Most rifles just aren't all that expensive. Civilian variants of the M16 (the AR-15, which is basically the mil-spec M16 with a different lower receiver that cannot be modified to fire in anything besides semi-automatic mode) generally run around $900-1100. Other hunting and target rifles such as the Remington 700 and 750, Winchester Model 70, and Browning A-Bolt run in the $600-1000 range as well. Sure, you can always get very expensive units like Barrett's AR-15 clone that costs over $2000, but those are the outliers rather than the rule.
1.3 billion transistors isn't even all that impressive any more. GPUs crossed that line years ago and a current top-line GPU has about 3 billion transistors. CPUs are also well above that, with Intel's 8-core Xeon 7500s clocking in at 2.3 billion transistors and AMD's 12-core Opteron 6100s having 1.81 billion transistors.
I'd say that's accurate since NVIDIA's latest behemoth, the GTX580, has 512 SIMD cores. The next die shrink ought to bring the counts to near 1000 SIMD cores.
Only if you are using Windows, and then only 64-bit Windows can boot a HDD bigger than 2.2 TB from a UEFI-enabled motherboard. 32- and 64-bit versions of Linux and the BSDs will gladly boot 2.2+ TB HDDs from a machine with a BIOS.
The governments in the U.S. do not discourage diesel fuel with higher taxes. I live in Missouri and most fuel pumps have the taxes charged for fuel posted on the pump. Total tax per gallon is $0.387 for gasoline and $0.414 for diesel here, between state and federal taxes. That's a whopping 2.7 cents per gallon difference in tax rate and certainly not enough to explain why diesel costs $2.99/gallon and regular unleaded costs $2.53/gallon right now.
The real reason diesel fuel is more expensive is because of demand. Diesel fuel is almost universally the fuel for heavy trucks, freight trains, and any sort of industrial and agricultural equipment. It is also used to some extent for heating purposes. In very slightly modified form, it is the most widely used type of jet fuel (Jet A1). Much of the world outside North America uses a fair amount of diesel for passenger cars as well. Gasoline is pretty much just used for passenger car transportation and consumer-level small engine-powered equipment like lawnmowers. Thus anything that affects any of the various uses of diesel fuel (for example, construction) will affect demand, while gasoline demand is pretty much only determined by the number of miles driven by passenger cars. A by-product of the distillation of crude oil for diesel fuel is lighter distillates like gasoline, so when diesel demand goes up compared to gasoline demand, you have more gasoline being produced along with the diesel and the price of gasoline goes down a little.
I live in Missouri and I have. Generally it's smaller gas stations in more rural areas that have them, and it's almost always a single pump set off by itself away from the gas pumps, or sometimes next to the diesel pumps. I have also seen kerosene for sale in most hardware stores as well.
Actually, a fair number of people get net income from the IRS because they get "refundable tax credits" and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Most tax credits either reduce your taxable income or reduce the amount of tax levied, but in any case, you can never end up with anything less than $0 on the "tax owed" line, so you simply get all of your withheld money back. Refundable credits and the earned income tax credit actually let you end up with a negative figure for "tax owed" so you get a refund in excess of what was withheld from your paychecks- in other words, net income from the IRS.
The brain and most of the internal organs develop relatively early during gestation. The lungs are the last major organ to mature and they are frequently what gives very premature infants trouble. Infants born before 32 weeks gestation don't produce surfactant (the stuff that keeps your lungs open so air can get in and out) themselves and can basically suffocate. Once you have them properly ventilated and such, they tend to do okay as long as they don't catch an infection. The immune system also is immature in a baby, but it generally doesn't really kick into gear until about 6 months of age for a normal infant, so it's not specific for premature infants.
Residency is supposed to be mainly about learning, but there's also a lot of "dues paying" that goes on. That is clearly understood by everybody directly involved. It's not confined to medicine, either. Most professions have a period where the people who have just entered the profession work ugly hours for low pay before they get to advance to the higher-paying, lower-hour positions. It is also frequently under the auspices of "learning" as well, although in practice learning is only part of what goes on. Academics call this a "post-doc" and get paid little to do some professor's work for them and write some professor's papers until they have their name on enough of their professor's papers to be able to get a professorship themselves.
