What kind of moron takes something that "look[s] like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding" onto an airplane?
What kind of moron LETS SOMEONE take something that look[s] like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding" onto an airplane? I mean, if snow globes are verboten, how in the world could that contraption possibly get on board in the first place?
... waiting for approval from Medicare to have knee surgery, and cataract surgery with lens implants. She's waiting. And waiting. Her doctors are warning ehr that if she doesn't do these things pretty quickly, it may be too late for the best outcomes.
Unless the TPA (third party administrator, the folks that actually are contracted to do the preauthorizations) are really behind, like years, that's FUD. A couple of months isn't going to change things and if it does, it suggests that the patient may well not be stable enough to deal with multiple surgeries. There are appeal procedures if reviews don't happen fairly quickly as well.
No Medicare isn't perfect, it's top heavy, slow and confusing. However private insurers aren't exactly known for timeliness when it comes to spending their money. And the Government has already taken over the industry, in large part because the industry has shown, when left to it's own devices, it is not much of an advocate for the patient.
She did all the x-ray crystallography that showed the structure. She should also get credit for the discovery of the structure. But because she was considered impersonable (to say the least), history relegates her to a footnote.
Impersonable? In the same context as James Watson? The only people less personable that Watson are Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin and Hermann Goehring. Rosalind Franklin was the tooth fairy compared to James Watson.
Less irrelevant trivia: As usual, everybody is getting all fuzzy eyed about Watson (who was a flaming asshole) and Crick (who was a really nice guy and the brains of the outfit). But it's easy to forget Rosalind Frankilin who did much of the heavy lifting that Watson & Crick tend to get credit for.
As even they have said, once you see the structure, the general mechanism is pretty obvious.
The alternative would be to close down the FCC and let people broadcast whatever they want wherever they want at whatever power pleases them. There are probably people who think this is a good idea, and won't believe otherwise until Anonymous gets a hold of a transmitter.
Correction: it would be a good idea, if humanity wasn't primarily comprised of greedy, narcissistic assholes.
If the laws of thermodynamics didn't apply to everything, perpetual motion machines would also be a good idea. But it does, so they aren't.
Same with humans. We ARE primarily composed of greedy, narcissistic, psychopathic assholes, so letting anyone broadcast anything anywhere is really a bad idea.
there needs to be a top to bottom evaluation of the entire medical system.
And, of course, that won't ever happen. This country can't even come to grips with simple things like Daylight Savings Time. Rejiggering a quarter of the economy at one time?
Coding for diseases and symptoms in the US is done with a system called the ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases, version 9). This was codified in the 1980s (the ICD has been going on since around 1900). This was superceeded by the ICD-10 in 1992 and is now used in every country except the US (and I think North Korea). It's just a database. We can't even get ourselves arsed to upgrade a bunch of tables, much less completely reframe how health care delivery is done.
75% of money spent on health care in the U.S. is for self-inflicted diseases or the consequences thereof. That might be a good place to start looking.
I'm not saying that people that need dialysis or bypass surgery shouldn't be helped; I'm saying we should be spending money on ways to help them not get there in the first place.
Citation please. Those are numbers pulled out of various nether regions. Yes, people can do much for themselves to decrease / delay morbidity (not mortality so much). And yes, we should encourage and teach people to watch their weight, not smoke, drink alcohol in vast moderation, do yoga, clean their rooms and brush their teeth twice daily (floss once) but health care still is going to cost quite a bit of money - maybe more as the number of frail elderly that need increasing care climbs dramatically.
Remember, one entertaining factoid in all of this - with all the 'bad things' we're doing (pollution / plastics / obesity / diabetes / whatever disease is popular this month) the average longevity of the population is slowly and steadily INCREASING. Now most of us think that's a good thing. Not many want to go back to the pre medical days of a 35 year average longevity, but it does have it's consequences....
