaries, especially legal and medical secretaries, who were often making more than their fathers. There are fewer secretaries now, but there is still a female predominance.
I felt then and I still feel that we should encourage people to go into professions that they enjoy and are good at, regardless of sex. But it hasn't happened. It used to bug me that probably half the male nurses and secretaries were straight, but the other half was gay. They were just strongly female occupations. There do seem to be biologically-based preferences.
Females simply don't seem to like software development work much.
Female developers tend to move away from development into project management, as soon as they can.
You describe all of engineering, not just software development: I've seen a lot women grads jump ship to Projects within a couple years of doing actual engineering work after college. Not just at this company either, I've kept track of a lot of my classmates via LinkedIn and it's a very common trend.
I once worked in a company that evaluated new technology for investors. We were writing reports in a Wall Street office. One of my co-workers was a woman with an engineering degree. After she graduated, she got a job in engineering. The way she described it, she sounded like a parody of Cosmopolitan. "I had to go out on the factory floor! I had to wear a helmet!" The kind of thing that I thought was cool, she thought was horrible. So she got a desk job with us.
There are good women engineers, but they're rare, and hands-on women engineers are even rarer. Many male engineers move into management or support roles, and they're useful too. But every female engineer I've met was in a management job where they didn't do things hands-on.
That's my experience. I wonder if anyone has done a formal scientific study.
It's also possible that it is in fact age appropriate computer science education. No, your kindergartner can't write C, but they can learn how to follow a flowchart to do a task that would be otherwise too complicated for them. They can play games and activities with sorting and filtering. They can learn about '0'. You can even introduce the concepts behind the basic data structures to a kindergartner if you do it right. The kids need not touch a computer at all in a young "computer science" course.
I did some research into K-12 science education. Science magazine had a lot of good articles.
I thought the most important thing that professional teachers knew, that I didn't know, and that most non-teachers don't know, is figuring out what's age appropriate.
Science magazine gave some examples of some fairly important, sophisticated ideas that you can teach to kindergarten kids -- if you know how to do it. OTOH there were some ideas that I thought were obvious, that even high school kids had trouble with.
What works -- one lesson for kindergarten kids was to learn the difference between living objects and inanimate objects. They give the kids a collection of small objects -- seeds, pebbles, etc. Then they plant the objects. A few days later, the seeds sprout but the pebbles don't do anything. That demonstrates what it means to be living. This is actually a point of confusion for kindergarten-age kids, and this is a good way of teaching that lesson.
What doesn't work -- DNA. Molecules. Kids can't understand the concept of molecules even in the lower high school grades. How could they? Science is the study of your observations of the natural world. How can 6th grade kids observe molecules? How can they do anything but learn by rote and parrot the textbooks? I took my niece to a museum, and they had an exhibit of DNA, with plastic CATG codes and evrything. After she saw the exhibit, I asked my niece what DNA was. She didn't know. I asked some other kids. They had no understanding of what that exhibit was all about. The best they could do was pick up a few buzzwords from the labels, like "Code of life." If I told them that angels were linking peptides together, they would have believed me.
Gerard Piel, the founder of the modern Scientific American, defined science for me. (1) A scientist has a theory. (2) He figures out an experiment to test that theory. (3) He performs the experiment. (4) The experiment confirms or rejects his theory. That's science. He said that every Scientific American story repeated that model. Rosalind Franklin thought DNA was a double helix. She did X-ray crystallography and confirmed it. That's science.
Cooking is not chemistry. Memorizing facts about things that you have never seen is not chemistry. Richard Feynman explained this very well.
Here's the best science teaching story I ever heard:
A kindergarten teacher was teaching her class about birds. She explained how different birds ate different food, and other age-appropriate facts. Then it was a nice day so she decided to take her class on a walk through the woods.
Along came a woodpecker. It started pecking on the tree. She hadn't mentioned woodpeckers, because woodpeckers weren't a common bird in their area. None of them had seen a woodpecker before.
A little girl said, "Oh, I know what he's doing. He's eating bugs."
Fuck computer science. Fuck coding. Get a good science teacher to take her kids on a walk through the woods, or whatever she thinks is good. Leave the science teachers alone. They know how to teach. They know about computers. If they need your help, they'll ask you.
If computers fit into it, fine, but don't go mandating computers and tell them, "Here, fit this into your science classes."
Read what Feynman has to say about science education, and ask yourself, "How would Feynman apply this to computers?"
In New York City, I don't need a Spanish dictionary. I just stop a pretty Spanish girl on the street, say, "Hable espanol?" and ask her to translate the word.
Germany has fewer college graduates. Is Sanders telling the less intelligent 2/3 that he is going to save them from student loans by refusing them admission to college, or is he just a bullshitter?
Germany invests in a student's education, and gets that money paid back in taxes after 5 years (just like CCNY did). With that return on investment, any business would keep expanding.
If Sanders got his way, anybody who was willing to put in the academic effort could go to college.
Even if a kid only goes for 1 year and drops out, you've still increased his lifetime earnings and tax contributions. It's free money.
Germany BTW has one of the best systems of trade schools in the world, so students can also choose vocational training if they prefer.
That's the kind of vocational education system the US used to have before the Reagan Revolution. We did it before, we can do it again.
"Maybe the Germans have collectively decided that the cost of the education is trivial compared to the long term gains of keeping some highly educated people around, or having its own citizens be educated."
Maybe Germans would re-think that decision if they had to pay a realistic sum for their own civil defense rather than rely on the US and NATO.
Maybe the Germans have decided that the last time they had a military big enough to bully everybody else it didn't work so well.
