Calliope

Actually the cost of med school is deliberately structured around the ludicrous salaries rather than the other way around. The schools are aware they can charge hundreds of thousands and their graduates can pay it all off within 5 years or so without batting an eye.

Also, it's not as though medical schools have a shortage of applicants. Quite the opposite, in fact - the median med school has a roughly 7% acceptance rate and there are fewer residency slots than there are graduates!

MDs are wildly overcompensated compared to literally any other doctorate, is the issue. And yes, of course the history PhD is making peanuts (that goes without saying...), but I do not see a compelling reason the median rocket scientist makes one-third what the average surgeon does.

There is minimal difference in the amount of time it takes to educate an MD vs. a postdoc in most of the sciences. The difference is that the typical physics postdoc's pay is around a third that of a medical doctor's.

Let us not forget the humble anesthesiologist, who pops into the operating room to collect their $8k payslip for no good reason whatsoever.

Honestly, though, if you're comparing to other Western countries...there's also the issue that the US does absurdly expensive procedures nobody else will.

Hospitals traditionally operate at a loss. Insurers constantly worry about going bankrupt. It really, truly is the fault of the AMA, and it is essentially *impossible* to criticize them for it because doctors are seen as a public good.

This is the result of a deliberate choice by the AMA back in the 1990s. It successfully lobbied to cap residency slots because it was worried there would be an oversupply of doctors, which would drive down salaries. This worked beyond their wildest dreams and now everyone including doctors hates it.

American doctors also wind up working completely obscene hours for no good reason, in part because the AMA is a cartel and restricted residencies in the 1990s and so now there's a shortage, and in part because the entire medical industry runs on dedovshchina. "You must suffer like I did" is common.

There's an idea in some circles that all we have to do to fix healthcare is get rid of the evil insurance companies and all of our problems will be solved.

There is no country on Earth with single-payer healthcare where the average doctor salary is $375,000. Not happening. Something has to give.

Technically there are also magnet charter schools which inexplicably cost $0/yr and all the kids get into RPI and Cal Tech. But those are really weird.

So Trump is now going to try to rule like an early modern king - just avoid calling the estates general or parliament or the diet and so rule by fiat.

Maybe someone in the GOP should turn the page in book and see what happened next...oh, oh dear...oh no...oh dear ohnonono....

Soon there will be no one left who fought the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese or the Italian Fascists, and no Holocaust survivors either.

And, on the plus side, no one who fought for the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese, or the Italian Fascists, either.

What a strange thing.

Never before in American history has one state's military force been deployed in another state over its objection.

I say never because the Civil War involved states whose governments legally ceased to exist, their offices vacated by constructive resignation, with no legitimate governors to object.

Aside from shattering core state sovereignty, it's saying one state's Guard (TX) is somehow more loyal to the national authority than another's (IL). It's treating the latter as something bordering on hostile, or at least alien. One part of the country and its soldiers are more America than another.

Perhaps more relevantly, a living Hitler would have been unavailable for Speer to throw under the bus, and the latter would almost certainly have been sent to the gallows because of that fact. It's a strange counterfactual, albeit one that was not likely given Hitler's own pride.

Frankly, a Hitler put on trial at Nuremberg and hung likely would have been robbed of the dubious dignity he attained via suicide. It also likely would have put substantial pressure on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to prosecute Hirohito.

Look, past a certain age it becomes an annoyance to learn new pop culture. This already happened with Christmas movies, the last one was *Love Actually* and it's not a coincidence that it came out right as the Boomers were hitting middle age.

I would shocked if it were the latter, Assad is the type of guy you keep in a nice villa just in case Syria collapses and you can install him later. Saudi Arabia and Libya did the same thing Idi Amin and Bokassa.

Isn't it actually a substitute for labor? My impression was that coding and software was one of the few places where there have been real and large productivity gains.

In fairness, while Aktion T4 *officially* ended, it was clandestinely continued (and indeed massively expanded to Soviet sanitaria as the Wehrmacht marched east). The bulk of the deaths occurred after the official end date.

But the point about protests having an impact in autocratic states is true

AI companies literally trained their models on pirated Disney IP. If the Mouse's lawyers don't dissuade you, Tweeter #1,245,935 certainly won't.

Without immigrants, the US population just straightforwardly implodes and the US undergoes Japanification. No one should want to live in a dying country populated by geriatric racists.

The core belief of the modern right is that Andrew Tate is by dint of biology both more virtuous and more intelligent than Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

It's incredibly ironic how the guys most likely to do pro-2A wank with "God made man, Sam Colt made them equal" also think that masculine elan is what wins the day on the battlefield rather than large quantities of precision guided high explosives

Your now-weekly reminder that the dot com bubble popping did not result in all websites ending in the suffix ".com" dissolving into the ether.

When Jack Kerouac wrote that phrase in 1958 only 7% of the population had a bachelor's degree. It's now 37%.

The cyberbullying among kids/teens is going to be absolutely unreal. Now instead of just spreading a rumor, you'll be able to create high quality video of them doing whatever embarrassing or grotesque thing you can imagine and share it with everyone at school. Gen video will have a body count.

Correct, this is *why* the government has enormous leverage when it comes to Medicare. It is a monosomy and thus can tell pharmaceutical companies to take a hike when they try to massively upcharge.

You had better believe that Blue Cross wishes it could do that.

Yeah, pretty much. It's going to look like Pets dot com going out of business. With comparable effects on the economy.

One thing to be said for the US is that it's in no immediate danger of becoming part of the Russkiy Mir due to poor choices it made in the 2000s and 2010s. The same cannot really be said of Germany.