Fear has nothing to do with it. Some people simply like privacy and quiet- having 30 kids running through their yard at random times of the day would be about as palatable to them as you living on a 10-section ranch in Wyoming and having your nearest neighbor being 10 miles away. Just because somebody has a different set of likes and dislikes than you does not make them "afraid" or wrong, just different than you.
Absolutely. The biggest advantage to a larger lawn is that you are guaranteed to have more space between your house and your neighbor's houses. The second advantage that going and playing outside is much easier in a larger lawn. (I know, go outside and play, who does THAT any more?) A half-acre lawn generally means you have at best 20 yards or so between houses, since most half-acre lawns are in town. That's really not a lot of room and the houses are fairly densely packed together in that area. Try to go outside and play pitch and catch in such a lawn. If you slip up at all, you broke the window in the Jones' house or put a dent in Mr. Smith's Buick. Not fun. A six-acre lawn guarantees that you are more like a hundred yards between houses. Also, if you value privacy and quiet, there's a lot more of that when you have a large lawn and thus a larger distance between neighboring houses. You could have a half-acre lawn in a 100-acre chunk of woods and have the privacy, peace, and quiet, but in practice, most people have a few acres of lawn around their house in such a setup just because it's nice to have a lawn to play around with the kids. Chasing the baseball into the woods isn't generally too much fun either.
Missouri is a right-to-work state. Teachers (or anybody else) in the state are not forced to join a union when there is a union at that place of employment. I know this because I have family that were teachers in Missouri that declined to join the teacher's unions.
Actually, you do hear "the great state of Missouri" if you know who to listen to. Tom Bradley on KSSZ (93.9 FM) in Columbia says it all the time during his morning show. I lived a long time in Missouri; it's not a bad place by any means. There is absolutely awesome barbecue coming out of Kansas City, the Cardinals are the best baseball team in the Midwest, the people are generally very friendly, there are abundant outdoor activities, the cost of living is low, and it's generally regarded as one of the freest states in the nation from a nanny-state perspective. On the downside, it's hotter than hell in the summer, and the stereotypical "you're a dumb 'hooz' if you live outside of 'the loop'" jerks in St. Louis are pretty darned annoying. You can recognize them by asking them what highways join with I-70 at "the loop" (I-270)- if they say "Highway Farty" (I-64, which hasn't been officially called U.S. 40 since 1987) and "farty-far" (I-44), you've found one. Overall, not a bad place, just stay a little ways away from St. Louis.
That would be fine and dandy until you realize that most people' natural born talents involve sitting on the couch eating Doritos and watching reruns of "Jersey Shore." If providing some income and relieving people of the need to work resulted in massive creative output, we'd expect to see a bunch of senior citizens on Social Security becoming the next Picasso and people on long-term unemployment compensation for the last 2+ years inventing the flying car. Nope, they just mostly sit on the couch. Call me cynical, but you know it's true.
No kidding, MU's tuition has gotten seriously high as of late. I guess all of those fake trees in the rec center were much more expensive than I thought...
Then you can do the Slashdot DIY mantra and make your own hooch. The chemistry is simple and unless you make an absolutely liver-shredding quantity of beer or wine (or any liquor), it's generally legal as well. If you miss "the scene," make your own 'shine still.
I wouldn't necessarily say the general population stopped wearing watches. Many people do wear them, particularly people who have a job, have a schedule to adhere to, and being able to quickly (and sometimes discreetly) check the time is an asset.
I don't understand the original article either. I am about 10 years younger than you and have worn wristwatches since I was a little kid. Almost all of them have been a normal analog watch, since I personally find them quicker to read than digital watches. They also look a lot nicer as well- when's the last time you saw a digital watch being sold in a halfway-decent department store? The digital ones are nearly all cheap and don't really look very professional. And as far as the "why don't you just use your phone to tell the time?," a watch is much quicker to tell time with. You just have to look at your wrist; it takes less than a second. You would have to reach into your pocket or holster, pull out the phone, and possibly tap at the screen to unlock the display or open the lid to get the phone to display the time, then you have to replace the phone into your pocket or holster. That's a lot more work than just looking at a watch. I am inclined to think that the people using their phone for everything are really just trying to say "hey, look at me, I have an iPhone that cost me $300 upfront plus $2-3k in service fees over the life of the contract!" I suppose a $200 wristwatch doesn't compare to that; you'd need something fancy like a Cartier to match the amount of money dropped on overly-expensive phones.
