As a medical student, I have a negative amount of trust in and/or respect for anyone in the healthcare sector that has a business degree.

Our server has been having some federation hiccups. I actually play with a really chill unit. Oddly enough, all the Arma units I’ve encountered have been pretty progressive. As a cis woman, I am almost always outnumbered by the trans gals because there’s always a bunch of them around. Also, all the units I’ve been with have a negative amount of tolerance for bigots.

I pretty much always play as the medic in our PvE ops, and unfortunately I’m a little incompetent when it comes to actual combat, so I haven’t been horrendously useful when we play Anyistasi.

I saw “milsim” in the title and came here looking for other Arma 3 nerds.

Unless you are obfuscating something, or there were some very unusual mistakes involved, I would think that medical neglect that caused a disability in an acute timeframe would warrant a consultation with a malpractice lawyer.

I think you misunderstood. EMTALA defines disability in relation to an emergent condition, injury, or acute illness. The degradation of a chronic condition into a disability is not something that an ER can or should be trying to treat. Disability as a whole can include things like chronic pain in addition to other neuropathies, parasthesias, or paralysis, but the definition of “disability” in terms of emergency medical care is entirely related to the disability being caused by an emergency medical problem, not a chronic one.

Per the laws involved here, “permanent disability” means something like paralysis from a spinal injury, or loss of organ function due to acute critical illness like a necrotic bowel or something. Unfortunately, according to the medical and legal literature on the topic, disability from pain or chronic disease is beyond the required services of an ER. Arguments can be made for acute-on-chronic situations like splenic damage or rupture in sickle cell crisis, but those areas can get pretty fuzzy.

What I have been trying to say is that we didn’t make any assumptions about that guy. We treated him with the same standard of care and urgency that any emergent medical condition would warrant until we had proof that he was faking it and after he grabbed a nurse’s breast so violently and so hard that the entire right side of her chest was bruised for a couple of weeks. We made no assumptions and only acted on his behaviors and proven medical condition.

The experiences you have had are horrible, but they are not universal. Unfortunately, the way the emergency medical system has been stretched to its limit lately means that the best the ER can do is to keep people from dying, and diagnose and treat the more straightforward conditions. For most of the more complicated and chronic stuff, there’s very strict laws about how much medication for what duration can be prescribed by an emergency physician, and a significant amount of the time, the best we can do is make sure you’re not actively dying and put in a referral to the specialists with a note that you should be bumped up the waiting list a bit depending on severity. Hell, even trying to admit people to the hospital isn’t a sure bet these days because the inpatient departments are allowed to enforce their staffing-to-patient ratios, so the ER gets stuck trying to take care of inpatient and even ICU patients with ER resources for up to days at a time.

My somewhat glib comment about people not being aware of what counts as an “emergency” is very literal when it comes to triage. We do our best to treat everything that comes through our doors, but if there’s not an immediate threat to life, limb, or permanent disability, there’s pretty distinct limits on what we’re able to do on a short timeline and what the hospital allows us to do for free. EMTALA stands for “Emergency Medical Treatment And Labor Act” and it dictates that anyone who turns up to an ER with an emergent medical condition that poses immediate threat to life, limb, or permanent disability will be treated and stabilized to the accepted level of care regardless of ability to pay, and a mother presenting in active labor will be provided with delivery care or appropriate timely transfer to a labor and delivery department if appropriate regardless of ability to pay. There’s very strict rules about the level of treatment to be provided and when or if transfer to another facility or provider is warranted and permitted, but past the stipulations of that law, it comes under the hospital administration’s rules and regulations about what level of care can be provided by the emergency department.

I’ve seen quite a few physicians defy the hospital rules by ordering some of the special labs and tests that the specialist would order so that the results are already available in the system for when (if) the patient gets seen by the specialist, but they can get in quite a bit of trouble for it, and if it’s not documented just right the patient’s insurance might not pay for it. That’s one of the other delightful limitations on what the ER can do…we have to toe the line on what needs to or should be done versus what the patient’s insurance will pay for, because believe it or not, we really don’t want to stick you with a bill for thousands of dollars of tests that your insurance denied coverage for.

Due to overwork, understaffing, antiquated training, and burnout, a lot of physicians’ and nurses’ bedside manner could use a fair bit of work, but in terms of the care provided, 99+ percent of the time, it really is the best we can do under the restraints created by laws, rules, resources, and insurance.