And let's not use euphemisms like "defense." The reason the U.S. has a military as big as the rest of the world put together is so that war wimps like GWB and Cheney can push other countries around. We would have been better off without it. They wouldn't have been able to evade Iraq.
"Maybe, gasp, it's possible to both make profits and take care of your people -- and that it isn't an either/or proposition."
Pick two:
o Make Profits o Take Care of Your People o Protect your People
o Spend $3 trillion invading Iraq. That's the one I can do without.
Part of it is not eating your planting seed. Germany sees what lack of education has done in the US, and isn't going to make that mistake.
In the US, pursuit of an education means that one has to get a decent job to deal with student loans unless one is born into wealth. While I was getting my degree, the classmate from Germany, China, and Chile were also doing coursework. However, come graduation, they all left and went home debt-free, and were wondering why the US penalizes people wanting to better themselves worse than they do criminals (since most fines and virtually all civil judgments can be tossed in bankruptcy.)
There is becoming a larger and larger disaffected population in the US. Right now, it mainly is apolitical and hedonistic, but just like a jar of liquid sodium acetate, it doesn't take much for things to crystallize around the smallest ideal and form an insurgent cause if people feel it might better their lives from the minimum wage grind.
Bernie Sanders, who got a free education at Brooklyn College, supports a European-style free education system. He also wants to forgive college loans.
This simply isn't true. People come to the US all of the time, and get their education...then move back to their country of origin and work there. Sure, not Everyone moves out of the US after studying here...but they're not forced to. And the taxes you're paying for all that FWEE education come from the working residents of Germany, from whom you'll have to continue to pilfer to fund this Utopian solution.
Research shows that the system is working, says Sebastian Fohrbeck of DAAD, and that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany.
"Even if people don't pay tuition fees, if only 40% stay for five years and pay taxes we recover the cost for the tuition and for the study places so that works out well."
Why? I didn't speak a word of Spanish when I came to study engineering in Madrid, and I didn't speak a word of German when I came to work in Stuttgart. 10 years later, I'm fluent in Spanish and German. I need human contact with native speakers (and beers, lots of beers!) in order to learn a language.
It's a lot easier to learn German from a German girlfriend than it is to learn it from Berlitz.
"Free". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. They pay out the ass in taxes for that "free" education and over the course of their career, they'll pay more money than if they just took out loans and paid for it themselves. But sure, keep using the word "free" for things paid for via taxes.
Research shows that the system is working, says Sebastian Fohrbeck of DAAD, and that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany.
"Even if people don't pay tuition fees, if only 40% stay for five years and pay taxes we recover the cost for the tuition and for the study places so that works out well."
It's free to the student because he didn't pay anything.
It's free to the government because they got paid back from it more than they put in.
It's free because when you invest money, and get more out of it than you put in, it's free.
City College in New York City used to be free. CCNY turned out Nobel laureates and creators of industry like Andy Grove, founder of Intel. You can read the biographies on the Nobel prize web site of people who say that they never could have afforded to go to college if CCNY weren't free.
CCNY was a meritocracy. You got in because you made the grade. That's different from a free market, where you get in because your father is rich (like George W. Bush).
I don't think you know what the word "free" means. Most native speakers of English know what the word "free" means, because they are familiar with "free" education and "free" libraries, which is where a lot of them spent their childhood.
I think there must be a script going around to search message boards for the text "free", and post a reply, "It's not free! They pay for it in taxes!"
People in functioning democracies realize that there are some services that the government can provide more cheaply than the "free" market. Education is one of them. The market is always more expensive. You can pay $10,000 in taxes or $20,000 in the marketplace for a year of school. There is no developed country in the world that doesn't provide free education for its population.
In the presidential election, Bernie Sanders is the one candidate who says that college should be free (as it is in Europe), and that students should be able to discharge their current loans. Sanders went to Brooklyn College, which was free at that time (and graduated a few Nobel laureates too).
So if you want free college for yourself and your children, and you want to get rid of your college debts, vote for Bernie. If like Mitch Romney your father's rich, then vote for Hillary or the Repugnicans.
It's also possible that your father is rich, but you want to see free college education for everyone because it's right, or because it's good for the country.
The Welfare Reform Act, which you credit to Clinton, was a Republican project only signed by Clinton when presented to him for the third time. It did a great deal to reduce poverty by getting the undeserving poor off their fat, lazy asses.
Unfortunately nobody got the undeserving rich off their fat, lazy asses. Democrat or Republican, they're still getting government handouts. GWB, you recall, was a drunken loser and a failure all his life, until his father's friends cut him into a government-subsidized football stadium deal.
The big-time undeserving rich can be found in the medical insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry. Obamacare has now forced people to get their health care through the insurance industry, which takes a 20% cut off the top of your premium dollar. They've guaranteed that Medicare will pay the pharmaceutical industry whatever they choose to charge, even if it's $50 for an asthma inhaler that costs $15 in Europe, or $100,000 for a cancer drug that was developed with government-funded research.
The welfare "reform", that Clinton signed, was a disaster for the poor. It worked passably well when the economy was booming, and there were jobs for everyone who wanted one, but after the economic bust, the poor were really suffering. There have been plenty of studies to show that.
http://www.newsday.com/opinion... OpEdOpinion Will Hillary Clinton run against her husband's welfare legacy? June 1, 2015 By MELINDA HENNEBERGER, Bloomberg News
Almost 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton made good on his campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it," some of his oldest friends were beside themselves....
