asml news

Thanks Phil, that's a keeper. :-)

I'm not visual, and I don't think in any particular language. Rather, I think in some sort of massively parallel machine language of fully-formed ideas that have to be snatched, as if from a meteor-shower as they fly by, and, if interesting, only then translated into some sort of verbal language. I find it as easy to 'think' in various foreign languages as my native tongue, since the language output is really being done by an output spooler of sorts, separate from the actual thinking.

Ever try thinking about a particular something without using any words? (That is, not allowing any English words to form in your brain while you solve a particular problem, or walk, or perform some task?) That's a good way to clear the clutter, sometimes.

Cheers, James "Quote Collector" Arthur

Sounds like fun.

Most of the time. In my family we apparently have weirdly quiet minds. My eldest sister once told me that she has no internal voice at all, so in order to rehearse what she's going to say, she has to actually say it softly.

Mine isn't as quiet as that, but there's not much in the way of "internal dialogue", which I've heard is a prominent feature of many people's experience. I use words in my head to help analyze stuff, but seldom to generate new ideas.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It's not meaningless. It just has to be understood in context. Your number required just as much understanding of context.

Some people don't work because they are physically or mentally sick. You co uld let them starve to death, though nobody actually seems to. The kind of welfare system that keeps them alive and nurses some of them back to the po int where they can work does cost money, is not "covering up" any kind of p roblem, it is dealing with it.

That report also includes the line "On the opposite end of the spectrum, ho wever, Legacy Early College Charter School had the second lowest SAT scores among public high schools in the county."

It is anything but baloney. The link you posted about about the three chart er schools that topped the Greenville County SAT scores includes the point that the other charter school did worse than all but one of the fourteen pu blic schools in the county, and that the school that did best was "highly s elective with a student body that includes talented young people from acros s the state admitted by audition".

You miss the point that the parents who are active enough to found a charte r school are likely to have kids who will do well.

Charter schools don't spring up because of some thermodynamic fluctuation i n the population - people have to set them up. It won't be the parents of t he kids from problem families that do that.

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What's that got to do with anything? Engineers and teacher both get more mo ney than the average industrial wage, because the jobs demand specific skil ls which you mostly document by getting by formal training. We both know th at for engineering, the formal training doesn't instill all the skills you need, and teaching seems to be similar in that respect.

Then they'd leave the US - there's a lot more need for good teachers in les s well-off countries. And it's not selfish to go where your skills are reco gnised - in places where your skills are recognised the children take them seriously and work harder. The fact that these places also demonstrate thei r respect by paying higher salaries is an incidental advantage.

This can go too far - Finland takes good teaching very seriously, and Finni sh students seem to be unfortunately unwilling to argue with their teachers , and are subsequently less innovative than they ought to be as researchers ...

That's a system that can work very well. It's also a system that is open to abuse. A few years ago a I posted a link to a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande about some curious difference in Medicare costs in Texas.

More recently some of the Texan doctors involved got jailed for fraud.

This may have influenced the legislation ...

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My take on this is that a lot of processing goes on without our conscious i nvolvement. My father claimed to get his best ideas while shaving (and he e nded up being the named inventor on about 25 patents, so his best ideas wer en't bad). I once woke up with the conviction that a Gigabit Logic four-bi t adder that we had been planning to use wouldn't do what we wanted it to d o. This happened on the evening of an Easter Friday and my wife was a bit s urprised when I went into work for a couple of hours on a holiday weekend t o confirm the conviction - we went back to a 100k ECL quad adder.

John Larkin's baffle-gab about wideband noise sources isn't helpful.

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It has come up here before, and John Larkin has a habit of justifying his c rummy filtering of silly ideas by claiming that better filters would also c ut out good ideas.

As with any threshold scheme, you have to balance false positives against f alse negatives, and John Larkin vents a lot of false positives here.

He also seems to reject schemes that involve him winding his own small-sign al transformers, which strikes me as identifying largeish class of false ne gatives ...

My feeling is that he doesn't know enough to do good filtering.

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James Arthur isn't uninformed. He's meticulously ill-informed.

He has spent thousands of hours on a national panel studying the law and re gulations with a view to minimising the tax load, and has a point of view t hat sounds plausible and well researched.

Of course the kind if "research" involved has let him tell us that the UK N ational Health Service is worse at keeping diabetics alive than the US heal th system, when if you split the diabetics into Type 1 diabetes (congenital ) and Type 2 (which is what you get when you stay obese for too long, is ea sier to treat and is more common in the US) the difference goes away.

of the ACA is to have large deductibles. Of course, you can pay higher pre miums to get the deductible down, but you have to pay that yourself.

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And James Arthur is one of the sheep who will tell you that. He may not eve n know that he is wrong. He's sufficiently indoctrinated that he doesn't no tice when somebody points tout that he has made a mistake - it's krw-like b ehavour but with a much more elaborate shell of rationalisation.

James Arthur would like to think that he has indicated that Rick C. is mistaken.

What he has actually indicated is that he thinks that Rick C. is mistaken. Political propagandist shouldn't bother making this kind of claim - nobody takes them seriously.

Or, looking at it more realistically, a way to score brownie points with Tea Party propaganda machine.