The real metrics that matter to programs is adverse outcome rates, since hospitals want patients to get the proper care and don't want to end up sued. Adverse outcome rares are also a pretty good measure of whether or not people are awake enough to still think and learn and also the problems involved in transitioning patient care from the team leaving to go sleep to the new team coming on. The overall adverse outcome rate has not changed in a statistically-significant manner since the adoption of the 80-hour work week/30-hour shifts in 2002, according to several studies. The rate of adverse outcomes resulting from fatigue or bad clinical judgment has gone down slightly, but it has been balanced out by an increase in adverse outcomes related to handing off patient care from one team to another (longer hours equals fewer handoffs.) The new ACGME guidelines of 16-hour shifts really has a lot of programs scared since the number of handoffs will roughly double. I suppose the studies done after the new guidelines take effect will bear out whether or not the shorter work hours are in fact better for patient care or not.
The finances of medical school don't mean as much on how long residents want to be in residency as the massive difference between a resident's salary of roughly $45k per year and an attending's salary of about $130-150k at the low end to over $500k at the high end. Interest accumulating on debt just adds to that difference. Unless Medicare was willing to pay residents attendings' salaries, residents want to get the heck out of residency as quickly as they can. I doubt any union could convince residency programs to increase resident salaries by up to an order of magnitude; the residency programs would shut down for lack of funding way before that. Work hours may get better if there were more open positions than applicants so programs had to compete for applicants (such as if you put a big quota on FMGs) but then you'd end up with a lot of unfilled positions and fewer newly-minted attending physicians coming out of residency. Fewer physicians is the last thing the country needs.
Medical residents joining a union would not change much with how medical residents are treated, since the pay and number of positions offered is largely set by the federal government as Medicare dollars pay residents' salaries. The ACGME sets pretty much everything else, from the allowable work hours to the number and types of procedures the resident must do to be able to finish residency. Any program that runs afoul of the ACGME gets its accreditation yanked and your eligibility to become licensed and your board eligibility are in jeopardy if you are at an unaccredited institution. If you are not licensed, it is illegal for you to practice medicine. If you are not board certified, you generally cannot get reimbursed for providing care. So unless a labor union arises and is so powerful that it can topple the ACGME and the specialty boards, and cause a lot of change in legislation pertaining to resident and physician payment, the union would be worthless and the union dues would be just another fee the resident can't pay.
Anyway, I doubt very many residents would join a union as the current ACGME recommendation (which will become practice in AY2011) of 16-hour maximum work days/80 hours per week as opposed to the current 30-hour maximum shifts/80 hours per week is already causing a lot of programs to say they'll need an extra year of residency to fulfill the ACGME knowledge/experience requirements. A union demanding further reductions would certainly cause programs to tack on extra years of residency. Extra years of residency is NOT in a physician's best interest as resident pay ranges between 10-30% of attending physician pay and you just end up pushing off your loans that many more years and accruing all that much more in interest. Also, physicians are pretty anti-union as medicine is very much a meritocracy and a union is the opposite of a meritocracy. Suffice to say there would not be a medical resident union of any size in the forseeable future.
We are in the beginning of the end of the War on Drugs, whereas we're definitely the middle of the War on Child Pornography. Case in point: quite a few areas are talking about "decriminalizing" marijuana and some have passed laws that officially reduced the penalty on possession and use and reducing enforcement of violations. Has there been any real discussion on doing anything about child pornography other than increasing penalties and enforcement of the laws? No, because even taking that position as a "devil's advocate" to provoke discussion is very socially unacceptable right now.
Sure. For the first point:
1. Reuters: $246k per job
2. International Business Times: $118k-179k per job, but they include the nebulous figure of "saved" jobs, which is nearly impossible to truly quantify.
