onomonomono

You do realize we spend $1,500M ($1.5 billion) on Medicare a day, yes?

For perspective, we spend about $1 trillion on means-tested welfare programs every year. So 17 years of war would cover about 18 months of welfare spending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...

I don't get the feeling the author has a deep understanding of economics.

Point 2 - She says she hates companies who make clothes exploiting cheap labor overseas, but then selling them cheap clothes is also bad? How is this Goodwill's fault? Should Goodwill not auction their clothes and send them straight to the landfill instead? (No, she's mad if they get sent to the landfill, too.) If Country X wants to protect their emerging clothes industry they can tax/tariff, but it's a strange argument that consumers in Country X are too happy with the clothes they're getting from Goodwill's auctions and they need to be harmed so local businesses can charge them more. (Also, am I supposed to know what a "neo-imperialist buyer" is?)

Point 3 - Author complains about Goodwill fighting the minimum wage because they have $3.8 billion in revenues. With 100,000 employees that's only $38,000 in revenue per employee per year. You could round up and say employees on average are bringing in roughly $20/hr in revenues. After paying for operating costs (buildings, land, trucks, electricity, gas, insurance, etc.) will there really be a minimum of $15/hr left for every single employee?

Point 4 - Author complains that Goodwill pays disable persons under minimum wage, one even made $3.27 for 24 hours of work. If you click through you see that worker was paid that because in 24 hours of work they were able to put 327 articles of clothing on hangers at a penny per hanger. That's obviously a sad situation but it's clear Goodwill wasn't exploiting them.

Point 5 - author says Goodwill doesn't provide safe working conditions for disabled employees. The linked article (from socialistworker.com?!?) makes it look like the unsafe conditions exist without regard to the worker's ability level. Still, this is the first real issue brought up.

Point 6 - Not great, but lots of companies fire employees for bringing them bad press.

Point 7 - "Performance Quotas" and Point 8 - "Corporate Responsibility" This is where it becomes clear the author wants impossible things, literally impossible. She says "...it is a company’s job to accommodate all employees’ needs, fairly compensate them for their labor, and give them the same tasks and work conditions as an able-bodied co-worker." I'm not sure what she thinks "fair compensation" for slowly putting t-shirts on hangers is but it's hard to justify $10/hr. Disabled people are by definition not capable of completing the same tasks as others, you can't give them the same tasks as others, if you could they wouldn't be disabled.

Point 9 - Executive Compensation. The age-old argument. If you want competent people to run your business with $4 billion in revenues, they're going to be expensive. How expensive? Who knows, but the fact that Goodwill is still in business means they're probably paying for decent leadership at least from a business perspective.

Point 10- ...The author closes with "Corporate abuse of employees has become a feature of modern capitalism, but doing so under the guise of charity? That’s something especially concerning about that." This, along with the link to an openly socialist website, makes me wonder what the author's been reading. She seems to be blaming capitalism for harsh realities of the world we live in, like disabled people not being able to work as productively as non-disabled people. Or free trade hurting some businesses and helping others. Or the fact that you have to make a distinction between an employee and a charity case.

I have to assume when you say national identity it means the same thing to you as racial identity because our national identity is mutable and transcends race. I can't move to Thailand and become Thai. I can't move to China and become Chinese. But they can move here and become American. They can move here and live the American Dream.

It's there but it's really easy to miss because it doesn't have a picture. I skimmed right past it on my first read!

That was a really interesting article, especially this part: "In 1949 at Fuld Hall in Rutgers University, Paul Braverman made a 75-minute recording of a Woody Guthrie concert using a wire recorder. The recording only came to light in 2001, and appears to be the only surviving live recording of Woody Guthrie; it was restored over several years and released on CD in 2007. The CD, The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949, subsequently won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Historical Album."

Somebody with more expertise than me needs to chime in here.

If you take the data from Table S2 and perform a two-sample binomial test (as seen here[0] and at 3 minutes here[1]) you can directly contradict a statement in the paper's abstract ("Male patients and female patients experience similar outcomes when treated by female physicians") Using the female doctor numbers I get a z-value of 8.36 which is well over the standard two-tailed significance value of 1.96 for p<0.05. With N being so large it looks like the gender of the patient is absolutely statistically significant with female doctors as well as male.

I feel like I must be missing something here but I'm such a beginner with statistics that I don't know what it is. Is it not a binomial distribution, is it not normally distributed? Am I plugging my numbers in wrong?

[0] - https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/113602/test-if-two... [1] - https://www.coursera.org/lecture/biostatistics-2/two-sample-...

There's a typo that appears twice in the appendix where both 'female physician/female patient' and 'female physician/male patient' were labeled female/female in both Table S2 and Table S3.

Also interesting are the raw numbers from Table S2 of patient survival:

                        Female Dr.        Male Dr.
    Female Patient        0.866            0.854
    Male Patient          0.888            0.883

These numbers make it look like both male and female doctors have a harder time saving female patients, the difference being a 2.5% vs 3.3% harder time. It's hard to reconcile this with the paper's abstract where they say "Male patients and female patients experience similar outcomes when treated by female physicians, suggesting that unique challenges arise when male physicians treat female patients."

These numbers are obviously too broad to tell the whole story but if you trained the male doctors to have the same male-to-female patient mortality drop as female doctors, that still leaves 3/4 of the male doctor male-to-female patient mortality difference untouched. That is unless you throw out the .888->.866 drop, which they apparently did, and I wish I had the whole paper in front of me right now to figure out why.

It looks to me like there might be more productive questions to answer here: Why are female doctors outperforming male doctors in this area? Why are female patients (ballpark) twice as sensitive to the gender of their doctor?

source: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2018/07/31/1800097115...