danet's comments

Good article that raises some very good questions. I had a few specific takeaways out of it.

>“Everyone does as much as they can,” Ashwinikumar Kudari, a senior gastrointestinal surgeon, says toward the end of a busy day at the Bangalore hospital. He’s just removed two malignant tumors the size of golf balls from a middle-aged woman’s intestines—the seventh surgery he’s performed or supervised since morning. A compact man with a trim mustache and a wry smile, Kudari is soon on the move again, checking in briefly on a gallstone removal next door before dashing up a spiral staircase to another operating theater. There, he takes over from a colleague who’s struggling to locate a particularly tricky fistula. “Our margins are low on one surgery, but because we do so many in a day, we can make enough,” he remarks after the elusive fistula—the longest he’s ever seen—is found, running from the man’s anus to above his groin. By working at this pace, the average Narayana surgeon performs as many as six times more procedures annually than an American counterpart.

I'm wondering how overworked doctors are in these conditions, or how long a senior doctor lasts in a hospital like this. It might be a good place to gain experience, but how feasible it is to work there for 10 years?

>It’s all a far cry from the high-touch treatment Westerners expect, but Shetty is adamant that none of the practices compromise safety. Sterilizing and reusing clamps and tubing is permitted under the standards of the Joint Commission, a U.S.-based body that vets and accredits hospitals worldwide, including Narayana’s cardiac hub. Involving properly instructed family members in the simplest care tasks isn’t unheard of in Europe and North America, and some studies suggest it may improve patients’ prospects. (Unlike busy nurses, relatives have just one person to focus on.)

I growing up in the soviet block I remember family members taking care of relatives in the hospital, and I never really questioned this at that time. Now looking at the western medical system, it seems like nurses are doing work that there not supposed to be doing and there aren't enough of them all the time.

> Yet even for bypasses—Narayana’s bread-and-butter procedure, with greater economies of scale than any other—Shetty needs to cut costs further, because Modicare will reimburse only about $1,300 for each surgery. For other treatments, the difference between current price tags and Modicare payment schedules is much wider. “They are paying less than what it costs,” Shetty says.

It seems that politicians have established a system that covers everyone. Not always effective, that underpays a lot, but it's there, now as society gradually accepts that the system is their and it is fair, it may be possible to expand in in the next 5-10 years either with the amount of coverage it provides or with the amount of money it pays per procedure.

That is why I'm holding to my 2011 ThinkPad T420 for dear life. I replaced keyboard 3 times ($30-$40 off ebay), changed HDD to SSD, and replaced CD-ROM with another SATA drive bay.

Not having USB3 is annoying, the CPU is a little slow and the batteries aren't what they used to be, but the things still works and gives me no problems.

I would like to get something smaller and lighter but all the affordable light laptops come with at most 8GB of not upgradable memory, whereas mine has 12GB and upgradable to 16.

What I ended up doing is getting a desktop computer for anything that needs performance and every time I look at anything apple, it just looks like I'm about to get on a treadmill of shelling out a couple of thousand dollars every year without the ability to own, upgrade or repair any of my devices.

If anyone is on android, I would like to recommend a podcast player that is in no way affiliated with google, is open-source and good

Antenna pod -- https://antennapod.org/

Google play page -- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.danoeh.ante...

Github -- https://github.com/antennapod/AntennaPod

It uses RSS and open standards, has all of the podcast playing features like 2x speed, sleep timer auto download etc.

This still doesn't fix the problem, bioplastics would still take long time to degrade, and they would need specific conditions to do so, we're just offloading the problem to indefinite future and prefix 'bio-' in the name makes us feel good about ourself.

For example PLA for 3D printers, technically bioplastic, but realistically it still needs to be collected and when it comes to breaking it down, the process is still pretty involved, and who is going to pay for all of that?

EDIT: I want to make my point sound less harsh

Part of reducing environmental damage is changing everyone's behaviour, and maybe considering eating in the car not being a good thing for several reasons, one of which is environmental impact.

After dark is the contiuation of the signal -- same music but different host.

I have archive of the last 3 years of the signal in mp3, it's about 90GB.

Send me a message at gimmespam at flamy.ca and I'll send you a link.

I'm sorry but this sounds too much like conspiratorial thinking -- all bloomberg reporting on the lawsuit and other controversies surrounding the company (which are not that controversial by the way). And what you are saying in response is that it's a hit piece.

I tend to listen to ambient music. There's radio show on CBC radio 2 -- After Dark, that plays tunes with not too many lyrics.

Now the server is dead :(