• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • The Democrats do not have a realistic chance of winning against Trump because the Democrats are entirely incapable of challenging power. It’s the fundamental contradiction of liberalism. They won’t do anything for the people they need to vote for them because if they do the people who fund them will stop funding them.

    Obama and Sanders both excelled at small-dollar donations, of course. Sadly, Obama was a silver-tongued coward and the Clinton Democrats made sure she didn’t repeat the mistakes of 2008 in 2016 by not bothering to sign up voters in case they killed her in the primaries again.

    They dig their own grave and they do so willingly because it makes them exceedingly rich.





  • Demanding that people vote for the least worst option without any content other than sneering at them for apparently not realising that one of the options is worse, is doing exactly that.

    It’s straw-manning the arguments of people who want (and desperately need) the Democrats to be better and are putting serious thought, time and energy into how that is possible in a world controlled by billionaires who unleash fascism the moment their power is threatened.

    And they’re doing it with a lazy, cynical, Bill Maher-wannabe take because apparently they think this is a good look?

    They’ll be the death of us all.











  • Obviously, people want that (the actual question asked was about an “urgent” need to see a doctor).

    But this proposal is just a repeat of one of Blair’s worst policy failures, without acknowledging how or why it failed.

    When New Labour introduced the 48 hour target to see a GP, the vast majority of GPs ‘met’ the target by closing down their phonelines as soon as they ran out of appointments. In the process, they turned the 48 hour target into a 24 hour target because otherwise they’d only have been able to open the phoneline every other day.

    It was very bad back then. It’s much worse now because the NHS was at least relatively well-funded under Blair.

    Not that they’re announcing this because they think the policy will work, obv. Just doing their best to make sure the voters blame everyone but them.

    [The link is to a video of an election Question Time audience haranguing Blair about the foolishness of this target.]


  • The why is a much harder question.

    You’re right about it probably being true, this is not the first study to find something similar, there’s two others reported on here: Patients have better outcomes with female surgeons, studies find

    It’s interesting that this study looked at the proportion of women on the surgical team (not the composition of the surgical team for any specific operation):

    Overall, female surgeons performed 47,874 (6.7%) of the operations. Female anaesthesiologists treated patients in 192,144 (27%) of operations.

    Hospitals with teams comprising more than 35% female surgeons and anaesthesiologists had better postoperative outcomes, the study found. Operations in such hospitals were associated with a 3% reduction in the odds of 90-day postoperative major morbidity in patients.

    There’s some speculation in that first link about differences in aggression and risk-taking. But, given the relative rarity of female surgeons, it could just be a competency effect. If women are a small minority for reasons not related to competency, and 93.3% of surgeons are men, it suggests that almost half the men are in the job because a more competent women didn’t get it. Groups with more women do better simply because they didn’t discount half the talent pool quite so heavily.




  • I mean, yeah. All of this. Absurd.

    But, FWIW, offloading cheap tat onto charity shops is not going to work well. It costs them money to put it on a shelf and it probably takes up more space than it is worth. Plus, they very likely can’t sell electrical equipment that has had its cord chopped up and repaired, or at least not without spending more on having it tested than they could sell it for anyway.

    Next time, find a friend with small feet who would like to take it off your hands.