Thoughts and prayers are all we have in this country. Nothing will be done about that just as nothing is done about guns or healthcare. Just more thoughts and more prayers.
Unfortunately agree, especially given how much of an influence the auto industry has on our government.
My goal is hence to make enough money to allow my family and I to live in an urban walkable environment. The venn diagram overlap of areas that have a high proportion of large trucks and how livable they are is quite small anyways.
Are there any cities where you don't need to be very wealthy to live there? The four you mentioned do not strike me as the kind of places you can live in without significant resources (I'm an Australian; I've been to all those cities except Boulder and wouldn't fancy living somewhere in them that was walkable without a lot of money, but I don't know them extremely well).
I think the efficiency of the market for lack of better term is showing its hand here as it is in everything else.
You used to go to an airport and see maybe 10 different airplane types and about twice that in trials and airline colors. Now you see three for each roughly.
While some base to final stall accidents are as simple as you make it sound a good chunk of them happen when you try to come OUT of the turn at an already slow speed increasing the angle of attack on one wing alone. The stall and subsequent spin catches the pilot entirely surprised unaware of why they’re even stalling and with very little escape bandwidth.
The FAA has been trying for better angle of attack instrumentation but what I described above isn’t an easy fix with technology.
When you talk to pilots who inadvertently stall spin and lived to tell the tale most of them will tell you they didn’t even recognize that they were in a stall. That’s where the problem starts.
The FAA also has the NTSB investigate every crash and accident, and if it was something as simple as "change the airport patterns to be larger and faster" or "make more airports straight in" it would have already been done.
Fancier aeronautics has a way of letting the plane get ahead of the pilot even faster.
I don’t have those I’m sorry. Not that much into it.
If you need a better understanding look for a video of a pilot I think in South Africa or Australia who took a cameraman and his wife and stalled shortly after takeoff.
It’s interesting to see how many warning signs throughout the whole video are glaring at him yet he keeps flying all the way into the crash. What’s also interesting is that that’s it. Just warning signs but if you really try to put yourself in his shoes it’s entirely hard to accept the warnings as everything on surface level understanding seems normal, controlled and flat. Very very very flat.
I think the biggest problem with real life stalls as compared to training world ones are that they are either more benign or entirely out of left field and believing you’re about to go into one doesn’t even begin to enter the pilot’s mind let alone correct recovery techniques.
Thanks, by the way if that’s the same video I’m thinking of the problem there was gross incompetence - he tied the door wide open to the wing strut!
Another piece of statistics I recently learned is that most stalls occur on departure or go arounds, and classic base to final are relatively rare. Maybe those have been successfully trained out.
Right but I don't know of any GA stall/spin warning system that takes into account pilot input. Even simple sensors are lacking, for example accelerometers are nearly free yet GA planes give you no warning that you're in a skid.
Similarly given yoke input, bank angle and speed you could warn of an impending stall well before it actually happens with a few position encoder sensors. As you point out, the current system relies on pilots recognizing a stall which is a foolish thing to rely on and almost all GA stall warning sensors are only on one of the wings and require actual airflow disruption to work. In many cases that is already too late or the other wing could stall first. The calculation doesn't even have to be perfect since most pilots want plenty of margin of safety on a base to final turn. I'd much rather have a false alarm + go-around than an inadvertent spin.
The collision thing is also ridiculously irrational. The FAA requires drones over half a pound to continually transmit their location yet somehow considers it sufficiently safe for planes to fly without a radio nor transponder around most of the airports in the US relying only on pilots looking out the window.
It's just disappointing that the vast majority of GA accidents could be completely avoided with slightly better avionics.
> the vast majority of GA accidents could be completely avoided with slightly better avionics.
Reading accident reports or the annual summary McSpadden Report (previously called the Nall Report), I get a different view: if pilots would keep fuel in the airplane and flowing to the engine(s), not fly into weather beyond the capability of the airplane and crew, and divert or not takeoff at the onset of signs that an aircraft is not airworthy, would reduce serious accidents by half or more. Better avionics has relatively little to do with that (other than the proper use of a fuel totalizer or better).
Most cars give you significant warnings that you're about to run out of gas and as a result very few people do.
Improved avionics could warn you that you're flying into a storm or that the airplane is not airworthy or that you are converging with other traffic.