3. ABC News: $160k-248k per job- the latter number is using the official number of jobs created, the former also adds the White House's estimate of "jobs saved."
The government inserting money anywhere is a bad idea. It mostly gets wasted with no real benefit to show for it. Just look at the effects of the stimulus and such. For the "bottom," they spend several hundred thousand dollars per job to create a job that pays the worker $40k or so per year. They also paid a lot to people in unemployment benefits and welfare, and a lot of those people are simply sitting back largely doing nothing until the government stops paying them for not working. For the "top,", they bailed out banks, who largely used the money to pay off their foreign-held debt rather than loan it out to Americans. None of that helped the U.S. very much, but we're stuck paying hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars for it. All of this exemplifies how poorly the government does when it tries to "stimulate" the economy by spending. It's a lot like trying to dig yourself out of a hole.
Tax cuts are NOT the government inserting money; the money is yours and the government simply takes less of it. If you want people to have money, why not let them keep it instead of taking it from the people, running it through the government, and then giving only some of it back to the people, because you had to spend a good amount of it on governmental overhead?
Then why not vote with your feet and move to Washington State or somewhere else instead of complaining and continuing to pay the Illinois taxes you oppose? If enough people do it, maybe even Chicago will get the message (although it will probably take nearly everybody moving out of state for them to get the message.)
I have a coworker who has a Judge and tried to use it to shoot a possum (with.410 shells.).410 shells hold very little shot compared and the short rifled barrel causes your pattern to be horrible at more than a few feet. The only reasonable projectiles that can be shot out of that weapon are.410 rifled slugs and.45 bullets. He learned that the hard way as all his #6 shot did is miss the possum. He then got out his AR-15 and properly dispatched the possum.
If I were to need to shoot a pesky possum or groundhog, I'd use either a turkey shotgun with a full choke and a healthy load of #4 shot or a carbine chambered for 9 mm,.40 S&W, 10 mm Auto,.44 Mag, or.45 ACP to do the trick. They are all very effective, relatively short-range weapons. A.22 could work but is a little small for a decent-sized possum and a small centerfire like a.223 or.243 would work well but those 3000 fps+ bullets fly much farther than low-velocity shot and handgun bullets and punch smaller holes in the pest.
Slower cores are also much lower in the binning stack than faster cores, and this also makes them less expensive. Spending hundreds or thousands of dollars less per CPU in a system is a big advantage of slower multicore systems, and you get that advantage right up front at system purchase. It takes years to decades to make up that kind of money in energy savings unless you have order of magnitude differences in power consumption between the two CPUs.
No, it really appears to be a generational gap phenomenon than anything. A certain generation thinks that the other generations are somehow inferior to them- both the older and younger ones. They see the older generations as clueless and out of touch, while the younger generations are inexperienced kids who have no clue as to how "the real world works." I've heard the same thing from many people in many different generations, so it doesn't seem to be particular to any specific generation.
Oh, it started way before G. W. Bush. Bill Clinton had CARNIVORE. Nixon wiretapped radical groups without a warrant (which was the impetus for FISA). The Olmstead case of 1928 was when government wiretapping was declared constitutional- which was well before G. W. was even born.
Immunizations are certainly the number one reason why children between the ages of about 9 months and six years hate going to the doctor and will kick and scream and flail as soon as they see anybody come into the exam room with a stethoscope. Vaccine patches would be great, particularly if they made it look like a sticker (which are second only to popsicles in the ability to placate an irritated youngster). Now if they'd only figure out a way to make looking in the ears and mouth easier, we'd be set!
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Most rifles just aren't all that expensive. Civilian variants of the M16 (the AR-15, which is basically the mil-spec M16 with a different lower receiver that cannot be modified to fire in anything besides semi-automatic mode) generally run around $900-1100. Other hunting and target rifles such as the Remington 700 and 750, Winchester Model 70, and Browning A-Bolt run in the $600-1000 range as well. Sure, you can always get very expensive units like Barrett's AR-15 clone that costs over $2000, but those are the outliers rather than the rule.