Won't work until you have a much higher penetrance rate for HDHP (HIgh Deductible Health Plans). Right now, anyone with an HDHP gets royally screwed paying top dollar for the care they do get. It does tend to prevent people from using health care resources, but given the broad brush you're sweeping with, that's not necessarily a good thing.
The idea that HDHPs will actually decrease billed costs to something more reasonable (no $60 aspirins) has yet to be shown. It puts the burden on the wrong person and typically will only be used by intelligent, reasonably well off, healthy people - a small subset of the total population.
You expect that. It's somebody-or-other's law. There is always going to be a distribution of disease / habit / whatever and thus money spent (or not spent).
Now, those folks are often touted as the low hanging fruit for medical cost savings, but it rarely works out that way because those people are sick. They're the ones that got short changed in the luck of the draw - they've had horrible diseases that are often not the result of anything under their control. Or they've just had the bad luck to walk into a bus.
Yes, we can always manage those folks better and cheaper but as always, most of the area under the curve is in the first two standard deviations off the mean.
Unfortunately, this time you're more correct than insane. (We won't talk about the adjustments - those should be done with a framing hammer for most people).
The little article quoted to support the argument that 'more spending is better healthcare' is illustrative.
mortality rate was 12.7% vs 12.8% for AMI, 10.2% vs 12.4% for CHF, 7.7% vs 9.7% for hip fracture, and 3.3% vs 3.9% for CHF
Note those big differences folks. Right down there in the noise floor.
In the US we spend WAY too much doing things to people that gives very little benefit to them. The major culprit is the 'free market' system where profit (at multiple levels) is considered the appropriate metric. Although everyone and their little sister will go on about how 'patient care is first', everyone in the system realizes that this is just a sop to the weak of mind.
It's been an interesting experiment, but the results are all too clear. Going to be a bit longer before the folks who stand to benefit from this mess get forced to clean it up (just like a couple of other industries, isn't it?).
All these new "flying cars" or "roadable aircraft" are utterly worthless until the day comes when one of them is fully capable of, at the push of a button, making the transition from car to aircraft and take off into the sky while actively driving down the highway.
You've just got to be an American with that mind set. I'm surprised you included the requirement to 'push the button'. Wouldn't mind control be less work?
The main problem with a "car autogyro" is likely to be chopping up pedestrians and bikers. Which is traditionally seen as "OK" when done by drivers, so maybe its not going to be so bad after all.
You've brought up the first positive thing about this goofball contraption in the entire thread.
Please, the fact that pretty much everyone have their personal portable communication device should be a pretty good indication that we have been in the future for a while now.
I assume it has a parachute like most similarly-sized aircraft.
I wouldn't assume that. Where would you put it? Below the blades? Oops. Look at that nice parachute floating in the sky - without the gyrocopter.
And it's not 'most similarly sized aircraft', it's one small manufacturer (Cirrus). Gyrocopters are felt to be safer than helicopters or planes because they can autorotate down safely in the event of power loss. That gives it a slower sink rate than a typical small aircraft in glide mode and a much smaller sinkrate that a typical non powered helicopter crash rate (typically, terminal velocity of the airframe). SOME 'real' helicopters autorotate, if everything is connected and working (also an issue with the gyrocopter although the blade / mast setup is much, much simpler than a powered helicopter's).
Hmm, see my previous post. Just looking at the various fora on these things (Rheem, GE, Fujistu), they do seem to fail fairly frequently. Fujitsu and GE just had a recall on the exchangers for some models (they might in fact be the same device, hard to keep track of who makes what these days).
The manufacturer would send the exchanger to your local dealer who could charge you labor to replace the unit. Oopsie.
So, I think you are correct - commercial stuff is pretty well made and would likely last a couple of decades. It also costs 4 - 5 times the cost of the residential units and then you're buying into overengineering unless you have a houseful of teenaged girls. Perhaps if I was designing a new house, I'd go that route but for a retrofit, the value just doesn't seem to be there.
