HN user

njtransit

301 karma
Posts0
Comments92
View on HN
No posts found.

My claims were entirely substantiated.

Original claim: doctor salaries are part of the problem.

Substantiation: Doctors in the U.S. earn way more than doctors elsewhere. It logically follows that higher salaries lead to higher healthcare costs. For reference, the average doctor in the U.S. earns over $360K. In Germany, that number is around 85K euros.

Then you claimed that some doctors think this is a problem.

I responded by saying that the AMA lobbied to artificially restrict the supply of doctors. This is a well known fact. It’s literally in the introduction (with sources) on their Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association

the AMA has frequently lobbied to restrict the supply of physicians, contributing to a doctor shortage in the United States.[10][11][12][13] The organization has also lobbied against allowing physician assistants and other health care providers to perform basic forms of health care. The organization has historically lobbied against various forms of government-run health insurance.[8]

So all that is left unsubstantiated is your claim that “a bunch of doctors do recognize the issue.” Ok, which ones? How widespread is this belief? Why is the AMA acting against these beliefs?

Hmm I guess when I see a single, unified viewpoint codified into law by the singular professional association representing the entirety of doctors in America, I don’t really think “hmm l, those doctors really have varying viewpoints on this issue.”

I’m very skeptical that there are many doctors that support removing the supply cap. Of course, many doctors understand that the supply cap increases their salaries and thus the cost of care. But that’s different from actively supporting policies that will lower their salaries.

It sounds like they want to increase the cap, not remove it entirely. This is, again, likely self serving. If there aren’t enough anesthesiologist, for instance, surgeons can’t perform surgery.

But, honestly, good for them. I wish other white collar ICs understood the power of banding together to lobby for your professions interests.

It’s not helpful to think of most pain clinics as fundamentally interested in treating chronic pain. Rather, these pain clinics were an experiment with de-facto legalization of opioids for recreational use. Just like you used to be able to see certain doctors in California for a “medical” marijuana license under dubious pretenses (“I’m having trouble sleeping”), you could walk into a pain clinic and get legal opiates (“My back hurts no matter what I do”). It turns out that legalization of opiates is a disaster.

One thing you could try is to get into a field that skews older. Most people don’t enter the trades until they’re in their 30s, so a 36 year old apprentice wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. From your post, it doesn’t seem like you’ll ever be cut out for knowledge work, but you didn’t really share any details so it’s hard to say.

Violence certainly can be effective, but also not. Everything is situational. See the Black Panthers vs. peaceful protesting during the civil rights movement. See also the American Revolution. Whether or not violence makes sense likely depends on how strong you and your friends are.

That how we define "all" logically but not linguistically. For instance, linguistically we would consider this inconsistent: "all 10-foot men have black hair AND all 10-foot men have blonde hair" yet it is true, logically, if there are no 10-foot tall men. The translation of the English word "all" should be something something like: |Q| > 0 ∧ ∀x∈Q, x is ...

The article focuses on the boards alleged ineptitude, not about Gelsinger directly, but the article directly states that Gelsinger was the best possible candidate:

But the reality is he’s the single best candidate for the company.

However, directly before this, the author offers this:

Meanwhile, Pat wanted to pursue the big, bold IFS bet, with 100s of thousands of wafers, when the reality is just getting 10s of thousands of wafers is a massive problem as is.

This sounds oddly reminiscent of people I've worked with in the past. They have grand, pie-in-the-sky visions of what something should be, but don't know how to quickly and efficiently take the steps to get there.

There’s an implicit assumption in the article that, because Gelsinger was technically competent, he was going to be a great CEO of given enough time.

Personally, I’ve heard nothing but bad things from Intel during Gelsinger’s tenure. He had some lofty ideas, but he clearly wasn’t executing well with Intel’s bread and butter business.

Also, I’m not sure good engineers always make good managers. Management is all about delegation. The skillset is really about identifying talent and trusting them to do things competently so you don’t have to worry about the details. That’s pretty much the antithesis of engineering, where you like thinking through the specific details of how things will work. And of course, engineering is only one part of brining products to market.

I once had a dream to be a writer. I made a tool that was going to help me write every day. The most insightful feedback I got was: "Wow, aspiring writers will do anything to avoid writing!"

I think something similar applies here: you see way more dev tools than successful products because people can't build many successful products using LLMs. Building a devtool (the old-fashioned way) is something that people can tangibly do.

Is it the blood brain barrier that keeps out bacteria or your immune system? Admittedly I know little about biology, but I thought bacteria growing inside your body was generally considered a “bad thing” (topologically speaking, your digestive system is outside your body).

This argument assumes that code is an ends not a mean, which is false. The value you deliver is not your code, it’s the enablement of business functions. Let’s say you launch a new product that gains traction. Sure, in 5 years your code may be refactored out of existence. But the people doing the refactoring only have jobs because of the value you delivered when launching the initial product. That is your lasting contribution, not the lines of code you wrote.