Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

People always complain with changes. I think it's reasonable to believe that people who actively want politics on HN would be on the noisier end of the spectrum of complainers. Any attempt to get these conversations off HN was bound, initially, to cause a loud and pointed reaction from one subset of users.

But people also adapt and forget. I think there's a real chance that after, say, 6-8 weeks, HN would have established a "new normal" and people would know that it's not a place to discuss the outrage of the week, just as it's already known it's not a place to discuss the latest celebrity-dancing-baking-show scandals.

I'll reiterate that it's a very tricky problem. But I don't agree that there was conclusive evidence that the political detox "didn't work" -- it was canceled long before a steady state was reached.

There are still many comments that, even when they often end up 'dead', spawn entire pointless discussions or just clutter up the rest of the discussion in the time that they're up. Quite possibly they affect the general conversation in ways that are difficult to measure.

The thing is that many of these comments appear to me as either immediately and obviously noise, or obviously so after a cursory check of the poster's comment history. In fact, I'm very often surprised that you or your colleague(s) leave a "don't do this here" message, when after clicking through to the commenter it's obvious that they're probably going to keep doing this until they're banned (and trivially create a new account).

I'm wondering if perhaps a stricter zero-tolerance to low-quality posts, or at least repeat offenders, might not be necessary to offset the inevitable growth of 'noisy' accounts.

I'm very impressed with the moderation here, to be clear, so I'm sure that it's more difficult than I think it is, or that I'm missing something. But I guess I'm just how often I come across an active, unbanned account that clearly hasn't been commenting in good faith for quite a while. Considering how little these accounts are 'worth' (as in, if there's any association with the username, it's negative, and karma is low), and how cheaply new ones can be create, a slightly swifter 'banhammer' might not do much harm?

Note that this is a problem not limited to communist countries like Cuba. In America, in particular, we have this problem when it comes to our teachers. Teaching the next generation is one of the most important jobs we have and, yet, the pay is so low that the best people for the job are disincentivized to go into that profession. When a hedge fund manager managing teacher pensions out-earns an entire school faculty who are invested in his fund while underperforming the S&P, we too have a problem.

They should put their money where their mouth is and spend at least a few decades in such countries before criticising others who've made a choice to leave(for various reasons).

What is it far more likely is that those who actually live the glorious communist future would make an educated choice that being a janitor in America is preferable.

I’d rather pay more for school and keep more of my earnings than have “free” school and high taxes forever.

Americans have more disposable income than the countries with “free” university. Student debt is temporary, confiscatory taxes are forever.

Study comp sci in France, graduate and make €40k per year before taxes. Study comp sci in the US, graduate and make $100k but with $80k in debt. What’s the better deal? Remember that $100k also includes health benefits, vacation and all that.

That €40k probably has an effective tax rate of 35% while the $100k likely has Ann effective rate of 20%.

School isn’t “free” — you pay dearly for it.

> The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency, helped broker the deal. Under it, Brazil pays Cuba... nearly four times what Cuban doctors earn through the arrangement.

Google makes $1,200,000 per employee; a comparable average salary is then $300,000, which sounds on the high end of plausible if restricted only to engineer salaries (and it'd be a very top-heavy average), but implausibly high for a company-wide average.

Plenty of people go to school and don’t rack up tens of thousands in debt.

The question we should be asking is why does education cost keep expanding so quickly: cost inflation is much higher than even healthcare. It isn’t “capitalism” it’s actually the he fact that student loan availability distorts the market. Eliminate student loans and costs will drop like a rock to a level the actual market supports. Don’t blame capitalism because capitalism would never support the artificial cost inflation caused by government intervention.

If Big Macs were subsidized as much as universities, they’d cost $100 because McDonald’s knows that if you can’t afford it, the government will be there to help.

You do realize that wasn't true until about 15 years ago, right? You should be asking what happened (hint: it wasn't Capitalism, it was the US Government's inflationary student loan program). Until the mid 1970s when the US Government nearly destroyed the dollar, you could pay for a Harvard education with a part time job. As recently as the late 1990s, the US had very little in the way outstanding student loans compared to the size of its median income (thus the epic student loans increase that everybody can't stop talking about, ie that's why it's a headline now, because it wasn't expensive before).

