08:51 – It’s currently 7F (-14C), but there’s no wind so it actually doesn’t feel as cold as it did yesterday when the temperature was 10 degrees higher but there was a stiff breeze. Fortunately, it’s also dry. Our furnace has been running pretty steadily, but it’s holding the indoor temperature at 69F (20+C).
I’m working on kit stuff today, mostly filling bottles that Barbara has already labeled. We’re low-stock (less than 24 bottles) on about 20 chemicals, so first priority is to get 60 more bottles of each of those filled and capped.
My Stetson is off to AlGore! His anti-global warming campaign has been a HUGE success!!
So much for winter. We are at 41 F and heading for 70 F on Friday. I just hope that we get some rain soon as these parts are getting parched.
Uh oh, Algore is getting fired:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/06/Futile-Climate-Change-Companies-Seek-New-Leadership
Looks to me that the feddies are looking for someone:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/06/government-checkpoints-driving/4265633/
Or space aliens living amongst us. But the Men in Black should have those people firmly in check.
Outsiders looking at US politics may be closer to truth than domestic analysis.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25643643
The comment that the Tea Party is made up of “Goldwater Republicans” offers some relevant insight, I believe. It signals that their ranks are old farts, like me. I campaigned for Goldwater before I could vote, although the hot chick I was teamed with to distribute flyers had as much to do with it as any real political commitment on my part, and all the other guys in the YR group were jealous. Our family had only one car at the time, and my dad was not about to relinquish his activities for mine. Goldwater Girl could get one of the 3 cars her family had at any time, but her dad would have been shocked, I’m sure, to know she relinquished the driving to me, once we were out of the neighborhood. Although maybe he did know, because her younger 10 year-old brother frequently accompanied us if we were going to a movie or to do something like play miniature golf.
She wore those gawd-awful grey translucent-frame glasses that were popular with girls back in the stiff hair days of the mid-‘60’s, although she did not follow the others, but left her hair long and soft. Her glasses resembled the ones Dame Edna Everidge wears today. She was average looking with them, but stunningly beautiful without them, and I took them off of her frequently and stuck them in my pocket. Her eyesight was such that she could see okay, but just could not focus well on things, so she let me do that, if I whispered the names of people approaching us that we knew.
Goldwater Republicans are stubborn. IMO, that is why Republicans will not accomplish much politically as the Tea Party, until they are gone from the scene of politics—or somebody with Reagan’s charisma comes along, which seems highly unlikely before 2016.
Another recent article pointed out that my kids’ generation are not interested in stubborn. They do not have the commitment to principles or issues the Goldwater Republicans do, nor do they see any reason why everyone should even have to live by the same principles. Until that generation takes over politics, I do not see things changing much at all in Washington, including who is in control. And that generation is quite satisfied with compromise, so the status quo may not change much—even when they get to Washington.
The area around my high school was one of the worst cases of white-flight I ever saw. Most of my high school classmates disappeared, because nobody’s parents stayed, and there was no one left to contact as the years progressed. In my class of 800 alone, only a few hundred have been located using Facebook and all the modern means of communication with the Internets. So Goldwater Girl disappeared. Her parents were Dutch and belonged to a Calvinist church in my old neighborhood, pastored by my debate partner’s dad. No one knows what happened to her. Mostly my fault, because we moved, too, and I just never spent time in the old neighborhood once that happened and I finished my first year of college. Just one of those many memories triggered by things like the mention of Barry Goldwater.
Results of random research. Let’s suppose it slipped your mind which firearms had been used in which movies by Goldie Hawn. You could just look it up in the Internet Movie Firearms Database.
http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Goldie_Hawn
Wow, thanks Chuck. I didn’t know that the lovely Sandra Bullock had used so many:
http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Sandra_Bullock
Mr Barkley wearing his Christmas present:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0sy1kybm6n0848c/1521473_10151851502032826_2057238382_n.jpg
… showing his mum and dad:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ndfw7xevdn8uy3d/1549375_10151851502062826_2125928421_n.jpg
Hmmm. I checked Diana Rigg, and found that they listed her as using an MP40 in an Avengers episode. So I clicked on the link for MP40
http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/MP40
and found that they’d misidentified an MP38 as an MP40. So I went over to Wikipedia’s MP40 page and found that they’d done the same. The first image
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MP_40_AYF_2.JPG
shows the four horizontal ridges on the magazine well that identify the weapon as an MP38 rather than an MP40. This image from later in the article shows an actual MP40.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MP_40_Schmeisser_Machine_pistol-_randolf_museum.jpg
The two weapons are nearly identical. The MP40 used more stampings rather than forgings to cut production time and costs, but visually they’re very similar other than the ridges present on the MP38 magazine well that are missing on the MP40.
