History may not repeat but it does rhyme. Harappan civ thought to have declined due to less water. Petra once thrived due to a system of dams, cisterns, and water conduits, but never-repaired damage after an earthquake and increasing aridity meant it less and less supported urbanism and so declined. The Soviets overexploited the Aral Sea which has yet to (and will likely never) recover. It is now spoiling the surrounding region with dust storms carrying with them pollutants from industry that settled in the drying lakebed. Owens Lake in California once fed LA, but when it dried up it too caused polluting dust storms.
Gov't has not learned from this history. The western US's water rights are outdated to the point of creating utterly backwards incentives. For example, Utah has use-it-or-lose-it water rights and the lion's share of water in the Great Salt Lake's watershed gets used to grow alfalfa. Alfalfa itself isn't necessarily a bad choice if you're going to grow stuff in an arid region, the issue is more how much of it is grown and in a wasteful way (little to no drip irrigation and no incentive to start using it, instead farmers are incentivized to flood areas during times of heavy rainfall or risk losing water rights). However even city and residential water use (a much smaller %) is still per capita wasteful compared to nearby Vegas which has done a much better job of becoming efficient in its water use. Utah got lucky this year in its snowpack, potentially buying some time to change, but is that gonna happen? No, they're praying for moisture and thinking their prayers got answered. Any guesses how long it'll be before the Great Salt Lake becomes the US/capitalism's Aral Sea? 5 years, 10, 15? Any techies wanting to move out here might think twice, homes without water and with seasonal arsenic-laden dust clouds probably won't have much resale value.
Note: if you want a meaningful discussion about physician salaries, you need to be discussing lifetime income after tax and after debt repayment, and compare this metric to other professions. Comparing the yearly salary of a vascular surgeon with 10-15 years of post-high school education, training, and compounding debt interest to the yearly salary of a junior developer ignores the very different lifetime shape of the careers.
Any substantial change to the pay structure for physicians needs to address the cost of education and training, and not screw over a large cohort of physicians saddled with debt who see a massive pay cut. They will significantly oppose any attempted changes that don't address these two things.
Doctors in Europe are paid a good bit less than here in the US, but their education is paid for (and then some) by the state.
Wow, lots to unpack here. First off, MAs are not remotely comparable to PAs or physicians. MAs typically earn a certificate, and salary is 20-30k. They are typically office or clerical workers with a medical support role. They are not diagnosticians or prescribers, like physicians, PAs, or NPs are. So talk of MAs 'practicing medicine' is weird, they don't, that's not the job role. We need them, they aren't well paid... nice work punching down there mate.
Frankly, this comment just sounds like you have an axe to grind with PAs. (Hence conflating MAs with PAs.)
PA is a Master's degree. They diagnose, treat, and prescribe. Unlike MDs, who are board-certified independent practitioners, PAs are not trained to work independently but as part of a team. In some cases that means they function as physician extenders, freeing up physicians to focus on more complicated cases. In other areas they focus on tasks delegated to them, for example central lines or other procedures, wound care. Some are used as First Assists in surgery, others are used for pre and postsurgical care, which helps surgeons do more surgeries. In any case, while the roles for physicians and PAs are much more similar, the condescension remains in your comment.
Punching down on MAs is inconceivably poor form. Punching down on PAs is still bad. Conflating the two gives away your game. You suggest harm... have any evidence to back this up?
Hint: you won't find any. There aren't a ton of studies, and quality could be better, but mid-levels (NPs and PAs) who stay within their roles have comparable outcomes to physician colleagues. How can this be, given the difference in training time? Easy. The roles are different. The subset of pts managed by PAs/NPs is different than MDs, because professionals consult and transfer care when appropriate. It's no different than a family practitioner or hospitalist consulting specialists. Nobody does everything, healthcare is a team effort.
Trash talking other professions, especially without evidence, is unprofessional.
Your entire critique depends on whether the person you're responding to can't differentiate MA from PA. This person is reporting that doctors have told him that MA and PA's somehow aren't being well trained, and they're also reporting a sense of smugness.
So do you think this person is lying or not? Did these conversations in fact take place? That's the more basic question to ask first.
