jacobrobbins

This is really interesting and seems like a great example of how small businesses are better for their community than chains. When I lived in Fort Greene brooklyn I was surprised by how many barbershops and hair salons there were, like 5 or more on the single little triangular block at fulton and greene. It seemed clear they were providing more of a community function than just the utility of getting a haircut that i was familiar with. On a side note I never got comfortable with making conversation while getting my haircut and eventually settled on just cutting my own hair at home. That said I never tried the barbershop-type places and usually went to pretty generic haircut shops.

wood expansion is a big factor for wide flat pieces. Non directional wood products like MDF are used in cabinetry because they do not expand to anywhere near the same degree as solid wood. If you want to use solid wood you have to float it in panels, like you sometimes see on doors. But that adds a lot of complexity. For cabinets where you have dozens of moving pieces using MDF (or plywood) is much better for the reliability of the moving parts.

it would seem likely that if they discover a physical mechanism at work in select individuals brains (electric waves followed by rhythmic waves of fluid) that the mechanism exists in some form in all individuals. I agree it does make for a clear follow up question: "could this mechanism be altered in some ways in people who experience sleep problems?"

while technology is very advanced it still has a lot of limits. Watching what is happening in someone's brain without damaging them is quite difficult. From the article "Currently, people who volunteer for such experiments have to be able to fall asleep while wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap inside of a noisy MRI machine—no easy feat." So it would seem that studying internal brain activity during healthy sleep is indeed a challenge.

the poster mentioned it was for greeting cards, I remember their used to be a lot of greeting cards that would play a recording when you opened them. I bet they loaded low-quality samples into the ROM for that.

so glad to see that place mentioned! it was my morning coffee stop when i lived in new york. the owner/operator is great to chat to, lots of interesting stories about the neighborhood.

yeah when I saw that quote the first thing I thought is that this is probably one of those non-replicable studies that was cherry picked out of a small sample size.

cars cost "tens of thousands" yet personal automobile ownership has been feasible and has a huge positive impact on the economy. If that 10-90K ballpark cost estimate is accurate then accessing the information superhighway could be a similar situation.

re-reading your comment "This is talking about the cost-benefit from a societal perspective, not from the accounting perspective of the hospital." I think perhaps you do not understand what residents do. Residents handle a portion of the patient workload. They provide direct economic benefit to the hospital by handling patient workload at a lower salary than more senior doctors. There is a hierarchical system by which work is reviewed by more senior doctors but this is used in all hospitals regardless of whether there are residents. The economic benefit to the hospital is that residents do the work for lower salary than doctors. Putting that into dollar terms is what this article has failed to do, likely because the data to do so is not there.

I agree with this logic about "if residency programs predictably broke even" but I don't see any concrete support for that in the article. They don't have an accounting of revenue per doctor or at least the article has not shown one.

Saying the benefit is social benefit doesn't help here, obviously it is it's a hospital, there needs to be revenue numbers in the mix to talk about breaking even.

bkovacev out of curiosity what country do you live in? Because i have friends who have had much better experiences in Estonia.

I dealt with an RSI issue and had a similar experience where traditional hospitals and MDs did not help. I needed to go outside that system to get help. The hospital system is simply not setup to deal with those things; it is setup to deal with people who are possibly going to die. Imagine this is your job: the city you live in collects all the people who are so seriously sick or injured that their families/friends are worried they might die and brings them to you. You have to deal with all of them. Any of the people you can't assist don't get treatment and their illness takes its natural course. Now imagine how much of your training is focused on RSI.

If you think of a modern hospital as a direct organizational descendant of a war triage hospital, albeit one that is dealing with the health issues that kill the American public (generally cancer, heart disease and other manifestations of our unhealthy lifestyles), then you will have a better idea of when to go there. i.e. your problem must be acute.

To contrast your single positive account with a single negative account, my brother has been unable to update his Estonian e-Resident card because the system only works reliably on Windows. He has to wait to re-activate until the next time he goes to Estonia.

He has used the system from the outset and describes it as dated. It was built for a pre-mobile era and does not have a full-featured ecosystem for mobile devices.