Does stamping vs. forging matter a lot in practical terms?
Stamped weapons look cruder. Forgings are stronger, but unnecessary for many components. As the Nazi war machine geared up, they migrated a lot of stuff from all-forged to mostly-stamped. The MP38 -> MP40 was one example. The MG34 -> MG42 was another. In both cases, the shift to stamping had no real effect on the quality or usability of the weapons, but the amount of labor was greatly reduced and the cost per weapon dropped dramatically.
I’ve fired the MG34 and MG42 fairly extensively. The MG34 is a lot prettier, but given my druthers I’d take the MG42 every time if only for its 20 to 30 round/second cyclic rate. (They didn’t call it Hitler’s Buzzsaw for nothing…) As to the MP38/MP40, I’ve fired only a few magazines through each and I didn’t see a lot to choose between.
The TEA Party (from the one meeting that I attended) is mostly old people worried about getting their government checks and benefits. I went to one meeting here in the Land of Sugar which had about a half dozen speakers (mostly boring and same message) and consisted of a lot of people my age and older. About two to three thousand people were there. Maybe half white and varied others (black, hispanic, oriental). It would not get that turnout today.
A few younger adults were there along with their kids. I saw a lot of homeschooler tshirts on the kids (very strong in my area). They are a significant force here in South Texas, possibly all of Texas.
The TEA party elected Ted Cruz in Texas and would do it again in a heartbeat. We love the anti-mainstreamers here in Texas.
The USA is getting older. A lot of people older than me (53) walking around and mostly getting a lot of government benefits like social security and medicare. Do not discount the power of these two programs. That is why I say that we should open up Medicare to all citizens of the USA.
That is actually a terrific idea, IMO. One of the broken parts of US healthcare is the purposely contrived shortage of doctors, which keeps their income sky-high compared to all other developed countries. As I have mentioned before, my German daughter in-law doctor, earns approximately the same as a tenured teacher. Already, my cousin who is a US doctor, is complaining that they get about 1/3 the fee from Medicare that they can earn billing a private person and his insurance company for the same operation. Putting everyone on Medicare would bring those high income doctors down to what doctors earn in the rest of the world, with very little muss or fuss.
People think government is ineffective—and generally, its regulations are. But Medicare is single-handedly dealing with high doctor and medical costs—and getting it done. Most doctors do not refuse Medicare paid work. You will not have that success yourself, and insurance companies are more likely to deny a claim, than to fight with the doctors to reduce fees.
ChuckW – German daughter in-law doctor, earns approximately the same as a tenured teacher.
Considering the amount of training, knowledge and skill involved I find that appalling.
US doctors might be overpaid but German docs are way underpaid.
Considering the amount of training, knowledge and skill involved I find that appalling.
US doctors might be overpaid but German docs are way underpaid.
I think that German Doctors and USA Doctors have different level of schooling. German Doctors might be called a PA here in the USA. Also, German Doctors probably get free schooling.
is complaining that they get about 1/3 the fee from Medicare that they can earn billing a private person and his insurance company for the same operation.
I suspect that putting everyone on Medicare in the USA will cause the Medicare payment rates to double. I also suspect that we would get co-pays and deductibles at that time. Essentially, Medicare would become a PPO system.
No, it is not true that German doctors are the equivalent of our PA’s, and in fact, the DIL could—at any time—come to the US and be certified in any of several states here in the Midwest with mostly bureaucratic effort. Their certification tests are exactly the same as here; most all Western countries use the same testing. Returning to the US was the plan at the beginning, but after some years under their belt and with both stepson and DIL securely employed, they are now quite happy to remain permanently in Germany. And yes, her education was free, as is a medical education in most of Europe and in the countries recognized as having the most advanced and effective healthcare systems.
The world’s health systems are one of the most studied items around the globe. The US spends over twice on healthcare as other developed countries with at least 20% of the US population having no access to any healthcare at all, and an additional group of about half that number getting insufficient care for all of their needs, whereas full healthcare is available to all of the populations of countries with nationalized or mandatory healthcare, which includes most of Europe, Cuba, and some South American countries. And in spite of double the per-capita spending in the US, health outcomes and life spans are better in other developed countries than here.
