Scientific American recently did an article about the soil bacteria mycobacterium vaccae, which you're likely to be exposed to in a forest. Apparently it gives mice a temporary, but fairly large boost in maze solving ability. No clue if it applies to humans as well, but there's certainly no harm in getting out of the city every once in a while.
Given the prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, and atherosclerosis, I don't think we've quite cleared the "error" part of "trail and error"... GMOs might be better or they might be worse, but we really ought to given them a trial. As far as public health is concerned, the only thing worse than our current diet is our sedentary lifestyle.
Exactly. Modern crops have been artificially selected for over 10,000 years and bear little resemblance to their ancestors. Strangely enough, the leading causes of death are related to diet... Eating unaltered food is probably a good idea, but it's not like modern agriculture grows anything like that, GMO or not.
Heck, most genetic engineering methods (e.g. tranduction) can occur naturally, and probably have given the time-frame, so it's not like this is unprecedented. The primary difference being that a scientist is guiding it, rather than several generations of farmers waiting for it to happen randomly. Plus the farmer only has appearance and taste to go off of.
In research it's important to understand the probability of a Type I and Type II error. Screwing up the math prevents this. You're not going to get 100% accuracy in research, so we're forced to accept that. The math (and grammar, spelling, etc.) is used to express the findings, and I see no reason for a journal not to at least check it. This isn't experimental brain surgery, it's a completely solved problem. It's not even like you have to know anything about the research to crunch the numbers.
As for doctors, with evidence based medicine they do alter treatment based on p-values and effect sizes. If two treatments are otherwise equivalent, a research study showing a benefit to one that's approaching significance might sway the doctor to prescribe that one. OTOH, a more obvious effect would be if Drug A lowers LDL cholesterol by 35% or 20% compared to the older Drug B which lowers it by 15%. The former (35% VS 15%) is likely a clinical difference, whereas the latter (20% VS 15%) likely isn't.
Given the amount of academic dishonesty, it wouldn't surprise me if some of these errors were even intentional, to sell more of a drug, or to ensure the researcher gets more grants. Given that researchers have sent in photoshopped before/after pictures and everything else, journals should obviously be looking for deception everywhere, including the math.
There's still evidence. Go to a doctor and get a copy of the medical record ASAP (preferably before changing cloths, although being arrested might preclude this). If the officers are completely fine except for knuckles injuries, whereas you just have defensive wounds then it's the office who needs to defend himself.
OTOH, this usually works out in the officer's favor, since officers are generally more reputable than the people they arrest (or at least that's how it is in the ER in my city). But the medical record will reflect reality, and the worst case scenario is that it'll be too ambiguous to tell. Just be sure you get a doctor familiar with such things, since forensics isn't a part of the standard medical curriculum.
Well, to be honest I did look a bit more at that part before criticizing it. On page two of the article they elaborate:
The Macbook Air we received from Apple had previously been sent to other reviewers, so we first needed to get the SSD into a "clean" state. While we have an established way of doing with Windows systems - using HDDerase to perform a low level format - we needed to find a way of doing this with OS X. The OS X installer actually allows you to load an app called Disk Utility, which can partition and format the drive - and one of the options is for a format which zeroes all the data.
According to Apple, "the "Zero all data" option... takes the erasure process to the next level by converting all binary in the empty portion of the disk to zeros, a state that might be described as digitally blank." The next level? Count. Us. In.
And the link goes to an Apple site that explains what zeroing the data does and how to do it.
Once we'd done this with the clean SSD, we then proceeded to give it a damn good thrashing. As with our Windows SSD testing, we filled the SSD with around 112GB of files from a USB hard disk - the files included OS files, game installs and media. We then deleted these files, then copied them across again, repeating the process ten times, so that we'd written over 1TB of data to the SSD.
So... they wrote over the whole disk with a format, then copied and deleted a bunch of files in hopes to get full coverage of the disk (i.e. exactly what the zeroing format did). That's about three levels of abstraction above what they're trying to test.
