based on a recent ER experience that involved staff cluelessly looking for me for 30 min even though i was sitting right in front of them, this isn’t hard to believe at all. if you are struggling with the basics, what hope do you have with real problems? the kicker was that that hospital then spammed me a few months later with a call for donations to continue to operate their 3rd world boiler room.
Tag: us
Dr. Congress
the level of discourse in the us
Tax prep is cruel and unusual punishment
have the IRS, which will be evaluating these people’s returns anyway, simply do all the math for most of the simple tax returns. We’re not talking about returns that would legitimately make use of deductions; we’re talking about very simple tax returns, which is what most people have filled out by tax preparers or tax software anyway. Now, this is usually where someone will make the obvious point: the government doesn’t deserve to be entrusted with this math. And, hey, I take that point seriously. The government has certainly shown its capacity to lie and deceive. But so has the tax-prep industry. Intuit has been guilty of all kinds of underhanded attempts to keep people from being able to file for free. They are proven deceivers, too.
this how taxes work in civilized countries. i hope this passes.
Cleveland protests
the city didn’t put the bid for this equipment out until March. Even if the equipment does turn up in time for the convention (unlikely), there won’t be any time to train with it. This degree of organizational incompetence is more than sufficient to guarantee a bad outcome for a convention city in a good year. However, this year’s convention won’t be a normal protest. It will be something altogether different.
Digital Census
The Census Bureau is aiming to get 55% of American households to respond to the next decennial census digitally, using personal computers or mobile devices.
Appoint an atheist judge
the appointment of an atheist Justice would send a meaningful message: it would affirm that legal arguments are secular, and that they are based on a secular document, the Constitution, which was written during the founding of a secular democracy.
Unfinished business
New Orleans Votes to Bring Down Memorials to White Supremacy. 4 prominent Confederate monuments will be removed from the city’s landscape.
A tiny step in the right direction. It’s time to deal with the reality that the south lost. Just like you don’t see a lot of Mussolini statues in Italy these days, why should it be any different with this nonsense?
SETI Lobbying
The only lobbyist pushing for disclosure of E.T. visitation
Stephen Bassett is the only lobbyist of his kind in Washington DC. He’s working to get the government to admit that it has proof of extraterrestrials visiting our planet.
CSI pseudoscience
This past April, the FBI made an admission that was nothing short of catastrophic for the field of forensic science. In an unprecedented display of repentance, the Bureau announced that, for years, the hair analysis testimony it had used to investigate criminal suspects was severely and hopelessly flawed.
Personalized medicine
Each patient is a unique, dynamic system and at the molecular level diseases are heterogeneous even when symptoms are not. In just the last few years we have expanded breast cancer into first 4 and now 10 different types of cancer and the subdivision is likely to continue as knowledge expands. Match heterogeneous patients against heterogeneous diseases and the result is a high dimension system that cannot be well navigated with expensive, randomized controlled trials. As a result, the FDA ends up throwing out many drugs that could do good.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 