A smaller percentage of Americans are getting the help they need: In 1996, 68 of every 100 families living in poverty received cash assistance. Today, only 26 of 100 do, and in 10 states, that number is under 10. Because federal aid is no longer guaranteed to anyone living in poverty, states can simply make it harder to qualify for help, and then point to the low number of people they're serving as a measure of success....
The consensus among Clinton's aides, both those who supported and opposed the bill, was that the move was not politically necessary. Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos told the president that he did not have to sign the bill to be reelected, but was far enough ahead of GOP nominee Bob Dole that he'd win in November either way.
Benjamin Franklin:
“I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
Now I understand why Howard Zinn said that the founders of the country were upper-class property-owners serving their own interest.
Franklin's advice may have worked when the county had a labor shortage and there was work for everyone who wanted to work, and free farmland for everyone (except negroes) who wanted to strike out on his own, but it doesn't make any sense when there's massive unemployment and no more free farm land.
I'm more and more convinced that the Republican and Democratic parties are like the head and tails of a quarter. No matter which one you look at it's just the other side of the same thing.
The proof of that is the Obama health plan, which is really the health plan of the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank.
The Democratic Party today is further to the right than Richard Nixon (whose Secretary of Health and Human Services was Daniel Patrick Moynihan), who supported a guaranteed national income and a national health program.
Clinton was a "centrist" Democrat, which is not really in the center of American opinion but pretty far to the right. It's only in the center of the big campaign contributors.
Clinton's advisor was Rahm Emanuel, who was also Obama's chief of staff, and who ruled out a single payer health care system or even a public option. The reason Emanuel was so powerful is that he was the Democratic Party's big fundraiser. Under Emanuel, their principles are for sale. Give them $100 million in contributions, as the health insurance industry did, and they'll give you anything you want.
The worst thing Clinton did for the country was his Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which took away the right to welfare, and gave everyone 5-year limits. That increased the poverty in the US, and made poor people really miserable. Clinton's own assistant secretary of health and human services, Peter Edelman, publicly resigned over it. Edelman and his wife were old friends of the Clintons, and Edelman said Clinton's welfare reform destroyed everything he believed in. That was another Rahm Emanuel idea.
The entire Democratic party isn't worthless, just most of them. You can look at the Democrats who voted against the war in Iraq, against the Welfare Reform Act, against the Bush and Obama education bills, against ending bankruptcy for college loans, against the tough-on-crime bills, for single payer and the public option. I'd estimate it might be as much as 1/3 of the Democratic Party. Most of them are in the Democratic Progressive Caucus.
Now Bernie Sanders is running, and he's getting about 15% of Democrats in the polls. We'll see if the majority is smart enough to vote for a candidate who represents their interests, or if they'll just be mesmerized by wall-to-wall TV commercials again.
this is why I'm a socialist. Anyone who complains about gov'ts wasting money has never paid any mind to how charities spend their bucks. With gov't we can at least bring corruption charges when this sort of thing happens (assuming we have the political will). With these private charities it's all nice and legal...
Under a well-run socialist government, you can set the priorities in a rational way, where there is the greatest need. In Haiti, they have to develop, equip and maintain their main hospitals, and in public health, the most cost/beneficial priorities are pregnancy and infant care, vaccinations, and sanitation.
Private charities respond to emotional and psychological needs.
We spend so much money on breast cancer that we're harming women from over-screening. The Koman Foundation got hijacked by the anti-abortion right wing.
Bill Gates came up with the Gates Foundation to reverse his horrible image as a monopolist. He started out ok by hiring public health people who really knew what they were doing, to recommend the most cost/beneficial ways to spend a few billion dollars, and that was AIDS and vaccinations in the third world, where he did a lot of good. Then the anti-government and charter school people put a bug in his head to "reform" education by mandatory testing and firing teachers. He's responsible for an educational disaster.
That shows what happens when you have a billionaire dictator running things.
As I said on another site, Not as bad as they try to make it sound.
The reporters at Pro Publica and NPR went to Haiti. The reporters went to the locations where the Red Cross said they had been working, to see what the Red Cross had accomplished, and they talked to the people that the Red Cross was supposed to have been helping.
I don't suppose you went to Haiti yourself to check them out, did you?
How about giving it to the Haiti government? Surely they know best what areas to focus on?
Unfortunately the US has been in the habit of overthrowing the Haitian government whenever the Haitian people elected a leader who did not defer to the wealthy power structure in Haiti and their American-sponsored corporate elite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
According to Paul Farmer, when Aristide was president, Bill Clinton undermined his health policies. Farmer, a doctor who splits his time between Harvard and Haiti, said that the only way to deliver health care was through a coordinated effort, and that had to be done through the government. Clinton OTOH insisted on sending all medical relief through independent agencies, so Aristide wouldn't get credit for it. The result was that care was uncoordinated, with different groups doing things independently, without regard to duplication or priorities.
One church group might might be giving out eyeglasses, another group giving out AIDS education, another group treating cleft lips, while what they really needed urgently was to develop their main hospitals and deliver care rationally. First reduce the infant and maternal mortality.
The people Farmer worked with were established in the communities, had contacts with everyone, and spoke the local languages.
The development groups would hire consultants for $10,000 a day. The local health care system could hire local laborers for $10 a day and local doctors for $100 a day.
I wouldn't call that "debunked". People are certainly throwing around the $500 million number assuming that all went to housing, which is not correct (only about $100 million did), but the Red Cross still failed at their own stated goals, and their lawyers refuse to provide any accurate accounting of where the money went beyond lumping large sums into large buckets (e.g., $24 million went into development of Campeche). The Haitians living in Campeche are equally curious about where the money went, because they haven't seen much done beyond some sidewalks and a wall painted with the Red Cross logo. The Red Cross specifically said they were going to build hundreds of homes and rebuild entire neighborhoods, and they've done neither. Even though it's true that they did not budget $500 million to that single effort, they still have failed to accomplish what they said they were going to do, and they have still failed to account for where that money went.