"Recruiting" immediately comes to mind as a reason to take on interns that cannot immediately benefit the company. You get a very good idea of how well-prepared students who will be graduating from a certain school are. If you are hurting for workers (probably not in today's economy, but maybe again sometime in the future), if you impress the intern they might come back to work for you and bring along some of their former classmates when they finish school. Those reasons sound like pretty good reasons for taking on interns to me.
Residents today in the U.S. generally make in the low to mid $40k range, although some places pay in the $30k range and some pay in the low $50s. Resident paychecks come from Medicare dollars as CMS funds the residency programs (and also limits the number of them as well.) They are officially prohibited from working more than 80 hours per week (along with a big long list of other restrictions- look at the ACGME's website if you want to see all of them), punishable by sanctioning and possibly disbanding the residency program that violates them. The number of hours actually worked varies a lot by specialty and some do lie and work 100 hours a week, but 80 is the official limit.
The difference is that most people making $50k or less ($50k is actually a bit high- most pay in the low to mid $40s with a few out on the west coast paying in the $30k range) don't have the $175-200k+ in student loans that they have to start repaying on graduation. (If they do have that much debt, then they screwed up somewhere.) The monthly payment on $200k in student loans with the standard 10-year program is about $2300 a month. That's $2300 in money after federal income tax, state and city income taxes if you have them, Social Security tax, Medicare/Medicaid taxes, and unemployment insurance taxes. The government considers paying more than 10-15% of your income to be a hardship, and if you take home $3000-3500 per month, that's a heck of a lot more than 15%. You'd have to earn over $275,000 to afford to repay the loan in 10 years using the government figures. Stretching that out to 30 years gives a minimum income of $156k to be able to pay back the loan. You'd never even come close to paying off your loans if you made $50k per year for your entire career.
You are talking about clinical rotations. Clinical rotations are considerably different than an unpaid internship in business or law or any other field. Clinical rotations are explicitly part of your curriculum and your "bosses" are faculty and evaluate you as to how well you perform on the rotation. There also is a good amount of formal education involved in the rotations. You must successfully complete the rotations to graduate, and everybody in all schools of the same type must do most of the same rotations. Yes, you have to report to the hospital/clinic and perform some work for free (actually, you're paying for the privilege), but there are fairly strict guidelines as to what work you can be made to do- it has to have "significant educational value." The accrediting body for medical schools actually gets pretty picky about that last part, so in most cases the student follows around nurses, resident physicians, or attending physicians and isn't required to do much for paperwork or other work. That is in stark contrast to a typical unpaid internship where any specific internship is rarely a mandatory part of your education and you are just doing it to improve your resume and chances of finding a job.
Physicians do have internships; the term is an old one for the first year of a medical residency. Completing at least one year of residency is required to obtain a full medical license in most states and few if any payers will pay you if you do not complete all of your residency, so going through residency is not optional for anybody wanting to practice medicine. Residents do perform a lot of work but they do receive a salary for it. You could argue resident salaries aren't enough and I'd agree with you, but they are getting paid for their work.
The term "climate change" does not suggest any particular kind of change to the climate, such as the term "global warming" did. It can mean literally anything. That allows for two things. Number one is that when any single specific change fails to occur, the people peddling the theory don't get embarrassed such as how the global warming folks got embarrassed when their "hockey-stick" warming prediction failed to happen. Secondly, it allows ANY severe weather to be used as "evidence of climate change" since "climate change" has no firm definition. Essentially it lets the people peddling the theory never be "wrong" in the eyes of the public.
Or in other words, they try to minimize how much they mess with one complex system they don't understand (the climate) by increasing the amount they mess with another complex system they don't understand (the economy.)
The critics do not need a model. The pro-global-warming crowd is hypothesizing that there is 1) statistically-significant warming due to 2) human-released carbon dioxide. They are making hypotheses, and the null hypothesis of "there is nothing that is actually statistically-significant occurring free of confounding variables" MUST be disproven by the people making the hypothesis. The critics merely claim the null hypothesis. That doesn't need a specific model since there is no explanation needed for "nothing is happening."
