domain:pedestrianobservations.com
Throwaway05
4m ago
Honestly I've used the downvotes from my sometimes half-cocked healthcare economics rants as part of exposure therapy for fear of online censure.
Our people pleasing and neuroticism needs treatment!
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5m ago
There are far too many conditions and too many of them are common (or general) for me to take that too seriously. Also my own family has some of them, but they definitely weren't shamans. Maybe the branch I know of really does have "it", though, and it's a selection issue -- the "it" being they immigrated to the US.
That hypothesis would have to be made a lot tighter before it could even be tested. I know links between left-handedness and giftedness have been tested, with widely varying results (some studies showing a strong effect, some none).
Throwaway05
6m ago
My recollection of medical school was that almost all of the stellar students and smartest students were the same people. You did have a pot of smart bad students but usually they had something like ADHD and couldn't keep up with the study demand. Although I find that the smart people who didn't do well were better at retaining information years later than the not as smart but better students (this retention being in reference to things like other people's specialties).
However, "bad student" for medical school in the U.S. is a god outside of it - things like pre-exam crams and all nighters are flat out impossible. It isn't uncommon at the start of first year to be basically learning multiple undergrad classes worth of material in a week, every week. Almost all exams are incredibly high stakes and some are full days in length or more etc.
The material usually doesn't require much beyond an above average IQ to learn but the amount of it is vicious - the classic statement is "like drinking from a firehose" and then you do that for years.
No amount of pure horsepower can do it - you also need the effort.
That said an interesting part of how this has gone in the US is that the rote memorization component of medical education has become more or less solved, and since they need to do some candidate discrimination..... they've worked very hard to dial in on the "thinking" parts instead of pure memorization.
A question might be - patient with x disease has y side effect, which of the following medications most likely caused the side effect? And then all 6 meds cause that side effect - they want you to know that one of the medications is overwhelmingly likely to be prescribed because of a practice guideline, causes the side effect at a much higher rate, or something else like that.
15-20 years ago the standardized tests were hard because the way medical knowledge has exploded in recent years. Now they are actually fucking hard and require much more in depth understanding.
This may be a bit US specific though, as the population of students here is generally neurotic passionate about care people or money seekers looking for the best gig (which also requires high performance).
Supah_Schmendrick
11m ago
Which, based on fairly gruesome videos circulating on social media, it appears to be doing fairly vigorously right now.
Supah_Schmendrick
14m ago
Why do you exclude South Africa-style reintegration?
Because everyone can look at South Africa to see just how well that goes.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
16m ago
Imagination works fundamentally unconstrained from physical reality, for a start. We can 'imagine' and see things like numbers, that have basically no real physical basis, and change the world from them. The list goes on and on.
If you're genuinely curious about this, I recommend the book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.
Throwaway05
18m ago
It's my favorite book but it can be Work.
I am shocked at how it only seems to become more prescient as I age.*
*and disturbed.
Throwaway05
19m ago
Ya'll don't have review books over there?
Dang.
Also medical classification systems are great. Fight me bro.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23m ago
Interesting. After discovering that One Battle After Another was based on Vineland, I've wanted to read it to get a feel for the source material, all the more so since I made my way through Gravity's Rainbow and well remember the sense of,"what in the actual fuck did I just read," stupefied awe that I felt afterwards. I kinda want to read it both less and more at the same time after that description!
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
29m ago
Crime really is down compared to the crack era, and New York City is reasonably safe, even after COVID-era backsliding. It's not the only city in the country, though. Chicago in particular has a much higher murder rate, with Philadelphia not far behind. And not to leave red state cities out -- both Dallas and Houston are pretty bad. And Atlanta's will knock your socks off (well, strip them from your corpse, most likely)
Repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 probably is neither necessary nor sufficient. But you do need to refuse to allow racial considerations to interfere with stopping serious crime, which might involve some of the law around that act.
There's Left Behind in Rosedale and Philly War Zone; I've heard stories similar to the latter about Baltimore also. "White flight" was in large part ethnic cleansing, and we're still dealing with the results of that.
aqouta
30m ago
If the Palestinians can give up on the pipe dream of driving the jews into the sea then a two or three state solution where both peoples prosper is totally possible. It's essentially the direction Trump's plan pushes things. What you're asking for is a near equivalent to demands all non-native americans leave turtle island and go back to the countries of their ethnic origin, justice by some tortured ethic but simply not going to happen and the sooner the fantasy is dispensed with the sooner real solutions can be tried.
I'm sorry, the Israelis are not going to lay down and let themselves all be killed or expelled from what they believe to be their homeland. If your plan is for them to do that then you need to come up with another plan.
DiscourseMagnus
30m ago
Maybe add Sally Hemings to the $2 alongside Thomas Jefferson?
JarJarJedi
32m ago
I don't know how it is in Sweden, but in the US I am not a big entrepreneur but I have to take into account, beyond my salary:
- Freelancing income - plus expenses, plus SEP IRA linked to that income
- Income from bank deposits
- Income from stock (is taxed differently from above and has a myriad rules like short/long term, wash sales, etc.)
- HSA
- IRA
- Local tax deductions
- Mortgage deductions
- Charity deductions
It became a bit simpler recently when standard deduction had been raised so most of these deductions aren't worth itemizing anymore, but before that I had to deal with it all. Obviously my workplace has no idea about any of it and can't deal with it. Some of them (like taxing income from bank deposits) can be done by the banks, but other stuff can only be properly calculated by somebody having the full picture, i.e. the IRS. Oh yes, and for many of those the actual tax level depends on my income. And not just plain income, but modified adjusted income (real term) - to calculate which you need to check a couple of dozens of rules on which parts are "modified" and which are "adjusted", and all of it depends on all of everything else, pretty much.