I would add that the people who wrote that article actually went to Haiti where the Red Cross said they provided aid, and talked to the people there on the ground.
I will bet money that the guy who wrote that attack job http://skeptics.stackexchange.... did all his research sitting on his/her ass surfing the Internet within the US.
Haiti had a massive cholera problem (as a result of cholera being introduced to the island by UN workers).
MSF had a detailed report on what they did with the money.
Emergency Response After the Haiti Earthquake: Choices, Obstacles, Activities and Finance Six months after the earthquake Six months after Haiti’s January 12 earthquake, MSF describes the organization’s largest ever emergency response. http://www.doctorswithoutborde...
Yes, and as the original Pro Publica article said, MSF collected money for Haitian operations, and then told people not to send any more money because they had enough money. They don't need money. Their main need is for competent personnel. When a crisis hits, MSF is swamped with volunteers, and they have to separate the competent volunteers with experience in crisis work, from the well-meaning inexperienced volunteers who will just create more problems.
When's the last time you heard a charity say they had enough money?
The Red Cross OTOH had meetings where the executives referred to it as a great fund-raising opportunity.
The Red Cross is a parking lot for incompetent, ideologically biased political appointees, like Elizabeth Dole, who among other things edited the AIDS education manuals to eliminate anything that would offend the Christian right, like homosexuality. http://www.thenation.com/artic...http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05...
OTOH, the staff below them includes a lot of dedicated, competent people, which is why they're always blowing the whistle to the press.
"A Pint's a Pound the World Around." By Charles A. L. Totten. International Institute for Preserving and Perfecting (Anglo-Saxon) Weights and Measures
They bid us change the ancient "names." The "seasons" and the "times;" And for our measures go abroad To strange and distant climes. But well abide by things long clear And cling to things of yore. For the Anglo-Saxon race shall rule The earth from shore to shore. Then down with every "metric" scheme Taught by the foreign school. We'll worship still our Father's God! And keep our Father's "rule"! A perfect inch. a perfect pint. The Anglo's honest pound. Shall hold their place upon the earth. Till Time's last trump shall sound!
CHORUS: Then swell the chorus heartily. Let every Saxon sing: "A pint's a pound the world around." Till all the earth shall ring. "A pint's a pound the world around" For rich and poor the same; Just measure and a perfect weight Called by their ancient name!
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fullt... A History of the Metric System Controversy in the United States. U.S. Metric Study Tenth Interim Report. National Bureau of Standards (DOC) , Washington, DC REPORT NO NBs-SP-345-10 August 1971. 307p. Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402 (Catalog No. 0 13.10:345-10, $2.25)
Why you could write a Python script called CEO.py to do their job.
Maybe it's early yet but I was expecting to see reply posts about how the job is much more complex than that and can only be done by a gifted person and not just any old random Joe. I did consider that probably not many CEOs will have/. accounts but there seems to be plenty of people who are not CEOs that buy into that concept.
I used to read BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal editorial page so I know what they'll say:
We are geniuses, we have MBAs, we can manage anything, we don't have to know what the business does, or how it works, we just have to cut costs, give incentives and fire people, the free market is God.
I could expand on that but I'd have to charge you $200 an hour.
Make that $400 an hour. I learned from them how to pull a number out of the air.
Slashdot Mirror
Since tobacco kills 400,000 Americans every year, and I forget how many millions worldwide, I don't get very upset about a drug like cocaine or heroin which kills only about 20,000 Americans a year.
Washington State is a (poorly run) nanny state. I work at UW. This past month, in order to qualify for a $125 "wellness incentive" on my health insurance next year, I had to fill out a "well-being assessment" that, among other things, asked me multiple questions regarding whether I felt "empowered" at work. Based on my answers, one of the suggested activities I could do for credit (in addition to the more reasonable "eat five fruits and vegetables" and "walk at least 35,000 steps a week") was "meet with a mentor". Yeah, you guys can't even agree on a budget but you can spend money developing an overly-simplistic computerized system to pretend you're actually caring for your employees...
I wouldn't blame the nanny state for wellness incentives. That started out from the HR departments of the big corporations, as a way to cut health costs. I remember reading about that in BusinessWeek in the 1980s. More recently, I've seen studies of wellness incentives in the New England Journal of Medicine. They vary between being totally useless and having a small effect. Science doesn't know enough about diet to tell you that eating specific foods will improve your health (and cut your employer's health care costs).
(Do you want to have fun? Ask your employer to show you the publications in the peer-reviewed literature to support those "suggestions.")
Of course BusinessWeek didn't want to recommend the non-corporate ways to cut health care costs. http://www.openmedicine.ca/art...
To speak to the nursing, the greater problem presented in that industry tends to be that there are more practicing male MDs than female MDs with females being weeded out and eventually going into nursing. So, it gets spun from "not enough males in nursing" to "women get forced out of MDs and over-saturate nursing".
That's not what's happening. Medical schools are admitting as many women as men now. https://www.aamc.org/newsroom/...
The route to medical school and nursing school are completely different. They draw different people.
Medical school is a much more intensive course, with more years of clinical training. Most medical students that I know come from upper-class families, where their parents could send them to top K-12 and undergraduate schools, and as we know, family income is the factor most strongly associated with school performance. I know doctors who didn't have loans because their parents could pay their tuition and expenses in cash.
