arkades

Case studies aren't science, and aren't meant to be. They're clinical medicine.

They (not necessarily all applying to this one) illustrate that: (A) This fucking cool thing happened. (B) This weird presentation (or lab finding, or imaging) turned out to be, we're pretty sure, X. (C) This weird presentation or case was successfully concluded with treatment X, with the caveat that, you know, we can't prove it was the treatment that did it.

When other docs are searching for "wtf is this weird presentation?", finding a case that shares other clinicians' reasoning and a possible diagnosis for that weird presentation is super helpful. Some things are too rare for your immediate colleagues to have much insight.

Case studies are professionals kibbitzing with one another, not science. They may give rise to science, as when an unconventional but logically sound therapy appears to have worked and prompts someone to test it in a proper trial.

You don't see the difference between "let's hold companies responsible for what people do as part of utilizing their services, while utilizing their services" and "let's hold companies responsible for what people do with an item they have purchased once entirely out of the supervision of that company, without any possible oversight or control"?

I can't hold a skateboard co. responsible for what people do with skateboards they've purchased. I can most certainly hold a skate park responsible for what happens in the skate park.

> They are a monopoly, and this is unjust.

Every store has a monopoly over the contents of their own shelves. That's why 'monopoly' is a concept that applies to markets, not to individual stores.

> Am I just getting bad doctors? How do you find this type of buddy doctor that becomes a long term relationship and really cares about you personally, like I hear about other people seeming to have.

Doc here:

Stay in one place, go to the same guy repeatedly over time, and ideally, be really candid with them, and send them your family members. When I see half (or more) of a household, it's an entirely different dynamic. You can't buy the sort of relationship that comes of seeing someone's kids grow up, and then treating that kid. That kid is like... 5% blood relative to the doc at that point. He will never be "just a patient." Or when you treat someone and their mother - that's a different level of candor right there, because that person trusts me with their mother - that right there suggests I can be more open with them, because they won't immediately blame/hate me for news they don't like.

Time is the key, though. A lot of patients, if they get "tough love", turn around and go to a different doc. Especially the ones that say they just want to hear it straight - they are trying to convince themselves, I think. So getting to "tough love" is something that's built up over time, in both directions. (Also, studies suggest that it's somewhere between "not effective" and "actively harmful" when it comes to positively changing patient's health-related behavior, so it's not a super high priority.)

Bonus points if you go to someone that only takes cash. For a once or twice a year visit, it's not that much money (compared to, say, one month of most prescription meds), but it means they don't have to hustle you through an 8-minute visit to keep their lights on. You can only get so much of a connection with someone that's forced to hustle you out of the door - it's jarring and kind of upsetting to everyone involved, on both sides of the interaction. (When I was in training I was told pretty candidly I'd make a fantastic attending one day, if I learned to actually hustle patients fast enough to be able to afford keeping an office open. ... You can imagine, I structured my career towards cash patients only. I don't like being inaccessible to folk, but I hate it less than I hate giving people half-assed help when they're in need.)

Another good element is going to a physician that you're community-bound to in some way other than a strict transaction. Your kid's little league coach will have an entirely different relationship to you than "random doctor." That's becoming less common these days, unfortunately - with the way reimbursement is swinging, I don't know of many docs that still have time for much in the way of community activities. They exist, but they're a lot rarer than they used to be.

It doesn't matter if they're hypocrites. At all.

It matters that we create reasonable and sane policies and enforce them evenly and fairly across all market participants. We don't apply them selectively based on whether the company is "a nice guy." None of them are nice guys. They're not people, and folks need to stop anthropomorphizing them.

> I understand Spotify's complaint about competing with Apple Music, and that does have merit, but at the same time I kind of just don't really care. Spotify is also in the process of ruining podcasts by making them exclusive to their platform, so no real love lost here for me

Spotify isn't a person. I don't care about their feelings or their hypocrisy. It's a matter of policy, which ought to be applied evenly and fairly. Monopoly behavior is harmful, and should be curbed when reasonable - whether it's being done /by/ someone we (dis)like or /to/ someone we (dis)like.

Other services are reporting failure to connect when trying to reach T-Mobile. I was just trying to call a coworker w/ T-Mobile, and the error message I received was "Verizon cannot complete this call." (I'm on VZ)

As another poster included: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...

“ An anonymous caller had contacted the company to say Tripp was planning a mass shooting at the Gigafactory. When the police confronted Tripp that evening, he was unarmed and in tears. He said he was terrified of Musk and suggested the billionaire might have called in the tip himself.”

Because plenty of them aren't out of print.

Publishers may or may not give a shit if you put forward a book in a fashion that does not impact them monetarily. They give a shit if you do. They definitely don't care what the ratio between the two is; they care that the latter is non-zero.

Because one of those groups is a set of criminals that will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the other one of those groups is a set of government agents with a history of not being held accountable for their actions.

There's never been a lack of focus on intra-community violence. It's been the go-to "whataboutism" for ... ever. It's also not relevant to the question of why government authorities should be exempt from the consequences of violating the law.

> Always surprising to me how the basic structure of analogy is so commonly misunderstood.

It's what happens when people don't have a rebuttal to the point being raised. It's generally a good sign that they're no longer engaging in good faith.

I'm not sure I understand your comment correctly.

Are you saying that black communities should be reasonably crime-free before they can expect institutions not to systematically discriminate them and enact retributionless, extralegal violence upon them?

This is largely what's kept me away. I'm comfortable adding piles of sources and citations to pass through some sort of Wikipedia Peer Review-Lite, but if I put in the hard work of creating a repository of knowledge for free and just see it go away...