1.3 billion transistors isn't even all that impressive any more. GPUs crossed that line years ago and a current top-line GPU has about 3 billion transistors. CPUs are also well above that, with Intel's 8-core Xeon 7500s clocking in at 2.3 billion transistors and AMD's 12-core Opteron 6100s having 1.81 billion transistors.
I'd say that's accurate since NVIDIA's latest behemoth, the GTX580, has 512 SIMD cores. The next die shrink ought to bring the counts to near 1000 SIMD cores.
Living in your mother's basement will do that for you.
Government officials.
Only if you are using Windows, and then only 64-bit Windows can boot a HDD bigger than 2.2 TB from a UEFI-enabled motherboard. 32- and 64-bit versions of Linux and the BSDs will gladly boot 2.2+ TB HDDs from a machine with a BIOS.
The governments in the U.S. do not discourage diesel fuel with higher taxes. I live in Missouri and most fuel pumps have the taxes charged for fuel posted on the pump. Total tax per gallon is $0.387 for gasoline and $0.414 for diesel here, between state and federal taxes. That's a whopping 2.7 cents per gallon difference in tax rate and certainly not enough to explain why diesel costs $2.99/gallon and regular unleaded costs $2.53/gallon right now.
The real reason diesel fuel is more expensive is because of demand. Diesel fuel is almost universally the fuel for heavy trucks, freight trains, and any sort of industrial and agricultural equipment. It is also used to some extent for heating purposes. In very slightly modified form, it is the most widely used type of jet fuel (Jet A1). Much of the world outside North America uses a fair amount of diesel for passenger cars as well. Gasoline is pretty much just used for passenger car transportation and consumer-level small engine-powered equipment like lawnmowers. Thus anything that affects any of the various uses of diesel fuel (for example, construction) will affect demand, while gasoline demand is pretty much only determined by the number of miles driven by passenger cars. A by-product of the distillation of crude oil for diesel fuel is lighter distillates like gasoline, so when diesel demand goes up compared to gasoline demand, you have more gasoline being produced along with the diesel and the price of gasoline goes down a little.
I live in Missouri and I have. Generally it's smaller gas stations in more rural areas that have them, and it's almost always a single pump set off by itself away from the gas pumps, or sometimes next to the diesel pumps. I have also seen kerosene for sale in most hardware stores as well.
Actually, a fair number of people get net income from the IRS because they get "refundable tax credits" and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Most tax credits either reduce your taxable income or reduce the amount of tax levied, but in any case, you can never end up with anything less than $0 on the "tax owed" line, so you simply get all of your withheld money back. Refundable credits and the earned income tax credit actually let you end up with a negative figure for "tax owed" so you get a refund in excess of what was withheld from your paychecks- in other words, net income from the IRS.
The brain and most of the internal organs develop relatively early during gestation. The lungs are the last major organ to mature and they are frequently what gives very premature infants trouble. Infants born before 32 weeks gestation don't produce surfactant (the stuff that keeps your lungs open so air can get in and out) themselves and can basically suffocate. Once you have them properly ventilated and such, they tend to do okay as long as they don't catch an infection. The immune system also is immature in a baby, but it generally doesn't really kick into gear until about 6 months of age for a normal infant, so it's not specific for premature infants.
Residency is supposed to be mainly about learning, but there's also a lot of "dues paying" that goes on. That is clearly understood by everybody directly involved. It's not confined to medicine, either. Most professions have a period where the people who have just entered the profession work ugly hours for low pay before they get to advance to the higher-paying, lower-hour positions. It is also frequently under the auspices of "learning" as well, although in practice learning is only part of what goes on. Academics call this a "post-doc" and get paid little to do some professor's work for them and write some professor's papers until they have their name on enough of their professor's papers to be able to get a professorship themselves.
