Exactly this. The VA already is hiring as many midlevels (NP/PA) as possible so that they don't have to hire MDs. You wouldn't believe how low the bar is to become an NP. PAs receive substantially better training, but at the end of the day they are still midlevels.
Worse still, many NP programs are now giving out "doctorates" of nursing practice so that NPs can introduce themselves to the patient as "Dr." Smith.
In short, the VA is willing to gamble with your life if it means saving a few bucks. It's pretty harrowing.
No, actually. I'm talking about people who move to an area wanting to change it, in my experience typically (but not always) rich, white, never gone hunting, that sort.
This is completely ideological, not racial. If you want to correlate those two, that's on you.
What differentiates a course as "high school" level vs. college? I honestly feel like my high school courses were just as hard as my college courses. The only difference is they required the prerequisite knowledge from the high school courses. Or, at least, having that knowledge helped.
Some Googling tells me the average final GPA for an engineer there is between 3.3 and 3.4, meaning a lot of people are going to graduate with much lower grades than that. I eventually graduated with a 3.5, but I was below 3 for quite some time. I had two Cs, a fair amount of low As, and a lot of Bs.
What tended to happen was that your GPA increases throughout your time in undergrad because:
* classes are easier later in the major, or they seem easier because you're more directly interested in the content and your classes up to this point have built up the base knowledge, rather than being the freshman year survey of "all the hardest but largely unrelated science classes all at once"
* your study skills improve
This doesn't really excuse how the students are treated in my opinion, both by the professors and generally how the system was set up. Obviously hard things are hard, but there were many, many brilliant students in a very dark place because the school just throws them in the deep end and says "fuck you".
Something like MIT's first semester being pass/fail only could have gone a long way.
Also we were on the quarter system, and engineers needed an absurd 48 classes to graduate, which is a full 4-class schedule every quarter without a single drop or failure in order to graduate on time.
These classes are the same content as full-semester classes at other schools, but crammed into 10 weeks to fit the quarter system.
My school seemed to revel in how hard it was, kids and professors would constantly disparage other top schools saying they were practicing grade inflation. To what degree that is true, who knows. Anytime you go to a top-but-not-Ivy-league school, people are going to talk about oh why our school is actually more legit, etc, whatever. Seemed like half jealousy and half Stockholm syndrome to me.
My department's policy was a 3.2 curve. So half the students in every class got B+ or worse. 2.75 is a B-, most classes had at least 30% at or below there.
Actually, that’s exactly how unfettered “free market” capitalism operates. The end game is big companies end up controlling everything, including the regulations in order to tip the scales in their favor.
The healthcare industry disaster wasn't born out of regulatory control - though money does now follow the regulations. The disaster was born out of regulatory mistakes(in particular, look back to the 1940's when the govt made it tax free to offer health insurance as a benefit). [1]
The industry is an onion and in order to understand why it is the way it is today you need to peel back all of the layers that have been added by the govt over time and the unintended consequences of those.
Wait, wait, wait--you're saying that we need to solve issues like regulatory capture through legislation... so that we can have a market without governmental interference (aka a "free market")? Huh?
You can't on the one hand tout the "free market", while on the other complain that we don't have the "right" kind of governmental interference.
Even if you could square that circle, it still sounds disingenuous to argue that we could have the most efficient system if only we were to eliminate _thing that said system actively encourages_. The failure is baked into the game, my friend.
I don’t think that reasoning is necessarily unsound. For there to be regulatory capture, there needs to be regulation. The legislation proposed could be to remove or minimize that regulation, and thus limit the ”hooks” whereby to capture it with. Replacing ”governmental interference” with ”less governmental interference”, not ”different governmental interference”.
I don’t take such a libertarian view myself, by the way. Just pointing out that I don’t think you can pick apart the argument of the person you replied to in that way.
Instead of advocating for and gambling on a "free market" health care system that has never been tried successfully anywhere, and hoping that it will work out (because dogma?), why not advocate for systems that have been tried all over the world that have been proven to work?