I've tried contributing once or twice, and my work was erased like marks on the beach, promptly and without explanation. That was enough to ensure I don't do it again.

No offense taken. Weeding out for accuracy is a fair and important concern, and there's no reason to assume a random person on the internet is the expert they believe themselves to be.

Though I'd point out that unless wikipedia has a team of people whose expertise equals or at least vaguely approximates my own (or that of any expert that might contribute), I have to raise the question of whether that's really what they're filtering, or simply something that superficially looks like accuracy to someone unfamiliar with the material.

It also assumes that the inaccuracy of the current articles is less than the inaccuracy of articles under a hypothetical alternative moderation policy. That might be true, or it might not - chase away enough contributors and you're left with one-sided, stale information. I imagine that's fine for an article on the simpsons, but maybe not great if you're looking up leukemias.

People think Wikipedia is complete???

I could add stuff in my field of specialty constantly. I just don't want to jump through all the hoops that come with being a wikipedia contributor, so I keep all my notes on a private wiki.

That's cool. I go through about two blades a week. I'm not sure either of those facts is relevant to the discussion.

The plaintiff would have seven years in which to have the court claw back the transferred assets and, as there's no way that it would come close to looking like an ordinary course-of-business transfer, it would not only make them more likely to lose the suit (by making them look even more like law-flouting criminals), but it would likely add a criminal charge to the mix (bankruptcy fraud).

Many libraries changed the policies you're describing during the pandemic. As though they, too, were responding to changes on the ground.

NYPL, for instance, suspended address verification for issuing new e-library cards, with the caveat that it was restricted to borrowing ebooks.

> Why are companies driving away people who make multi-thousand dollar purchases with scummy behaviour that nets them spare change?

Because high-margin goods aren't spare change. Look at the razor:

I can sell you the razor at cost-plus for $20 on a $19 manufacturing cost. I can sell you each individual razor cartridge at 90% profit for $1. At the end of the year I've sold, say, 5 razors and 50 blades, for a total of $150.

On the one hand, the razors made up the bulk of my gross revenue ($100/$150).

On the other hand, looking at the actual profit I've generated, $45 came from blades and $5 came from razors - that is, 90% of my profit came from those "pennies" that the razors brought in.

If you can strong-arm people into buying high-margin goods, that's a strong bonus to your bottom line, even if the absolute price isn't that high.

Let's plug a fridge into those numbers.

A nice new GE fridge can be had for something in the vicinity of $800 (sears website is showing me stuff $600-$1000, so let's just split the difference). Amazon has GW RPWFE filters up at $50 a pop.

You buy a fridge, what, every ten years? Every twenty? Those filters "should" be replaced every quarter? Let's be generous and say every half a year.

Those filters generate the same profit as the fridge at 16 years out, at the same profit margins. At asymmetric profit margins (say, 30% vs. 5%) they've produced profits equal to that of the fridge in a handful of years.

These aren't pennies.

> No activation was not removed, a license is still required.

This was even explicitly stated in the linked article, but for some reason people keep asserting in this thread that it was a cracked version of windows.

Am I missing something, or are people just making big assumptions and not reading the article?

> It's also quite difficult to get adequate sputum cultures

Heck yes. PNA cx will come back negative a good 2/3 of the time. Doesn't mean an awful lot.

It's a bad one.

Controlling medical expenses isn't easy. Neither is getting admin + overhead under 10%. You need both to get a reasonably profitable insurance product.

That applies to health insurance. I don't believe it applies to any other kind. Lemonade isn't a health insurer.

The essay seemed to me a very lengthy rumination on the question that ultimately got scared and ran away from actually taking an unpopular stance on the answer.

What university is this where tuition plus school-based insurance is < 20% of open market insurance?

In the US the first two years of a PhD are heavily focused on classwork, with a research component; the latter years are the "sabbatical to focus on your own research." People who quit after the first two years are often granted a parting Master's degree, because that's basically what a Master's is - the two years of graduate coursework that kick off a PhD.

This does, of course, differ by program.

Comparing the field of people with PhDs to the field of people with BSs isn't exactly comparable to comparing PhDs to people with Master's degrees who are already doing all the relevant academic work and receiving academic acclaim in the field.

There may be financial benefit, maybe not. There's also the opportunity cost of giving up your career income for four+ years to get a grad student stipend (if it's a program with stipends at all).

I understand you were broadening the point, but I think "first-career PhDs" vs. "second-career PhDs" are the topic under discussion, and broadening it to "bachelor's" is too broad.

> but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter.

Oh yeah. I went to med school after having an actual career. Going back to a heavy-handed bureaucracy whose primary intention is to herd a mob of people with the least benefit of doubt is incredibly infantilizing. It's hard to endure the first time, when you're in uni, but after you've already been an adult?

>If you have any friends who are not rich, or are European or South American

One: 55-60% market share in the US, by definition, is not confined to "the rich."

As to the other categories: my personal answer to "If you have any friends that aren't American" is "that's what whatsapp is for." I imagine for a lot of people the answer is that, or "I don't, actually."

Like, all the teenagers in my family. Their list of non-US friends is near-zero. Their non-US family are all on whatsapp.

They don't experience a gap.

IME there's a loss of a number of features when communicating without someone with "blue bubbles", that you come to take for granted, and that cause a bit of friction when you realize the messages/functionality you took for granted in your exchange aren't there. If I find myself chatting with someone with green bubbles, I find I tend to transition the conversation over to whatsapp.

It's not like a "relationship killer" or something, but I imagine it is a low-level contributor to my lock-in to the platform.