dikdik

There's very few people that would not be deep in poverty if they only received 2/5 of their wages.

I spend 1.25 days a week working just to afford rent (roommates, very crappy construction, no AC, no central heat, semi-decent area... ie can't find anything cheaper unless I were to add at least 2 hours to my commute every day).

These are the types of comments I just can't relate to on HN. I do not have many luxuries in my life (due to lack of funds) and I know I'm hardly doing poorly in modern America.

Which of the companies paid the best/has the best benefits?

If it's the tech giant, it's very possible they attract better candidates because they offer more.

I have never heard of that, will check it out. Thanks.

No, he just took every precaution he could to prevent his identity from being linked with the sample he sent.

Do you plan to have children in the near future? Are you currently pregnant? Do you prefer men or women as romantic/sexual partners? How old are you? What religion were you raised with? Do you currently attend a church?

>Why is this information legal to acquire when I'm wearing my business hat vs when I'm wearing my friend hat? You tell me....

A friend of mine did this when he used the service. Used the office of an acquaintance as his address, a fake name, and paid with a pre-paid Visa card that he bought in cash.

There are already companies out there using DNA sequencing for some absolutely bullshit products...Vinome comes to mind, they suggest wine you might like based on your genome.

Personally, I'm all for it though. It's a way to have fun with science. As a scientist, it's nice to have stupid "horoscopes" to keep life interesting.

I used to work for a medical lab and worked on a lot of projects that involved aggregating and cleaning medical data to sell. Often it would just go to pharma companies so they could target the best places to sell their drugs.

Anyway, it's completely legal. You just have to scrub the data pretty thoroughly before you sell it.

I did an undergrad in biotechnology which was effectively worthless, could barely make a dent on my 20k in undergrad debt.

Now I've got a MS in bioinformatics and while I got a slight raise, I also had to take out more loans for the second degree. So I'm still floundering. If I had known what I know now, I never would have attended college (even though I had 70k worth of scholarships thrown at me).

Would have picked up some programming on my own and maybe taken a few courses at a community college. Feel like I've completely wasted a decade of my life and it looks like I'm about to waste another decade.

I fall in this category and I would love to be a stay at home husband, not sure about wanting kids though. I'd do all the domestic duties happily and work on my own projects with my freetime, what a dream that would be!

I have the same reaction to the word "opportunity" thanks to some pretty horrific past managers (who of course had MBAs).

While it should be, it's not. There has been lawsuit after lawsuit of pharma reps that promote off label uses of drugs among many more egregious acts (typically at the behest of the pharma companies).

Yes, I know a TON of doctors and used to work very closely with about 50 of them.

Well the solution to your problem is not to inundate them with misleading or false information from someone whose entire base of scientific knowledge comes from employer-led seminars. The solution would be to train more doctors, so they have more time with patients AND can be more effective physicians.

WHAAAAAAT?!

You don't hang around scientists much, do you? The people researching and making these drugs do not make a very good living. Not caring about your salary is seen as a mark of a good scientist, I've heard it from many, many people I work under. Most scientists make absolutely crap, even the ones in the pharma sector.

The majority of the pharma profits go straight to the business people that make all sorts of weird deals, jack up prices after cornering the market, get certain chemicals/processes banned so they can re-patent the same drug under a new mechanism, etc.

>Why spend years getting a PhD in biochemistry when you can go make $400k/year with just a BS at Google?

Because they like the work and find it interesting, go ask literally any scientist today. Reducing the profitability of pharma companies will hardly move the salaries for scientists because they are not at all tied to profits.

>The notion that every practicing doctor has enough free time - or is even smart enough - to keep up on the latest pharmaceuticals, is ridiculous.

That's part of the doctor's job, if they can't keep up with new medical/pharma literature then they need to find a different job. Further, most doctors know taking a ton of info from a pharma rep is just asking to be misinformed. A lot of pharma sales reps have no science background and many lie about approved populations and other aspects of a drug (just see the many, many lawsuits out there).

It could be a cultural thing, they want those that care more about having fun than just keeping their nose down and doing the work.

Or they may be want people who aren't very bright because they might be willing to take more abuse from management?

Interesting. I suppose that could have some effect, but I was not even born until housing discrimination was over with and when I moved into my small town it was largely farmland and not much of a suburb until a decade later.

