BREAKING: Rochester General Hospital in New York hired 82 resident doctors.
80 are foreign workers on H-1B or J-1 visas.
Only 2 are Americans.
98% of the residency slots went to visa workers- mostly from countries with documented USMLE cheating.
Americans got 2 jobs.
On radically different incomes life in America can be surprisingly similar.
Imagine three single mothers, each raising a ten-year-old boy. One is a public-school teacher in Tampa earning $50,000 a year. Another is a lawyer in Atlanta earning $200,000. The third is a venture-capital partner in Chicago earning $1 million.
On paper, they inhabit three different Americas. One earns twenty times more than another. One is 25th percentile im wealth the other 84th the last one top 1%. They describe inequality in the USA.
Now look at their sons.
All three wake up with electricity, running water, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning. They eat plenty of food, ride in safe modern cars, wear sneakers, watch YouTube, play the same video games, use similar phones and tablets and have access to vaccines, antibiotics, dentists and modern medicine.
One goes to public school, another to private school, the third perhaps to an elite private school. One flies economy once a year, another travels frequently, the third may occasionally fly private. Their houses, neighborhoods and vacations are different.
But their actual daily lives are far less different than their mothers’ incomes suggest.
The socialist argument has always been about equality of outcomes.
Well, look around. In much of ordinary material life, capitalism has already produced something remarkably close to it.
The millionaire’s refrigerator does not keep milk twenty times fresher. Her son’s iPhone does not make YouTube twenty times more entertaining. He cannot eat twenty breakfasts, sleep twenty hours at once or enjoy a video game twenty times more because his mother earns twenty times as much.
For several hours every day, these three boys may be doing almost exactly the same thing.
This would have been unimaginable two centuries ago. The child of a rich family and the child of a laborer often lived in genuinely different physical worlds. One had plentiful food, warmth, books, servants, doctors and transportation. The other might lack adequate calories or clean water.
Industrial capitalism destroyed much of that inequality by doing something socialism never managed very well: making formerly scarce things cheap enough for almost everyone.
Cars, refrigerators, televisions, air conditioning, computers and smartphones began as luxuries and became mass-market goods. The entrepreneur became rich precisely by making what the rich had available to everybody else.
And that may explain one of the great ironies of the new American enthusiasm for socialism. Capitalism’s victories are now so complete that nobody notices them.
Clean water is not considered wealth. Neither is electricity. Nor refrigeration. Nor an air-conditioned bedroom, instant global communication, unlimited music, thousands of films or a computer in your pocket more powerful than anything that existed when many of today’s billionaires were children.
Those things have become invisible because almost everyone has them.
What remains visible are the inequalities capitalism has not eliminated: the mansion, the private school, the beachfront house, the prestigious university, the best neighborhood.
But if the political demand is that ordinary people should be able to enjoy many of the same basic experiences as the rich, something extraordinary has already happened.
Put these families on a chart and the inequality looks enormous.
Put their ten-year-old boys on three sofas at eight o’clock at night, eating pizza in sweatpants and staring at nearly identical screens, and the difference becomes surprisingly hard to see.
Equality of income? Obviously not.
Equality of many of the outcomes that actually fill a human day?
Far more than we admit.
We need to get these psychiatrist quacks out of the court system entirely. It's an absolute farce that a person can commit murder and then the defense can drag in a bunch of random psychiatrists to perform some retroactive mind reading stunt and tell us what was going on inside the consciousness of the killer at the time of the crime as if he has the slightest clue at all. There is no "expert" on the face of the planet that has the supernatural ability to peer back in time and examine the unspoken thoughts of another human being. You might as well let the defense present evidence from astrologists and fortune tellers. Total joke. This country really needs to get over its completely unwarranted reverence for psychiatrists. These people are just making shit up as they go.
@JDVance If an American company works internationally it should Expat American workers to manage and operate locally. Make Expat jobs opportunities great again!