He came in for an entirely unrelated complaint and faked the overdose to get taken back immediately. The only drug in his system at the time was meth. Literally every room was full except for the resuscitation bay where we took him, and we had to keep him there for almost 2 hours until we had somewhere to move him to. It was the biggest of the resuscitation bays we had, so if we had someone coming in that needed ECMO, we’d have been kind of fucked.

I wish we hadn’t had to deal with that guy. Every nurse in the department had minimum 5 patients, mostly high acuity, and his stunt backed up the department for an extra couple hours by pulling unnecessary attention. I much rather would have been helping the nice gentleman in the lobby who had been waiting 5 hours with chest pain and a cardiac history, or the sickle cell patient in pain crisis.

I don’t have a problem with drug seeking. Pain is horrible and substance use disorders are diseases, not moral failings. I do have a problem with attention seeking, malingering, and abuse or assault of staff. As a physician, I plan to treat pain appropriately with the necessary medications or therapies, and to treat abuse of my staff with extreme prejudice.

And an edit to add: a drug overdose is treated as the same level of emergency as a cardiac arrest. We don’t serve Narcan on a silver platter, we serve it via wide bore IV while getting set up for intubation and resuscitation if it fails because we mean to move heaven and earth to keep the patient alive. An OD gets you to the front of the line, almost no questions asked besides “what substance?” so we know what antidote to give.

I’m terribly sorry that you have had that experience, and I’m disgusted with people who have treated you that way. However, you are making similar assumptions about me that other people have made about you. Working as an ER tech, I’ve literally had mental health patients try to strangle me, then given 10 minutes or so to shake it off, and then run straight into another code on a 16 hour shift that did not include any other breaks besides that 10 minutes… and then I came back 8 hours later for another 16 hour shift because the department was so understaffed that it would have been disastrous if I called out sick.

I’ve come into work, wholly unrecovered from a kidney infection and my own trip to the ER as a patient, and never let a whisper of it show on my face so that I could provide the best care possible for my patients. I’ve been the patient in the waiting room with 9 out of 10 pain for 6 hours, and I know how much it sucks. That’s part of why I do everything I can to give every patient the time, attention, and care that they need to heal them as much as I can.

I know that the general public’s idea of what ERs are for doesn’t help. EMTALA doesn’t mean that everyone who comes into an ER will get treated for anything regardless of ability to pay. It’s that they’ll be treated and stabilized for any emergent medical condition, illness, or injury… And many people seem to have interesting ideas about what constitutes an “emergency”.

I’m a medical student that is aiming for emergency medicine, and threads like these are a special kind of demoralizing. When I was working as an ER tech, there were a fair few times where aggressive or combative patients would only let me get anywhere near them for anything because I never showed any judgement or disdain. Not that I blame my coworkers. It’s hard to treat someone nicely after they fake having an overdose in the lobby and then assault one of the nurses after they “wake up” from the narcan.

For me, it just looks like he has a certain coldness in his eyes. It’s not a dead or vacant look, it’s just the way a smile, or any other facial expression for that matter, just doesn’t seem to make it to his eyes. There’s obviously life and intelligence there, but it’s not a friendly intelligence. I pulled up the most lizard-man pictures of Zuckerberg for comparison, and even at his most robotic, his eyes still look human. Like there’s some capacity for empathy in there somewhere. With Musk? His eyes just don’t quite read as human to me in an uncanny valley sort of way.

One thing that Blizzard has always been good about it making games that can run on a potato. It’ll look like crap and your view distance will be obnoxiously short, but you can run WoW on a potato of a laptop and still participate in the core gameplay. Obviously, there’s lots of options to crank up the graphics to 11/10 if you have a powerful computer, but I really appreciate that they lower the hardware barrier to entry where they can.

An interesting thing about Benadryl (diphenhydramine): if you look at “PM” meds or things that are supposed to help with sleep, diphenhydramine is usually the active ingredient. Benadryl is a sleep medication that happens to also work as an antihistamine which I find a bit amusing.

I won’t be buying one for quite a while. I’m driving my 2021 Crosstrek with a manual transmission until it dies and I can’t reasonably repair it anymore. It’s the first new car I’ve ever had, it’s my first manual transmission car, and I’m not giving it up for anything besides another of the same in a newer model. (and unfortunately, it looks like manuals are getting phased out throughout the market)

(Edit to add: I would be sorely tempted by a BRZ though.)

Just based on build quality and reputation, I’d take a Subaru Solterra over even the highest-end Tesla any day. I live in Minnesota, and my bigger concern about Teslas is the lack of ground clearance. If I can get out of the snow bank in the ditch, I don’t need my car’s heating system to last 12 hours.