Complacency kills because it sneaks up on pilots, but it doesn't have to be that way. We should not accept that the FAA's answer is an IMSAFE checklist. Pilots should not have to die simply because they didn't realize they were feeling slightly stressed or emotional prior to takeoff and forgot to check a single one of the 40+ items on the preflight/runup/takeoff checklists.
Of course good pilots should check it all anyway but just as NHTSA requires safety warnings for cars, we could save many more lives if we required low fuel warnings, terrain warnings, gear warnings, speed warnings, etc. in aircraft avionics.
>Most cars give you significant warnings that you're about to run out of gas and as a result very few people do.
You will see accident reports where the problem is that the pilot just completely failed to put enough fuel in the airplane and then flew it until it ran out; but that's not the typical thing.
What's much more common is that the pilot takes off with what seems like ample fuel, gets halfway there, discovers weather that is worse than expected, has to fly lower than planned, burns a lot more fuel as a result, discovers that they will have to refuel, can't find an airport with good weather at which to land, and ends up flying a graveyard spiral into a fatal crash caused by disorientation in conditions for which they are not trained.
The majority of accidents are traceable to poor planning or decision-making once airborne; and I tend to agree with the other poster that improved avionics are not going to make a really big difference.
Improved avionics should help with all of those aspects:
1) Continually recalculate fuel remaining upon landing at destination based on ground speed and burn rate. Warn if getting anywhere near reserves.
2) Show nearest filtered airports (those with runways that satisfy both airplane and pilot requirements (max x-wind). If IFR, further filter by approach preferences and if available current wx data against approach minimums.
I agree with you that what you describe is a common accident scenario but imagine a PPL could just hit a single button if they inadvertently enter IMC and the avionics provides a route and vnav profile to make it safely to an airport with low minimums? The most difficult part of flying IFR is that it takes a ridiculous number of button presses on most systems to accomplish that all while trying to also keep the plane straight and level.
I'd be fairly surprised if most (say 75+%) GA airplanes regularly used for purposeful travel lack a moving map GPS and fuel-flow enabled engine monitor. (The moving map is probably well over 90% and it's the engine monitor equipment rate that may drag it down.)
In every airplane I've been in that is equipped with both of those, the pilot has access to both projected* fuel remaining at destination (in minutes and in gallons), has an ability to get a warning if configurable thresholds are violated, and with just the moving map GPS to have a filtered (usually by minimum length, paved vs soft, and sometimes lit vs unlit) and to have the nearest ("NRST") button present a list of airports, distance, and direction with a single button push.
There are things that could be done to make it better, but I wonder if you're imagining a lower/lesser level of equipment in typical GA traveling aircraft than is currently the case. (To the extent that equipment is already installed that provides 90-95% of the proposed functionality, providing that last 5-10% probably isn't going to be the missing piece of the puzzle.)
If you’re about to run out of gas in a car it’s usually not a big deal - you find the nearest gas station and go there. Usually. There are exceptions like driving 100 miles of desert with no gas stations in sight and forgetting to put enough gas in. If that was the common driving scenario I’d bet way more people would run out of gas, and no warning light will help.
Flying a plane is often sort of like that - planning mistakes tend to become problems with large time windows where a warning light is way too late to affect the outcome. Flying into a long narrow canyon is another example where your fate can be sealed minutes before you actually fly into the mountain.
All of this can and should be made better with technology, but a lot of flying hazards are more complex than “warn the user about something happening in the next few seconds”.
Why does the warning have to happen in the next few seconds? Electric vehicles warn you at the start of your trip if you won't make it to your destination.
I used to have a super old handheld aviation GPS that would warn me something like 15 minutes out if my flight path was going to intersect either with terrain or B/C/D airspace. I guess foreflight somewhat recently added the feature but it still defaults to something like 3 min.
> Electric vehicles warn you at the start of your trip if you won't make it to your destination.
Road navigation is relatively simple and even then there are unexpected road closures and stuff like that. If running out of gas was an emergency in a car you’d never rely on this warning alone, you’d do more careful planning and fuel monitoring. And then cars don’t have to deal with unexpected headwinds, weather (maybe occasionally), closed runways, the list goes on. It’s just a much harder forecasting problem.
People run out of gas all the time (there are a lot of drivers, probably most never will in their lifetime, but that still leaves a lot that do). However in a car running out of gas is much easier to recover from - most of the time you can safely and easially coast to the side of the road. In an airplane there rarely is an airport nearby to coast into, so you end up looking for a place that might or might not be a good option - roads have power lines that you won't see until it is too late, fields sometimes have large holes (wet spots) that if you into at landing speed will flip the plane.