If you are wondering why the critics are claiming the null hypothesis, it has to deal with the pro-global-warming crowd's projections of warming failing to materialize as well as a lot of confounding variables not being adequately addressed, such as the heat island effect and non-constant number/location of monitoring stations over the recording period, plus the assumptions being made in the indirect extrapolation of past temperatures via ice cores, etc. being incorrect.
I've never had to spoof my browser's user agent to connect to the university wireless to avoid having to download the Cisco Clean Access crap. It apparently just sees I am not running MacOS or Windows and gives me a click-through webpage and that's it. I have had to spoof the user agent to get on some hotels' wireless networks through the Web browser clients. I have never had any actual problem with connecting in those cases after I set the user agent to Windows or Macintosh.
My experiences pretty much mirror yours. The university neither supported nor blocked Linux or any other non-Macintosh/non-Windows operating system. If you had a problem, you had to figure it out on your own, but if you got it to work, they wouldn't stop you. The wireless network was originally 802.11b with just a single shared 128-bit WEP key that was widely distributed and changed once yearly. They eventually moved to WPA2/PEAP once they replaced the 802.11b stuff with 802.11g gear, and that worked fine with wpa_supplicant. The only restrictive thing they ever did was to have scattershot MAC filtering that was supposed to kick off machines that hadn't updated Windows. That process entailed going to a website, typing in your WLAN NIC's MAC, and downloading a utility that was supposed to scan your machine and install the campus antivirus and update Windows. All you had to do is download the utility to unblock your MAC; the website never checked to see if you actually ran it or not. They abandoned the tool pretty quickly after it didn't make much of a change in the number of infected machines on their network and presented a lot of support calls to the IT staff. They then just stuck with the WPA2/PEAP setup with no MAC filtering or whatnot. This worked out well when WLAN-equipped mobile devices started to show up on campus in large numbers, and as far as I know the university still uses this method of filtering.
Currently I work at a facility of a different university and being an employee we use the same network as the students do. Their IT department's stance is that Linux is not supported. They do use the Cisco Clean Access stuff on top of a WPA2/PEAP setup. However, their implementation is to simply make anything that's not supported by the Cisco client click through a webpage. I think they have little choice since the large numbers of iCrap, WLAN-equipped phones, and gaming consoles that the students use would otherwise not be able to work. A bunch of angry tuition-payers is probably not what the university wants.
I'd also add that whoever has a "college degree required for this position" job generally also hopes that because somebody managed to get a degree, they probably (hopefully) have the worst of the immaturity out of their system. The degree holder would have had to have lived away from their parents for a few years and been exposed to The World and not completely succumbed to booze, laziness, drugs, etc. to get that degree. I personally think college is an awfully expensive and wasteful method to try to have people grow up a little before starting a Real Job (I'd prefer to have seen people worked full-time at some place and have a decent work record), but that's certainly a mindset of HR people.
A flat tax is a flat tax, it taxes the exact same proportion of anybody's income no matter what their income is. You have a flat tax confused with a sales/consumption tax, which is considered regressive since people with a lower income tend to spend a greater percentage of it than people with a higher income.
Deductions by and large do not affect "the rich," if you're using the IRS's definition of "rich" to mean anybody that makes $175,000 or more per year and is subject to the alternative minimum tax. They don't affect "the rich" since "the rich" get to take few to no deductions due to the alternative minimum tax. The alternative minimum tax phases out deductions and exemptions such that if you make ~$300k/year as a single person or a little under $450k as a married household, you get absolutely no deductions and pay the AMT tax rate on every dollar you earned.
Deductions are all about trying to ensure that most of the general population do not have to pay much in taxes, since they are most of the voter base. "The rich" are at most a few percent of the voters.
The tax code is mostly about social engineering, not obtaining revenue. Tax the things you want to go away and people you want to punish, don't tax the people and things you like. That's why there is such a huge number of exemptions and such in the tax code. If it was simply about obtaining revenue, there would be no deductions. Calculating how much you owe would be as simple as adding up how much money you made in the last year no matter how you made it, and then multiplying by a number (flat tax) or multiplying by a series of numbers/looking it up in a page of tax tables (bracketed tax). That would be very simple, but does not allow for politicians to stick their fingers in all of our business through the tax code, so it will never happen.
