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Submission + - Student president candidate brings paid astroturfing to higher education 1

grimsnaggle writes: Stewart MacGregor-Dennis, a candidate for Stanford student president, has brought paid astroturfing to higher education. An unofficial Stanford blog post outlines the extent of his antics, including purchasing more followers than the sum total of the Stanford student body. Astroturfing is for more than customer reviews, it seems.

Comment Re:Medical expenses? What's that? (Score 1) 651

My friends who work at medical device companies feel no pressure to keep costs down. Why make a part out of plastic when things machined from billet aluminum are shiny? Oops, there was an error in that part. Maybe we should order twice as many more of the next revision, because surely we will have caught all the bugs. Later, when the R&D is done, they'll sell the machine for a boatload of money and only honor the warranty if the end-user (your doctor) buys all of their consumables from the OEM. Now they also sell bottles of buffered saline for $10k/liter. As far as I can tell, the rest of the medical industry works in much the same way. But it's all OK, because you want the very best possible care and you wouldn't want to kill Uncle Pete for want of a few hundred thousand dollars.

Comment Re:Medical expenses? What's that? (Score 3, Interesting) 651

I'm a US citizen and I needed medical care in Coober Pedy, South Australia. The hospital was closed for the night so they called in a doctor for me. He looked me over, gave me some painkillers and anti-inflammatories, slapped on an ice-pack, billed me $46, and sent me on my way. No government or insurance was involved.

Had this been the United States, they would've billed me $400 for opening the door, $150 for the first drug, $220 for the second, $190 for the ice-pack, $30 in clerical fees, and made me sign a bunch of paperwork. I don't understand why medicine is so expensive in our country.

Comment Re:I bought a house (Score 1) 651

8% is a pretty good rate. If you find an investment that can pull that off without violating any laws, please let me know. Also, having cash on hand does not correlate to a credit score. As recently as last year I was unable to get a post-paid cell phone plan despite having enough cash on-hand to pay the monthly bill until the end of the millennium.

Comment Re:Now we need cameras in toilet stalls (Score 1) 551

I said nothing that all six stalls were big, just that the bathroom was needlessly large. But we digress; size of the bathroom isn't the point. The point is that engineering everything to accommodate everyone is unrealistic. In a world of infinite variety, I can always come up with another edge case that will define another requirement. At some point it makes more sense to move the mobility solution closer to the person requiring the mobility, rather than bending infrastructure to fit around the edge case. If there's a worthwhile market, technology will grow to provide a solution.

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