Nursing school is shorter and less intense. Nurses are more often working-class. It's less expensive (that is, more attainable) and the payback time on your investment is shorter. It's less competitive. It's also easier to take time off from your career and come back. It's less of a career commitment.
Most nurses I meet are pretty smart. Nurses catch doctors in mistakes. Some of them manage departments, go into research, get PhDs, MBAs, law degrees, etc. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to manage an operating room?) But it's a different career track.
Why does nobody ever worry about boys under-representation on things, like Nursing ?
I mean, I know the reason why there are disparities between genders in certain fields, and it isn't representative of some hidden misogynist agenda of the HeMan Woman's Haters Club. The fact is, that there are Gender Attractions to certain kinds of work, and why can't we just leave it at that.
Men and Women tend to be different.
Actually, back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was some discussion in the nursing profession about the overabundance of women. One of the nursing associations had a logo with a stylized design of a nurse, that looked female. After some discussion, they changed the design to make it more androgynous. But the ratio of male to female nurses hasn't changed much.
I would hypothesize that there was a strong movement to move women into more desirable male occupations. But there was no corresponding movement to move men into more desirable female occupations, like nursing. I don't remember any men suing a nursing school or hospital for not giving equal opportunity to men.
Another occupation that was female-dominated and highly-paid was secretaries, especially legal and medical secretaries, who were often making more than their fathers. There are fewer secretaries now, but there is still a female predominance.
I felt then and I still feel that we should encourage people to go into professions that they enjoy and are good at, regardless of sex. But it hasn't happened. It used to bug me that probably half the male nurses and secretaries were straight, but the other half was gay. They were just strongly female occupations. There do seem to be biologically-based preferences.
Females simply don't seem to like software development work much.
Female developers tend to move away from development into project management, as soon as they can.
You describe all of engineering, not just software development: I've seen a lot women grads jump ship to Projects within a couple years of doing actual engineering work after college. Not just at this company either, I've kept track of a lot of my classmates via LinkedIn and it's a very common trend.
I once worked in a company that evaluated new technology for investors. We were writing reports in a Wall Street office. One of my co-workers was a woman with an engineering degree. After she graduated, she got a job in engineering. The way she described it, she sounded like a parody of Cosmopolitan. "I had to go out on the factory floor! I had to wear a helmet!" The kind of thing that I thought was cool, she thought was horrible. So she got a desk job with us.
There are good women engineers, but they're rare, and hands-on women engineers are even rarer. Many male engineers move into management or support roles, and they're useful too. But every female engineer I've met was in a management job where they didn't do things hands-on.
That's my experience. I wonder if anyone has done a formal scientific study.
You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.
It's also possible that it is in fact age appropriate computer science education. No, your kindergartner can't write C, but they can learn how to follow a flowchart to do a task that would be otherwise too complicated for them. They can play games and activities with sorting and filtering. They can learn about '0'. You can even introduce the concepts behind the basic data structures to a kindergartner if you do it right. The kids need not touch a computer at all in a young "computer science" course.
I did some research into K-12 science education. Science magazine had a lot of good articles.
I thought the most important thing that professional teachers knew, that I didn't know, and that most non-teachers don't know, is figuring out what's age appropriate.
Science magazine gave some examples of some fairly important, sophisticated ideas that you can teach to kindergarten kids -- if you know how to do it. OTOH there were some ideas that I thought were obvious, that even high school kids had trouble with.
What works -- one lesson for kindergarten kids was to learn the difference between living objects and inanimate objects. They give the kids a collection of small objects -- seeds, pebbles, etc. Then they plant the objects. A few days later, the seeds sprout but the pebbles don't do anything. That demonstrates what it means to be living. This is actually a point of confusion for kindergarten-age kids, and this is a good way of teaching that lesson.
What doesn't work -- DNA. Molecules. Kids can't understand the concept of molecules even in the lower high school grades. How could they? Science is the study of your observations of the natural world. How can 6th grade kids observe molecules? How can they do anything but learn by rote and parrot the textbooks? I took my niece to a museum, and they had an exhibit of DNA, with plastic CATG codes and evrything. After she saw the exhibit, I asked my niece what DNA was. She didn't know. I asked some other kids. They had no understanding of what that exhibit was all about. The best they could do was pick up a few buzzwords from the labels, like "Code of life." If I told them that angels were linking peptides together, they would have believed me.
Gerard Piel, the founder of the modern Scientific American, defined science for me. (1) A scientist has a theory. (2) He figures out an experiment to test that theory. (3) He performs the experiment. (4) The experiment confirms or rejects his theory. That's science. He said that every Scientific American story repeated that model. Rosalind Franklin thought DNA was a double helix. She did X-ray crystallography and confirmed it. That's science.
Cooking is not chemistry. Memorizing facts about things that you have never seen is not chemistry. Richard Feynman explained this very well.
Here's the best science teaching story I ever heard:
A kindergarten teacher was teaching her class about birds. She explained how different birds ate different food, and other age-appropriate facts. Then it was a nice day so she decided to take her class on a walk through the woods.
Along came a woodpecker. It started pecking on the tree. She hadn't mentioned woodpeckers, because woodpeckers weren't a common bird in their area. None of them had seen a woodpecker before.
A little girl said, "Oh, I know what he's doing. He's eating bugs."
Fuck computer science. Fuck coding. Get a good science teacher to take her kids on a walk through the woods, or whatever she thinks is good. Leave the science teachers alone. They know how to teach. They know about computers. If they need your help, they'll ask you.