While skimming the article two parts really stood out. First:
Apple's description of the zeroing format method we used fits the description of what we wanted in terms of resetting the SSD to a clean state
Zeroing is not the same operation as TRIM. TRIM marks a block as unused, and if you read it you'll either get random data, or zeros (probably the later). Zeroing marks it as in-use, and if you read it you'll get zeros. The SSD's wear management algorithm will move the latter around as though it were real data, whereas it knows the former is "empty" so it won't bother (so the SSD will be faster). In other words, they don't seem to be using a "clean state" at all, which would explain why there's no difference.
Secondly, the SSD in the Macbook Air really isn't very fast at all
Which strengthens the hypothesis that they were comparing one "full" state with another. Pop out the drive, TRIM the whole disk in another OS, and run the benchmark again. It'll probably be a lot faster. It wouldn't surprise me if installing the Mac OS at the factory caused every block on the SSD to be used at least once (e.g. a whole disk image was written), which would mean you'd already be at the worse possible performance degradation.
I don't give partial credit. =) But in any case, there's no excuse for getting the math wrong. Most scientists aren't mathematicians, but math is what separates science from philosophy. Without accurate math it's all just pointless speculation unlinked with objective reality.
As for changing the conclusion, that's absolutely unacceptable since it moves science backwards. Changing the p-value is bad enough, since someone is definitely going to double check a p-value of.049 but might accept one of.001 since a type I error is so unlikely. Or having a higher level of effect might make doctors prescribe a more expensive/risky medicine when there's really no clinical difference. This stuff can easily kill people. Journals are paid extremely well and that's mostly to filter out and correct errors.
Well, I have libertarian tendencies, so I like to think having fewer laws in general is a good idea. In a pure democracy the unwashed masses get to make laws, which I think is generally a bad idea. But just being able to remove them is a decent check on legislative power.
I doubt the first, second, fourth, thirteenth, or nineteenth amendments would be revoked, but that is a bit optimistic in retrospect. I was thinking more along the lines of the eighteenth and the random "interstate commerce" laws. I'm having difficulty thinking of a law representative of the will of the people that could be struck down, but I suppose an actor might sway the gullible majority.
Personally, I think we should go back to putting a Hammurabi-style stone monument in the center of every city with every law that applies in the jurisdiction. If congress, state government, or the mayor want more laws, they need to pay for a bigger stone and let people visually see how ridiculous it's getting. And no cheating with 1 pt font, it needs to be readable by a person walking past.
OTOH, it'd go a long way in the right direction to repeal any law the majority of the population disapproves of. Just a simple democratic vote at election time on anything strongly opposed. No law could be any worse than public apathy tolerated, and laws with secret justifications have no place in a republic. Having not read the article it's possible that's the role of this website. But for some reason I doubt the politicians relinquished their authority to override the will of the people.
A quick googling indicates that 38% of papers published in Nature contain at least one statistical error. A student that earns a 62% in a subject is said to not understand that subject.
Personally, I use tabs so I can open the relevant links and get to them after I read the current page. There are fewer interruptions that way. Usually, I'd rather finish what I'm currently reading than go off on a tangent, but I'm sure it's just a matter of preference. OTOH, I'd say your strategy of Click, Back, Click, Back is how most people would intuitively try to search for something.
Two hundred characters for a single phrase would be huge. It's a passphrase, not a passsentence. Plus you can type real words much faster than high entropy passwords. Time-wise they might take a bit longer than a well-memorized (a.k.a. "soon to be expired") password, but nothing like the difference in character count would suggest. OTOH, it's much harder to gauge the entropy of an English phrase than a random string, so there are practical problems with them from a policy standpoint.
If you're in a group that disagrees with you then you're likely to succumb for two reasons. First, an open minded person will always keep in mind the fact that they might be wrong, and several people echoing that doubt will strengthen it. Second, evolutionarily it's better to be in a group that's kinda wrong about something than to be alone. Of course, it's better to jump ship if they're really wrong, which leaves some room for the average person to go against the group.
As for intelligence, it seems this would both filter out everyone's unique stupidity, thus raising the group's collective intelligence. OTOH, smart ideas that don't quickly convince people would also be filtered out, thus reducing the group's collective intelligence. Overall, I'd say that puts a group at slightly lower intelligence than its average member, but also less likely to make stupid mistakes. And the random but convincing sound-bites outweigh the more intricate ideas, hence politics.
