Feynman actually used a strip club as an office and defended it in court.

From Wikipedia:

"In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he gives advice on the best way to pick up a girl in a hostess bar. At Caltech, he used a nude/topless bar as an office away from his usual office, making sketches or writing physics equations on paper placemats. When the county officials tried to close the place, all visitors except Feynman refused to testify in favor of the bar, fearing that their families or patrons would learn about their visits. Only Feynman accepted, and in court, he affirmed that the bar was a public need, stating that craftsmen, technicians, engineers, common workers "and a physics professor" frequented the establishment. While the bar lost the court case, it was allowed to remain open as a similar case was pending appeal.[12]"

>> ^Truckchase:

>> ^mentality:
I wish I could've bought him a drink at a strip club and just listen to him talk all day.

I believe per his own specified criteria in this video he'd be too distracted to think.

I'm 100% on board with @MaxWilder. @Yogi, and @ghark seem to be falling into the same trap the tea party is falling in. By using your ideological base to hold your party hostage, you make your party less electable with the centrists. Right now, the centrists run this country, and Obama is our CEO.

To paraphrase Obama, "if we were to start from scratch, single-payer is the way to go, but we aren't starting from scratch." I agree, and in fact almost everybody agrees, there is little in this bill to effectively control costs. This bill is more about the moral imperative, not the financial one. It makes healthcare obtainable for more people, and it ensures that the people paying for coverage receive it. That is, it focuses more on the "quality and availability of care" problem, than the "cost of care" problem.

There is a very good reason for this. The cost issue is trickier to deal with.

On one hand you have the single payer direction. How do you do that? Presumably you just start offering medicare for everybody, which in effect means raising taxes substantially to pay for it. Remember, we just got out of a recession. Politically, nobody can stomach more taxes. Granted, in theory, everyone should receive a commensurate pay raise for the insurance they were previously receiving. If you thought that was going to happen... well... I think I've got a bridge that can get over that ocean for you...

On the other hand, you have the public option. In effect, that's making medicare optional for everyone. Well, if you talk to anyone in the medical industry, they'll tell you that medicare under-compensates. They don't cover the cost of care, and doctors are forced to subsidize that care by over charging patients with private insurance. Many doctors stop accepting medicare for exactly this reason. This puts you in a pickle. You can either A) force doctors to accept medicare, or B) reduce the availability of care to medicare subscribers. Of course, this is a false choice. Option A causes doctors to operate at a loss, which discourages entry into the medical profession more generally, and results in consequence B. Government price controls result in supply-demand imbalances. This is well documented.

If you really want to control costs, the best (maybe only) way is to lower the barriers to entry to the medical profession. Becoming a doctor should be a less costly endeavor, and doctors shouldn't be the only ones providing care. Nurses and technicians can do much of what is currently on the doctor's plate. Routine prescription renewals, diagnoses of common illnesses, and basic preventative tests could all be handled by people that didn't spend ten years and hundreds of thousands of dollars becoming a practicing doctor. Also, the creation of medical schools should be heavily subsidized. If you increase the number of care providers, the costs will come down.

The other aspects of costs are lawsuits, and medical technology (e.g. pharma, medtronic, etc). Dealing with lawsuits is hard, but one way to do it is to push liability to the people actually providing the care (like those nurses and techs, not the deep pockets), and make sure that the person getting the care understands the risks involved and signs waivers. That is where the dems are weakest because of their close ties to the ABA. With medical technology, we've got bigger problems that really have to do with overhauling our deeply flawed system of intellectual property in this country (and protectionist tendencies surrounding it). I agree, it's ridiculous that titanium screws cost 8k just because they go in your spine, or that 10 cents worth of pills can cost $600, but dealing with that is another whole TL;DR.

FYI - The video shows that having a constant diameter (cross-section) is not enough to show the shape is round. This was discovered to be a problem in getting segments of the Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters to fit together. (The SRB segments would flex out of shape when they were transported across country lying sideways on railcars.) They had to be forced back to a round shape to fit together, with the O-rings in the gaps. As described in Richard Feynman's book, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", NASA would measure diameters at different points. But Feynman knew about the funny shapes in this video, and knew that diameter measurements did not prove roundness. The technicians on site always had to keep inspecting the segments as they came together to get them to fit together.

9 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

>> ^ant:

Isn't this a dupe?


I know I've seen it before, but I can't find it.

