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Comment Re:Need a prescription. (Score 1) 35

My wife is one of those who left.

Yes, a lot of it is to do with the over worked and under paid, but not all of it - a lot of it is also due to the unbelievable stress of the responsibility heaped on you as a doctor, coupled with the diminishing respect for being a doctor by pretty much everyone.

For example, GPs being told that they have to open in the evenings and weekends, despite not having enough staff to run a 9-5 Monday to Friday service already - and your budget is being taken by the pharmacists who are doing random pointless examinations or reviews on anyone who comes through the door (because the pharmacy makes money that way, but they can charge the GP for doing it). And if you refuse to, then a GMC complaint is raised.

How about being rung up by the police at 6pm and told to do a wellness check on a patient, despite it being the police’s responsibility and not yours - but because you have now been told, you have a duty of care if anything happens. Which means a GMC complaint being raised.

How about the physicians associate refusing to take your guidance, and putting in complaints if you have any feed back at all which isnt glowingly positive, despite them being under your license and insurance. Which means a GMC complaint being raised.

How about having to spend £100,000 and two years of your life defending your license because someone thought you had too much to drink at the staff party and thus must be an alcoholic, with no evidence at all.

How about the government dictating how much you pay into your pension fund each month, how much you will get back, the pension fund being massively in profit to the point where the government gets £6Billion in rebates from it annually, and STILL requires you to pay more in and take less out

How about patients coming into your consulting room clutching the Daily Mail, complaining that you get paid too much because thats what the newspaper says and ranting for 20 minutes, and then still complaining that you are running behind.

How about the only way to get a specialist training position is to have an interview on one specific day of the year, but your current training program absolutely refusing you the ability to go to it?

I can go on and on.

Comment Re:Need a prescription. (Score 2) 35

Antibacterial soap doesn't contain antibiotics... At least, it never has in any country I've lived in.

Their properties are supposed to be chemical in nature, not medication based - the fact that they haven't exactly stood up to scrutiny isnt surprising, but they arent adding to the current antibiotic-resistent problem...

Comment Re:Need a prescription. (Score 4, Interesting) 35

A few things to note...

Over the past couple of decades, more and more roles within the British healthcare system have become able to prescribe - pharmacists (as noted in the summary), nurse prescribers, physicians associates (who technically should be under the supervision of a GP, but the way the NHS has that set up its very much a "PA prescribes, GP actually has little say")...

The role of doctors in the British healthcare system is being deminished and replaced by lower paid, lower trained positions, and GPs are particularly hard hit by it - which is why GPs are retiring or moving overseas at record rates, far beyond the ability for the current GP training schemes to replace them.

The UK is actively doctor hostile these days, and British doctors do not want to be part of it any more.

Comment Re:Visual Studio is a great IDE, but... (Score 1) 44

Over the years I have used as my main development machine:

* 2011 17" Macbook Pro with 8GB RAM
* 2016 iMac with 8 cores and 32GB RAM (with 2 additional 4K screens)
* M3 Max 14" Macbook Pro with 36GB RAM (and an additional 4K screen)
* M4 Max 16" Macbook Pro with 48GB RAM (and an Apple Studio screen)

I havent really ever run into a resource issue - I had to retire the iMac just last month because the screen was ghosting, but it was still perfectly usable for development purposes right up to that point (ie I never get frustrated with it in terms of performance). The M4 Max MBP tho is worlds ahead of it in performance, so I dont regret upgrading - I just didn't upgrade for performance reasons).

Comment Re:Meanwhile slashdot has released popup ads (Score 3, Informative) 44

Slashdot has progressively got shitter over the past decade, and its noticable that that also correlates to a decline in the number of comments being left on stories.... The community has shrunk.

Slashdot used to allow me to give them money to avoid ads, but they took that away - so I have no moral or ethical issue with blocking ads on this site. Especially as they also used to provide an option to hide ads for long term users - which they started to ignore for specific ads, and then got rid of entirely.

Comment Re:You're obviously not a maintainer of a popular (Score 0) 113

But thats the entire point - at that point you arent scratching your own itch, you are voluntarily scratching someone elses.

If people stuck to scratching their own itches, we would either have fewer large projects or more involvement from users who are scratching their own itches.

But in the meantime, many OSS projects exist on the following flow:

1. Scratch your own itch, and make the solution public because it might help out others
2. Someone else finds your scratching to be valuable to them, so uses your solution
3. You like being involved with something someone else finds valuable, so you start scratching more of other peoples itches to increase your solutions value
4. Growth
5. You complain that other people are having their itches scratched without helping out

All of that is voluntary, and you put yourself in that situation - but you end up blaming others because thats easier than accepting that you made your own situation.

Comment Re:The road to hell is paved with good intentions (Score 0) 39

Are you saying all copyright laws are stupid? Because thats what the Internet Archive unilaterally decided in these cases.

Its not just the usual issue about length of copyright term, because the IA were sharing (and initially they had no way to enforce the sharing, so really it was just distributing) scans of books that were both old and brand new.

So if you are saying all copyright laws are stupid, what else do you think shouldn't be a law? All property law full stop? Lets eliminate ownership entirely?

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