This is an interesting and highly technical application of math and grammar, but biology is too messy for it. Probabilities are for when you don't have all of the information. You might be able to refine the estimate slightly, but if you knew everything then you have a 100% "chance" of the actual outcome (assuming a deterministic universe... or maybe not). Since the Y chromosome is lighter, more males are born than females. OTOH, females are more likely to survive. Apparently birth order also affects the distribution of sexes. Birthdays also aren't entirely randomly distributed, so did a Tuesday fall nine months after a holiday 10-15 years ago? There's probably some more epidemiology you could throw in, so this quickly rises outside the scope of a mathematical problem. It just depends on how technical you want to get, and what your area of expertise is. But it's just refinement, and at some point you'll run into the L'effet Tetris.
Most people couldn't even tell you who the trusted certificate authorities were on their browser. From there, I'd say the number of users who personally trust all of them approaches zero. Knowing that you're connecting to the same entity on every connection would prevent most MITM attacks.
Of course, ideally, we'd verify the certificates over physical means. Until there's an easy way to do that you always run the risk of connecting to an impostor. OTOH, people are happy to give money to a random company (e.g. VeriSign) that promises security without requiring any change in behavior.
I detest examples such as this. They imply that you only need privacy if you're doing something wrong. Why not use one where a person is friends with both a fundamentalist christian and a well-known atheist, or a homosexual and a homophobe? There are countless examples of where doing the right thing has negative repercussions if the wrong people find out about it.
Privacy isn't your right to get away with illegal or immoral behavior. If you frame it as such then people will rightfully point out that you do not have such a right.
This does show though that proving that something is not random data would be very important before they try waterboarding a password out of you:)
Well, torture isn't really effective as an information gathering technique. OTOH, it's probably great stress relief, which they might need after realizing they've wasted weeks/months of computer time because you decided to be cute...
Having libertarian tendancies and liking to test my assumptions, I did a quick linear regression of HDI VS Tax Rate. I included the 20 countries with the highest HDI (.950 or higher) and excluded Liechtenstein since I couldn't easily find its tax rate. Taxes were measured as Tax Revenue as a percent of GDP to control for the various types of tax systems.
R = -.17. For countries with high development indexes, higher tax rates have little effect on HDI, and the effect seems to be negative at that. So, governments are not using higher tax rates to improve the lives of their citizenry. Therefore, I'd like to use my own money to improve my own life, since giving it to the government seems to be a poor investment.
Of note, Japan, the US, Switzerland, Australia, and Canada have the highest HDI to Tax ratio (i.e. best bang for your tax buck), respectively. HDI^3/Taxes only swaps the position of Switzerland and Australia.
Basically non-contact sports games (assuming they don't reference "Taiwan"). In other words, stuff that you have no reason to do virtually rather than physically. One of the main advantages of games is to the ability do things you can't or shouldn't in real life.
Interesting, since the 100th anniversary of the Flexner report was this year.
When Flexner researched his report, many American medical schools were "proprietary", namely small trade schools owned by one or more doctors, unaffiliated with a college or university, and run to make a profit. A degree was typically awarded after only two years of study. Laboratory work and dissection were not necessarily required. Many of the instructors were local doctors teaching part-time, whose own training left something to be desired. The regulation of the medical profession by state government was minimal or nonexistent. American doctors varied enormously in their scientific understanding of human physiology, and the word "quack" flourished. There is no evidence that the mass of Americans were dissatisfied with this situation.
An advance nurse practitioner seems to match what you're looking for. The last I heard, they were considered to be around the equivalent of a third year medical student as far as competency goes. A full doctor has four years of medical school plus 3-7+ years of residency, so they have about half the training. The problem is, most patients want full doctors, highly specialized ones at that, just as they want the latest, greatest, highly expensive treatments.