I'd sign up for a significant increase in my taxes if the US system were replaced by the system that I experienced in Belgium for the first 30 years of my life.
And by successfully, I mean: everybody, irrespective of income or status, can expect to get the care they need.
The free market healthcare system in the USA worked great up until regulations pushing out mutual aid societies completely changed it. Costs were affordable for everyone.
It takes an exceptional breed of ignorance to say "just implement whatever <country> has" as if that is a silver bullet and that the same forces that caused the current debacle wouldn't also do their magic on anything we attempt to transition to.
If it was as easy as paying out way out of the problem we'd have done it already.
It also takes an exceptional amount of knee jerk assery to interpret my comment as "change the US system to the Belgian one". The Belgian system is one that works more or less from my experience. Most inhabitants of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and others will claim the same for theirs.
Nobody is claiming that the US should copy the system of some specific country verbatim. But it's equally dumb to dismiss the common traits of these other systems, and say "nah, let's do just the opposite."
>It also takes an exceptional amount of knee jerk assery to interpret my comment as "change the US system to the Belgian one"
Well you literally said "I'd sign up for a significant increase in my taxes if the US system were replaced by the system that I experienced in Belgium for the first 30 years of my life" so why don't you tell me how that was supposed to be interpreted?
America shares a very long border with a nation with a functional healthcare system and we generally prefer to compare to them.
I wrote "why not advocate for systems". Notice the plural form. Did you assume that by writing "all over the world", I actually meant the superpower of Belgium?
What all those systems have in common is that they are a mix of free market and strong regulation. The opposite of "let's do even more free market than what we have now."
I don't know how the US can get there. It's probably impossible, just like school shootings and the "No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" argument.
Feels a lot like 'Real free markets have never been tried!' which we all know from its standard form on the left. If, at this point in history, real free markets have been unable to sustain themselves in the areas of the economy that people depend on the most (healthcare as a major example) then perhaps we ought to consider whether they're able to sustain themselves at all. I believe free markets and meritocracy are two systems commonly pointed to today that may be 'ideal' in one sense or another but which in practice cannot help but sow the seeds of their own destruction.
Markets exist by virtue of laws created by governments - property law being the primary example - expecting actors in a free market who aggregate enough wealth to affect those governments not to just strikes me as unrealistic. It reminds me a bit of gaming. Everyone agrees that in a competitive game the most fun part is early on before a 'meta' can be established. But of course that meta will always end up established and it's basically dumb to be mad at people for metagaming or to otherwise expect them not to.
> Free markets are the most efficient way for information to be transferred throughout the system.
What do you think of VC-funded "growth" companies that lose money for years while providing products/services at below cost? Is this a case of the free market working or of it being subverted?
There is no such thing as free market capitalism. This is why the parent comment said "capitalism" and not "free markets". I assume that's what you meant by putting "free market" in quotes, I'm just making an explicit clarification.
I would say the drug cartels are about as close to free market capitalism as we have today. They are largely unregulated because they can either buy off the regulators / government, or fight them with armies.
Went from being the golden child of /r/wallstreetbets (literally every portfolio screenshot was of robin hood) to being villainized due to suspicious circumstances regarding locking people out of trading Gamestop "for their own good." Now any screenshot of robin hood is ridiculed.
Yeah as soon as those orders weren't being filled and the ceo of robinhood was grilled by congress no one ever believed in them. On the discord there still people that use robinhood but most people use different brokers anyway like TD Ameritrade.
This product is uniquely appealing to me because as a kid, I actually used to type almost completely with one hand at 40 wpm using my right hand solely for the backspace, enter, shift, and space keys. The only reason I stopped and learned how to use both hands to type was that my left hand started getting arthritis-like symptoms as a 10th grader.
Unfortunately, my hand hurts just looking at the example in the promotional video I found. I don't see how you could hold your hand up at that angle like that and not end up straining it. However, I'd love to be wrong.