We're also seeing only the second or third generation units come out now. It's certainly possible that they can figure out the manufacturing problems and come up with a better design. Look at cars - it only took GM 80 years before they manufactured vehicles that could last longer than a decade.
Read up on the various tankless systems out there. If you follow the various forums, there are two consistent complaints. The first is that folks don't understand electricity and they think they can put 30 kW through an extension cord - they don't plan on having an electrician look at the panel before the thing ends up at the door on pallet. Second issue is that they break. The heat exchangers and compressors seem most problematic. If your installing one to save money and you end up with a $500 repair bill, that equates to a fair amount of hot water.
Another common complaint is that the power savings are not nearly as much as advertised (surprise!).
When we did the last major upgrade on the our house, mostly looking at energy efficiency, I looked carefully at both tankless heaters and heat pumps. Given the poor quality of the residential gear coupled with marginal savings and increased complexity, we passed on both. Adding a passive solar boost to the hot water system makes the most sense for me, even in SE Alaska with it's notorious lack of sunshine - so that's the next project. Might finish it before the sun goes out...
OTOH, endless hot water is endless power use. No free lunch here. What running out of hot water means is that you didn't get your tank sized correctly.
Likely cheaper to buy a bigger tanked heater (modern one with decent insulation) than run around putting a bunch of instant on heaters that need their own dedicated power circuits and have lots of little gizmo type things to break. Larger tankless systems need a fair amount of power. If you have an older house, that might mean an upgrade in your panel box. Now, that has lots of other potential advantages (safety, flexibility) but now you're in the endless-renovation dilemma.
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I think I'm going to kill myself with the mains power cord before they take that away from me.
Sounds like 1984 on ketamine.
Wow.
"This did indeed management to pass."
That is on the front page of your website. Everyone should be fired, immediately, and replaced with people who know how to write English.
We apologise again for the fault in the titles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
What kind of moron takes something that "look[s] like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding" onto an airplane?
What kind of moron LETS SOMEONE take something that look[s] like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding" onto an airplane? I mean, if snow globes are verboten, how in the world could that contraption possibly get on board in the first place?
Unless the TPA (third party administrator, the folks that actually are contracted to do the preauthorizations) are really behind, like years, that's FUD. A couple of months isn't going to change things and if it does, it suggests that the patient may well not be stable enough to deal with multiple surgeries. There are appeal procedures if reviews don't happen fairly quickly as well.
No Medicare isn't perfect, it's top heavy, slow and confusing. However private insurers aren't exactly known for timeliness when it comes to spending their money. And the Government has already taken over the industry, in large part because the industry has shown, when left to it's own devices, it is not much of an advocate for the patient.
Denial Denialism?
Where does that get fun?
Yo Dawg....
No, no. Won't do that.
Two GUIs enter!
One GUI leaves!
That would be "last week" from last week when inhabitat got the story a week late? The boat was sighted March 20th.
Ha. Wait until next week. "Ghost Ship Closing In on American Coast!".
Slashdot will report that sometime in August.
She did all the x-ray crystallography that showed the structure. She should also get credit for the discovery of the structure. But because she was considered impersonable (to say the least), history relegates her to a footnote.
Impersonable? In the same context as James Watson? The only people less personable that Watson are Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin and Hermann Goehring. Rosalind Franklin was the tooth fairy compared to James Watson.
Less irrelevant trivia: As usual, everybody is getting all fuzzy eyed about Watson (who was a flaming asshole) and Crick (who was a really nice guy and the brains of the outfit). But it's easy to forget Rosalind Frankilin who did much of the heavy lifting that Watson & Crick tend to get credit for.
As even they have said, once you see the structure, the general mechanism is pretty obvious.
The alternative would be to close down the FCC and let people broadcast whatever they want wherever they want at whatever power pleases them. There are probably people who think this is a good idea, and won't believe otherwise until Anonymous gets a hold of a transmitter.
Correction: it would be a good idea, if humanity wasn't primarily comprised of greedy, narcissistic assholes.