Mainly because he gets done like a dog's dinner when he tries. The kind of cut and dried propaganda that works on less sophisticated audiences gets a rather negative response here.

Let's try to find ways to encourage them.

A huge valuable resource may be going to waste. Wher do these ideas come from? Why are they so good? What can we do to encourage them?

I think answers to these questions and others could have a huge benefit.

Let's try to find out. It's worth the effort.

That's great, and just as it ought to be. We see a lot of that over here too.

Ensuring personal financial gain is not part of the equation is very comforting.

But I would be concerned about those that have become disillusioned and/or have repayments/alimony pending.

When I asked my question of a British ex-pat living in Boston with an HMO(?) arrangement, he thought and said "the fear of being sued". We both found that sad.

I should have made it clearer. My concern is that doctors are people, and they have all the good and bad characteristics, motivations and behaviour that other people do.

Most people are good, but there is a need to contain those that aren't. The question is how that is and should be done.

This is interesting. Any ideas on how to do it?

I may be a bit older and short naps are beneficial. There seems to be a common ground that complete relaxation is helpful.

There are also ideas that come out of a clear blue sky while you are busy doing something else. What causes these?

As someone said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Let's explore. See if anyone else has a good idea on what is happening.

With part B, D and whatever those extra fees are included? That would be a good deal.

Except for their member services department. We were overcharged several timea and occasionally by large amounts. Since member services was usually unable to do anything meaningful about it (sometimes I wonder just what they can do ...) we had to file grievances, occasionally all the way up to the state level. Their docs are usually good though and their pharmacy is efficiently run.

It was his way or the highway. Leftist's dreams of how things are to be run are usually that everyone must buy at the company store, meaning the government.

Yeah, I have the drug supplement, one of those letters. I get dental too, but my dentist isn't in the network so I pay him for checkups. If I needed something major done, I'd probably use one of theirs.

That's too bad; I haven't had any business problems.

I got a robo-call from K on Thursday, bugging me to refill my BP meds. They are afraid I might run out. Refilling takes about 30 seconds online, they mail me the drugs for free, and the bill the company for the $4 or whatever co-pay.

Leftists think they understand - hence are entitled to control - things that nobody understands. So, unintended consequences. Which obviously requires more control.

They never actually believe in evolution.

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There's nothing particularly leftist about Obamacare - the prospect of exte nding health insurance to some of the 15% of Americans who didn't have it before Obamacare did appeal to leftists, but the UK National Health Insuran ce system was put together by leftists and Obamacare fell a long way short of that, or the health insurance system in Germany, which dates back to tha t arch-leftist, Bismark.

The American right is spooked by Obamacare, but it isn't all that obvious w hy - employer-paid health insurance is a device that capitalists can use to influence their work force, and making the system marginally more equitabl e may be giving ground to trade union ideas, but that would be fearfully ol d-fashioned.

Unfortunately so. The medical professione needs to be supervised carefully to get rid of the bad people.

All doctors and hospitals should be required to post price lists. There is no other business in the USA that presents an arbitrary bill after the services are performed. One big reason to have insurance here is to delegate fighting over the bill.

The incentives should be right. Too often they are not.

We don't have dental insurance because it's either cheap HMO and then the dentists have to upcharge to make ends meet or it is regular insurance and then capped at around the amount of your yearly premiums, which doesn't make sense. I found that negotiating a bit with dentists gets us a better deal. I currently pay about $100 for regular cleaning and $400 for the deep root scaling where they numb you down and it takes several hours. List prices are usually around 2x that.

We shell out in full, also for doc visits, unless one of us would ever get really sick and exceed the $5k/person or so yearly deductible. That's when you see instantly whether they overcharged or not. This is one of my main gripes with our current health system, the lack of transparency. People just think "Oh, nevermind, the insurance will pay anyhow", not truly realizing that they will pay it all in the end via higher premiums.

Their mail order pharmacy is great. No standing in line. Though even if in line it's not bad because they staff the counters well. Like when I get another sudden and bad case of poison oak exposure. No idea why the ointment for that has to be prescription, considering that most people experience this sort of poisoning way out in the sticks.

Only in their kind :-)

It isn't obvious to you because you don't live here. To us it is obvious. Obamacare has trashed (made "illegal") many good health plans that people had for years. Obama lied when he said that people can keep their health plan if they liked it.

It went on from there. Due to onerous and often nonsensical rules plus extra taxes on "other" health plans premiums for people like us more than doubled.

The rules on health savings accounts (HSA) that were introduced under Bush were also changed in that now only prescription items could be paid with them, not OTC drugs that you need. The fact that this was done after people had already paid in and could get their many back made this particularly galling for many. Under Obama they also made extra sure people wouldn't pull money out early by doubling the penalty for doing so.

Obamacare is in a nutshell just a gigantic and costly welfare program. The vast majority of "new" participants either get full subsidy or use the nearly free Medicaid option. Many plopped themselves into Obamacare and reduced their work hours to get the subsidy because previously affordable regular health plans have now become unaffordable (our regular plan more than doubled in cost). Without the subsidy Obamacare plans are outrageously expensive so people make sure not to exceed the

One could talk about it some, write an essay or something, but that would be sort of like talking about playing tennis. It's a start, but you have to really do it to get any good.

Like tennis, it takes some time too. And it takes some native talent.