And it's not pocket change either - if it's not done right, the difference can easily be hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars even for mid-tier income like mine. IRS could calculate it all (well, except state taxes which is different rules in every single one of them) - but nobody else, realistically, could do it without me giving them all the data and them recreating what IRS has from scratch. Which is what H&R, Intuit and such are charging the money for.
And to be clear here - my taxes are very simple, comparatively. People have massively more complicated tax situations that I do. I'm still in the DIY zone, people with more complex taxes just hire somebody to do it for them, because there's no way a layman can figure it out.
Supah_Schmendrick
32m ago
Lacan's cult of personality is bigger than Marx's? What? How are they even in the same order of magnitude?
Psychoanalysis is a weeeeeeird discipline, man.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
33m ago
A standalone top level post needs a blurb or explainer for why it's relevant to this forum. If you went ahead and did that, we'll let this through the queue.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
33m ago
That was a fantastic read, cheers. I liked his list of jobs for modern shamans in particular.
Supah_Schmendrick
34m ago
who is the "they" in "they need to seize the means of cultural production"
Realistlcally, a small vanguard party of dedicated ideologues.
Who are the cultural Marxists?
Initially there was Horkheimer, Adorn, Marcuse, Fromm, Benjamin, Pollock, and Lowenthal. Of those, Columbia, Brandeis, and a few west coast public universities (Marcuse wound up at UC San Diego) saw the most influence in political science and theory. Fromm had a large impact on feminist theory.
Second generation figures include Habermas, Frederic Jameson, Stuart Hall, and generally the New School for Social Research and the UC system more broadly (which also played a big part in bringing in and fusing French post-structuralist analysis into it).
Then you have the full efflorescence through Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Duncan Kennedy, Kimberle Crenshaw, Nancy Fraser, Donna Haraway, Wendy Brown, Cedric Robinson, Walter Mignolo, Andreas Malm, Shoshanna Zuboff, etc.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
37m ago
Yes, Marwhan Bargouti has been referred to as the Palestinian Mandela for quite some time. The Israelis refuse to release him from prison and repeatedly torture him in order to make sure there's no peaceful resolution to the conflict beyond the extermination of the Palestinians (to the best of my understanding - maybe there's an alternative and more charitable explanation, but if there is I haven't found it).
Supah_Schmendrick
41m ago
The Jordan Peterson-esqe "cultural Marxism" shibboleth is genuinely gibberish. ... It's literally just "I 'ate communism, I 'ate wokism, refer to 'em interchangeably, simple as"
It really isn't. It's a popularization (thus, inevitably, a bit of a bastardization) of a real theoretical development. I strongly recommend Martin Jay's "The Dialectical Imagination" for an academic but decently accessible intellectual history of the movement.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
43m ago
So they do have a Nelson Mandela?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
47m ago
I don't think that the Israel issue is over - even though the focus might change away from Palestine, my money on the next major issue in US politics is the US-Israel relationship. The current arrangement isn't sustainable, and the polling I've seen suggests that a majority of Americans want AIPAC and Israel brought to heel. There's no way this particular milk gets unspilled, and none of the normies who supported Palestine because it was the Current Thing are going to forget what they saw Zionists and those funded by them do. The activists are already hard at work on projects like the Hind Rajab foundation and other efforts to make sure the world does not forget what Israel did. The outsize influence of Israel over western governments is being pulled into the spotlight all over the world, and the consequences of that conflict have in no way finished playing themselves out. Given that Israel is potentially going to be restarting the conflict with Iran and drawing the US in to that fight as well, I don't think this particular issue is going to leave "current thing" status barring some other major event (AGI getting achieved, climate disaster, another pandemic, another war, etc).
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
49m ago
Genuinely asking, who is the "they" in "they need to seize the means of cultural production"
Who are the cultural Marxists? Because the people Lobster Daddy hates have been in control of art, universities, etc for the back half of the 20th century and all of the 21st
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
51m ago
If the money never leaves that other company, never returns to the US and then never gets paid to those executives then I don't think there's any issues with letting those other countries tax it. I don't think there are any issues with saying that money your company never actually lays hands on (a foreign subsidiary does instead) isn't subject to taxation. Of course, if you can't actually bring any money back from a foreign subsidiary there's not much point to having them....
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
59m ago
Israel will no longer be fighting with one arm tied behind their back.
Israel was lining Palestinians up and then crushing them with bulldozers (see the story about the IDF soldier who killed himself because he couldn't live with being the driver), on top of torturing people with downs syndrome (Mohammad Bhar) and murdering small children (Hind Rajab). They deployed more explosive power relative to the size of their target than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you think this is them being restrained, you're making the case that Israel needs to be removed from the Earth before they can do this to anyone else.
"They" is the disadvantaged. And if "they" won't seize the means of cultural production, then a cultural Lenin or Lenins has to do it for them. When the welfare state (mid-20th century, which explains your timeline) solved economic problems but none of the attendant social problems in marginalized communities, it seemed like maybe the problem was cultural power. If no one lacks anything material, but you still don't have the equality you were looking for, maybe you need a black little mermaid.
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