In college in the early 1980s I did some work at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. I spent several days wiring up the logic circuits (CAMAC modules) for our detectors. Our data cables were labeled with their lengths in nanoseconds. A 1 nanosecond cable would be about a foot long.

Much of my income is based on performance, Anonymous Coward, so get off your high horse. What I mainly resent is specialists with an equal amount of training making 5 times the money I make.

I'm a primary care physician in the US. There are a number of logistical issues in the decision whether to prescribe antibiotics. They revolve around the ease of followup. It would be nice to always be able to say "You'll probably be fine. If you get sicker, come back." But if it's a Thursday or Friday, or if the patient lives an hour's drive from the clinic, or if I'm about to go on vacation, or if my schedule is overbooked for the next few days, I'm much more likely to prescribe an antibiotic. We need better access to care. Among the things that would help that would be (1) single payer insurance, so people could get care anywhere, and (2) better compensation for primary care providers (PCPs) which would result in (a) more of them, relative to specialists and (b) less need for existing PCP to overbook their schedules to make ends meet.

Why is it that news stories about movie revenues never take inflation into account?

My brother Karl Jansky and His Discovery (1929) of Radio Waves from Beyond the Earth