programmertote

I can second this! I studied medicine for two years in a SE Asian country. My late dad was a doctor. Both of my host family parents are doctors in the US. My gf is a doctor.

The main reason I left med school and decided to study math and comp sci. is because of the need of rote memorization necessary in medical training. This is especially worse in the US because the system here requires 4 yrs (undergrad) + 4 yrs (med school) + 3 yrs (residency) = 11 years of training to become a doctor. In contrast, it takes 5 yrs (med school) + 2-3 yrs (residency) of training to become a doctor in my home country.

The journey to become a doctor in the US is unnecessarily lengthy and it makes doctors feel more entitled (because they have spent a lot of time and money as investment) to charge exorbitant fees despite what most of them are doing is simply prescribing antibiotics; analgesic; insulin; and garden-variety stuff (or read up "Up-to-date" [https://www.uptodate.com/home] to refresh on what they learned or what the current consensus treatment is).

Most of them do the same thing day-in-day-out. Sure, there may be some specialists that are top notch, but they are like the minority and even their work is mostly about being able to keep steady hand and cool head during emergency situations.

I have both Home and Alexa in my house. If I give Google the full benefit of the doubt and believe that they only record when I say 'Hey/OK Google', what about Alexa? Does it send the recording to its server all the time or only transfer them when I invoke its service?

Ah...I definitely see the Telecoms recording and hoarding a lot of data without any regard to consequence/implication. I know a couple of coworkers who decided to leave my current employer and work for big Telecoms, and they said it's more chaotic there. :)

> Imagine you’re a marketing-degree graduate in middle management. If you’re lucky, you may have done some statistics courses. In your day-to-day, you likely don’t apply these to a great amount. You hear about this great thing called “Machine Learning” which is sweeping marketing departments. You might have read a white paper or two about it, heard about it at a conference, or been schmoozed by someone from IBM trying to sell you Watson (ugh). You decide to talk to a consultancy about it, or are referred to one by upper management, who’s been living from cocktail-to-cocktail on the consultant’s corporate AMEX for their entire career.

Lets be real - when you’re in this position, the consultants say a lot of words to you that you don’t understand and then you say yes to a contract because the PowerPoint looks good. Not only do you get to mention your huge new budget on your resume, thanks to the huge invoice, but you also get to mention you implemented MACHINE LEARNING at your company. But what’s next?

I have been working in advertising industry (background in software engineering) for 3+ years as an engineer (for one of the four biggest agencies). I think the author overestimates how much data we can/do collect, and how much we leverage on it. But the excerpt above is absolutely spot on. I'm a mid-level manager and I sometimes baffled at how much bullshit some companies try to sell to our clients (e.g., some big CPG companies), and how much the management folks from our clients and our advertising agency/company alike buy into that bullshit. "ML/AI" and "Media attribution" are really big now. But I believe almost 99% of the people who are leading these efforts (at least in my company) have no clue as to how to do it--thus, the snake oil salesmen are taking advantage of this.

In the 'Notes' sheet, it says we can create a copy of this Google Sheet, but I am having a hard time seeing the Menu to do that. Does anyone have success downloading this sheet into CSV or something? If so, I'd like to know how. Thank you.

Can you please share where you read that "the US has some of the cheapest generic drug prices"?

My mom, who lives in a southeast asian country, came to visit me in the US last month and I asked her to buy generic antibiotics; ear drops; artificial tear drops; generic antihistamines; and they all are much cheaper than what I would have paid here (and are equally effective in a way that I've been weathering fine in this allergy season with these drugs). My significant other, who is from the same country as I, is a medical resident in the US and she still orders meds from her parents.

I recently ordered an iPad for my mother from Walmart (after comparing prices at Amazon, Costco and Apple store, and found Walmart's one to be $20 cheaper).

The iPad arrived literally the next day. The iPad covers, although apparently shipped from abroad, arrived in less than 7 days. I was impressed. Next time around, I'll definitely be checking out Walmart before I purchase any other items above $100 for sure.

Side note: I never had prime subscription.

I consider myself a fairly progressive person. But I think at least some of the people, who don't like paying so much taxes, don't like the fact that the government is allocating the tax money collected, and it could, according to their belief, cause inefficiency.

I agree with that notion to a certain degree. For example, I wish there is a way to allocate the tax that I pay yearly to the programs that I want to fund. Specifically speaking, say if I pay $100 in tax, I should have a say to paying at least $50 of that to programs that I think are important for me (e.g., dept. of transportation; dept. of education; EPA...)

Not everyone. My host family parents are both doctors (psychiatrist and anesthesiologist) in the US, and my girlfriend is currently in a residency program in Long Island, so I can tell from my limited observations.

My host family father (anesthesiologist) works from 7am to about 3pm (works for Einstein medical center in Philly). He pulls weekend extra time (on-call) to make ~$1000/call on Saturdays (to support his hobbies like expensive bikes and lens for photography). Gets paid well above $400K/year until he retired in 2015.