It should take you about 15 minutes to do some research and compare the price of a college education prior to the year 2000, versus incomes at the time. Pick any decade prior to 2000 and do the comparison. What happened after 2000? The Bush years wars & spending hammered the dollar, which also sparked the big commodity bubble.

College tuition & fees costs climbed 500% from ~1990 to ~2010. I wonder if that was spontaneously caused by Capitalism; you know, just out of the blue prices suddenly skyrocketed because of Capitalism; or if it was something the US Government did to cause it.

Another hint: how were college costs able to completely disregard income growth and all other restraints for two decades?

You need to get out of your echo chamber.

Capitalist medical system would mean the value of a particular medical certification would be set by the market, ie. everyone would be able to sell medical services. Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.

Yea, if you break down all their on call hours and shit, it's not very much hourly. But they still make more than most people in their small city.

I'm not totally sure that's still true. It might be. But I think a lot of people are now nostalgic for communism after living what is apparently the alternative for them.

The most anti-communist people I know, though, are definitely some people in _the U.S._ from Eastern European countries, who moved here before or shortly after the end of communism. (I also know some people in the U.S. from Russia especially who are not particularly anti-communist. Russia definitely had it better than most other soviet bloc). (Also, the very poor seldom get to immigrate to the U.S. from Eastern Europe either before or after communism, immigrants are not a representative sample. Although I knew a lot of poor-ish undocumented immigrant Poles in Chicago in the late 90s. They weren't particularly anti-communist by and large.)

But yeah, the grass is often greener, as they say.

Every nice thing (or thing that looks like it was once nice) you see in the picture was produced by capital markets; and it looks like the 1940s because because the capital markets stopped functioning in the 1940s.

In any walk of life in a capital system, your pay is determined by how you serve people. Doctors serve the very basis of their patients' lives.

If you can put a price on that, it should be pretty darn high.

They're not chipping in, they don't have a choice in the matter. I think Cubans would rather have a better basic quality of life, than spend so much of their income training doctors who probably won't even operate near them, and who are used basically as indentured servants by the government, a government which pockets most of the money (as evidenced by the mansions and secret wealth of the despots).

It's pretty clear by that statement that you don't understand the government of Cuba or how it has been funded. Most Cubans don't pay taxes, and haven't since the revolution. Only recently have income taxes been put in place, and mostly that's for business owners and comes with significant write-offs.

>Ah but how many Americans really get a shot at medical school? In the most recent year for which quintile census data are available, more than three-quarters of medical students came from families in the top two quintiles of family income. [0]

Ok, so 75% of medical students come from families in the top 50% of incomes. That doesn't seem too absurd to me.

As to your Wired article, the statement that "In effect, Cuba that poor communist country is to a certain extent actually subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system that happen to be less lucrative"

is a bit ridiculous, because that article mentions a total 100 doctors using the program over a 17 year period. Yes, Cuba may train 6 American MD's a year, (actually, more like 4 - not everyone graduates) but that isn't really subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system, not in any meaningful way.

[1] Of course there were people with the old cars, but these were passed down and are, as I understand it, required by law to act as a mini-bus service.

[2] Although internet in Cuba is only officially available by buying a hourly code on a scratcher card from the telephone company and then Wifi is in the parks in Havana, I did notice bootleg Wifi SSIDs when walking the streets. They were easy to spot even without "war-walking" since they are a good 1/2 km from any nearby park and had usually a dozen folks on their phones browsing Facebook or using Skype. I suspect it's either an insider connection at the telephone company OR a clandestine Directway / Hughesnet satellite (there are NO visible dishes in Cuba, I believe it must be illegal).

Also - dictatorships can work. There have been several 'benevolent' dictators who made communism work without introducing any more evil than many democratically elected leaders. A dictatorship doesn't naturally lead to Mao/Stalin etc.

The millions of American Indians that were murdered because they wouldn't give up their valuable land?

How is throwing away good food because no one pays for it, and thereby letting poor people starve, not capitalist? How is it the "antithesis of free enterprise"?