You're being disingenuous and attempting to deflect from real issues. It's not only the text of the honor code that matters, but also the social context and how it is applied.
If you attend BYU as an LDS member, you need to maintain an ecclesiastical endorsement. Part of this includes paying tithing and attending at least some services. If you do not maintain your ecclesiastical endorsement, you can have a hold put on your account to where you can't register for additional classes, graduate, and possibly can't even apply for a transcript. In short, they can keep you from transferring schools unless you are willing to start from scratch, in order to get you to comply. Yes, that is mandatory religious worship, just with extra steps between point a and c. I should know. I attended BYU within the last decade and stopped believing at that time. You are not free to cease being a practicing LDS member. As it is a private school, I would have been fine had they simply asked me to pay the non-member tuition, or requested that I transfer schools. Instead they held my transcript as punishment. I had to grovel and go through a family friend to get an ecclesiastical endorsement to get a transcript. What rubbish. Surely you would be upset if Notre Dame treated a student who converted from Catholicism to Mormonism similarly?
The Honor Code Office has a whole history rife with abuse. In 2015, student Madi Barney was raped. She reported this to Provo police. She was placed under investigation by the Honor Code Office and was barred for a time from enrolling in classes. Unlike previous victims of this institutional abuse, she fought back and went public, ultimately forcing the Title IX office to formally separate from the Honor Code office. Previously information had been shared freely between the two.
And it's not just the Honor Code Office and the Title IX office. BYU's campus police department was and is complicit in the institutional abuse of authority wielded to keep students in line. Earlier this year the BYU police department was sanctioned in a move to decertify the entire police department. This happened because they failed to investigate misconduct where campus officers were accessing and sharing information using external police databases.
In my own personal experience, I and friends disclosed information to religious leaders, which was subsequently disclosed to the honor code office and used to justify academic probation and punishment. Yes, this was absolutely a blatant violation of priest-penitent confidentiality.
Think about that for a minute. Think about the sharing of information between religious authorities, school's honor code office, title IX office, campus police, and external law enforcement. All in a direct line. Institutional abuse of power and crossing lines that should not be crossed.
The social implications of student body awareness that the Honor Code can be used against you as a student, has been taken advantage of by predators. During my time on campus, talking with victims of sexual assault, the following was explained to me. Would-be predators would attempt to target individuals, like women or closeted gay men, and manipulate them into breaking the honor code in some manner. And have a recording of this. And then assault them or attempt to coerce them. If the victim then went to the police, the campus would become aware that they had previously broken the Honor Code and would have action taken against them. This was used to try to silence victims and prevent them from turning to the authorities for help. And you know what? It worked in a number of cases I personally knew of, allowing predators to victimize multiple individuals before being stopped.
I'm no longer a believer, but reading this comment, I assume you are. Is this how you believe Jesus would want his church, and a school supposedly run in his name, behaving?
FWIW, What you described as your personal experience doesn’t strike me as all that abusive.
If my (non Mormon) pastor was told someone was violating title IX (sex assault), I’d expect them to report to various other authorities. Mandatory reporting laws mean most information communicated to religious leaders abouse sexual harm isn’t all that confidential.
Maybe Mormons have a relationship to clergy more like Catholics do to priests?
You've got it backwards. This has nothing to do with mandatory reporting laws. You are assuming something is said about person B during person A's confessional. That isn't what is being described.
A student confesses to their religious leaders that they have done some sin. Fine, go through the religious repentance process. That's how things normally work in other religions too. A religious leader doesn't have authority to academically punish someone. What doesn't normally happen, is that this info gets shared with a school authority that does. And then the school authority shares info with campus police, from where it can also go into state or federal databases.
Or it goes the other way, where info given to city police ends up in the hands of academic or religious folks who use it abusively.
A student like Madi Barney is assaulted, she goes to city police. City police share detailed info with campus police, who share it with title ix and honor code office, who share it with religious authorities. She was not the assaulter, she was the victim. Yet, because a part of the police report includes a history of some breaking of the honor code, even though as in my original response predators manipulate folks into doing this, she ends up being investigated and punished academically and religiously. City PD ends up functionally an investigation and enforcement arm of academic and religious authorities. That is ABSOLUTELY institutional abuse of power.