My host mom works as at a quasi-private psychiatry treatment center where she manages about 20 in-house patients (almost always the same patients who she has been treating for many years). She goes to work just like any other 8-5 job. Very relaxed atmosphere. Gets paid very well (to the tune of more than $320K/year until she retired in 2016).

My gf and her fellow residents at the hospital do not have a lot of stuff going on during most part of the days. She is a bit luckier than average resident in that regard though because her hospital is in a suburban setting. Her friends who got into residency programs like in Brooklyn, Bronx or Queens (e.g., Elmhurst hospital in Queens) have to work harder in their first and second years (especially only the first year). But not as bad as like 80 hrs/week like what you read in exaggerated news articles. Sure they work more than 40 hours because of on-calls and night duties. But definitely around 60 hrs/week (never approaching more than 70).

All this is to say that the work hours of US doctors and medical residents (doctors in training) that we see in the news, I suspect, are a bit exaggerated (of course, they have to be bad/outliers in order to be in the news).

I'd like to add that my host parents practiced in the UK for almost 7 years, and decided to move to the US (practiced here for almost two decades) because in the UK, they made like a quarter of what they were able to make in the US.

Last but not least, all of them (my host parents and my gf) studied medicine in Burma (a third world country) for 5 years only (+2 years of residency). Certainly, the education one can get at Myanmar government-funded medical Universities isn't top-notch or state-of-the-art, but most med students learned on their own by supplementing with private classes, self-learning and practice (e.g., shadowing doctors). They (international medical graduates) score very well (usually better than their US peers--see chart #6, #7 in [1]). The point I'm trying to make is that we do NOT need 4 years of undergraduate education for wanna-be doctors (pre-med students) because that is not necessary and adds more debt burden to future doctors. This artificial barrier to entry is adding to the inflated healthcare price by making it very difficult for anyone to become a doctor in the US. We don't need 8 years of college and medical school education for most specialties; in the end, the garden-variety illnesses can be diagnosed by reading up references like [2], and it doesn't take 8 years of training to do that.

[1] http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Charting-Outc... [2] https://www.uptodate.com/login

P.S. This rant is partly contributed by my experience when I got an ear infection (acute otitis media) last week and saw a doctor in New York, who charged me $200 for looking into my ears with otoscope for 10 seconds, and wrote up a prescription (the entire encounter lasted no more than 5 minutes). Since my deductible is high ($3K/yr), I had to pay $133 out of pocket. The oral pills (amoxicillin-variant and an antihistamine) for three days costs $30 (which I paid). The worst part is seeing the $283 price quote for ear drop (CIPRODEX). When I decided to not buy that and asked my doc for a more generic version, that costs $35. I asked my mom to buy the same generic version of ear drop from Myanmar as she is visiting me this week. The ear drop costs $15 a piece there; doctor consultation $40; oral pills $7 (for two weeks supply just in case I get the ear infection again in the near future).

I was born in Myanmar and grew up there for more than two decades. The impact of economic sanctions are felt not by the ruling class (the military generals), but by the average citizen. Looking back, I firmly believe that sanctions simply deteriorates the human capital and resource (and thus the potential to spur any progressive change) rather than creating any sort of difficulty for the military.

Because of the sanctions, there's always constant emigration and drained my country of a lot of intelligent and hard working people. We are still suffering from that and the current democratically elected government can't easily find competent people to help rebuild the country...

I 100% agree. I was born in Myanmar (Burma) and in the last few years, the news that I've been reading on NYT and BBC (the only two sources that I used to respect) are exaggerated and/or biased and/or inaccurate.

Some of the HN readers will be very skeptical about my comment and this may get removed/buried, but I can only say that only when you have lived in a place and experienced the culture and dynamics between different ethnic/racial/religious groups there, you will understand what I mean. E.g., Some people outside of the US can see the current president and think the country is pretty stupid to have elected him. But we all know that the reality is not that simple.

The gist is to not trust the news outlets with blind faith and get riled up, even if they are 'reputable' that they are reporting unbiased/non-exaggerated/agenda-filled news. There are a lot of interested/invested parties that benefit from conflicts like that, so if the article is quoting just one side of the story (e.g., if the story is only presented by the INGOs, UN and NGOs that receive funding), I usually take it with a big grain of salt.

Just my two cents.

I have cute aggression. I learned about that in https://priceonomics.com/why-do-we-smother-cute-things/ which was published in 2014. So why does this article say Yale researchers first describe it in 2015?

Back in 2012, I worked with a guy in grad school. He was then a grad student as well--just one year senior than me. He would recruit new incoming grads to 'collaborate' with him on his current projects or whatnot.