Anecdotal at best but I fled NM to CO precisely because it was so bad in Eduxation (and job market). Fast forward 15 years and kids graduated Jeffco with indoctrination heavy politics in classroom even from elementary. Multiple sex abuse cases directly in schools attend. Son was draw into office multiple times with lawyers / sheriff officers over 8th grade he said she said childs play. Property tax rates tripled even with heavy school closures. Lockdown clown show thru HS ruined any education experience. Expensive and ideology captured higher education options in state.
Compare to NM friend’s kids. Most graduated HS early and had multiple high school alternatives school options. Most ended high school with full associates degree (40 college credit hours in HS classes). Nearly free higher education options in state due to lottery scholarships and credit earned during high school year. No purple haired teachers spewing grooming sex lies. Early graduation for college nearly debt free. It’s 100% politics in Jeffco and CO. Don’t send your kids here. Dumbest teachers not interested in anything other than politics shameful.
@ChiefEngineerCE This post is reminiscent of every Michael Scott clown manager trying to manufacture team motivation with some bagels and two hour lecture. It not happening chief! Hope is not a solution.
Agree we are all living in the result. Boomer and GenX issues were a product of private and corporate desicions over two generation. Millennials and GenZ issue are now entrenched in the political class and infinitely harder to solve by individuals. The self involved suburbanite doesn’t even care to get involved. Plus there is now meaningful population who wants it all destroyed. Overwhelming odds and dropping out of the race is the vast majority of the response I see around me. Very bleak indeed.
In lethal injection, a powerful anesthetic is given first because concentrated potassium chloride causes searing, fire like pain as it travels through the veins.
A paralytic follows, then the potassium chloride to stop the heart.
Without anesthesia, the person would experience that agony while conscious.
In late term abortions, the same potassium chloride (or digoxin) is injected into the unborn child’s heart or umbilical cord to stop the heartbeat before the procedure.
No anesthetic is given to the child.
Pain receptors are present, neural pathways are functional, and research shows premature infants of similar age are actually more sensitive to pain than full term newborns, partly because the pathways that normally dampen pain signals are not yet mature.
The same chemical that requires anesthesia for a condemned prisoner is delivered to an unborn child with none.
Ultrasound has documented fetal movement and signs of distress during the process.
People who are okay with this, are sick.
Some math regarding the pied-a-terre tax.
If I own a $5 million condo, the tax is 6.5% - every year, forever. That's $325,000.
Prospective buyers understand this, and they 're not stupid. They price it in.
They calculate, or "capitalize," the obligations, determining the present value of all that debt.
The numbers are devastating. Using a discount rate (or "cap rate") of 6% means you knock $5.4 million off the value of the property...
...meaning you wouldn't even take the property if it was given to you for free...
...meaning the value of the condo has been reduced to less than zero from $5 million.
You've been Zohran'd.
So, a fair question to ask is, "If my $5 million condo is now worth zero, am I now exempt from the tax? And does my exemption drive the value back to $5 million, so now I'm getting taxed again?"
Does anyone understand how insane this is?
Pickles: “That officer, the first officer that was up on the roof, do you remember his name?”
Candace: “Officer Bagley”
Pickles: “Yeah, what was his first name?”
Candace: “Christopher.”
He then proceeds to ask Candace if she thinks Bagley planted the screwdriver on the roof to which Candace replied “No”.
He then asks “Who do you think planted it?”
At first I thought Pickles was being annoying by trying to quiz her to see if she knew the officer’s full name, but looking back, I think he was trying to set her up to make a claim about the officer so that they could sue her for defamation. He had to make sure she said his full name. It was, and still is, a coordinated group effort to try to silence Candace. It was as though they were each building toward the same defamation claim against her. Andrew’s sole purpose was to provoke and annoy her into saying something she shouldn’t, including sharing who her sources are & sharing anything else that she knows about the case. All of them (Neff, Kolvet, Frantzve, Bagley, Flood, Harpole) were waiting for her to slip up, in my opinion.