It is a profoundly complex issue, and that’s what makes much of this comment section so frustrating. Many of the arguments here are very reductionist and fail to account for detail or nuance. In this particular case, I have a hard time excusing the behavior of the accused interlopers given that this is a women’s conference that has been a recurring event for quite some time and has always been a women’s conference.

Lack of education or not, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask professionals to act professionally and refrain from attending events not intended for them. I think there’s a significant amount of leeway being given to the men/foreign workers who showed up at the women’s conference as if they cannot be expected to regulate their behavior in a professional context. It’s the same kind of hand-waving and excuses that perpetuate the good ol’ boys’ club that the tech industry already is. It is irksome that people here aren’t realizing that the arguments they are making about exclusivity or discrimination are the same arguments frequently used to excuse the misogyny and sexual harassment that is so ubiquitous in the tech industry to begin with.

Admittedly, my sympathies for some of the foreign workers is a bit more limited. One of the worst jobs I had was working as a contracted project manager at Google for an India-based contracting company. The team in India that I was supervising was extremely difficult to work with and my boss and coworkers that were all either H1B visa employees or over-staying expired student visas actively contributed to the problems I was having. There were a few times that my project failed to meet adequate performance metrics because the team in India refused to complete tasks that I had created for them and my supervisor did very little to back me up in that situation.

The other side of the coin for the foreign worker situation is that the mega-conglomerates like Google, Apple, etc. specifically hire foreign workers and H1B visa employees because they will work for less pay and minimal to no benefits unlike American college graduates that have student loans to pay off and nowhere else to go. I have a couple of friends still in the tech industry, and they are frequently undercut and out-competed by foreign workers that can accept lower pay and worse benefits as it is a temporary situation for them. I have much more sympathy for those that are actively immigrating and assimilating, but the ones who work on H1B visas or other similar contracts are part of the problem that drive down wages and benefits for everyone else. If they were working in genuine solidarity with American workers, I would feel very differently about it, but as it stands, the vast majority of foreign tech workers I have interacted with have been people abusing the visa systems and dragging down the market for everyone else. In some ways, they are victims, but they also help to perpetuate many of the worst problems in the industry.

California recently passed legislation that now protects social caste against discrimination because the massive Indian population in the tech industry has been horribly discriminatory and brutal to Indians from lower castes. It’s also worth pointing out that many of the H1B visas and more temporary workers are from the upper castes and they intend on moving back to India after making enough money and the ones who are truly immigrating are usually from the lower castes and are working under green cards. The workers from the lower castes are also much less likely to be tech workers in the first place because they did not have access to education in India. All of this to say: there are injustices that foreign workers face, but for foreign workers in the tech industry, I’m more inclined to believe that they are among those that are part of the problem.

(Not to mention the fact that some of the worst sexism I have dealt with was from Indian workers from upper castes.)

As a woman who used to work in tech, I would like to point out that you are missing some very key details here. The expectations placed on women in tech are much stricter, much more demeaning, and much more harsh than those placed on men. I had an employer while I was a contractor decide not to renew my contract because I “didn’t smile enough” and “wasn’t friendly enough”, and this was not an expectation placed on my male coworkers. The contracting agency I was working through tried to argue in my defense, but the employer was allowed to discontinue my contract at any time for any reason. Unfortunately, the contracting agency didn’t have any other positions open for me, so I was just out of a job.

In just about every tech job I’ve had, it was made explicitly clear to me that behaving and interacting with others in the same manner as my male coworkers was not acceptable. I was hired with the implicit understanding that, in addition to providing my labor and expertise, I was required to present myself as feminine, demure, and almost submissive to any men I worked with, even if I was their supervisor.

Women need more help getting jobs in the tech industry because they are more likely than their male counterparts to lose jobs to sexism, unequal expectations, sexual harassment, and hostile work environments. This job fair was not allowed to officially exclude men, so it would be helpful for male tech workers to acknowledge and understand their inherent advantages and refrain from interfering with opportunities aimed at helping women in the industry.

I’m saying that the unemployment rate is artificially low as well as being a stupid metric to use, but unfortunately, it’s the metric that powerful entities use to make decisions about manipulating the economy at large.

Except that the published figure is what gets used in policy and calculations. The real rate is largely ignored and the numbers are heavily skewed by ever-changing definitions and parameters making the “unemployment rate” a nearly useless metric. We need to run our country based on keeping people out of functional poverty, not based on keeping profits up.