It's not a naive notion, I am a healthcare worker and see this day in and day out. Granted I work in primary care instead of in some specialty, but costs ARE a big factor and are discussed very openly and very frequently in the several places I have worked. Medical students and residents are taught to keep costs in mind and providers are reminded by patient feedback (usually angry feedback if they forget) to keep costs in line. The bottom line is that a patient who has to pay a non-trivial amount of money for a prescription, test, or procedure is not going to have it done and they are going to be royally PO'd at whoever prescribed/ordered/performed whatever it was that cost so much. Maybe specialists are a different story, but primary care physicians are nearly universally aware of the costs and conscious of them to varying degrees. I'd be willing to bet that your doc that discussed the costs freely and then retired was likely an internist or a family doc who dealt with a bunch of Medicare/Medicaid/not insured patients. Medicare/Medicaid doesn't pay for much and deductibles can be quite high, so a lot of the treatments have to be prescribed with the intention that the patient has to pay for a good chunk of it or all of it out of pocket. You get to be very aware of the costs in a hurry in that case as patients will simply not get the expensive stuff done and then complain to you about how expensive it would have been. Medicaid and Medicare also are royal pains in the butt to deal with, which is probably where a lot of the frustration came from. The words "prior authorization" were likely the bane of that poor doc's existence.
The pharmaceutical industry does not care if the drugs are being used in accordance with the FDA indications or not. They simply cannot advertise the drugs as being usable for any purpose except its official FDA indications. They want to sell more drugs and physicians using drugs "off-label" (not in accordance with the official FDA indications) sells more drugs, so they'd actually hope the kid finds a new use for their drugs. The government is the one that would get the kid in trouble if he is violating DEA prescription drug laws. I'd be willing to bet that no 16-year-old kid working alone has the right paperwork from the DEA that lets them obtain prescription drugs for research purposes.
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Fear has nothing to do with it. Some people simply like privacy and quiet- having 30 kids running through their yard at random times of the day would be about as palatable to them as you living on a 10-section ranch in Wyoming and having your nearest neighbor being 10 miles away. Just because somebody has a different set of likes and dislikes than you does not make them "afraid" or wrong, just different than you.
Unless you're buying a road or power line easement, not very many six-acre tracts are 2/3 mile long and 75 feet wide.
Absolutely. The biggest advantage to a larger lawn is that you are guaranteed to have more space between your house and your neighbor's houses. The second advantage that going and playing outside is much easier in a larger lawn. (I know, go outside and play, who does THAT any more?) A half-acre lawn generally means you have at best 20 yards or so between houses, since most half-acre lawns are in town. That's really not a lot of room and the houses are fairly densely packed together in that area. Try to go outside and play pitch and catch in such a lawn. If you slip up at all, you broke the window in the Jones' house or put a dent in Mr. Smith's Buick. Not fun. A six-acre lawn guarantees that you are more like a hundred yards between houses. Also, if you value privacy and quiet, there's a lot more of that when you have a large lawn and thus a larger distance between neighboring houses. You could have a half-acre lawn in a 100-acre chunk of woods and have the privacy, peace, and quiet, but in practice, most people have a few acres of lawn around their house in such a setup just because it's nice to have a lawn to play around with the kids. Chasing the baseball into the woods isn't generally too much fun either.
Missouri is a right-to-work state. Teachers (or anybody else) in the state are not forced to join a union when there is a union at that place of employment. I know this because I have family that were teachers in Missouri that declined to join the teacher's unions.
Actually, you do hear "the great state of Missouri" if you know who to listen to. Tom Bradley on KSSZ (93.9 FM) in Columbia says it all the time during his morning show. I lived a long time in Missouri; it's not a bad place by any means. There is absolutely awesome barbecue coming out of Kansas City, the Cardinals are the best baseball team in the Midwest, the people are generally very friendly, there are abundant outdoor activities, the cost of living is low, and it's generally regarded as one of the freest states in the nation from a nanny-state perspective. On the downside, it's hotter than hell in the summer, and the stereotypical "you're a dumb 'hooz' if you live outside of 'the loop'" jerks in St. Louis are pretty darned annoying. You can recognize them by asking them what highways join with I-70 at "the loop" (I-270)- if they say "Highway Farty" (I-64, which hasn't been officially called U.S. 40 since 1987) and "farty-far" (I-44), you've found one. Overall, not a bad place, just stay a little ways away from St. Louis.