Further, if housing discrimination was still going on in the 90's and 00's, I have no idea where these people were being "pushed out" to. The closest towns/cities with significant racial minority populations were at least 250 miles away...the city I grew up outside of was 90% white (currently 82% white) and there were/are plenty of undesirable locations there. It's middle America, there are just a ton of white people (sorry?).

Isn't free speech restricted in certain contexts. Like you can't incite a riot or run into a building a yell 'fire!' to rile people up?

Stoking fear/attempting to create societal tension regarding race/class/etc could fall under this umbrella.

Only in some areas. I grew up in one of those flyover states, according to wikipedia the demographics of my town were 97% white while I was a teenager (~94% white now).

I much prefer being in more diverse areas, but I don't think where I grew up was somehow bad or wrong. It is a very middle class place, so it's not like the minorities were being pushed out, there just weren't many non-white people that wanted/want to live there! ...but to be fair, a lot of white people don't want to live there either, it's quite boring.

So you are against the ability for people to declare bankruptcy then?

Many boomers that spent beyond their means and lost their homes in 2008 were able to walk away from their loans. While they had a house to "give back", that asset probably lost 50-300K depending.

Many people every year get expensive medical care and are unable to pay it off. They cannot "give back" a medical procedure, so the cost is written off and/or they declare bankruptcy. This negatively affects everyone else that pays for healthcare.

But when it comes to education, it's a different story? I have a feeling the different story is: educational debt primarily effects the young, housing/medical debt primarily effects the older generations.

Educational debt used to be like other debt, but then the boomers went to college and got into positions of power...

And what happens when you switch majors? All of your scholarship money gets revoked?

Most schools do not require you to declare a major when applying or during the freshman year. Most people that have a major in mind when entering college end up changing it as well.

I think this is telling that MOST people do not go to college because they are super passionate about whatever subject. Most people go to college because they would like to find a job that will ensure them middle class wages.

If we fixed the job market (ie prevent jobs from requiring a bachelors or masters when many high school graduates could be trained to do it AND increase wages not just at the top of the spectrum), I have a strong suspicion there wouldn't be so many people going to college for "bullshit" degrees and even if there were they would actually be able to pay their loans back in a timely manner.

> It was weird because he is such a staunch right-wing kind of guy, yet here he was putting money towards what seems like a very left-wing socialist idea.

Many Democrats where I live, Southern California, find these ideas quite repugnant. So it's not just the right-wing that needs convincing. In expensive housing markets, people get pretty upset when they see anyone getting something "for free."

It's a childish attitude, but it knows no political ideology.

If farm work paid 200,00$/year, farmers would all of a sudden have status. Status follows money, not the other way around.

I waited tables in college at a medium priced restaurant. On my great shifts I would pull down $50/hour on my best nights, $25-30/hour on typical weekends, and $10-20/hour on weeknights. Like most servers, I did not report most of my tips so it wasn't taxed.

This was AMAZING for me, the employee. If I was an hourly worker, I doubt I would have gotten paid over $10/hour.

Why?

Low-level jobs shouldn't have huge, if any, barriers to entry. If a manager/foreman/etc can't teach high-school graduates how to do a basic job well, it reflects much more negatively on the manager/foreman than the high-school graduates.

>At the same time, we have a public school system that after 18 years with a child...has not actually prepared them to get a job.

Maybe I just went to a great public school, but I could have easily done by first professional job at the age of 18 with no college. However, having a BS was a requirement, so I wouldn't have been able to get hired without that piece of paper.

So, you've never met a poor person that's also responsible?

While you probably are poor people at Starbucks, most of them don't go there.

Everything you state is true, but are we really supposed to use third world countries as our baseline? If Michael Phelps used Terry Schiavo as his competition, I doubt he would be as good as he is.

In the US we should be comparing ourselves to the best countries with the least amount of poverty, the highest socioeconomic mobility, and the healthiest populions.

We can't and won't improve if we always look for the lowest denominator then pat ourselves on the back because we are better than that.

> the bottle necks they would put up to raise the wages to MD level.

Dentists can easily make more money than the majority of physicians. Not to mention they don't have a residency, my few dentist friends came out of dental school at 26 making 150k+.

So assuming someone that went to Harvard must be really smart means you deserve a black mark?