If the laws of thermodynamics didn't apply to everything, perpetual motion machines would also be a good idea. But it does, so they aren't.
Same with humans. We ARE primarily composed of greedy, narcissistic, psychopathic assholes, so letting anyone broadcast anything anywhere is really a bad idea.
there needs to be a top to bottom evaluation of the entire medical system.
And, of course, that won't ever happen. This country can't even come to grips with simple things like Daylight Savings Time. Rejiggering a quarter of the economy at one time?
Coding for diseases and symptoms in the US is done with a system called the ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases, version 9). This was codified in the 1980s (the ICD has been going on since around 1900). This was superceeded by the ICD-10 in 1992 and is now used in every country except the US (and I think North Korea). It's just a database. We can't even get ourselves arsed to upgrade a bunch of tables, much less completely reframe how health care delivery is done.
We're doomed.
What are we doing different in the U.S.?
We're throwing our money at CEOs the same way school girls throw wet panties at Justin Bieber at concerts. Next question.
Man, am I ever glad I've never been to a Justin Bieber concert. What a lucky life I've lived.
75% of money spent on health care in the U.S. is for self-inflicted diseases or the consequences thereof. That might be a good place to start looking.
I'm not saying that people that need dialysis or bypass surgery shouldn't be helped; I'm saying we should be spending money on ways to help them not get there in the first place.
Citation please. Those are numbers pulled out of various nether regions. Yes, people can do much for themselves to decrease / delay morbidity (not mortality so much). And yes, we should encourage and teach people to watch their weight, not smoke, drink alcohol in vast moderation, do yoga, clean their rooms and brush their teeth twice daily (floss once) but health care still is going to cost quite a bit of money - maybe more as the number of frail elderly that need increasing care climbs dramatically.
Remember, one entertaining factoid in all of this - with all the 'bad things' we're doing (pollution / plastics / obesity / diabetes / whatever disease is popular this month) the average longevity of the population is slowly and steadily INCREASING. Now most of us think that's a good thing. Not many want to go back to the pre medical days of a 35 year average longevity, but it does have it's consequences....
Won't work until you have a much higher penetrance rate for HDHP (HIgh Deductible Health Plans). Right now, anyone with an HDHP gets royally screwed paying top dollar for the care they do get. It does tend to prevent people from using health care resources, but given the broad brush you're sweeping with, that's not necessarily a good thing.
The idea that HDHPs will actually decrease billed costs to something more reasonable (no $60 aspirins) has yet to be shown. It puts the burden on the wrong person and typically will only be used by intelligent, reasonably well off, healthy people - a small subset of the total population.
You expect that. It's somebody-or-other's law. There is always going to be a distribution of disease / habit / whatever and thus money spent (or not spent).
Now, those folks are often touted as the low hanging fruit for medical cost savings, but it rarely works out that way because those people are sick. They're the ones that got short changed in the luck of the draw - they've had horrible diseases that are often not the result of anything under their control. Or they've just had the bad luck to walk into a bus.
Yes, we can always manage those folks better and cheaper but as always, most of the area under the curve is in the first two standard deviations off the mean.
PUT THAT TWINKIE DOWN! NOW.
Hi grub! You're back! We missed you!
Unfortunately, this time you're more correct than insane. (We won't talk about the adjustments - those should be done with a framing hammer for most people).
The little article quoted to support the argument that 'more spending is better healthcare' is illustrative.
mortality rate was 12.7% vs 12.8% for AMI, 10.2% vs 12.4% for CHF, 7.7% vs 9.7% for hip fracture, and 3.3% vs 3.9% for CHF
Note those big differences folks. Right down there in the noise floor.
In the US we spend WAY too much doing things to people that gives very little benefit to them. The major culprit is the 'free market' system where profit (at multiple levels) is considered the appropriate metric. Although everyone and their little sister will go on about how 'patient care is first', everyone in the system realizes that this is just a sop to the weak of mind.
