This is manifestly not true. What leads you to believe this? Certainly there are some who don't, just as with undergraduate education. But there's no blanket program in the US to pay for all STEM PhDs.
All of the dozens of US STEM PhDs I know from recent decades had to pay their tuition by working as TAs, RAs, or usually both. They didn't walk in the door with a trust fund, work through the coursework, and then write up a dissertation. I'm not sure that's even a possibility in most STEM fields: you need access to millions of dollars of ultra-specialized equipment which you can realistically only get by working in an existing lab, which means being an RA.
"...a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development"
That "growing sense" is not growing organically, it's being energetically fertilized. The problem isn't that most Americans aren't benefiting from global goodwill and development, it's that they aren't benefiting from domestic development. And the minority who are benefiting disproportionately from domestic economic growth are expending significant resources to convince everybody else that the problem lies with the rest of the world.
>...but out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbing along.
I don't know that the official data shows things "still bobbing along." The graph of monthly employment numbers looks like it has a decidedly downward trend overall. September jobs were unexpectedly high, but we've had a lot of subsequent downward revisions and it may happen again for September.
looks like a return to post GFC pre-covid trend. That's sort of what I mean, we've obviously come from a boom-ish market and correcting. How much of it now is the shock that now isnt the same as the 2021-2023 market v this is the start of a real downturn. I don't know
Not necessarily. Average income can be up substantially at the same time that median income remains flat or even declines. This means that it is possible for spending by wealthier Americans to make up for sales lost from the unemployed middle class and poor.
I'm sure there are bad regulations. But the reason that there is reliance on simple one-size-fits-all rules is that we are unwilling to pay the cost of investigating each special case and having someone make an expert judgment.
Taking the trucking case as an example, it's certainly reasonable to require proof that the proposed technology solution doesn't actually make the problem worse in practice. While most people are honest, there are dishonest businesses that would claim environmental benefits for their product that simply don't exist (see the case of VW and their "clean diesel" fraud). So the regulation is a good one. The author's complaint is that it took too long and cost too much to provide the proof. Maybe he's right, but maybe he's not. Maybe he was satisfied by less evidence than the government, because he had a financial interest in believing in the technology. Just saying it was all unnecessary doesn't make it so.
How, exactly, is private equity responsible for our medical system and our massive government budget problems. Please explain to me step by step like I'm stupid.
Not the guy you asked, but PE focuses on short-term profits via high-debt acquisitions, cost-cutting, and price increases. In the context of healthcare, for example, this means higher costs for both out-of-pocket and government payers, fewer staff and lower quality of care, and, in some cases, even closure altogether due to the acquisition debt (which was dumped onto the acquired org itself) pushing the org into bankruptcy (of course only after the PE firm has squeezed all the juice possible out).
>The long and short: In 2010, private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management purchased Caritas Christi Health Care, a struggling eastern Massachusetts hospital system, from the Archdiocese of Boston, converting it from non-profit to for-profit and rebranding it as Steward Health Care. In 2016, after years of continued financial instability, Steward signed a sale-leaseback agreement with Medical Properties Trust (MPT), selling the land and buildings occupied by its hospitals to the real estate investment trust then leasing them back. Steward made $1.25 billion from the agreement—enough to steady its financial footing, pay off Cerberus, and fund a growth spree. The next year, the company purchased 26 more hospitals across the country. But with the agreement came what many viewed as inflated rents.
There is a new doc on Netflix called "Country Doctor" which follows a doctor who works in a very rural area, it shows what happens when the hospital goes through another round of being sold off to a new firm and the difficult access of the county.
Others have pointed out how PE has degraded the medical system. The debt crisis I referred to is the private credit crisis, though no doubt private equity has played a key lobbying role in creating our national debt crisis as well. Regarding private debt, Jeffrey Gundlach sums it up:
"'This is starting to show up to be the problem that I've been referencing… that private credit and private equity, frankly, is being borrowed from private equity. It's sold on a volatility argument, primarily," Gundlach added. "Maybe there's some excess return for your illiquidity that you can get, but it's largely a volatility argument.'