I didn't share much of my personal experiences, just enough to rebut the claim that religious attendance is not mandatory, that was the purpose of paragraphs 1-2 so I don't know what you are going on about. The rest of the response was what detailed the abusive system.
I didn't even touch on how this is used against LGBT students.
If there are no barriers between the police, the sexual assault investigation department of the university, the honor code enforcement of the university, and what the religious leaders hear during private confessional (what the poster above describes):
1. Anything said to the police, the university, or during confessional can get you, the victim, in trouble with the honor code department.
2. Predators know this, so they intentionally work to get victims to break minor rules that will bring major honor code punishments down - preventing the victims from reporting real crimes, or even talking about them to anyone - the police, the relevant university departments, or even their religious leader.
This isn't about the pastor reporting evidence of a crime to authorities, this is about the honor code department destroying the integrity and value of every other law enforcement or authority and effectively protecting predators.
This happens outside BYU with drugs: predators rape victims after getting them under the influence of minor drugs which will get the victim in trouble if they go to the police.
While you are right that having and endorsement is a hard requirement, if seems BYU makes it as easy as they can for a religious-backed university to get it. I found nothing so far that says you must pay tithe or must attend some services so you’ll have to provide sources for that.
I think the biggest thing you understate in your post is the percentage of students who attend BYU and are active Mormons. Figure I found says that this number is close to 98%! I feel bad for your situation, but you should have switched universities when you discovered your atheism before things got that bad.
Simply put BYU is not for non-religions and non-conservative people. With so many other great choices in the US and the world it feels disingenuous to once again attack Mormons for simply trying to do their own thing.
A lot of people are willing to do what's convenient to keep from causing a social furor or losing connections and support. Ironically, and sadly, it's having the integrity to be forthright about your (lack of) belief that is damaging. But having your school career come crashing down on you shouldn't be one of those consequences with a federally funded institution.
This article falls prey to a myopic view of capitalist vs communist 'econ'. The reality is that the 19th and early 20th centuries were abuzz with economic tinkering and innovation. Rather than a simple left/right dichotomy, there is a whole color palette of possibilities, if only only we can remember them, and then imagine them in a modern context.
Proudhon early on imagined a world without capitalist ownership, but with a free market. He expounded the idea of Mutualism, building from earlier writers like John Gray. This libertarian-socialist vision has little in common with either the state socialism of the USSR, or the internationally-corporate world we live in today. Socialism as social ownership of the means of production, either by workers (agricultural or factory coops), communities (in our time, municipal fiber), or users/consumers (credit unions are a descendant of mutualist credit systems).
Later socialists argued over the recompense owed to individual labor vs the community as a whole (Bakunin v Marx), over the methods to reach their aims (through socialist parties, or revolution and establishment of a proletarian state, or through direct expropriation as the syndicalists and anarchocommunists did in Spain).
Later writers and revolutionists fought against imperialism, against racism and apartheid, for feminism and LGBT rights, and now for the rights of animals and the environment.
We have always allowed some few to take the lion's share of our collective efforts. To run our mutual efforts like their private fiefdoms. We tolerate in privately-held companies what we never would in public democracy.
And now, now that the world has been globalized and new markets exhausted, they look to privatize our public lands, our schools, prisons, thoroughfares, and every other system held in common.
Programmers are waking up to their exploitation. There is more talk of forming coops and unionizing than I have ever heard. However, I hope you all (and we) keep in mind that our affluence, now or future, also rests on the inherited exploitation of others in our past and around the world. Let's not be like the white American socialists who were exclusionary towards others' struggles (and whose efforts were broken when the capitalists brought in those they excluded as scabs). Let's not repeat the mistakes of the past. But to do that, we need to know them.
I think the author is specifically saying that the economic dichotomy that pits capitalism vs communism no longer holds. Basically that modern technology has taken us (and continues to take us) to a point where all of that is moot, but what replaces it has yet emerge. I somewhat disagree, I don't think the economy has moved or is about to move on to quite the degree he seems to believe, and that certain things like modern monetary policy are some of the early vehicles that take us beyond that dichotomy.