It's been an interesting experiment, but the results are all too clear. Going to be a bit longer before the folks who stand to benefit from this mess get forced to clean it up (just like a couple of other industries, isn't it?).
All these new "flying cars" or "roadable aircraft" are utterly worthless until the day comes when one of them is fully capable of, at the push of a button, making the transition from car to aircraft and take off into the sky while actively driving down the highway.
You've just got to be an American with that mind set. I'm surprised you included the requirement to 'push the button'. Wouldn't mind control be less work?
Exercise! It's what's before dinner.
The main problem with a "car autogyro" is likely to be chopping up pedestrians and bikers. Which is traditionally seen as "OK" when done by drivers, so maybe its not going to be so bad after all.
You've brought up the first positive thing about this goofball contraption in the entire thread.
We're officially in the future now.
Please, the fact that pretty much everyone have their personal portable communication device should be a pretty good indication that we have been in the future for a while now.
Yeah, and just look where it's got us....
I assume it has a parachute like most similarly-sized aircraft.
I wouldn't assume that. Where would you put it? Below the blades? Oops. Look at that nice parachute floating in the sky - without the gyrocopter.
And it's not 'most similarly sized aircraft', it's one small manufacturer (Cirrus). Gyrocopters are felt to be safer than helicopters or planes because they can autorotate down safely in the event of power loss. That gives it a slower sink rate than a typical small aircraft in glide mode and a much smaller sinkrate that a typical non powered helicopter crash rate (typically, terminal velocity of the airframe). SOME 'real' helicopters autorotate, if everything is connected and working (also an issue with the gyrocopter although the blade / mast setup is much, much simpler than a powered helicopter's).
SOME Helicopters can autorotate. SOME of the time.
I'll take wings over a Jesus nut any day.
Hmm, see my previous post. Just looking at the various fora on these things (Rheem, GE, Fujistu), they do seem to fail fairly frequently. Fujitsu and GE just had a recall on the exchangers for some models (they might in fact be the same device, hard to keep track of who makes what these days).
The manufacturer would send the exchanger to your local dealer who could charge you labor to replace the unit. Oopsie.
So, I think you are correct - commercial stuff is pretty well made and would likely last a couple of decades. It also costs 4 - 5 times the cost of the residential units and then you're buying into overengineering unless you have a houseful of teenaged girls. Perhaps if I was designing a new house, I'd go that route but for a retrofit, the value just doesn't seem to be there.
We're also seeing only the second or third generation units come out now. It's certainly possible that they can figure out the manufacturing problems and come up with a better design. Look at cars - it only took GM 80 years before they manufactured vehicles that could last longer than a decade.
Read up on the various tankless systems out there. If you follow the various forums, there are two consistent complaints. The first is that folks don't understand electricity and they think they can put 30 kW through an extension cord - they don't plan on having an electrician look at the panel before the thing ends up at the door on pallet. Second issue is that they break. The heat exchangers and compressors seem most problematic. If your installing one to save money and you end up with a $500 repair bill, that equates to a fair amount of hot water.
Another common complaint is that the power savings are not nearly as much as advertised (surprise!).
When we did the last major upgrade on the our house, mostly looking at energy efficiency, I looked carefully at both tankless heaters and heat pumps. Given the poor quality of the residential gear coupled with marginal savings and increased complexity, we passed on both. Adding a passive solar boost to the hot water system makes the most sense for me, even in SE Alaska with it's notorious lack of sunshine - so that's the next project. Might finish it before the sun goes out...
OTOH, endless hot water is endless power use. No free lunch here. What running out of hot water means is that you didn't get your tank sized correctly.
Likely cheaper to buy a bigger tanked heater (modern one with decent insulation) than run around putting a bunch of instant on heaters that need their own dedicated power circuits and have lots of little gizmo type things to break. Larger tankless systems need a fair amount of power. If you have an older house, that might mean an upgrade in your panel box. Now, that has lots of other potential advantages (safety, flexibility) but now you're in the endless-renovation dilemma.