Low fuel warnings wouldn't really help in an airplane - from what I can tell most who run out of fuel know they are low for a while but are unable to get someplace to fill up.
Civilian drones are fairly new. There are century old GA aircraft still flying around. I'm sure the FAA would love to require them all to carry radios and transponders but it's technically and politically difficult to impose new requirements on old certified aircraft. Some owners can barely afford to fly as it is so they'll resist any new mandates.
This is a common argument but makes little sense because the accident and loss rates of GA is so incredibly high. The cost of an ADS-B receiver for example is only $200. Full transceivers are a few thousand.
Aircraft owners are already paying well over that as insurance rates yearly because of all the accidents, so total cost to fly would likely decrease by mandating things that actually move the needle on safety, especially ADS-B and fuel alerts.
Every time the topic gets of healthcare comes up I always wonder how many doctors have tried themselves to interact with their own clinic (has to be their own)
Trying to do simple things like:
- Setting or getting an appointment.
- Calling to sort out their office’s coding error that resulted in me getting an erroneous bill
- Trying to get access to their portal or getting results for tests transferred in a realiable manner to another doctor’s office.
I truly think that they would be mortified beyond words and wouldn’t believe their name is on the sign up front.
Trust me, they are all aware of this. The problem is that, for the majority of doctors now, they do not own or control their clinics. They are either: 1)employees of the health system or 2)partners or employees of a provider's group that essentially contracts with the system to provide doctors. The doctors themselves have no real control over how their clinics operate outside of contractual negotiations.
The doctors are just cogs in a machine. The problem is that if your compensation is $200k-$1000k why would really want to tackle the issue.
Specialists make so much money they can hire a personal assistants to handle all the annoying things.
I know several pharmacists, one is highly intelligent and she is the only one who wants to get out of the field because healthcare in the US is toxic and profit driven.
Yeah, most of the time when patients send emails, they get responses from a nurse. At least at my wife's clinic, they do not always charge for emails. They only choose to charge when an email is asking something non-obvious or for the doctor to take some action that requires additional work/time outside of just reading and responding to an email.
Well, despite that physician-owned hospitals have better outcomes than profit-above-all-else hospitals run by MBAs, Congress outlawed future physician-owned hospitals in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
actually, the problem is that Congress continues to LOWER physician reimbursement, but RAISE hospital reimbursement. When I became a surgeon in 2002, medicare paid $600 for me to take out a gallbladder. I had to pay my overhead (50%) so my take-home was $300. Today, in 2024, after price reductions, medicare pays $600.
That is why I have to be employed. I guarantee that after 22 years, office expenditures (rent, salaries, supplies, health insurance) would eat up the remaining $300. So taking care of Medicare patients would be charity. Medicare is 60% of my practice. Private insurance is 25%. Medicaid is 10% and unfunded is 5%.
That is basically scenario #2 (which is common), but for whatever reason they haven’t been very successful at pushing back against some of the changes that cause these issues. I don’t have much insight to offer there since I’m not at the negotiating table there.
I mean I think the answer is that good doctors do form employee-owned co-ops, which are often very successful and establish a great deal of trust in their community, but then when the time comes for them to retire they very understandably cash out and sell to the private organizations that proceed to run them for profit first.
I've been playing with the idea for a while that any time a company uses its name, it has to disclose its ownership (first the company at the top of the chain, then the ownership structure of that company). So like for example the company name "Gerber" would have to always be coupled with "owned by Nestle, a publicly traded company.", and "Dave Franklin, a Dentist in your Community You can Trust" would have to be coupled with "Owned by Private Equity Incorporated, mostly owned by pension funds".
This would make it easier to keep track of if the same company is just screwing you over and over again with different faces, while still allowing some value to remain to brands that are consistently good for customers.
My wife is a doctor. They all know the problems, but there's often either not the incentive or time to fix it. The system they work in doesn't care to fix it.
> I truly think that they would be mortified beyond words
My primary knows and gives me tips for navigating the administration of their own (as in, they own it) practice. I guarantee they hear quite a bit of griping and moaning from patients about phone tree and waiting room delays.
Retaining good admin staff in my area is very difficult, but doctors aren't going to close their practices because of it.
