kenesom1's comments

None of this is outdated. You're trying hard to to rewrite history with downvotes.

The 1997 cap on medicare-funded residency slots has remained in place since that time, unchanged despite population growth and an aging population. The current crisis and physician shortage is in large part a result of that two-decades-old legislation which was engineered by the AMA and other major medical groups.

Based on your comment history, you trained as a doctor, which is great and absolutely commendable [1].

However, do you feel compelled to troll and post obviously slanted information due to your personal association with the AMA?

For the record, I think doctors should get paid well and more than they currently do. Clinics should be run by physicians. But allowing guilds like the AMA to artificially restrict the availability of critical healthcare has resulted in millions of avoidable deaths and serious suffering across the entire population.

"The predicted physician shortages will result in decreased access to care for millions of individuals. [...] [A]dding one PCP per 10,000 people would reduce predicted all-cause mortality [...] by 5.31 percent. Translated nationally, this would avert 127,617 deaths." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16337410

[2] https://web.stanford.edu/group/sjph/cgi-bin/sjphsite/the-loo...

Your comment wasn't wrong. In 1997, The AMA along with five other medical groups lobbied congress to limit the number of medicare-funded residency slots [1, 2]. This limit was enacted in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 and hasn't changed since then [3]. Hospitals were paid hundreds of millions of dollars to voluntarily reduce the size of their resident training programs [4].

[1] http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-03-01/news/1997060012_...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/01/us/doctors-assert-there-ar...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/13/health/train-more-doctors-res...

[4] http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9708/24/doctor.glut/

"In 1997, a consortium that included the AAMC, the AMA, and other major organizations declared that [...] 'the United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians'. The consortium recommended limiting the number of residency positions funded by Medicare, a goal that was partially achieved in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997" [1]

See also the 1997 senate finance committee hearings on graduate medical education [2].

[1] http://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/717927

[2] https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/hrg105-901.pdf

There are fees involved in getting a photo ID.

The voter ID law in Wisconsin disqualified 9% of its registered voters. The right to vote is protected by 5 constitutional amendments and isn't conditional upon obtaining a state-issued photo ID. Requiring a photo ID is akin to a poll tax (24th amendment). There's no evidence that photo IDs make elections more secure, since voter-impersonation fraud is practically non-existent [0].

[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-why-voter-i...

In 2013, the supreme court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act. As a result, "fourteen states had new voting restrictions in place for the first time in 2016. [...] This was the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act." [0]

For instance, this was the first election in Wisconsin where voters were required to show a photo ID, a measure which barred 300,000 people from voting. Trump's margin of victory in Wisconsin was only 22,525 votes.

In addition to voter suppression, there were also large unexplained discrepancies between exit polls and vote counts. [1]

[0] https://www.thenation.com/article/the-gops-attack-on-voting-...

[1] http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/can-we-count-election-...

Think about what specific aspects of the business generate profits and where your costs lie. To rapidly expand, you'll want a multiplier that greatly increases profits or drastically cuts costs.

As a thought exercise, think about what you'd need to do to double or triple your sales. A bigger marketing budget? Institutional clients? More staff? Content? The details will depend on the specific nature of your business. Once you have one or more scenarios laid out, work backwards and figure out what's required to get there. The result will give you a good idea of what investments to make to grow your business.

Yes, the government and the sweatshop owners are working hand-in-hand to exploit workers and both are culpable. Sometimes they like to present themselves as good cop / bad cop [0].

First, the ability to be self-sufficient is curtailed by the government through entitlements granted to a select few by the ruling class.

The Enclosures in England [1] are the canonical example. Agricultural land once used by everyone is privatized. With their livelihood threatened, the rural populations are driven to the cities to seek employment in dangerous factories.

Most industrial societies are based on this concept. The sweatshop isn't doing anyone any favors. They are simply another side of the same coin.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_cop/bad_cop

[1] http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust...

>> DHS Giving Firms Free Penetration Tests

Whether they want them or not...

That's awesome!

Very interesting. Atmospherics might also be useful as an RNG or possibly a trustworthy public randomness beacon.

"There are an average of 45 lightning flashes per second around the world. [...] The radio signature (like a fingerprint) of a lightning strike can be detected around the world [...] [R]eceiving ELF/VLF waves allows us to determine the exact location of most lightning strikes on the whole planet, with just a small number of ELF/VLF receivers [...]"

http://vlf.stanford.edu/research/introduction-vlf

http://vlf.stanford.edu/research/global-lightning-geo-locati...

If you think the situation is unlikely to improve, line up a better job and then quit. You don't have to tolerate a dysfunctional team. It won't affect your resume or job prospects and joining a better team will enhance your career.