Illiquidity could turn paper losses into real ones, Gundlach cautioned, pointing to the kind of liquidity squeeze that worsened the 2008 financial crisis, when investors were unable to meet capital calls."
And here’s a ChatGPT summary of it for the TLDR crowd:
Private equity ownership of hospitals and medical practices is linked to worse patient outcomes, higher prices, and weakened physician autonomy. The paper argues that PE’s standard playbook — heavy debt loading, cost-cutting, consolidation, and short-term profit extraction — is fundamentally misaligned with long-term medical care. Case studies like Hahnemann University Hospital show how sale-leasebacks and aggressive financial engineering can push essential hospitals into collapse. Consolidation of physician groups reduces competition and raises prices for patients and employers, while staff cuts and reduced investment correlate with lower care quality. The author calls for stronger antitrust scrutiny, transparency of ownership, and limits on practices such as asset-stripping to prevent further harm in the healthcare system.
"All models are wrong; but some are useful." - George Box
Even particles aren't actually particles, nor spin states actually spin states. The map is not the territory. Physics models are only useful (and "correct") to the extent that they make successful predictions. If the adaptation of these principles to social communication yields useful predictions, then however inaccurate they may be in reproducing the exact nature of what they model, they are nonetheless useful and therefore worthwhile. FTA: "In summary, we review both empirical findings based on massive data analytics and theoretical advances, highlighting the valuable insights obtained from physics-based efforts to investigate these phenomena of high societal impact."
Natural scientific models use the vocabulary of pre-existing intuitions we have from interacting with the world: particles, rotation, etc. We try to simplify predictions by mapping experimental outcomes using things we already know and can directly perceive.
Using these abstractions as foundation for models of social dynamics and modern media feels a little wrong: the mapping is imperfect and incomplete, and as these physical models inevitably become outdated it will be more and more difficult to make sense of social dynamics models that use these physical models as a given.
The word “some” in the quote from Box is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
If a model is useful, I’d like to see it being used (outside academia, where there’s minimal penalty for complexity and a high emphasis on novelty).
If models like these are widely adopted at social media companies or news agencies, it’s fair to say OP’s take isn’t valid. Otherwise they may have a point.
Agreed. But these kinds of models almost always start in academia, that's one of the big reasons we have academia, to explore ideas that may (or may not) be useful. My point was that you can't prejudge the usefulness of a model simply because it doesn't fully replicate all the complexity of the phenomenon being modeled.
These ideas are used, and they influence what policy is crafted.
You can’t predict what an individual will do, but work like this kills many inaccurate ideological positions that we inherited.
There’s a paper from 2016 that shows how posts saturate/cascade through conspiracy communities and that it has distinct cascade dynamics. This wasn’t a model, it was a description of observed behavior.
Or take some relatively recent work from Harvard, which suggests that while our capacity to create misinformation has increased in both quantity and quality, its consumption rate seems to be stable.
> kills many inaccurate ideological positions that we inherited.
It doesn't, which is part of the point the OP is making. And now my point, it's ok that these pseudo-scientific "revelations" don't kill those "inaccurate ideological positions", because that's the whole point of human free will, there's no "accurate ideological position" when it comes to the day-to-day life, or to societal life in general.
> That said, I suspect you haven’t read the paper and are arguing from the headline.
You're correct on that, as I find that applying the word "science", or "research", or "paper", to the day-to-day life, like to news article in this case, is not science per se, and unfortunately I don't have time to lose on drivel that paints itself as science (but which it is not science, as I mentioned above).
Nonsensical for the US, but not necessarily nonsensical for Donald Trump and his family, depending on what Altman can offer him. Maybe not a 747, but he could certainly arrange to purchase Trumpcoin, like the UAE did to invest in Binance.
When you have the most openly corrupt administration in modern US Presidential history, the interests of the nation are not the yardstick to use to measure the value of a deal.
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