I have a partner who's a nurse practitioner in primary care and I just want to emphasize how hellish it is for people on the inside as well. The economic model of running a healthcare business is entirely based on their ability to bill for provider time. Healthcare providers have very high costs to match their very high fees and also pay a bunch of people to 'help' providers see more patients. A big part of this mix is also that it is not enough to provide healthcare - you are actually paid for providing documentation that you carried out the specific care that you "should have done" given the case notes. Ensuring you properly annotate the files of patients (for the benefit of generating the right charge codes! Nothing to do with patient care) is another burden that's required to sustainably provide care. As a result the costs "per provider" are much higher than the provider themselves - you also need medical assistants who do every piece of work the provider isn't legally required to do, billing staff to properly bill that work, admin staff to manage their schedule in detail, etc.
The lack of regard for patient schedules is a direct result of how insanely packed the schedules of providers are. Fifteen minutes per patient is luxurious and my partner spends a lot of time after work entering notes for patients she saw that day (she "works" 32 hours / 4 days a week, which is really closer to 40-45 all told). My understanding is that the clinic does not have a high profit margin (serving medical / medicare patients + high overall costs), so every patient counts, and the admin staff will add people w/o permission. It's common for her to find patients scheduled over her breaks or for her to be scheduled after she should have left the building. Burnout has always been bad but it's reaching epidemic levels now in the wake of covid, which further restricts the supply of healthcare and makes people wait longer to be seen.
I think people tend to get stuck on the ridiculous charges/billing and don't often get to the point where they appreciate just how bad the provided healthcare is, and how much it utterly destroys patient agency by replacing it with bureaucracy. The provider/"insurer" dynamic is really the deep set home of the rot. As a table stakes reform, health "insurance" companies need to be prevented from managing healthcare and relegated to purely financial payers, but doing so would put so many low-level bureaucrats out of work it's politically untenable.
For a recent event, I got a whole nurse calling me from the "insurance" company, out of the blue, seemingly just to chat about the medical situation and how things are going. I haven't figured out what her KPIs are, but I doubt she remains so friendly when you bump up against them! And she obviously represents a severe misallocation of labor - the industry would be better off if someone with her education (and likely experience) was actually providing healthcare.
Somehow, US healthcare is ~ 2-3x expensive as equivalents in other wealthy countries, which get better outcomes. Who is collecting this extra money? It's not the medical professionals, you say (and I believe).
It's partially medical professionals! My partner is better paid than she would be in, say, Canada. US medical worker pay absolutely contributes to our costs - I just meant to point out it's not the only factor and that those jobs, though well paid, can be taxing for the people in them on a day-by-day basis.
No, the worst part is dying of a painful terminal illness while being sued into bankruptcy in your dying days having to fight to keep minimal possessions because the hospitals and doctors want money.
It's really not, it's a frankenstein of a system with capitalist and socialist traits. If it were capitalism run amok, a consumer would be able to figure out the price of something as though it were a cup of coffee. Pricing is completely opaque and provides nearly zero demand for providers to compete.
It's not socialist (Medicaid/Medicare notwithstanding). But, it's definitely not "ECON-101 free-market capitalism" either. Lots of regulatory capture from both medical and insurance providers. Plus a bunch of self-inflicted dysfunction because we keep electing ding-dongs into Congress.
So why is our healthcare twice as expensive as the countries who actually do have socialized health care? When is that competition going to kick in and bring down costs?
If it were fully free market, there would be more competition. If it were fully socialized, the government would control prices.
Instead, our system is the worst* of both worlds. The government limits the supply to prevent competition, but allows those they've licensed to charge as much as they want.
*(That is, worst for patients; it's the best for profits)
I don't believe there exists a possible free market for health insurance, just like with flood insurance or earthquake insurance. Adverse selection kills it.
Even if there were no insurance, I don't believe there exists a possible free market for expensive emergency medical procedures either.
Well, we don't have competition because the much-vaunted doctor's union blocked how many doctors we could have so that they could keep doctor pay up. And that's not me attributing purpose. That's them saying why they did it.
Because we don't have death panels like in countries with government-run plans. Your insurance carrier won't deny you a bone marrow transplant because you're 85 (it costs over $1m). Other countries will deny it, because you're 85 and have had a good life.