The real metrics that matter to programs is adverse outcome rates, since hospitals want patients to get the proper care and don't want to end up sued. Adverse outcome rares are also a pretty good measure of whether or not people are awake enough to still think and learn and also the problems involved in transitioning patient care from the team leaving to go sleep to the new team coming on. The overall adverse outcome rate has not changed in a statistically-significant manner since the adoption of the 80-hour work week/30-hour shifts in 2002, according to several studies. The rate of adverse outcomes resulting from fatigue or bad clinical judgment has gone down slightly, but it has been balanced out by an increase in adverse outcomes related to handing off patient care from one team to another (longer hours equals fewer handoffs.) The new ACGME guidelines of 16-hour shifts really has a lot of programs scared since the number of handoffs will roughly double. I suppose the studies done after the new guidelines take effect will bear out whether or not the shorter work hours are in fact better for patient care or not.
The finances of medical school don't mean as much on how long residents want to be in residency as the massive difference between a resident's salary of roughly $45k per year and an attending's salary of about $130-150k at the low end to over $500k at the high end. Interest accumulating on debt just adds to that difference. Unless Medicare was willing to pay residents attendings' salaries, residents want to get the heck out of residency as quickly as they can. I doubt any union could convince residency programs to increase resident salaries by up to an order of magnitude; the residency programs would shut down for lack of funding way before that. Work hours may get better if there were more open positions than applicants so programs had to compete for applicants (such as if you put a big quota on FMGs) but then you'd end up with a lot of unfilled positions and fewer newly-minted attending physicians coming out of residency. Fewer physicians is the last thing the country needs.
Medical residents joining a union would not change much with how medical residents are treated, since the pay and number of positions offered is largely set by the federal government as Medicare dollars pay residents' salaries. The ACGME sets pretty much everything else, from the allowable work hours to the number and types of procedures the resident must do to be able to finish residency. Any program that runs afoul of the ACGME gets its accreditation yanked and your eligibility to become licensed and your board eligibility are in jeopardy if you are at an unaccredited institution. If you are not licensed, it is illegal for you to practice medicine. If you are not board certified, you generally cannot get reimbursed for providing care. So unless a labor union arises and is so powerful that it can topple the ACGME and the specialty boards, and cause a lot of change in legislation pertaining to resident and physician payment, the union would be worthless and the union dues would be just another fee the resident can't pay.
Anyway, I doubt very many residents would join a union as the current ACGME recommendation (which will become practice in AY2011) of 16-hour maximum work days/80 hours per week as opposed to the current 30-hour maximum shifts/80 hours per week is already causing a lot of programs to say they'll need an extra year of residency to fulfill the ACGME knowledge/experience requirements. A union demanding further reductions would certainly cause programs to tack on extra years of residency. Extra years of residency is NOT in a physician's best interest as resident pay ranges between 10-30% of attending physician pay and you just end up pushing off your loans that many more years and accruing all that much more in interest. Also, physicians are pretty anti-union as medicine is very much a meritocracy and a union is the opposite of a meritocracy. Suffice to say there would not be a medical resident union of any size in the forseeable future.
We are in the beginning of the end of the War on Drugs, whereas we're definitely the middle of the War on Child Pornography. Case in point: quite a few areas are talking about "decriminalizing" marijuana and some have passed laws that officially reduced the penalty on possession and use and reducing enforcement of violations. Has there been any real discussion on doing anything about child pornography other than increasing penalties and enforcement of the laws? No, because even taking that position as a "devil's advocate" to provoke discussion is very socially unacceptable right now.
Sure. For the first point:
1. Reuters: $246k per job
2. International Business Times: $118k-179k per job, but they include the nebulous figure of "saved" jobs, which is nearly impossible to truly quantify.
3. ABC News: $160k-248k per job- the latter number is using the official number of jobs created, the former also adds the White House's estimate of "jobs saved."
For the second:
1. Seasonal workers rejecting landscaping jobs, prefer to stay on unemployment.
The story links back to the Detroit News, which has since placed the article behind a paywall.