Physician salaries, OTOH, aren't really as high as one might think. They used to be quite good, but they didn't keep up with inflation. An average surgery resident (whose education is payed for by the US government) earns $11 - $14 per hour, and has $150k in debt. After the completion of residency that figure triples, but it's still pretty low for 11+ years of post-graduate education and a hectic work/on-call schedule for a stressful and somewhat risky occupation. Some specialties are better than others, but you can't pay doctors much less unless you want it to return to being a historic "profession" where people do it for mostly altruistic reasons. Many claim that's already the case.
The primary problem is that we have the medical technology to greatly improve quality of life, but not the economic resources to provide everything to everyone. Just as there are only so many kidneys to transplant, there are only so many dollars to pay for healthcare. In a capitalist system you're screwed if you're poor, though autonomy is maximized. In a socialist system you're screwed if the quality-adjusted-life-year to cost ratio is above a certain cutoff point, but overall beneficence is maximized. As medical technology advances, there will be more and more that we can't afford to do for everyone. It's not really a solvable problem, though there is a ton of room for optimization.
And 10 years later the company's software won't run on anything but slow, outdated, unsupported hardware. A major upgrade is required, and the cost saved by forgoing incremental updates is blown, with a fair bit of downtime as a bonus. It's penny-wise but pound-foolish.
OTOH, realistically, big business just holds technology back (e.g. IE6). But it's not like 64 bit, modern browsers, and OS upgrades are fads. It'll have to be done eventually, and procrastination rarely makes things cheaper.
So, in other words, we should annex all countries with a lower or equal population to the largest US state? Obviously they're too small to govern themselves...
Unjust laws are the reason we need multiple strong tiers of government. It's far less likely that your city, county, state, and country will all tolerate an injustice. Right now, the bulk of laws are federal (actual or de facto through coercion and pork), so there's a single point of failure. What we need is to have most laws be local, with progressively fewer, but stronger ones as you go up. Such a strategy decentralizes the power, so your local government's laws are broad but weak, whereas the federal government has narrow, but powerful laws.
The other benefit is that you get to determine how and where you live, and it's more difficult for people in other places to get esoteric laws passed that change your way of life. People need to mind their own business, and only meddle in other's if it's to correct a serious injustice.
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I think it'd help the obesity epidemic. Just make sure they're going 5 mph in the opposite direction from any fast food restaurant.
Scientific American recently did an article about the soil bacteria mycobacterium vaccae, which you're likely to be exposed to in a forest. Apparently it gives mice a temporary, but fairly large boost in maze solving ability. No clue if it applies to humans as well, but there's certainly no harm in getting out of the city every once in a while.
Given the prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, and atherosclerosis, I don't think we've quite cleared the "error" part of "trail and error"... GMOs might be better or they might be worse, but we really ought to given them a trial. As far as public health is concerned, the only thing worse than our current diet is our sedentary lifestyle.
Exactly. Modern crops have been artificially selected for over 10,000 years and bear little resemblance to their ancestors. Strangely enough, the leading causes of death are related to diet... Eating unaltered food is probably a good idea, but it's not like modern agriculture grows anything like that, GMO or not.
Heck, most genetic engineering methods (e.g. tranduction) can occur naturally, and probably have given the time-frame, so it's not like this is unprecedented. The primary difference being that a scientist is guiding it, rather than several generations of farmers waiting for it to happen randomly. Plus the farmer only has appearance and taste to go off of.
In research it's important to understand the probability of a Type I and Type II error. Screwing up the math prevents this. You're not going to get 100% accuracy in research, so we're forced to accept that. The math (and grammar, spelling, etc.) is used to express the findings, and I see no reason for a journal not to at least check it. This isn't experimental brain surgery, it's a completely solved problem. It's not even like you have to know anything about the research to crunch the numbers.
As for doctors, with evidence based medicine they do alter treatment based on p-values and effect sizes. If two treatments are otherwise equivalent, a research study showing a benefit to one that's approaching significance might sway the doctor to prescribe that one. OTOH, a more obvious effect would be if Drug A lowers LDL cholesterol by 35% or 20% compared to the older Drug B which lowers it by 15%. The former (35% VS 15%) is likely a clinical difference, whereas the latter (20% VS 15%) likely isn't.