Good introduction to the importance of fat tailed distributions in financial markets:

http://aida.wss.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/documents/statis...

A film (PiraMMMida) came out in 2011 depicting the rise and fall of MMM in early-90s Russia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-JgGV8cH1I

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606652/

Sadly the housing situation in most metropolitan areas is an assault on all the senses. Housing right next to highways, no sound insulation between units, damp buildings infested with mold, inadequate ventilation, overflowing trash bins.

A lot of it is down to the short-term objectives of most property development projects, management companies who are unwilling to properly maintain buildings, and shoddy building standards in the US - flimsy materials, stick-built buildings instead of concrete, etc. The housing stock is in terrible shape and current policy encourages the development of disposable buildings that are barely livable.

Poor noise control in building designs results in:

Everyone's Upstairs Neighbors - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IRB0sxw-YU

"SIRF reporting reveals that Valeant has been closely involved with Philidor at every stage of its life-cycle, controlling it in all but name, since day one."

http://sirf-online.org/2015/10/19/hidden-in-plain-sight-vale...

SIRF's report on October 19 [1] discusses operating structure and entities, many of which are named after chess references. From several articles:

"Philidor" ["Francois-Andre Philidor was an 18th century French Chess master"]

"BQ6 Media" ["named after the chess shorthand for Bobby Fisher's legendary move against Russian chess master Boris Spassky in 1972"]

"End Game LP" ["stage of a chess game when there are few pieces left"]

"KGA Fulfillment Services Inc." ["popular chess move is the King's Gambit Accepted, or as it's often referred to in chess notation, KGA."]

"Isolani LLC" ["Isolani refers to an isolated queen’s pawn."]

"Lucena Holding LLC" ["Lucena position - one of the most famous and important positions in chess endgame theory"]

"Back Rank" ["a checkmate move in which a rook or queen takes the king on the back row of the board."]

[1] http://sirf-online.org/2015/10/19/hidden-in-plain-sight-vale...

[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/valeants-s...

[3] http://www.propublica.org/article/pharmacies-valeant-affilia...

[4] http://sirf-online.org/2015/10/25/the-kings-gambit-accepted-...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_endgame

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucena_position

If you no longer want to run the business, there isn't much to lose by offering it for sale or letting someone else manage the affairs indefinitely while you pursue other opportunities.

It's profitable and worth something to buyers. The engineering team alone would be worth a fair amount per head in terms of recruitment. You can delegate the leg work to brokers if you don't want to spend that much time on an acquisition.

It's not important to have an exit per se (though nearly any transfer of assets can be called an exit). The experience of running a business (a profitable one at that) is a positive signal to future partners/investors.

State crime labs are simply a rubber stamp on whatever story the prosecutor has decided on presenting ahead of time. It's not well known, but crime labs are paid per conviction [1]. Intentional contamination of evidence, falsification of results, and the use of unreliable methods are entirely routine and expected within these departments. They are corrupt through and through. No state crime lab report should ever be considered at all credible in any way.

Occasionally large-scale corruption comes to light such as when a Boston crime lab falsified drug tests on a massive scale [2] or New York state police were found to have fabricated fingerprint evidence for nearly a decade [3]. The "forensics" field has been embroiled in a steady stream of scandals [4]. Far from being isolated incidents, this is the norm within law enforcement.

[1] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0731129X.2013.817...

[2] http://www.policeone.com/csi-forensics/articles/5956534-Mass...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Police_Troop_C_...

[4] http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/crime_labs_under_... http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/csi-is-a... https://www.nacdl.org/criminaldefense.aspx?id=28286 http://listverse.com/2015/02/06/10-heinous-cases-of-miscondu...

Forrest was horribly biased against the defense. The prosecution's case was extremely problematic - resting on a chain of flimsy evidentiary and legal assumptions that would never have survived proper judicial scrutiny. The appeal will expose serious irregularities and hopefully overturn the decision.

Forrest spent a year at the Department of Justice before being confirmed as a federal judge in 2011. Her handling of the case was pay back to her sponsors at the DOJ.

From the transcript: "No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court".

Her comments smack of racism and classism. She reveals her implicit belief that since illicit drugs are associated in the media with oppressed minorities or less affluent communities, Ulbricht isn't entitled to such an "uppity" defense. She clearly can't fathom any possible reason why anyone might be opposed to prohibition and mass incarceration.

The transcript: "What Silk Road really was was a social market expander of a socially harmful drug that we have deemed in our democratic process to be unacceptable"

Except polls show that most Americans are opposed to US drug policies, even for "hard" substances like heroin [1]. Any discussion about drug laws that doesn't acknowledge its racist roots or the commercial interests involved is missing the point.

[1] http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2014/04/new-pew-poll-confirms...