DIL’s salary is on a par with doctors in other European countries–in fact, probably better, because Germany pays higher wages than others on all fronts. Being a doctor is a job in Germany, and most work for hospitals or clinics, rather than the piecemeal system we have in the US. Moreover, you do not see European doctors working 3 days a week, living next to exclusive golf courses where they spend large amounts of time, owning big boats or airplanes, or even driving anything more expensive than a BMW—a car that many ordinary Germans drive, but which only the rich (or deeply in debt) drive here in America. To give you an idea of salary ranges, I have noted before that almost everyone that we knew in Germany has an income of between US$45,000 and 65,000, and that includes lawyers. Doctors and teachers make between US$65,000 and 85,000. Teachers are as highly valued there as doctors. Most people pay between 30 and 40% income tax and additionally about $US600/mo for healthcare of a family of 4. Germany has a large middle-class and they make huge efforts to protect both it and mom and pop businesses.
Our primary purpose in living in Germany, was to make it possible for DIL to attend medical school by helping take care of the kids so she could attend classes and study. If you want to be a doctor over there, you start medical education with your first year of university. None of this bullshit of having to waste 4 years to get a political science degree or an English degree or social science degree first, or maybe something useful like a biology or chemistry degree. And her first day of school was also her first day working in a hospital. The education and putting it into practice went hand-in-hand from the day one. And although they have something akin to residency, they are fully certified doctors before beginning that program, unlike here. She was functioning like a PA, assisting doctors in surgery and attending to patients post-op after her third year. I have mentioned before that in Germany, nurses are secretaries; doctors assist doctors in the operating room. Normally, she could have finished everything, including the residency, in 6 years, but she took time off to have kids (3 more after she started medical school), and thus it took just over 7 years to finish, plus another 6 months for the residency-like part.
Contrast that with US requirements of a 4-year undergraduate degree, 4 years of medical school, 3 years of residency (5 for surgery) and after more than a decade of education, the US still gets beat on the quality of healthcare it provides by countries spending about half the educational time as the US. Requiring an undergraduate degree before medical school is a seriously unproductive waste of time and money, IMO.
I do feel some compassion for US doctors whose fees and lives need to come into line with doctors in the rest of the world, where compensation is nowhere near as extravagant as in America. Although I do hope my doctors do not see this, as I’m quite sure they do not agree with a significant lowering of their income. But whether they want that or not, they cannot stop it. World intercourse WILL level our doctors’ salaries, eventually. But in the meantime, don’t get things backwards: it’s not Germany that pays doctors poorly—they pay what the rest of the world pays;—it’s the US where compensation is outrageously high and extraordinarily out-of-line, due primarily to contrived shortages from allowing doctors’ ‘self-regulating’ body the AMA to determine how many doctors will be admitted to medical school and how many will be certified to practice. Exact same situation exists with lawyers, who create the same shortage in their field, driving their fees up phenomenally compared to other countries.
In the Seventies in Australia 17 year olds would enter medical school straight out of high school, spend the first year doing preparatory subjects (biology, chemistry, physics, behavioural science, genetics in the case of Adelaide University) and then in their second year start specialist medical subjects. Took six years all up, then they had a year of residency when they were run off their feet. At Flinders University (in Adelaide’s southern suburbs) up to about a quarter of the course was deliberately non-medical: you could take a sub-major in Spanish lit if you wanted. Strong preference in each state was given to locals for admission.
Nowadays you have to take one year of an unrelated degree (perhaps even a full degree) and the preference for locals is reduced or gone. Getting top marks in high school is no longer good enough for admission, as they also give a lot of weight to interviews that try to measure subjective things like “maturity” and interpersonal skills. An Adelaide boy who dreamed of becoming a doctor had to move to Melbourne to study because he didn’t get in locally, despite outstanding academic results. Mostly, I don’t agree with this: “maturity” and other qualities should be taught, not assumed in 17 year olds, and you don’t graduate without it.
Many doctors bulk bill, which means they take a payment from the government instead of charging the patient. When I was young our family doctor worked solo, when he retired in the Eighties he sold his “goodwill” to a consortium of three doctors who operated a single practice. Nowadays there are large clinics where you go and wait your turn – no appointments. I think doctors working alone are fairly uncommon now. The new government is talking about introducing a co-payment for seeing the doctor to discourage people from going without a good reason. I don’t think that will have the desired effect.