Given the amount of academic dishonesty, it wouldn't surprise me if some of these errors were even intentional, to sell more of a drug, or to ensure the researcher gets more grants. Given that researchers have sent in photoshopped before/after pictures and everything else, journals should obviously be looking for deception everywhere, including the math.
There's still evidence. Go to a doctor and get a copy of the medical record ASAP (preferably before changing cloths, although being arrested might preclude this). If the officers are completely fine except for knuckles injuries, whereas you just have defensive wounds then it's the office who needs to defend himself.
OTOH, this usually works out in the officer's favor, since officers are generally more reputable than the people they arrest (or at least that's how it is in the ER in my city). But the medical record will reflect reality, and the worst case scenario is that it'll be too ambiguous to tell. Just be sure you get a doctor familiar with such things, since forensics isn't a part of the standard medical curriculum.
The Macbook Air we received from Apple had previously been sent to other reviewers, so we first needed to get the SSD into a "clean" state. While we have an established way of doing with Windows systems - using HDDerase to perform a low level format - we needed to find a way of doing this with OS X. The OS X installer actually allows you to load an app called Disk Utility, which can partition and format the drive - and one of the options is for a format which zeroes all the data.
According to Apple, "the "Zero all data" option... takes the erasure process to the next level by converting all binary in the empty portion of the disk to zeros, a state that might be described as digitally blank." The next level? Count. Us. In.
And the link goes to an Apple site that explains what zeroing the data does and how to do it.
Once we'd done this with the clean SSD, we then proceeded to give it a damn good thrashing. As with our Windows SSD testing, we filled the SSD with around 112GB of files from a USB hard disk - the files included OS files, game installs and media. We then deleted these files, then copied them across again, repeating the process ten times, so that we'd written over 1TB of data to the SSD.
So... they wrote over the whole disk with a format, then copied and deleted a bunch of files in hopes to get full coverage of the disk (i.e. exactly what the zeroing format did). That's about three levels of abstraction above what they're trying to test.
Apple's description of the zeroing format method we used fits the description of what we wanted in terms of resetting the SSD to a clean state
Zeroing is not the same operation as TRIM. TRIM marks a block as unused, and if you read it you'll either get random data, or zeros (probably the later). Zeroing marks it as in-use, and if you read it you'll get zeros. The SSD's wear management algorithm will move the latter around as though it were real data, whereas it knows the former is "empty" so it won't bother (so the SSD will be faster). In other words, they don't seem to be using a "clean state" at all, which would explain why there's no difference.
Secondly, the SSD in the Macbook Air really isn't very fast at all
Which strengthens the hypothesis that they were comparing one "full" state with another. Pop out the drive, TRIM the whole disk in another OS, and run the benchmark again. It'll probably be a lot faster. It wouldn't surprise me if installing the Mac OS at the factory caused every block on the SSD to be used at least once (e.g. a whole disk image was written), which would mean you'd already be at the worse possible performance degradation.
I don't give partial credit. =) But in any case, there's no excuse for getting the math wrong. Most scientists aren't mathematicians, but math is what separates science from philosophy. Without accurate math it's all just pointless speculation unlinked with objective reality.
.049 but might accept one of .001 since a type I error is so unlikely. Or having a higher level of effect might make doctors prescribe a more expensive/risky medicine when there's really no clinical difference. This stuff can easily kill people. Journals are paid extremely well and that's mostly to filter out and correct errors.
As for changing the conclusion, that's absolutely unacceptable since it moves science backwards. Changing the p-value is bad enough, since someone is definitely going to double check a p-value of
Well, I have libertarian tendencies, so I like to think having fewer laws in general is a good idea. In a pure democracy the unwashed masses get to make laws, which I think is generally a bad idea. But just being able to remove them is a decent check on legislative power.
I doubt the first, second, fourth, thirteenth, or nineteenth amendments would be revoked, but that is a bit optimistic in retrospect. I was thinking more along the lines of the eighteenth and the random "interstate commerce" laws. I'm having difficulty thinking of a law representative of the will of the people that could be struck down, but I suppose an actor might sway the gullible majority.
