dukeleto
1yr ago
I agree, I strongly resent the paternalism of a system that even requires a prescription in the first place (if your concerned about drug abuse a good start would be that prescriptions are required for controlled substances and that insurance doesn’t have to cover drugs purchased without prescriptions)
dukeleto
1yr ago
I had a PhD advisor who used to make me prototype things I wanted to do with python (which I am very good at) in Matlab so he could understand what I was doing. One of the most frustrating months of my life (and part of the reason I quit!).
Also fuck matlab
dukeleto
1yr ago
The indexing from one thing aways pissed me off so much (what’s worse is that is trying to keep this straight when using Matlab to do signals processing since it’s obvious that Matlab Fourier transform functions are wrapped C or some other real language)
dukeleto
1yr ago
Also I never figured out if Matlab even has a real debugger. Being able to just %debug is so ridiculously useful
dukeleto
1yr ago
Depending on where you are in your major and if it overlaps well with your major you might consider minoring in CS. I majored in geophysics but minored in CS which forced me to take formal computer science courses up to data structures. All of these courses (at my school) were taught in C and this background (which I wouldn’t have ever gotten without it being hammered in) has been enormously valuable to my subsequent scientific work.
dukeleto
1yr ago
Would be interesting if this still holds for Caucasian students. I’m guessing it wouldn’t.
dukeleto
1yr ago
I haven’t actually read any of his papers (so I may be wrong), but given how interested everyone seems to be in NOT dealing with the nuclear waste issue (exhibit 1: Yucca Mountain) I’d be suspicious of just about anyone posted to this job. I don’t think it’s a problem that the administration wants solved.
dukeleto
1yr ago
I read a lot and find my self spending around 40$ a month buying books through Amazon for my kindle. It’s recently come to my attention that Amazon takes a whopping 70% cut for self published titles (https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210) ! Does anyone know what the range is for books that come from a real publisher? I may switch back to paper backs …
dukeleto
1yr ago
Wow, on the one hand I am surprised that amazons margins are actually pretty fair (although still annoyed because it isn’t like they are taking any kind of a risk since they don’t give advances).
Also hadn’t really thought of publishing as basically having a VC model.
I don’t really understand how his rationale holds any water and am convinced that this is probably the stupidest thing he could have done to preserve the longevity of the platform. I think he taking ambien again…
dukeleto
1yr ago
Oh I agreed with basically everything he’s done at twitter up to this point. Banning a lot of obnoxious journalists just seems like a huge self own.
Fundamentally I suspect that everyone would be much better off if there were fewer, better compensated graduate students. The situation which presently exists is that there are many graduate students that have either mediocre talent or are independently wealthy (or both) that use graduate school as an opportunity to slack off and enjoy their 20’s. This group is an enormous beneficiary of the stipend and probably mostly only puts in 20 hours a week.
This is in contrast to a second smaller group which conducts substantial amounts of valuable scientific work, usually putting in 40-60 hours a week while receiving shit compensation and negligible benefits. This group mostly consists of international students whom can’t get other jobs and domestic students whom are either brilliant/delusional enough to believe that they will get an academic job.
I was in this category making 25000 a year (in Colorado which is much lower coa than California) working weekends so I left for a job in the private sector where I make considerably more money and don’t work weekends. I would have stayed if a hard core graduate school option that paid me 40-50 k a year to work weekends had existed (which is vastly less than what I make outside of graduate school) and insulated me from having to deal the obnoxious activist type whom mostly come out of the first category.
Graduate schools should serve this second group of students and treat them like salaried employees hired to do research. Teaching/grading jobs should be simple hourly jobs open to any student and tuition wavers need to disappear (since no one besides extremely rich masters students actually pay tuition, stated tuition is ridiculously high).
dukeleto
1yr ago
I wholly agree. I got out about 6 months ago and have been much happier working a regular job
dukeleto
1yr ago
My assumption is that the ccp either believes their own propaganda with respect to the quality of their vaccines OR they are simply refusing to import western vaccines out of some kind of misguided national pride. I’d love to know if the leadership and other important Chinese officials have used moderna or phizer vaccines (not that we are ever likely to find this out but it would be a great example of revealed preferences)
dukeleto
1yr ago
Do you know if there is any place I can get this as an epub? I tried googling it and I just find links to the guys website, im not interested in reading the whole thing online.