That would be fine and dandy until you realize that most people' natural born talents involve sitting on the couch eating Doritos and watching reruns of "Jersey Shore." If providing some income and relieving people of the need to work resulted in massive creative output, we'd expect to see a bunch of senior citizens on Social Security becoming the next Picasso and people on long-term unemployment compensation for the last 2+ years inventing the flying car. Nope, they just mostly sit on the couch. Call me cynical, but you know it's true.
No kidding, MU's tuition has gotten seriously high as of late. I guess all of those fake trees in the rec center were much more expensive than I thought...
Then you can do the Slashdot DIY mantra and make your own hooch. The chemistry is simple and unless you make an absolutely liver-shredding quantity of beer or wine (or any liquor), it's generally legal as well. If you miss "the scene," make your own 'shine still.
I wouldn't necessarily say the general population stopped wearing watches. Many people do wear them, particularly people who have a job, have a schedule to adhere to, and being able to quickly (and sometimes discreetly) check the time is an asset.
I don't understand the original article either. I am about 10 years younger than you and have worn wristwatches since I was a little kid. Almost all of them have been a normal analog watch, since I personally find them quicker to read than digital watches. They also look a lot nicer as well- when's the last time you saw a digital watch being sold in a halfway-decent department store? The digital ones are nearly all cheap and don't really look very professional. And as far as the "why don't you just use your phone to tell the time?," a watch is much quicker to tell time with. You just have to look at your wrist; it takes less than a second. You would have to reach into your pocket or holster, pull out the phone, and possibly tap at the screen to unlock the display or open the lid to get the phone to display the time, then you have to replace the phone into your pocket or holster. That's a lot more work than just looking at a watch. I am inclined to think that the people using their phone for everything are really just trying to say "hey, look at me, I have an iPhone that cost me $300 upfront plus $2-3k in service fees over the life of the contract!" I suppose a $200 wristwatch doesn't compare to that; you'd need something fancy like a Cartier to match the amount of money dropped on overly-expensive phones.
"Recruiting" immediately comes to mind as a reason to take on interns that cannot immediately benefit the company. You get a very good idea of how well-prepared students who will be graduating from a certain school are. If you are hurting for workers (probably not in today's economy, but maybe again sometime in the future), if you impress the intern they might come back to work for you and bring along some of their former classmates when they finish school. Those reasons sound like pretty good reasons for taking on interns to me.
Residents today in the U.S. generally make in the low to mid $40k range, although some places pay in the $30k range and some pay in the low $50s. Resident paychecks come from Medicare dollars as CMS funds the residency programs (and also limits the number of them as well.) They are officially prohibited from working more than 80 hours per week (along with a big long list of other restrictions- look at the ACGME's website if you want to see all of them), punishable by sanctioning and possibly disbanding the residency program that violates them. The number of hours actually worked varies a lot by specialty and some do lie and work 100 hours a week, but 80 is the official limit.
The difference is that most people making $50k or less ($50k is actually a bit high- most pay in the low to mid $40s with a few out on the west coast paying in the $30k range) don't have the $175-200k+ in student loans that they have to start repaying on graduation. (If they do have that much debt, then they screwed up somewhere.) The monthly payment on $200k in student loans with the standard 10-year program is about $2300 a month. That's $2300 in money after federal income tax, state and city income taxes if you have them, Social Security tax, Medicare/Medicaid taxes, and unemployment insurance taxes. The government considers paying more than 10-15% of your income to be a hardship, and if you take home $3000-3500 per month, that's a heck of a lot more than 15%. You'd have to earn over $275,000 to afford to repay the loan in 10 years using the government figures. Stretching that out to 30 years gives a minimum income of $156k to be able to pay back the loan. You'd never even come close to paying off your loans if you made $50k per year for your entire career.
