vgoh1

I see a lot of posts on this thread blaming overworked, tired, well-meaning professionals that just can't do right, but I think you hit the nail on the head. In my experience, arrogant pricks are just attracted to becoming medical doctors.

I haven't gone to the hospital or doctors too much in my life, but every time, I come away astonished at their attitude, and wondering how is it that people can call a doctor a hero. When I went to the hospital to get my gall bladder taken out, I was in the worst pain of my life. I needed pain killers, and could hardly talk, and they spent 10 minutes getting my billing information before a doctor would even see me. When the doctor finally game in, I wasn't screaming or anything, even though I wanted to, just curled up in a ball, and the doctor rolled his eyes at me like a teenage girl - I instantly became more scared of being cut opened by one of these assholes than of the pain I was in.

Before this, I had been misdiagnosed several times - I had to figure out it was my gall bladder from Google, and work hard to convince my doctor to even explore the possibility it was my gall bladder. I had to TELL HIM that not all gall stones are visible on an ultrasound. Before that, I had minor bladder issues, which the doctors turned in to a major issue by constantly putting catheters up me, and prescribing me several medicines to "see if they work" even though they all said to not take if I was experiencing the exact same symptoms that I had told them about.

I almost had a surgery for the problem - my doctor would always tell me that the surgeon would discuss possible side effects before the surgery - I was trying to get info at least days before the surgery, so I could sleep on it and make an informed decision, but I wasn't able to talk to him until right before they were going to put me under. When I continued to press him for questions, he was huffing and puffing, like a teenage girl, any other grown man would have been embarrassed to act like that. After pressing him, I finally found out that a very likely side effect of the surgery would have put me in a much worse situation that the problem they were going to fix - it would have turned minor but annoying irritation into me needing to wear adult diapers for the rest of my life! And he was visibly angry for having to tell me that! Of course, I canceled the surgery.

I could go on and on, like how I was lied to about my bill, telling me it would be around $250, but was really $2000, for tests that i didn't want, and knew would come up negative, or how my daughter was born early but healthy, and simply in the NICU for observation for 2 weeks, at $5000 a DAY, sitting in an OLD incubator, with one nurse watching a few kids. I, for one, can't WAIT until WATSON takes all their jobs.

One accident might set back consumer driving for 50 years, but not commercial. The safety record simply needs to be much better than human drivers, which shouldn't be too hard, because one driver is already taken out of the equation. And there are billions upon billions to be saved, in our corporatocracy of the USA, it WILL happen. Bad roads shouldn't be too much of a problem, they can just use humans on the bad roads, the bulk of our highways are in good shape. Snow is an issue, yes, but remember that they will have the highways perfectly GPS mapped, great reaction time, and commercial vehicles can have big ugly shrouds to keep cameras clean. There is also the possibility of hiring temporary human drivers for the worst snow days, but I don't see that happening because I honestly think the robots can have a much better safety record in snow. The plastic bag/rock thing could be a problem, that could be partially solved by just assuming it's a rock, pulling over to the side and waiting for a remote human to identify it, and clearly mark the truck as autonomous so the humans on the road know to expect different behavior from it. That's not a perfect solution, but we have thousands of the smartest people working on it - there is enough money at stake, it will be solved.

What the US has been doing since 2001 has been totalitarian and unfair, of course. Let's not play "but that guy is doing it too, so it's not that bad". It's all bad, and all needs to be stopped.

Yes, startup founders will become rich if they are successful, but what good does a startup founder having $10 billion in wealth vs $100 million? I don't think anyone outside of soviet russia is suggesting the hyperbole that is being discussed in this article, but let's be real - the reason for people working hard is to make more money, yes, that we know that is what keeps us from becoming an economic hell-hole, but there needs to be some limits here. At some point, the the cost of keeping so much wealth at the top is not being paid back by encouraging more and better entrepreneurs.

Also, let's not kid ourselves. It's not a zero sum game, but it's not the opposite either. He is discussing carpenters making a chair or whatever, and then comparing that to something completely different - the founders of facebook, sorry, they did not code every line of facebook themselves, they have thousands of employees that actually GENERATE the wealth. And, to be hyperbolic myself, if a wealthy founder gives away all his money to his employees, yes, that seems a little zero-sum if you look at it that way.

It get the article, he is trying to keep his founders from getting lynched, saying that they aren't a part of the problem, it's the rent seekers. But he is again trying to paint a black and white picture, saying "no, those guys are all bad, my guys are all good"