I think it could be cool to have an evidence-based death panel of experts instead of our ad-hoc death panel of one guy (or one LLM!) running through a spreadsheet and clicking "no."
Because Obamacare legislation ended up as a terrible version of socialism/pork-barrel spending/crony-capitalism in order to get the required support to pass.
The democrats wanted to get subsidized healthcare for low income people and people with existing health issues that would guarantee they would be uneconomical to insure. The healthcare providers, insurance companies and pharma companies wanted to remain viable, profitable businesses.
The compromise was to essentially guarantee profits to healthcare companies by crafting legislation that overcharges young people, healthy people, male people, middle class and affluent people to subsidize costs for other groups, while giving a consistent profit margin regardless of costs to insurance companies.
There is nothing about American healthcare that resembles functioning markets or capitalism. It's a very heavily regulated industry where the government exerts extreme control, while choosing to legislate in a way that maintains a consistent flow of money to influential lobbying groups and political donors.
It was actually worse in that you could be denied health insurance. And I know a lot of people who are denied health insurance for very mundane reasons.
Insurance companies had teams of people who, if you made a substantial claim, would look over your application for anything that was amiss. And if they found it, they'd drop you so they wouldn't have to pay.
Your health record became a criminal record. You just hoped there was nothing on it that would prevent you from getting coverage in the future.
Obamacare has some very serious problems, but at least you can't be denied insurance just because you have back pain.
surgeon here. before Obamacare insurance companies denied payments if they deemed the issue pre-existing and were not told about it in the patient's application. I was in private practice for 10 years and now employed surgeon for 12 bc insurance companies notoriously deny payments for no legitimate reason. One time I saw a patient with an inguinal hernia and then fixed it. We were denied payment because my initial consultation said, 'presents with hernia he's had for 2 years, but now increasing in size and causing discomfort'. Their reason for denial was that he only had coverage for a year and had not told them about the hernia. From then on, my notes were very brief. 'Patient presents with symptomatic hernia'
Before Obamacare, some policies had lifetime limits, which could affect expensive treatments like cancer.
We celebrated the fact that now medicare can negotiate 10 drug prices. It should negotiate all drugs. The organization that gets the lowest prices is the VA. Congress could easily pass a law saying medicare will only pay that much and it would not cost much to implement.
> There is nothing about American healthcare that resembles functioning markets or capitalism.
This is cope, just like "(socialist catastrophe) wasn't caused by TRUE socialism" is cope.
The mechanism by which capitalism causes concentration of wealth and power, and by which said concentration then creates means, motive, and opportunity for self-dealing is crystal clear.
Because Americans don't want to let people who can't pay for emergency care die (which I'd argue is a good thing) but also can't have a serious conversation about how to pay for that.
As a paramedic (part-time) and someone who has worked in claims benefit management systems, EMTALA (the rules/laws around emergency stabilizing care) are not what make our healthcare astronomical. It's prescriptions, imaging, and labs. You can easily be charged several thousand dollars for diagnostic imaging. My insurance covers labs 100% but a recent stool sample test charged $780 to see if I had blood in a stool.
Speaking of DI, DI is a money-printing machine, with CT and MRI machines that range from a few hundred thousand to over a million have breakeven points well under two years. And the DI companies work to find and gather physicians who want to start a DI practice. Offer financing, consulting, and then, shockingly, we find that physicians who own a DI practice or a share in one tend to over-refer their patients to imaging.
It’s a false excuse. Plenty of countries that also don’t let poor people die because they cannot afford going to the hospital also spend much, much less per capita. Actually, all of them do, and by far. The US really are an anomaly.
I like to say that there's blame enough for everyone to share. There's truth to virtually every argument. The entire "system" is so "sloppy" and filled with points where money just leaks out.
The emergency care angle is what drives the socialism / capitalism bickering and that's what I see a the biggest impediment to actually making effective change.
Typically one would not do that. You'd shop around ahead of time, sign up for a plan and then if/when the emergency came it would already be taken care of.
The American healthcare "system" is dysfunctional because parties who profit from the status quo keep the public bickering about inflammatory issues and distracted from making meaningful change. (My favorite example is "death panels".)
Since the American system doesn't allow people who can't pay for emergency care to die the system ends having a socialist component. Socialism is such a hot-button issue that we can't have mature conversation about funding it. Almost any conversation about it gets caught-up in partisan and "personal responsibility" bickering.
It would be easier if we just let people who can't pay die.