Personally, I think we should go back to putting a Hammurabi-style stone monument in the center of every city with every law that applies in the jurisdiction. If congress, state government, or the mayor want more laws, they need to pay for a bigger stone and let people visually see how ridiculous it's getting. And no cheating with 1 pt font, it needs to be readable by a person walking past.
OTOH, it'd go a long way in the right direction to repeal any law the majority of the population disapproves of. Just a simple democratic vote at election time on anything strongly opposed. No law could be any worse than public apathy tolerated, and laws with secret justifications have no place in a republic. Having not read the article it's possible that's the role of this website. But for some reason I doubt the politicians relinquished their authority to override the will of the people.
A quick googling indicates that 38% of papers published in Nature contain at least one statistical error. A student that earns a 62% in a subject is said to not understand that subject.
Personally, I use tabs so I can open the relevant links and get to them after I read the current page. There are fewer interruptions that way. Usually, I'd rather finish what I'm currently reading than go off on a tangent, but I'm sure it's just a matter of preference. OTOH, I'd say your strategy of Click, Back, Click, Back is how most people would intuitively try to search for something.
Sounds like when I realized Ctrl + Left Click works the same way for touchpads. OTOH, right clicking then hitting "T" wasn't that big a deal.
Two hundred characters for a single phrase would be huge. It's a passphrase, not a passsentence. Plus you can type real words much faster than high entropy passwords. Time-wise they might take a bit longer than a well-memorized (a.k.a. "soon to be expired") password, but nothing like the difference in character count would suggest. OTOH, it's much harder to gauge the entropy of an English phrase than a random string, so there are practical problems with them from a policy standpoint.
If you're in a group that disagrees with you then you're likely to succumb for two reasons. First, an open minded person will always keep in mind the fact that they might be wrong, and several people echoing that doubt will strengthen it. Second, evolutionarily it's better to be in a group that's kinda wrong about something than to be alone. Of course, it's better to jump ship if they're really wrong, which leaves some room for the average person to go against the group.
As for intelligence, it seems this would both filter out everyone's unique stupidity, thus raising the group's collective intelligence. OTOH, smart ideas that don't quickly convince people would also be filtered out, thus reducing the group's collective intelligence. Overall, I'd say that puts a group at slightly lower intelligence than its average member, but also less likely to make stupid mistakes. And the random but convincing sound-bites outweigh the more intricate ideas, hence politics.
This is an interesting and highly technical application of math and grammar, but biology is too messy for it. Probabilities are for when you don't have all of the information. You might be able to refine the estimate slightly, but if you knew everything then you have a 100% "chance" of the actual outcome (assuming a deterministic universe... or maybe not). Since the Y chromosome is lighter, more males are born than females. OTOH, females are more likely to survive. Apparently birth order also affects the distribution of sexes. Birthdays also aren't entirely randomly distributed, so did a Tuesday fall nine months after a holiday 10-15 years ago? There's probably some more epidemiology you could throw in, so this quickly rises outside the scope of a mathematical problem. It just depends on how technical you want to get, and what your area of expertise is. But it's just refinement, and at some point you'll run into the L'effet Tetris.
Most people couldn't even tell you who the trusted certificate authorities were on their browser. From there, I'd say the number of users who personally trust all of them approaches zero. Knowing that you're connecting to the same entity on every connection would prevent most MITM attacks.
Of course, ideally, we'd verify the certificates over physical means. Until there's an easy way to do that you always run the risk of connecting to an impostor. OTOH, people are happy to give money to a random company (e.g. VeriSign) that promises security without requiring any change in behavior.
I detest examples such as this. They imply that you only need privacy if you're doing something wrong. Why not use one where a person is friends with both a fundamentalist christian and a well-known atheist, or a homosexual and a homophobe? There are countless examples of where doing the right thing has negative repercussions if the wrong people find out about it.
Privacy isn't your right to get away with illegal or immoral behavior. If you frame it as such then people will rightfully point out that you do not have such a right.
This does show though that proving that something is not random data would be very important before they try waterboarding a password out of you :)
Well, torture isn't really effective as an information gathering technique. OTOH, it's probably great stress relief, which they might need after realizing they've wasted weeks/months of computer time because you decided to be cute...