If computers fit into it, fine, but don't go mandating computers and tell them, "Here, fit this into your science classes."
Read what Feynman has to say about science education, and ask yourself, "How would Feynman apply this to computers?"
In New York City, I don't need a Spanish dictionary. I just stop a pretty Spanish girl on the street, say, "Hable espanol?" and ask her to translate the word.
I wish I had known that when I was younger.
Germany has fewer college graduates. Is Sanders telling the less intelligent 2/3 that he is going to save them from student loans by refusing them admission to college, or is he just a bullshitter?
Germany invests in a student's education, and gets that money paid back in taxes after 5 years (just like CCNY did). With that return on investment, any business would keep expanding.
If Sanders got his way, anybody who was willing to put in the academic effort could go to college.
Even if a kid only goes for 1 year and drops out, you've still increased his lifetime earnings and tax contributions. It's free money.
Germany BTW has one of the best systems of trade schools in the world, so students can also choose vocational training if they prefer.
That's the kind of vocational education system the US used to have before the Reagan Revolution. We did it before, we can do it again.
"Maybe the Germans have collectively decided that the cost of the education is trivial compared to the long term gains of keeping some highly educated people around, or having its own citizens be educated."
Maybe Germans would re-think that decision if they had to pay a realistic sum for their own civil defense rather than rely on the US and NATO.
Maybe the Germans have decided that the last time they had a military big enough to bully everybody else it didn't work so well.
And let's not use euphemisms like "defense." The reason the U.S. has a military as big as the rest of the world put together is so that war wimps like GWB and Cheney can push other countries around. We would have been better off without it. They wouldn't have been able to evade Iraq.
"Maybe, gasp, it's possible to both make profits and take care of your people -- and that it isn't an either/or proposition."
Pick two:
o Make Profits
o Take Care of Your People
o Protect your People
o Spend $3 trillion invading Iraq. That's the one I can do without.
Part of it is not eating your planting seed. Germany sees what lack of education has done in the US, and isn't going to make that mistake.
In the US, pursuit of an education means that one has to get a decent job to deal with student loans unless one is born into wealth. While I was getting my degree, the classmate from Germany, China, and Chile were also doing coursework. However, come graduation, they all left and went home debt-free, and were wondering why the US penalizes people wanting to better themselves worse than they do criminals (since most fines and virtually all civil judgments can be tossed in bankruptcy.)
There is becoming a larger and larger disaffected population in the US. Right now, it mainly is apolitical and hedonistic, but just like a jar of liquid sodium acetate, it doesn't take much for things to crystallize around the smallest ideal and form an insurgent cause if people feel it might better their lives from the minimum wage grind.
Bernie Sanders, who got a free education at Brooklyn College, supports a European-style free education system. He also wants to forgive college loans.
This simply isn't true. People come to the US all of the time, and get their education...then move back to their country of origin and work there.
Sure, not Everyone moves out of the US after studying here...but they're not forced to. And the taxes you're paying for all that FWEE education come from the working residents of Germany, from whom you'll have to continue to pilfer to fund this Utopian solution.
FTA:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
Research shows that the system is working, says Sebastian Fohrbeck of DAAD, and that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany.
"Even if people don't pay tuition fees, if only 40% stay for five years and pay taxes we recover the cost for the tuition and for the study places so that works out well."
Why? I didn't speak a word of Spanish when I came to study engineering in Madrid, and I didn't speak a word of German when I came to work in Stuttgart. 10 years later, I'm fluent in Spanish and German.
I need human contact with native speakers (and beers, lots of beers!) in order to learn a language.
It's a lot easier to learn German from a German girlfriend than it is to learn it from Berlitz.
"Free". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. They pay out the ass in taxes for that "free" education and over the course of their career, they'll pay more money than if they just took out loans and paid for it themselves. But sure, keep using the word "free" for things paid for via taxes.
Yes, it is free.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
Research shows that the system is working, says Sebastian Fohrbeck of DAAD, and that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany.
"Even if people don't pay tuition fees, if only 40% stay for five years and pay taxes we recover the cost for the tuition and for the study places so that works out well."
It's free to the student because he didn't pay anything.
It's free to the government because they got paid back from it more than they put in.
It's free because when you invest money, and get more out of it than you put in, it's free.
City College in New York City used to be free. CCNY turned out Nobel laureates and creators of industry like Andy Grove, founder of Intel. You can read the biographies on the Nobel prize web site of people who say that they never could have afforded to go to college if CCNY weren't free.
CCNY was a meritocracy. You got in because you made the grade. That's different from a free market, where you get in because your father is rich (like George W. Bush).
I don't think you know what the word "free" means. Most native speakers of English know what the word "free" means, because they are familiar with "free" education and "free" libraries, which is where a lot of them spent their childhood.
I think there must be a script going around to search message boards for the text "free", and post a reply, "It's not free! They pay for it in taxes!"
People in functioning democracies realize that there are some services that the government can provide more cheaply than the "free" market. Education is one of them. The market is always more expensive. You can pay $10,000 in taxes or $20,000 in the marketplace for a year of school. There is no developed country in the world that doesn't provide free education for its population.
In the presidential election, Bernie Sanders is the one candidate who says that college should be free (as it is in Europe), and that students should be able to discharge their current loans. Sanders went to Brooklyn College, which was free at that time (and graduated a few Nobel laureates too).
So if you want free college for yourself and your children, and you want to get rid of your college debts, vote for Bernie. If like Mitch Romney your father's rich, then vote for Hillary or the Repugnicans.
It's also possible that your father is rich, but you want to see free college education for everyone because it's right, or because it's good for the country.