That's repugnant and wrong, but it would certainly make the conversation easier.
I'm in agreement that healthcare is sorely lacking many individualist incentives, including market ones [0], but can we not pigeonhole anything we don't like as "socialism" ? It just makes for a terrible time talking past one another.
[0] hint: receiving bills for charges you never assented to is not a foundation of a working market, and should obviously be illegal.
I moved to Canada recently and caught a flu that I didn't take care of and, in turn, developed into pneumonia. It took me FIVE days to be able sit down with a doctor and get an antibiotic prescribed even thought it was more than evident I needed immediate care. I could have died if I waited another day. But was it free? ... ehrm ... yeah.
In Mexico, doctors are as free market as it can get, downsides and upsides of that considered; with cash in hand you can get any kind of attention you need in the exact moment you need it. And it's not even that expensive, after converting MXN <-> USD. I could've dropped by with any of the 1,000s doctors that are available, many of which don't even require appointments. I would've got the attention I needed and the antibiotic prescription in 2-3 hours. That would had cost me ~60 USD.
> MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president said Friday the country’s minimum wage will rise by 20% in 2024, to the equivalent of about $14.25 per day.
> About one-third of Mexico’s registered workers report earning the minimum wage, which will amount to about $1.75 per hour starting Jan. 1.
$60 is 4 days wages for 1/3 of workers in Mexico. It's the equivalent of $820 for someone making 75k per year in the US. So it's the same as any other free-market healthcare system: easy access for the wealthy at the exclusion of the poor.
Your reasoning is flawed as $75k/year is WAY above the minimum wage in the US. Adjusting for that, it comes to about ~$160.
I'm not saying it's fair, I'm saying it's cheap, compared to the US as that is implied by the context of this conversation.
When you buy a $1 dollar shirt from Malaysia, is it cheap? Yes. Is it fair? Who knows.
It's the same thing.
Also, doctors in Mexico make way more than minimum wage, it's not unusual for some of them to have incomes around 200k-300k USD/year, plus read about RESICO and your jaw will drop to the floor. The average person in the US would kill to have the income and purchasing power doctors have in Mexico.
"Canadian healthcare wait times" are mostly a myth invented by the American healthcare lobby [1]. Canadian cities are dotted with walk-in clinics you can go to and see a doctor same day. Or worst case scenario you would go to a hospital ER. Neither of these options will cost you any money and you will get same-day treatment and care. If you made an appointment with a GP then yeah you would wait, since those visits are typically for non-medical emergencies. :)
Germany has socialized healthcare and you can just go to your doctor without an appointment in acute cases like yours. Saying that ~60 USD is not that expensive comes from a privileged position where 60 USD doesn't hurt you.
I'm going to jump in here and offer up an Ayn Rand because you brought her name up.
Ask anyone who has a dog, preferably a big dog, what it costs for a vet visit.
Better yet, talk to someone who has had a sick dog. Something terminal, or possibly terminal. Costs are wayyy lower. Same x-ray, same imaging, many similar medicines. I've talked with vets, human doctors, and doctors who own dogs. They all come to the same conclusion:
Only ONE key difference - there is no insurance or government regulation involved (obvously stuff like taxes, basic health codes, licensing, but I think you know what I mean).
I'm more than happy to agree with you if you could show me a plausible explanation for this enormous disparity in costs.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone say something this wrong on HN. Calling the American health care system socialist in any way is laughable.
None of that stuff would be possible without government. It's a statism run amok.
It's the same story every time. Something works relatively OK (US health care before 20 century big-gov), huge changes to incentive structure and overheads are introduced by statists ignoring higher order effects, everything goes downhill, statists blame capitalism.
Let me legally not have insurance, pay anyone in cash for my health care (no licensens and government enforced monopolies), and buy any medicine I'd like and opt out of this madness completely and let's compare with real capitalism.
It's always been legal not to have insurance (though there was a brief period where externalizing costs that way was taxed). You can pay cash for health care as you like now with any provider who cares to negotiate with you on a cash basis. There's even a variety of non-MD providers whose licensure ranges from more accessible through informal to non-existent should you object to credentials as distorting.
If you try doing health care this way for long enough, you might even discover which incentives are poorly aligned without collective policy of some kind, but who knows, maybe not.
We can surely fix this mess via same invisible hand that sent people down the horses aisle in the farm goods warehouses to use deworming medicine as a preventative antiviral.