Medical degrees reflect most degrees here: there are very few general education courses, you just dive right into whatever you want to do. Medicine is studied at the same level as computer science, or physics – it *is* basically a bachelor’s degree. However, it is very competitive to get in, because places are restricted, and is a very intense program of study.
The degree gives you the right to be called “Dr.” as a professional title, but does not confer an academic doctor’s title. There has been a racket going on that allows doctors to do a joke of a dissertation in a few months, and claim the academic title. This is coming under serious criticism due to the increasing scrutiny applied to graduate degrees in the wake of several plagiarism scandals.
Switzerland tightly restricts the number of students accepted. Part of this is because the education is essentially free. but the main reason is to protect doctors from competition, because the health care system here has false incentives: if a doctor gets hungry, he starts ordering lots of extra tests and other work on his patients. So the solution is to keep the doctors overworked, so that they don’t do that. Nonetheless, it’s very hard to make a living as a GP, especially in the cities, because people go straight to specialists, even for stupid things.
The really bad thing that has occurred in the US, is that doctors have used the AMA’s power to organize themselves better than any union. Most doctors around here work 4 days a week, from 9 to 5—most take either Monday or Friday off. If you get sick, good luck. Doctors don’t do house calls, nor do they receive work calls outside of business hours, unless they are a surgeon and legally responsible for a patient’s recovery. Even then, that is problematic. I have been involved in a case where the operating doctor could not be reached when a patient was deteriorating after surgery, a substitute took over for the recovering patient, the patient got worse and died, and the original operating doctor said he would not have followed the course his sub did.
Doctors around here make—on average—around $200 to 300,000/yr without breaking a sweat. The guys doing joint replacements can easily break a million. The Tiny Town hospital does a minimum of 4 to 6 joint replacements every day.
Now a doctor’s insurance eats up about $80,000/yr (higher for surgeons) so their net is going to be essentially $100k less than they bring in, but still. In the US, nurses’ insurance is generally paid entirely by the hospital they work for. A few purchase supplemental insurance from their own salary ‘just in case’, or if they do private duty work. From what I have learned, nurses pay between $80 and 150/mo for such supplemental insurance. In Germany, the hospitals/clinics pay for the insurance of the doctors they employ. But there is hardly any legal activity against doctors in Germany compared to the US, where my own experience sees lawyers moving over to “med mal” as they call it, all the time. Even lawyers who did other types of work are abandoning everything else for the med mal.
Get sick outside of office hours, and you will be told to go to the hospital emergency room, and the doc will see you on Monday. I once had some pretty severe abdominal pains that were not getting better, and my doc would not see me until the next week. It made no difference that I had the symptoms for a couple days—they would not even let me come in and see him at the end of the day. If it got worse, I was told to go to the emergency room and call the doctor’s office to let them know I did that. Great! I did start getting better the next day. When I saw the doc the following week, he said there was no way of knowing what the problem was, but he guessed it was either a stomach flu bug or a bowel lock that worked itself out.
Brad brings up an important difference between the German-speaking countries and the US. Education is revered there. It is rare to find people in the top echelons of management in big companies who do not possess a PhD, and are therefore Herr Dr. or Frau Dr. I taught quite a few at Deutsche Telekom and BASF. In fact, I would venture to say that the academic “Dr.” is more cherished there than the medical title “Dr.”.
Most medical doctors I was acquainted with in Berlin were both medical Dr.’s AND PhD’s, including DIL. She worked for more than 2 years on her thesis, which involved a lot of math that was beyond my level, but which she understood perfectly. My contribution was getting the math programs she used to work on her computer.
There is a whole different attitude and approach to education between the US and much of Europe. Higher education there is seen as part of the asset wealth of the country, and the cost barriers to obtain education are kept low—often free. But they do discriminate on who gets access to higher education. If you do not prove yourself by secondary school, you are only going to trade school. If you prove yourself to be smart and capable, you can earn a spot on the university track.
That puts incredible pressure on parents and kids that we generally do not have here. Starting around 5th grade, the assessment begins. I remember DIL fretting considerably over her oldest son’s lack of committment to bearing down on school work. Like his dad, he was coasting through school. His dad even repeated a couple grades—even though he was quite high IQ. After a couple years working in construction, he decided he wanted to go to college. His mom was shocked and never thought he could make anything of that, because he had goofed off so badly during grade and high school. But he graduated magna cum laude. Not sure his son will have that opportunity if he is not chosen for the college track by high school.