>> ^VoodooV:

Different people react differently when they are confronted with something they don't know.
Some people want to learn, some people don't want to admit that they don't know something, or if they do admit that they don't know, they try to pretend that the reason they don't know is because it's beneath them.
Even the "nerd" was kind of a dick...too busy trying to establish dominance over her, quibbling over whether or not it's a box or a pc, instead of teaching her something.


Isn't teaching her that it isn't a box and IS the PC part of learning something? You need a starting point when learning something you don't know, the names of things are as good a place as I can think of. To that end, she didn't get frustrated with just one person, but 2, and the other tried to explain it in much more common language. I can't think of a more basic idea than "front", and that failed to register.

http://videosift.com/video/Either-she-is-trolling-or-a-technician-s-worst-nightmare

loved the xbox asplosion!

...and they wondered why the lighthouse technician wanted a flame thrower.

>> ^Crosswords:

What are the qualifications to become a TSA officer?
Have reached his/her 18th birthday at the time of application submission;
Be proficient in English (e.g., reading, writing,
speaking, and listening);
Have a high school diploma, GED or equivalent; OR
Have at least one year of full-time work experience in security
work, aviation screener work, or X-ray technician work.

That's it.

<div><div style="margin: 10px; overflow: auto; width: 80%; float: left; position: relative;" class="convoPiece"> nanrod said:<img style="margin: 4px 10px 10px; float: left; width: 40px;" src="http://static1.videosift.com/avatars/n/nanrod-s.jpg" onerror="ph(this)"><div style="position: absolute; margin-left: 52px; padding-top: 1px; font-size: 10px;" class="commentarrow">◄</div><div style="padding: 8px; margin-left: 60px; margin-top: 2px; min-height: 30px;" class="nestedComment box">What gets me is they keep talking about all the training the TSA staff get, yet all these videos we're seeing make it look as though they drag random people in off the street, slap a uniform on them and tell them to behave in any damn way they please!
On second thought randomly selected people would have more common sense.
</div></div></div>

Not to knit-pick but, those are just the qualifications to get hired, has nothing to do with the training. And no, I'm not defending TSA, just trying to keep you on track.

What are the qualifications to become a TSA officer?

* Have reached his/her 18th birthday at the time of application submission;

* Be proficient in English (e.g., reading, writing,
speaking, and listening);

* Have a high school diploma, GED or equivalent; OR

* Have at least one year of full-time work experience in security
work, aviation screener work, or X-ray technician work.


That's it.

>> ^nanrod:

What gets me is they keep talking about all the training the TSA staff get, yet all these videos we're seeing make it look as though they drag random people in off the street, slap a uniform on them and tell them to behave in any damn way they please!
On second thought randomly selected people would have more common sense.

Surgical implantation?
>> ^SDGundamX:

How exactly is this protecting us? Neither the body scan nor the pat down are going to find items hidden in body cavities. So what's next, we all get full cavity searches? It's the only logical way to be sure. And if you want absolute 100% safety EVERYONE has got to do it--including the TSA employees, stewardesses, and pilots, technicians... every time they show up for work. I'd love to see how long that lasts.
This insanity needs to stop. Now. I hope on the 24th when the scanner/pat-down becomes mandatory at most airports, people would take a stand and say enough is enough.

How exactly is this protecting us? Neither the body scan nor the pat down are going to find items hidden in body cavities. So what's next, we all get full cavity searches? It's the only logical way to be sure. And if you want absolute 100% safety EVERYONE has got to do it--including the TSA employees, stewardesses, and pilots, technicians... every time they show up for work. I'd love to see how long that lasts.

This insanity needs to stop. Now. I hope on the 24th when the scanner/pat-down becomes mandatory at most airports, people would take a stand and say enough is enough.

Not the cat I would hire as my bomb disposal technician.

...and the last thing the firework technician heard before dying from his burns was the cheer of amazement, wonder, and happiness from across the lake.

>> ^imstellar28:

why go to the hospital for 3 stitches? how about you rub some dirt on it and man up?


He didn't want a scar on his pretty face.

In all seriousness though, the system is borked. My buddy works as a technician during spinal/neural surgeries. They charge $7000 for a screw.

What all this talk about the rates paid by individuals vs. insurance companies shows is the power of larger pools in negotiations. If we could all negotiate our prices together as a nation, maybe we could work something out that is fair for everybody. Sure, it might cost more than it currently costs those with insurance, but we wouldn't be pushing the costs on to the self/un insured. It's not as though the unconscious guy laying on the hospital bed has much opportunity to shop around and let the free market work its magic.