1) everybody read pretty much the same content. And not highly curated personalized content. So if you did strike a conversation with someone you’d have some common ground.
2) When starting said conversation the newspaper didn’t keep vibrating in your fingers or making sounds begging your attention back to it and you didn’t experience the FOMO of not giving said attention to it.
In other words. Sense of community was easier to establish and the artificial attention grabbers weren’t there for the social aspect of our beings to come between us as we try to do that social thing our species is known for.
Also, it was when much content was meaningful. Scientific American was interesting. Popular mechanics had actual mechanical projects. Computer magazines were all adds but even the adds were showing amazing things full of real potential. Now corprat curated content is much cheaper empty calories.
There is great content but you have to dig and sometimes I am just to tired from real life.
American Airlines (at JFK) proved you can call emergency just because you feel like it with no repercussion.
And really the pilot in command is the one in control. For the attitude that controller had he should have declared an emergency and told him what he was going to do and have him clear all airplanes around them.
Bullying attitude don’t belong in a game with 500mph (~300mph in this case) objects. If you’re going to be a bully expect others to play the game in the same manner.
> American Airlines (at JFK) proved you can call emergency just because you feel like it with no repercussion.
I don't think it's that simple. In the AA case you refer to, the pilot was concerned about the high crosswind on the runway ATC wanted him to land on, so he declared an emergency so he could land on a safer runway. Crosswind landings are dicey at the best of times, and I suspect that if the AA pilot didn't get any repercussions it was because in that situation his action was considered a reasonable judgment call. Yes, technically it wasn't an "emergency" since nothing was wrong with the plane, but it was in the sense that the pilot did not think he could safely land on the runway ATC wanted him to land on, so it was a safety issue.
Following along that logic. Nobody would fault the LH pilot for a similar judgement call requiring an immediate landing at the closest suitable airport, namely SFO.
ATC was in the wrong here and the attitude displayed was neither called for nor professional.
> Nobody would fault the LH pilot for a similar judgement call
Bad analogy. The LH pilot's reason for asking for an ILS approach was company policy; he made no claim that he was unable to make a visual landing safely because of actual conditions, only that his company wouldn't allow him to make a visual landing as a matter of policy.
> ATC was in the wrong here and the attitude displayed was neither called for nor professional.
Many other posters in this discussion have pointed out aspects of the situation that make it clear that it wasn't that simple.
And this is (should be, at least) good practise. When there's an emergency, you don't want pilots second-guessing that radio call because they are worried about repercussions if they understood the situation wrong.
That’s entirely lost in translation due to language barrier. Expecting a non American to pick up on that is futile at best.
Having that said, it’s incredible that pilots forget time and time again that as PIC they are the drivers of the airplane, not ATC.
This pilot could have easily declared an emergency and be asked to be diverted to SFO and be number 1. Deal with the ramifications later. And as we saw from American in JFK who was in a rush to get home early, nothing happens.
It's not as simple as that. The pilot says he knows he can do it, and doesn't want to because it will fuck up things, big time.
It would do so for everyone. Both other crews in the air, and ATC. It would generate a huge load of work for the controllers (and that can lead to fuckups)...and end up causing numerous other flights to be delayed in landing. Flights with tired crews and fuel concerns of their own.
This has always been the problem with folks in all levels of education.
They view the world with glasses looking backward applying them to the present and future. (A form of if all you have is a hammer)
If yesteryear the rote learning curriculum was about knowing Who was X and what did Y do then they’ll expect that everybody coming in today should know that verbatim and convince you it’s in your future’s best interest to commit your memory to it too.
Rarely does life work that way. More so in real (western) life, it’s all a game and you score high if you can find how to cheat the game or carve a niche for yourself.
A society that punishes heavily for failure can’t expect that people would emerge well rounded. It can absolutely expect that people would be professional gamers.
Author wants them to be able of an informed argument about things. And if it's cultural things these all came from history. Even in STEM fields history is equally as important as first principles.
I agree, however, time is zero sum. In school, it's all a numbers game to A) pass and B) pass ahead of your peers. This is the similar to the work environment A) not get fired and B) appear better than your coworkers.
So while in an ideal situation, students would be learning the context of a historical event, dive deeper in a topic, to create a better, more informed knowledge, what's the point? Does knowing more about Plato help with Java 101 by a statistically significant margin?