The Welfare Reform Act, which you credit to Clinton, was a Republican project only signed by Clinton when presented to him for the third time. It did a great deal to reduce poverty by getting the undeserving poor off their fat, lazy asses.
Unfortunately nobody got the undeserving rich off their fat, lazy asses. Democrat or Republican, they're still getting government handouts. GWB, you recall, was a drunken loser and a failure all his life, until his father's friends cut him into a government-subsidized football stadium deal.
The big-time undeserving rich can be found in the medical insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry. Obamacare has now forced people to get their health care through the insurance industry, which takes a 20% cut off the top of your premium dollar. They've guaranteed that Medicare will pay the pharmaceutical industry whatever they choose to charge, even if it's $50 for an asthma inhaler that costs $15 in Europe, or $100,000 for a cancer drug that was developed with government-funded research.
The welfare "reform", that Clinton signed, was a disaster for the poor. It worked passably well when the economy was booming, and there were jobs for everyone who wanted one, but after the economic bust, the poor were really suffering. There have been plenty of studies to show that.
http://www.newsday.com/opinion...
OpEdOpinion
Will Hillary Clinton run against her husband's welfare legacy?
June 1, 2015
By MELINDA HENNEBERGER, Bloomberg News
Almost 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton made good on his campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it," some of his oldest friends were beside themselves....
A smaller percentage of Americans are getting the help they need: In 1996, 68 of every 100 families living in poverty received cash assistance. Today, only 26 of 100 do, and in 10 states, that number is under 10. Because federal aid is no longer guaranteed to anyone living in poverty, states can simply make it harder to qualify for help, and then point to the low number of people they're serving as a measure of success....
The consensus among Clinton's aides, both those who supported and opposed the bill, was that the move was not politically necessary. Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos told the president that he did not have to sign the bill to be reelected, but was far enough ahead of GOP nominee Bob Dole that he'd win in November either way.
Benjamin Franklin:
“I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
Now I understand why Howard Zinn said that the founders of the country were upper-class property-owners serving their own interest.
Franklin's advice may have worked when the county had a labor shortage and there was work for everyone who wanted to work, and free farmland for everyone (except negroes) who wanted to strike out on his own, but it doesn't make any sense when there's massive unemployment and no more free farm land.
I'm more and more convinced that the Republican and Democratic parties are like the head and tails of a quarter. No matter which one you look at it's just the other side of the same thing.
The proof of that is the Obama health plan, which is really the health plan of the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank.
The Democratic Party today is further to the right than Richard Nixon (whose Secretary of Health and Human Services was Daniel Patrick Moynihan), who supported a guaranteed national income and a national health program.
Clinton was a "centrist" Democrat, which is not really in the center of American opinion but pretty far to the right. It's only in the center of the big campaign contributors.
Clinton's advisor was Rahm Emanuel, who was also Obama's chief of staff, and who ruled out a single payer health care system or even a public option. The reason Emanuel was so powerful is that he was the Democratic Party's big fundraiser. Under Emanuel, their principles are for sale. Give them $100 million in contributions, as the health insurance industry did, and they'll give you anything you want.
The worst thing Clinton did for the country was his Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which took away the right to welfare, and gave everyone 5-year limits. That increased the poverty in the US, and made poor people really miserable. Clinton's own assistant secretary of health and human services, Peter Edelman, publicly resigned over it. Edelman and his wife were old friends of the Clintons, and Edelman said Clinton's welfare reform destroyed everything he believed in. That was another Rahm Emanuel idea.
The entire Democratic party isn't worthless, just most of them. You can look at the Democrats who voted against the war in Iraq, against the Welfare Reform Act, against the Bush and Obama education bills, against ending bankruptcy for college loans, against the tough-on-crime bills, for single payer and the public option. I'd estimate it might be as much as 1/3 of the Democratic Party. Most of them are in the Democratic Progressive Caucus.
Now Bernie Sanders is running, and he's getting about 15% of Democrats in the polls. We'll see if the majority is smart enough to vote for a candidate who represents their interests, or if they'll just be mesmerized by wall-to-wall TV commercials again.
this is why I'm a socialist. Anyone who complains about gov'ts wasting money has never paid any mind to how charities spend their bucks. With gov't we can at least bring corruption charges when this sort of thing happens (assuming we have the political will). With these private charities it's all nice and legal...
Under a well-run socialist government, you can set the priorities in a rational way, where there is the greatest need. In Haiti, they have to develop, equip and maintain their main hospitals, and in public health, the most cost/beneficial priorities are pregnancy and infant care, vaccinations, and sanitation.
Private charities respond to emotional and psychological needs.
We spend so much money on breast cancer that we're harming women from over-screening. The Koman Foundation got hijacked by the anti-abortion right wing.
Bill Gates came up with the Gates Foundation to reverse his horrible image as a monopolist. He started out ok by hiring public health people who really knew what they were doing, to recommend the most cost/beneficial ways to spend a few billion dollars, and that was AIDS and vaccinations in the third world, where he did a lot of good. Then the anti-government and charter school people put a bug in his head to "reform" education by mandatory testing and firing teachers. He's responsible for an educational disaster.
That shows what happens when you have a billionaire dictator running things.
As I said on another site, Not as bad as they try to make it sound.
The reporters at Pro Publica and NPR went to Haiti. The reporters went to the locations where the Red Cross said they had been working, to see what the Red Cross had accomplished, and they talked to the people that the Red Cross was supposed to have been helping.
I don't suppose you went to Haiti yourself to check them out, did you?
How about giving it to the Haiti government? Surely they know best what areas to focus on?