I think it’s important because airlines are so heavily regulated that the rules which govern passenger compensation in the event of a cancellation are written by the bureaucracy. A few days ago southwest was trying to blame all of the cancellations on the weather which under the current rules would have allowed them to avoid paying for the hotels/rental cars etc. that they may be liable for.
While they can’t retroactively enforce these rules on southwest they can credibly threaten to impose more passenger friendly rules in an attempt to get southwest to behave better now.
I had to visit the emergency room earlier this year for a nose bleed. At the time I was discharged (October 2022) I paid a 200$ bill to the hospital, foolishly believing that this was the entire cost of the visit. I subsequently received a 357$ physicians statement. This little episode in medical billing really irritated me since I felt that the hospital had hidden the actual cost of their services and because the amount was absurd for the services rendered (10 minutes for a physicians assistant to apply some topical TCX). As a result I have been thinking of not paying it and am trying to understand if recent changes to that the credit reporting agencies have made may allow me to get away with this without damaging my >800 credit score.
In particular it sounds like medical debts < 500$ will no longer impact a credit score starting in 2023 https://www.equifax.com/personal/education/credit/score/can-medical-debt-impact-credit-scores/ and I am trying to determine if this determination is made based on the date of the service(s) (october 2022) or the date that a bill is sold to a collections entity, which could occur in late January. I also discovered that paid medical debt collections haven't impacted a consumers credit score since 2022 (https://investor.equifax.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1222/equifax-experian-and-transunion-support-u-s-consumers), so its my understanding that even if they are able to sell this bill to a collections entity, the worst that could happen is that I would simply have to pay the amount at a later time.
Does anyone know if this analysis is basically correct? Its my understanding that their only other recourse would be to try and sue me which is unlikely to happen over a 357$ bill.
I truly don’t understand the moralizing, there is no universe where having an in network hospital with an out of network doctor is anything other than an attempt to obfuscate in an attempt to extract a higher price. Also I am surprised that you believe that complaining to congress about exorbitant healthcare costs is anything but a waste of time, the last 30 years of history would seem to contradict you on this.
Upon reflection it’s stunning that americas credit reporting agencies apparently consider healthcare to be so predatory that they don’t think medical debt is predictive of someone’s willingness to repay other kinds of consumer debt.
dukeleto
1yr ago
It was insurance, apparently the hospital is in network but the physicians assistant was not so they won’t pay any of it. Also the physicians bill didn’t come from the hospital but from some other entity which refused to negotiate.
You can see my responses below if you are interested in more details but I fundamentally don’t feel any moral obligation to a system where you have in network hospitals with out of network doctors.
Also it’s sort of stunning that americas credit bureaus appear to agree that the system is so exploitative that they simply ignore small
Amounts of medical debt when considering my probability of repaying other debt.
Fundamentally, it sounds like you perceive that the problem is that people don’t pay enough for health care (whether that is through private insurance or through Medicaid).
This means that the hospital/physician is trying to take advantage of me because I am easier to negotiate with than my insurance company or the government. In the recent past where they could fuck my credit score they had most of the leverage and this would have worked and people like me would have been responsible for propping up a broken payment system. How is this not absurdly predatory?
Now that this is more difficult perhaps the AMA or the hospital lobby or any number of absurdly powerful interest groups which exist to guarantee the welfare of the healthcare industry, can take action on this instead?
I suppose they might also just increase bills so they always meet the 500$ credit reporting threshold but this will probably take them a few years since it will need to at least look somewhat what organic to avoid being sued by some ambitious attorney general somewhere.
I’ll admit that I didn’t read the whole thing, but why would he use an MAOB instead of just taking a stimulant? (Or was he being treated for depression)
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