Boy are you in for a surprise. Medical school lectures are mostly optional these days and are entirely skipped by a significant proportion of med students in favor of resources like Strong Medicine (literally a YouTube channel), gigantic Anki digital flashcard decks (see reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki), UWorld, First Aid, Sketchy, Pathoma, etc.
'High Yield' is the buzzword for resources that are a better use of time.
So yes, you almost certainly will trust a doctor someday who was educated at least in part by YouTube or comparable online resources. You just won't know it, since the paper on the wall will say "University of X". And as long as they pass the boards and make it through residency, does it matter?
Some people rely on the 'free' resources more than others. The real question is where is the cutoff percentage at. Say someone got 95% of what they know only from free resources and passed boards swimmingly. That sure don't look good on the med-school.
Say 95% of the entire class got 95% of the learning through Youtube/Anki and 95% of them passed boards. At such a percentage, med-school is all but useless to the general public that they serve. May as well get rid of them.
Granted, I don't think it's anywhere near that kind of level of dereliction that the med-schools are at (Cadaver Lab is an obvious counterpoint). But, where is the cut-off point for the schools and society? It's not 5% of the material being learned outside of them, that's fine I think. But if 95% is 'learned' outside the lectures, then yeah, that's a real bad sign.
It's a complicated question and the answer will likely be more complex and will evolve from class to class and year to year.
As someone who went to medical school more than 20 years ago, it wasn't that much different other than people using "question banks" in order to help them pass the tests. There were plenty of prep books for preparing for the USMLE and board specific exams (for rotations in the third year).
Nothing in evolution is inevitable. Granted some things are more likely (oxygen-binding hemoglobin has independently evolved several times from its related non-binding globin family). Brains, nervous systems, even multicellularity are not inevitable. The specific combination of astronomical, geological, and biological features that lead to our development might not lead to similar outcomes if ran a million times.
As other responders have pointed out, brains are just one possible substrate for intelligence. We can't account for other systems (biological or otherwise) that could lead to the development of intelligence, so of necessity any probability estimate based on us has to be a lower bound of possibility.
One bit of our earth history that is worth noting is that the conditions when life presumably arose are hostile to multicellular life as we know it. Earth's early oceans were hot, anoxic and reducing, and under heavy pressure from far thicker atmospheres. The great oxidation event essentially turned earth's atmosphere into a bacterial waste dump, the waste being oxygen produced by early cyanobacteria. Life had to evolve ways to cope with oxygen or learn to hide. This is still true of our own cells. While we need oxygen to survive, it is still and will always be toxic. Free radical damage such as from reactive oxygen species is a constant threat, and is the ultimate form of irrecoverable information death when we die.
Might it be that the conditions under which life can arise, and under which intelligent life can arise, are different? We got lucky that earth traversed from the first to the second. Add this to the list of a million things that had to go right for us to exist at all. The same might well be true of any other intelligences out there. And the odds of two arising close enough in time and space to contact each other would be far less common than lonely civilizations looking out into the dark.
It took 2 billion years for the hard-working unicellular cyanobacteria to produce enough oxygen to first oxidize the rocks and minerals on the Earth's surface, and to build up enough oxygen in the atmosphere for the birth of multicellular life to be possible.
But if the planed had only supported one half of the cyanobacterial biomass it did, or if the amount of rocks to oxidize, or the mass of the atmosphere, was larger, that 2 billion years could have as well taken e.g. 4 billion years. And the Sun would have already become too hot, and multicellular life would never have evolved.
This. I'm gonna cut to the chase: that line is probably the most fascist thing I'm going to read all day, and excepting you, Hacker News has failed to call it out. This idea that war can somehow mythically rejuvenate the ethos or spirit of a country isn't unique to fascism though. It was also common in the jingoist imperial western european powers, and partly used as justification for aggression against neighbors and abroad.
This is disgusting to see at the top of the comment thread. Anyone who upvoted that comment needs to engage in some serious introspection.
This tactic, of identifying a problem that may have some real validity, but then making logical leaps into absurdity, is typical of postmodern types like Bannon. How exactly does war solve the problem identified? Who are we to watch against?