Unfortunately the US has been in the habit of overthrowing the Haitian government whenever the Haitian people elected a leader who did not defer to the wealthy power structure in Haiti and their American-sponsored corporate elite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
According to Paul Farmer, when Aristide was president, Bill Clinton undermined his health policies. Farmer, a doctor who splits his time between Harvard and Haiti, said that the only way to deliver health care was through a coordinated effort, and that had to be done through the government. Clinton OTOH insisted on sending all medical relief through independent agencies, so Aristide wouldn't get credit for it. The result was that care was uncoordinated, with different groups doing things independently, without regard to duplication or priorities.
One church group might might be giving out eyeglasses, another group giving out AIDS education, another group treating cleft lips, while what they really needed urgently was to develop their main hospitals and deliver care rationally. First reduce the infant and maternal mortality.
The people Farmer worked with were established in the communities, had contacts with everyone, and spoke the local languages.
The development groups would hire consultants for $10,000 a day. The local health care system could hire local laborers for $10 a day and local doctors for $100 a day.
I remind you that Clinton was a Democrat.
I wouldn't call that "debunked". People are certainly throwing around the $500 million number assuming that all went to housing, which is not correct (only about $100 million did), but the Red Cross still failed at their own stated goals, and their lawyers refuse to provide any accurate accounting of where the money went beyond lumping large sums into large buckets (e.g., $24 million went into development of Campeche). The Haitians living in Campeche are equally curious about where the money went, because they haven't seen much done beyond some sidewalks and a wall painted with the Red Cross logo. The Red Cross specifically said they were going to build hundreds of homes and rebuild entire neighborhoods, and they've done neither. Even though it's true that they did not budget $500 million to that single effort, they still have failed to accomplish what they said they were going to do, and they have still failed to account for where that money went.
That's a good summary of the Pro Publica/NPR article. https://www.propublica.org/art...
I would add that the people who wrote that article actually went to Haiti where the Red Cross said they provided aid, and talked to the people there on the ground.
I will bet money that the guy who wrote that attack job http://skeptics.stackexchange.... did all his research sitting on his/her ass surfing the Internet within the US.
Funny, I had come across that a couple days ago and was about to post it.
At least they're ahead of Doctors Without Borders, I hear they didn't build any permanent residences in Haiti. Where does all the money go?
Medical treatment.
http://www.doctorswithoutborde...
Haiti had a massive cholera problem (as a result of cholera being introduced to the island by UN workers).
MSF had a detailed report on what they did with the money.
Emergency Response After the Haiti Earthquake: Choices, Obstacles, Activities and Finance
Six months after the earthquake
Six months after Haiti’s January 12 earthquake, MSF describes the organization’s largest ever emergency response.
http://www.doctorswithoutborde...
Another good one is MSF (Doctors Without Borders).
http://www.doctorswithoutborde...
Yes, and as the original Pro Publica article said, MSF collected money for Haitian operations, and then told people not to send any more money because they had enough money. They don't need money. Their main need is for competent personnel. When a crisis hits, MSF is swamped with volunteers, and they have to separate the competent volunteers with experience in crisis work, from the well-meaning inexperienced volunteers who will just create more problems.
When's the last time you heard a charity say they had enough money?
The Red Cross OTOH had meetings where the executives referred to it as a great fund-raising opportunity.
The Red Cross is a parking lot for incompetent, ideologically biased political appointees, like Elizabeth Dole, who among other things edited the AIDS education manuals to eliminate anything that would offend the Christian right, like homosexuality. http://www.thenation.com/artic... http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05...
OTOH, the staff below them includes a lot of dedicated, competent people, which is why they're always blowing the whistle to the press.
1. Number of metric-using nations who put the first man in space.
2. Number of non-metric nations who put the first man in space.
"A Pint's a Pound the World Around."
By Charles A. L. Totten.
International Institute for Preserving and Perfecting (Anglo-Saxon) Weights and Measures
They bid us change the ancient "names."
The "seasons" and the "times;"
And for our measures go abroad
To strange and distant climes.
But well abide by things long clear
And cling to things of yore.
For the Anglo-Saxon race shall rule
The earth from shore to shore.
Then down with every "metric" scheme
Taught by the foreign school.
We'll worship still our Father's God!
And keep our Father's "rule"!
A perfect inch. a perfect pint.
The Anglo's honest pound.
Shall hold their place upon the earth.
Till Time's last trump shall sound!
CHORUS:
Then swell the chorus heartily.
Let every Saxon sing:
"A pint's a pound the world around."
Till all the earth shall ring.
"A pint's a pound the world around"
For rich and poor the same;
Just measure and a perfect weight
Called by their ancient name!
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fullt...
A History of the Metric System Controversy in the United States. U.S. Metric Study Tenth Interim Report. National Bureau of Standards (DOC) , Washington, DC
REPORT NO NBs-SP-345-10 August 1971. 307p. Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402 (Catalog No. 0 13.10:345-10, $2.25)
Why you could write a Python script called CEO.py to do their job.
Maybe it's early yet but I was expecting to see reply posts about how the job is much more complex than that and can only be done by a gifted person and not just any old random Joe. I did consider that probably not many CEOs will have /. accounts but there seems to be plenty of people who are not CEOs that buy into that concept.
I used to read BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal editorial page so I know what they'll say:
We are geniuses, we have MBAs, we can manage anything, we don't have to know what the business does, or how it works, we just have to cut costs, give incentives and fire people, the free market is God.
I could expand on that but I'd have to charge you $200 an hour.
Make that $400 an hour. I learned from them how to pull a number out of the air.