In the US, education is about schools making lots and lots of money, not about a capital wealth asset of the workforce.
Odd then that there are no German universities among the world’s best. Among “good” colleges/universities, US institutions outnumber German ones by at least 100:1. Nor is it just population/size. The UK has several top universities.
Also, although I can’t speak to Ph.D.’s outside the STEM fields (and, of course, in my opinion Ph.D.’s should not be granted for non-STEM “disciplines), German STEM Ph.D.’s are not highly regarded in the US or elsewhere. At best a German Ph.D. is considered maybe equivalent to an M.S. from a US institution. Or maybe not.
German STEM Ph.D.’s are not highly regarded in the US or elsewhere.
Not quite. The German Chemical Engineer PhDs are quite admired here in the USA, lately Dr. Wagner.
http://www.thermo.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/en/prof-w-wagner.html
After all, Chemical Engineering was invented in Germany. Mustard gas in WWI. Coal to Oil in WWII. Mass production of aspirin (Bayer).
That’s not wholly true. A lot of German universities dominate certain specialities in my field, biomedical engineering. The US does better for drug and molecule design, true, but Germany does better for a lot of detailed tissue modelling, for example.
I’m always leery of educational comparisons from country-to-country. My son dated an American girl whose parents were both professors at a university here in Indiana. She is one of those students who were in the gifted classes throughout school and graduated from her university in the top 10. She went to Oxford for 2 years to get a Master’s a couple years ago, and said it was the biggest educational disappointment of her life, and without a doubt a complete waste of money for her parents, who paid about 80% of the tuition.
I’m sure there are schools that are good at teaching people things, but my life observation has been that the success of Ivy Leaguers is most often due to the connections the alumni make sure the new graduates get. Romney is a perfect example, as are the people at the big public TV station in Boston, who make life easy for Yale graduates, while forcing out those from Harvard and MIT, who usually get their first jobs there as interns while still in school.
The people I knew in Germany who became exchange students in the US, were very glad for the experience, which taught them English well, but they all said the schools (high schools) in the US were inferior to their own. Because high school is 5 years in Germany, instead of 4, they all returned to more school in Deutschland, and they maintained they had a lot of catching up to do. I also am aware that during the decade we were in Germany, it was generally accepted that the secondary school systems were crumbling in effectiveness. They were busy trying to adopt the old East German school practices throughout the country when I left.
Cannot speak to a comparison of higher education, except that I think what America is after educationally, is different than what Europe wants, which is different from what Africa wants, which is different from what the Orient wants. The young people in my German classes from Norway were very knowledgeable and well read—even though they kept telling me in perfectly grammatical English, that their English was not very good.
I believe that any American benefits from time abroad, but I also think that foreigners benefit more from time spent in the US. People who had spent a year or two of their schooling in the US were real fireballs and highly motivated compared to those who had never been to the US. Most of those were either young managers in big companies, or else entrepreneurs owning their own successful businesses. One guy who spent time in New Jersey, of all places, and had an accent right out of The Godfather or The Sopranos, started a security tech business, installing recording surveillance cameras, electronic locks with key cards and associated computer tracking equipment. He was so successful at this that he admitted he was embarrassed that he did so much better than his same-age peers were doing. He stayed with his US host family one summer, which had 2 boys one younger and the other older than he, and worked with them at the father’s HVAC business. I’m sure that experience gave him the initiative to achieve as he has.
You have to take those college ranking lists with a huge grain of salt. Lots of the reputation is based on graduate programs, faculty research and – lets be honest – political connections. The undergraduates get to listen to TAs, or maybe some poor, overworked-and-underpaid adjunct.
The schools I’ve taught at (one in Germany, one in Switzerland) are both “Fachhochschulen” – colleges that focus on undergraduate education. Classes are taught directly by the professors, labs are supervised by the professors. class size rarely exceeds 40 (and is usually around 25). That’s the kind of environment that a motivated student can really profit from. But we have no groundbreaking research results, few spinoff companies, nothing to grab publicity.
Yeah. The line is blurred nowadays, but we used to call your type of institution a “college” versus a university, which had undergrads but focused on grad students, research, and so on. That’s the type of institution where I did my undergrad work. Everything was taught by professors. No TA’s or grad students on campus. That’s the way it should be everywhere, with universities doing grad stuff only.