2. Workers not applying for new jobs until unemployment runs out
3. I have also personally run across several construction workers who stated they were staying on unemployment rather than working as "they'd lose their benefits" if they started to work again. It's an anecdote, but it tells me that behavior is going on in my area as well.
The government inserting money anywhere is a bad idea. It mostly gets wasted with no real benefit to show for it. Just look at the effects of the stimulus and such. For the "bottom," they spend several hundred thousand dollars per job to create a job that pays the worker $40k or so per year. They also paid a lot to people in unemployment benefits and welfare, and a lot of those people are simply sitting back largely doing nothing until the government stops paying them for not working. For the "top,", they bailed out banks, who largely used the money to pay off their foreign-held debt rather than loan it out to Americans. None of that helped the U.S. very much, but we're stuck paying hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars for it. All of this exemplifies how poorly the government does when it tries to "stimulate" the economy by spending. It's a lot like trying to dig yourself out of a hole.
Tax cuts are NOT the government inserting money; the money is yours and the government simply takes less of it. If you want people to have money, why not let them keep it instead of taking it from the people, running it through the government, and then giving only some of it back to the people, because you had to spend a good amount of it on governmental overhead?
Then why not vote with your feet and move to Washington State or somewhere else instead of complaining and continuing to pay the Illinois taxes you oppose? If enough people do it, maybe even Chicago will get the message (although it will probably take nearly everybody moving out of state for them to get the message.)
I have a coworker who has a Judge and tried to use it to shoot a possum (with .410 shells.) .410 shells hold very little shot compared and the short rifled barrel causes your pattern to be horrible at more than a few feet. The only reasonable projectiles that can be shot out of that weapon are .410 rifled slugs and .45 bullets. He learned that the hard way as all his #6 shot did is miss the possum. He then got out his AR-15 and properly dispatched the possum.
If I were to need to shoot a pesky possum or groundhog, I'd use either a turkey shotgun with a full choke and a healthy load of #4 shot or a carbine chambered for 9 mm, .40 S&W, 10 mm Auto, .44 Mag, or .45 ACP to do the trick. They are all very effective, relatively short-range weapons. A .22 could work but is a little small for a decent-sized possum and a small centerfire like a .223 or .243 would work well but those 3000 fps+ bullets fly much farther than low-velocity shot and handgun bullets and punch smaller holes in the pest.
And it will probably be in Illinois, because there's a mandatory minimum of a $350 fine for speeding in a construction zone there.
Slower cores are also much lower in the binning stack than faster cores, and this also makes them less expensive. Spending hundreds or thousands of dollars less per CPU in a system is a big advantage of slower multicore systems, and you get that advantage right up front at system purchase. It takes years to decades to make up that kind of money in energy savings unless you have order of magnitude differences in power consumption between the two CPUs.
No, it really appears to be a generational gap phenomenon than anything. A certain generation thinks that the other generations are somehow inferior to them- both the older and younger ones. They see the older generations as clueless and out of touch, while the younger generations are inexperienced kids who have no clue as to how "the real world works." I've heard the same thing from many people in many different generations, so it doesn't seem to be particular to any specific generation.
Oh, it started way before G. W. Bush. Bill Clinton had CARNIVORE. Nixon wiretapped radical groups without a warrant (which was the impetus for FISA). The Olmstead case of 1928 was when government wiretapping was declared constitutional- which was well before G. W. was even born.
I think you'll get the same response in both cases: "There he is, Officers! Don't let him get away!"
Immunizations are certainly the number one reason why children between the ages of about 9 months and six years hate going to the doctor and will kick and scream and flail as soon as they see anybody come into the exam room with a stethoscope. Vaccine patches would be great, particularly if they made it look like a sticker (which are second only to popsicles in the ability to placate an irritated youngster). Now if they'd only figure out a way to make looking in the ears and mouth easier, we'd be set!
No, that's a Roofie aka Rohypnol, or for the medically inclined, fluunitrazepam.
I was thinking more along the lines of "they have chlamydia or gonorrhea"...
.