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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 MBA school must consist of memorizing BS... (Score 1) 25

Davuluri says "we care deeply about developers. We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences.

Windows 95 and 98 shipped with "Progman", a UI shell that loosely mirrored Windows 3.1. Windows XP, and even Vista, shipped with a "classic mode" Start Menu. My standards are lower now; if they could stop breaking ExplorerPatcher and OpenShell, that'd be great.

When we meet as a team, we discuss these pain points and others in detail, because we want developers to choose Windows..."

And do what? Develop UWP apps to be sold in the Windows Store that was so poorly implemented and curated that it's useful for almost-nobody - the developers still writing desktop Windows software likely have an established distribution channel at this point, so they don't need to pay the MS tax. The users have no need for it because they're either doing everything in a web browser, or using their existing software that already has a distribution channel of some kind. This means that the software on offer amounts to mostly-shovelware.

The good news is Davuluri has confirmed that Microsoft is listening, and is aware of the backlash it's receiving over the company's obsession with AI in Windows 11.

Tangential because it's Office...but they could show they're listening by making Copilot an icon in a corner when logging into Microsoft365, rather than spitting the user into a chat window by default. They're still trying to find a use case for on-device AI, and it's pretty telling that they're shoving it into the OS via annoyances, while their best example (Recall) is something that made more people say "that's creepy" than would say "that's useful". Copilot is the new Clippy in Office, there are memes about how plain-English formulas in Excel make obvious mathematical mistakes, and this is all on the backdrop of sucking everyones' data into OneDrive.

That doesn't mean the company is going to stop with adding AI to Windows, but it does mean we can also expect Microsoft to focus on the other things that matter too, such as stability and power user enhancements.

...So, by the author's admission, AI isn't a feature that matters? ...Seriously, I'm half asleep and I can still come up with holes in this argument...I don't think it's going to stop until the AI bubble implodes; the best we can hope for is for MS to implement fewer nags about it, but if Edge is any indication, I've got no confidence.

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:"ALI" of it? (Score 1) 72

Say your reactor has a neutron injector on a rotor. The fission fuel has started vibrating, creating a feedback loop that could cause the reaction to become unstable. Running the rotor in reverse would change the pattern of incident neutrons just enough to stop the vibration. And the way you make a rotor go the other way is by reversing the polarity of its drive current.

That's the best that I could ground this technobabble off the top of my head.

Comment Quantum noise (Score 3, Insightful) 37

Any article talking about qubit counts should reference the computers capabilities in terms of logical qubits.

Any article talking about error correction should provide a scaling law for the required fanout of correction circuitry as a function of logical qubit count.

Any article failing to do either of these things is a waste of time.

Comment Re: should forced ESPN to be an add on package and (Score 1) 101

They could do it like Sling, which has two basic tiers: Orange and Blue. Blue has the limited basic channels and a bunch of channels from programming providers other than Disney. Orange has limited basic and Disney, fewer channels and fewer simultaneous streams than Blue, with an "Orange & Blue" add-on tier that adds the missing channels from Blue.

Comment Technology (Score 1) 70

The oil industry has a half dozen or so new technologies for extracting oil from the ground that wouldn't be otherwise accessible. They aren't using them because it costs a lot to ramp up manufacturing and deployment of new gear, and training people to use it. Fracking and traditional pumping work fine for now. Once what's available gets harder to extract using those methods, prices will go up and they'll switch to a different technology.

Comment Re:Tax slaves (Score 1) 76

The IRS steals your lottery winnings in the US? 40%?

There is a mandatory 28% witholding on lottery winnings above $5,000. You will receive a W-2G form.

You can at least claim expenses against this "income" such as costs of tickets, gambling losses , etc? No? What a scam!

Your ability to claim expenses or gambling losses on a lottery win is restricted heavily. Most likely those deductions will end up being disallowed if you try to claim them without getting a CPA and making sure you document and can follow the IRS rules to a T.

The payor is required to withold the amount regardless. You will need to file an income tax return for that year in order to receive a refund for any portion of the witholding you end up not owing as taxes.

Comment Re:Bad Move (Score 1) 76

She still has to pay income tax on $150K, given that the tax deduction on donations isn't 100%.

A cash donation to charity is capped at 60% of your AGI for the year the donation is made. So 40% of that donation would be not deductible from federal taxes - let-alone state income taxes.

If you win a $150k lump sum; the Lottery doesn't give you the full amount. There is a federal mandate requiring 25% to be witheld from the payout for taxes, so you'd walk away with $112k MINUS any witholdings required by your local state government as well. Also, MINUS fees.. because if you won the 150k lottery and choose to go for the lump sum instead of the annuity that adds up to 150k over time-- your total amount is going to be less Based on the present amount of those future cash flows minus fees.

Comment Sling Blue and Sling Orange (Score 1) 101

Disney requires specific channels to be at the basic tier of a multichannel video provider's offering, not a "sports" tier. Last I checked (today), multichannel IPTV provider Sling worked around this by offering two different basic plans: "Orange" with ESPN and other Disney properties and "Blue" with more channels but no Disney. Orange subscribers can add the extra Blue channels on a second "Orange & Blue" tier.

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