It's not always about the words that are said. There's a subtext or more than one. The given justification isn't always the real justification, it just has to be plausible enough to get the real message out, seen in that last line. The overton window opens, and those on the sidelines who might have kept similar thoughts to themselves can now be drawn in and engaged. And that last sentence creeps closer to becoming real.
I think you're straw manning a bit there. It's not illogical to say that severe national challenges help rejuvenate society in the long run. You can even see it locally when the power goes out for a few days in a hurricane, and all of a sudden neighbors who barely knew each other for 10 years are pooling resources and talking.
War is horrific in the short term, but everyone on this site has benefited from it in some form. Much of the internet came out of military research, as did flight, as did satellites, as did many nautical advances, the list goes on.
Whether those benefits are worth it and on what scale could be the subject of a dissertation, but we don't want to become the Eloi any more than we want to be the Morlocks.
Just because the concept can be twisted into pointless war mongering by fascists doesn't make it less true. For my part I think climate change alone is going to provide enough national challenges.
So people who die in war don't benefit from the war... and?
My point was that war is not always entirely negative if you zoom out far enough. It can be entirely negative or partially positive, just like many other things. Would you rather the British to have surrendered to Hitler and the Americans refuse to fight in WWII?
> So people who die in war don't benefit from the war... and?
And therefore your claim that everyone here has benefited from it suffers from significant survivor bias.
> It can be entirely negative or partially positive, just like many other things.
Sure. But we've seen way too many examples of people selling how wonderful a war would be (and you're flirting dangerously close to that). War's not wonderful. It's horrible. Only fight it when the alternative is even more horrible (which is not never).
Strange, because in this thread the closest thing to calling war "wonderful" I've seen is "Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country..."
Things that are wonderful aren't sad to imagine. Nor am I saying anything resembling calling a war "wonderful". I hear a lot of accusations and assumptions of intent with few real arguments other than "war bad".
From where I sit the conversation appears to go like:
Person 1: War bad.
Person 2: War sometimes good in certain contexts...
Person 1: NO! WAR ALWAYS BAD YOU FASCIST COWARD!!!
military research is not the same as war. Flight was developed by the commercial sector.
the people blabbering about war as a means of national rejuvenation are usually the ones not planning on bleeding out in a muddy ditch. 30 million people died in WWI and not much was rejuvenated
Can't speak for everyone, but your second point is an easy one for me. If I were drafted, in any remotely realistic circumstance I would go.
And military research is a result of war or potential war. And if you want to deny the lack of the military's influence in human flight, I'm not even sure what to say to that. Aircraft were adopted by militaries around the world as soon as they were viable. And military observation balloons go back to the 18th century. The military may not have invented human flight, but they funded a crap ton of it.
Or it could simply be that no one is paying attention. HN comments are not exactly the most important thing to which a person can devote their time and attention.
Utilities are natural monopolies.
Not exactly the best fit for a market solution, especially when, as in this case, they are negative externalities borne by the public that the company is trying to avoid paying for.
The company will pay for nothing. Its a powerco not a mint. Their only significant revenue stream is electric bills (pole rental for telco fiber optics, pole rental for cable TV cables, all small amounts of money)
What we have here is a decision between one group of accountants getting electricity users to pay, vs a different group of accountants getting taxpayers to pay. The fraction of the population that are net positive taxpayers is much smaller than the fraction of the population that uses electricity, so in a democracy it would be surprising NOT to see the people deciding the few people who are net positive taxpayers will get the bill. The large chunk of the population that pay electric bills while being net negative taxpayers are not going to volunteer to pay more.
A counterpoint might be that binding private enterprise by strict liability rules might coerce it to be extra cautious not to cut corners that lead to fires -- as opposed to a state owned company which might have less to fear from lax practices.
Although, it's debatable how avoidable starting fires is in the bone-dry tinderbox of 21st-century California, even if you stick closely to best practices.
What you describe is exactly what PG&E is today. Those strict liability rules did not prevent them from cutting corners. They estimate damages at 15B and their insurance and assets are worth $5B. So do the math.... taxpayers will have to pay for rebuilding and if PG&E survives will they pass costs on to rate payers (aka the same people whose houses burnt down) or will they tax PG&E more or ?. Maybe PG&E will become insurance company owned since they will owe the insurers tons of money since they can't pay out for liability.