You are talking about clinical rotations. Clinical rotations are considerably different than an unpaid internship in business or law or any other field. Clinical rotations are explicitly part of your curriculum and your "bosses" are faculty and evaluate you as to how well you perform on the rotation. There also is a good amount of formal education involved in the rotations. You must successfully complete the rotations to graduate, and everybody in all schools of the same type must do most of the same rotations. Yes, you have to report to the hospital/clinic and perform some work for free (actually, you're paying for the privilege), but there are fairly strict guidelines as to what work you can be made to do- it has to have "significant educational value." The accrediting body for medical schools actually gets pretty picky about that last part, so in most cases the student follows around nurses, resident physicians, or attending physicians and isn't required to do much for paperwork or other work. That is in stark contrast to a typical unpaid internship where any specific internship is rarely a mandatory part of your education and you are just doing it to improve your resume and chances of finding a job. Physicians do have internships; the term is an old one for the first year of a medical residency. Completing at least one year of residency is required to obtain a full medical license in most states and few if any payers will pay you if you do not complete all of your residency, so going through residency is not optional for anybody wanting to practice medicine. Residents do perform a lot of work but they do receive a salary for it. You could argue resident salaries aren't enough and I'd agree with you, but they are getting paid for their work.
The term "climate change" does not suggest any particular kind of change to the climate, such as the term "global warming" did. It can mean literally anything. That allows for two things. Number one is that when any single specific change fails to occur, the people peddling the theory don't get embarrassed such as how the global warming folks got embarrassed when their "hockey-stick" warming prediction failed to happen. Secondly, it allows ANY severe weather to be used as "evidence of climate change" since "climate change" has no firm definition. Essentially it lets the people peddling the theory never be "wrong" in the eyes of the public.
Or in other words, they try to minimize how much they mess with one complex system they don't understand (the climate) by increasing the amount they mess with another complex system they don't understand (the economy.)
Yup, that sounds like a winner!
The critics do not need a model. The pro-global-warming crowd is hypothesizing that there is 1) statistically-significant warming due to 2) human-released carbon dioxide. They are making hypotheses, and the null hypothesis of "there is nothing that is actually statistically-significant occurring free of confounding variables" MUST be disproven by the people making the hypothesis. The critics merely claim the null hypothesis. That doesn't need a specific model since there is no explanation needed for "nothing is happening."
If you are wondering why the critics are claiming the null hypothesis, it has to deal with the pro-global-warming crowd's projections of warming failing to materialize as well as a lot of confounding variables not being adequately addressed, such as the heat island effect and non-constant number/location of monitoring stations over the recording period, plus the assumptions being made in the indirect extrapolation of past temperatures via ice cores, etc. being incorrect.
I've never had to spoof my browser's user agent to connect to the university wireless to avoid having to download the Cisco Clean Access crap. It apparently just sees I am not running MacOS or Windows and gives me a click-through webpage and that's it. I have had to spoof the user agent to get on some hotels' wireless networks through the Web browser clients. I have never had any actual problem with connecting in those cases after I set the user agent to Windows or Macintosh.
My experiences pretty much mirror yours. The university neither supported nor blocked Linux or any other non-Macintosh/non-Windows operating system. If you had a problem, you had to figure it out on your own, but if you got it to work, they wouldn't stop you. The wireless network was originally 802.11b with just a single shared 128-bit WEP key that was widely distributed and changed once yearly. They eventually moved to WPA2/PEAP once they replaced the 802.11b stuff with 802.11g gear, and that worked fine with wpa_supplicant. The only restrictive thing they ever did was to have scattershot MAC filtering that was supposed to kick off machines that hadn't updated Windows. That process entailed going to a website, typing in your WLAN NIC's MAC, and downloading a utility that was supposed to scan your machine and install the campus antivirus and update Windows. All you had to do is download the utility to unblock your MAC; the website never checked to see if you actually ran it or not. They abandoned the tool pretty quickly after it didn't make much of a change in the number of infected machines on their network and presented a lot of support calls to the IT staff. They then just stuck with the WPA2/PEAP setup with no MAC filtering or whatnot. This worked out well when WLAN-equipped mobile devices started to show up on campus in large numbers, and as far as I know the university still uses this method of filtering. Currently I work at a facility of a different university and being an employee we use the same network as the students do. Their IT department's stance is that Linux is not supported. They do use the Cisco Clean Access stuff on top of a WPA2/PEAP setup. However, their implementation is to simply make anything that's not supported by the Cisco client click through a webpage. I think they have little choice since the large numbers of iCrap, WLAN-equipped phones, and gaming consoles that the students use would otherwise not be able to work. A bunch of angry tuition-payers is probably not what the university wants.