Having libertarian tendancies and liking to test my assumptions, I did a quick linear regression of HDI VS Tax Rate. I included the 20 countries with the highest HDI (.950 or higher) and excluded Liechtenstein since I couldn't easily find its tax rate. Taxes were measured as Tax Revenue as a percent of GDP to control for the various types of tax systems.
R = -.17. For countries with high development indexes, higher tax rates have little effect on HDI, and the effect seems to be negative at that. So, governments are not using higher tax rates to improve the lives of their citizenry. Therefore, I'd like to use my own money to improve my own life, since giving it to the government seems to be a poor investment.
Of note, Japan, the US, Switzerland, Australia, and Canada have the highest HDI to Tax ratio (i.e. best bang for your tax buck), respectively. HDI^3/Taxes only swaps the position of Switzerland and Australia.
Basically non-contact sports games (assuming they don't reference "Taiwan"). In other words, stuff that you have no reason to do virtually rather than physically. One of the main advantages of games is to the ability do things you can't or shouldn't in real life.
When Flexner researched his report, many American medical schools were "proprietary", namely small trade schools owned by one or more doctors, unaffiliated with a college or university, and run to make a profit. A degree was typically awarded after only two years of study. Laboratory work and dissection were not necessarily required. Many of the instructors were local doctors teaching part-time, whose own training left something to be desired. The regulation of the medical profession by state government was minimal or nonexistent. American doctors varied enormously in their scientific understanding of human physiology, and the word "quack" flourished. There is no evidence that the mass of Americans were dissatisfied with this situation.
An advance nurse practitioner seems to match what you're looking for. The last I heard, they were considered to be around the equivalent of a third year medical student as far as competency goes. A full doctor has four years of medical school plus 3-7+ years of residency, so they have about half the training. The problem is, most patients want full doctors, highly specialized ones at that, just as they want the latest, greatest, highly expensive treatments.
Physician salaries, OTOH, aren't really as high as one might think. They used to be quite good, but they didn't keep up with inflation. An average surgery resident (whose education is payed for by the US government) earns $11 - $14 per hour, and has $150k in debt. After the completion of residency that figure triples, but it's still pretty low for 11+ years of post-graduate education and a hectic work/on-call schedule for a stressful and somewhat risky occupation. Some specialties are better than others, but you can't pay doctors much less unless you want it to return to being a historic "profession" where people do it for mostly altruistic reasons. Many claim that's already the case.
The primary problem is that we have the medical technology to greatly improve quality of life, but not the economic resources to provide everything to everyone. Just as there are only so many kidneys to transplant, there are only so many dollars to pay for healthcare. In a capitalist system you're screwed if you're poor, though autonomy is maximized. In a socialist system you're screwed if the quality-adjusted-life-year to cost ratio is above a certain cutoff point, but overall beneficence is maximized. As medical technology advances, there will be more and more that we can't afford to do for everyone. It's not really a solvable problem, though there is a ton of room for optimization.
And 10 years later the company's software won't run on anything but slow, outdated, unsupported hardware. A major upgrade is required, and the cost saved by forgoing incremental updates is blown, with a fair bit of downtime as a bonus. It's penny-wise but pound-foolish.
OTOH, realistically, big business just holds technology back (e.g. IE6). But it's not like 64 bit, modern browsers, and OS upgrades are fads. It'll have to be done eventually, and procrastination rarely makes things cheaper.
So, in other words, we should annex all countries with a lower or equal population to the largest US state? Obviously they're too small to govern themselves...
Unjust laws are the reason we need multiple strong tiers of government. It's far less likely that your city, county, state, and country will all tolerate an injustice. Right now, the bulk of laws are federal (actual or de facto through coercion and pork), so there's a single point of failure. What we need is to have most laws be local, with progressively fewer, but stronger ones as you go up. Such a strategy decentralizes the power, so your local government's laws are broad but weak, whereas the federal government has narrow, but powerful laws.
The other benefit is that you get to determine how and where you live, and it's more difficult for people in other places to get esoteric laws passed that change your way of life. People need to mind their own business, and only meddle in other's if it's to correct a serious injustice.