The way he operates usually goes like this: he has a hypothesis (something that is usually trivial in my opinion). Then he recruits grad or undergrad students to work with him on it. After that, he let his teammates to do all the development work (coding) and experimentation (recruiting subjects and sitting with them in the lab to run the experiments). We needed to recruit human subjects because our work was related to usability of assistive technologies. By the time the data was collected and analyzed, the guy would show up with a vague draft of the paper, in which he has liberally cited his own (and his grad school mentor's) old publications, without knowing a damn thing about what his teammates did. Then we, as his teammates who ran the experiments, fill out the experiment and results sections. He then would write up the conclusion and fill up the rest of the holes. After that, he submits the paper taking the first authorship (because he came up with the hypothesis). That's the way he was able to publish >25 papers during 5 years of grad school (until he got his PhD).

Now that guy is an assistant professor--with ~50 publications--at a well-known University in one of the midwest states (of the US) at the very young age (I think he's just above 30 years old). If you look at his publications, he liberally cites himself and his mentors.

Kudos to him, he knows how to play the game.

From my graduate CS classes in the US, most women are from foreign countries. I notice the same in other US grad schools as well. From that, I am led to believe that women from developing nations (which kind of includes China) still choose STEM careers (most likely for practical purpose of making money).

Yeah, he told me that he did similar thing in the past before and it worked. Now that trick no longer works for him unfortunately... Thanks for the tip though!

My cousin's iPhone 6 stopped charging a few days ago. Everything works, but it seems like the port for charging is worn out or something and wouldn't recognize/charge when being plugged in. He is visiting from Australia and he took a lot of pictures lately with his phone. So he went to the Apple store in New York to get it fixed (in the hope to save his photos/data). They told him that they'll give him a discount for a new iPhone 6 (same model) for just ~$270 or there's no way to fix it.

I thought changing the charging port should be relatively easy. Now it is certain that my cousin will lose all of his photos in the old phone unless he gets it fixed at an unauthorized repair center.

The situation is more complicated than what we usually read in western media, and sources for those news are either people from NGOs or self-acclaimed activists from Myanmar in the western world who have never set foot in the region.

My understanding is that the Rohingyas are migrants from Bangladesh (with a densely-packed population of over 150m). The label Rohingya itself is fairly recent and it represents anyone who looks like a non-native in that region (because the majority ethnic group there is Rakkhine and they are fairer-skinned than the ones migrated from Bangladesh, who look more like people from India or South Asia). They speak Chittagong, which is a local dialect of Bangladesh as well. But they have been slowly migrating into Myanmar since early 1900s (the borders are porous and the enforcement of legal settlement is non-existent especially for a poor country like Myanmar) and have accrued in numbers over the years. Unfortunately, a few guys from the migrant community raped and murdered a local girl from Rakkhine ethnic group a few years back (I think, it was in 2012). Because of that, the tension between the locals and the migrants rose to an unprecedented level, resulting in people being killed on both sides. But because Rakkhines are the majority, their casualty is significantly lower. The current Myanmar government invited a UN panel, led by former UN chief Kofi Anan, to assess the situation and give recommendations. Their findings and recommendations just came out recently [1] and their report is quite mild and does not mention observation of any violence (or ethnic cleansing) against Rohingyas in the region like some western media usually portrays.

Think about it this way: what if the US's economy is as big/poor as Myanmar and yet over a million people (with very different religious and cultural background) from an overpopulated neighbor (say, Mexico with significantly smaller land area) migrated to the US. In addition to that, the migrants want to be granted citizenship as well as be given an autonomous region to protect themselves from the natives, how would you handle that? Not even a country, as resourceful as the United States, can deal with the migrant issue properly at the moment. So, it is really a tall task for Myanmar government and people living in the country.

Finally, please keep in mind that the NGOs (including the UNGOs) aren't the most trustworthy sources of news. The people from NGO need budgets and donations from parties of interest, and it is sometimes good for them to keep things, at least, exaggerated to make sure the funding keeps flowing in (I interned at Save The Children and World Concern for a total of about 5 months in Myanmar; I also have friends who have worked or are still working in INGOs in Myanmar and they've told me of the conflict of interest that the NGOs usually have in such issues). There are also self-acclaimed "activists" from Myanmar (including some Rohingyas themselves), who give interviews to the western media and cries about the purported sufferings of minorities so that they can claim asylums in other countries (e.g., the United States and the Europe ). I say that because I know a LOT of people from Myanmar in the US (two lives in the house that I currently live; one of them used to work as a logistic person for UN for more than three years and she had worked in Rakkhine on the Rohingya issue) who have already filed for their asylum-ship related to ethnic strifes despite the fact that they came from middle class families and were never persecuted as such is claimed in their asylum applications. But in preparing for their asylum-ship application, they participate in protests and events related to Rohingyas and other minorities to make sure they get the photographic evidence of their participation in the issue.

Long story short, the issue is not as black and white (Rakkhine people bad, Rohingyas oppressed) as you'd read in the news. As most things in life, there are more than one side to the issue.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-annan-idU...