I'd also add that whoever has a "college degree required for this position" job generally also hopes that because somebody managed to get a degree, they probably (hopefully) have the worst of the immaturity out of their system. The degree holder would have had to have lived away from their parents for a few years and been exposed to The World and not completely succumbed to booze, laziness, drugs, etc. to get that degree. I personally think college is an awfully expensive and wasteful method to try to have people grow up a little before starting a Real Job (I'd prefer to have seen people worked full-time at some place and have a decent work record), but that's certainly a mindset of HR people.
A flat tax is a flat tax, it taxes the exact same proportion of anybody's income no matter what their income is. You have a flat tax confused with a sales/consumption tax, which is considered regressive since people with a lower income tend to spend a greater percentage of it than people with a higher income.
Deductions by and large do not affect "the rich," if you're using the IRS's definition of "rich" to mean anybody that makes $175,000 or more per year and is subject to the alternative minimum tax. They don't affect "the rich" since "the rich" get to take few to no deductions due to the alternative minimum tax. The alternative minimum tax phases out deductions and exemptions such that if you make ~$300k/year as a single person or a little under $450k as a married household, you get absolutely no deductions and pay the AMT tax rate on every dollar you earned. Deductions are all about trying to ensure that most of the general population do not have to pay much in taxes, since they are most of the voter base. "The rich" are at most a few percent of the voters.
The tax code is mostly about social engineering, not obtaining revenue. Tax the things you want to go away and people you want to punish, don't tax the people and things you like. That's why there is such a huge number of exemptions and such in the tax code. If it was simply about obtaining revenue, there would be no deductions. Calculating how much you owe would be as simple as adding up how much money you made in the last year no matter how you made it, and then multiplying by a number (flat tax) or multiplying by a series of numbers/looking it up in a page of tax tables (bracketed tax). That would be very simple, but does not allow for politicians to stick their fingers in all of our business through the tax code, so it will never happen.
It's not a naive notion, I am a healthcare worker and see this day in and day out. Granted I work in primary care instead of in some specialty, but costs ARE a big factor and are discussed very openly and very frequently in the several places I have worked. Medical students and residents are taught to keep costs in mind and providers are reminded by patient feedback (usually angry feedback if they forget) to keep costs in line. The bottom line is that a patient who has to pay a non-trivial amount of money for a prescription, test, or procedure is not going to have it done and they are going to be royally PO'd at whoever prescribed/ordered/performed whatever it was that cost so much. Maybe specialists are a different story, but primary care physicians are nearly universally aware of the costs and conscious of them to varying degrees. I'd be willing to bet that your doc that discussed the costs freely and then retired was likely an internist or a family doc who dealt with a bunch of Medicare/Medicaid/not insured patients. Medicare/Medicaid doesn't pay for much and deductibles can be quite high, so a lot of the treatments have to be prescribed with the intention that the patient has to pay for a good chunk of it or all of it out of pocket. You get to be very aware of the costs in a hurry in that case as patients will simply not get the expensive stuff done and then complain to you about how expensive it would have been. Medicaid and Medicare also are royal pains in the butt to deal with, which is probably where a lot of the frustration came from. The words "prior authorization" were likely the bane of that poor doc's existence.
The pharmaceutical industry does not care if the drugs are being used in accordance with the FDA indications or not. They simply cannot advertise the drugs as being usable for any purpose except its official FDA indications. They want to sell more drugs and physicians using drugs "off-label" (not in accordance with the official FDA indications) sells more drugs, so they'd actually hope the kid finds a new use for their drugs. The government is the one that would get the kid in trouble if he is violating DEA prescription drug laws. I'd be willing to bet that no 16-year-old kid working alone has the right paperwork from the DEA that lets them obtain prescription drugs for research purposes.