I’m so sad that Kamala stole our governor. He’s going to be really good for the country as a whole, but he was ours!

Biden absolutely has some control over this, but Netanyahu is the bigger problem at the moment. Biden has influence over Netanyahu (with a lot of caveats and red tape due to decades of foreign policy), and Harris has influence over Biden…but that’s not the same thing as absolute control. There are also parts of this that have to get approved by congress and there’s only so much the office of the president can do unilaterally.

They can be doing more, and they should be doing more, but Harris’ role and capability is limited to that of an advisor (under strict scrutiny from everyone) right now, and that doesn’t actually give her that much power.

I’m not terribly old, but I’ve been around long enough to know that the lower offices are where you actually affect change in this country. The higher the office, the less they listen to their constituents.

There are lower ranking Democrats that are espousing the right ideas about things like the filibuster, gerrymandering, and even some that are agitating about the electoral college BS. The best strategy I see right now is to clear as many Republicans out of office as we can, and support the newer, lower-level representatives that are aiming to affect real change.

My voting strategy has always been to “vote blue, no matter who” on the top of the ticket, then do my research and be more selective about the offices lower down, especially in the primaries. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if more progressive candidates take hold of the House and the Senate if everything they pass just gets vetoed by the fascist in the Oval Office anyways.

You do realize that she’s the Vice President and doesn’t actually have any authority or power unless Biden kicks the bucket, right?

Because it really seems like you think that she has any ability to make unilateral decisions or enact her policy platform right this second, and that simply isn’t the case.

America is, unfortunately, a two party system. If not enough people vote for Harris, Trump wins. Period. There are no options besides Harris and Trump, and only one of them has talked about how Israel should literally nuke Gaza (I’ll let you take a guess on which one it was.)

I see your idealism, and I agree that any amount of genocide is unacceptable, but letting Trump win will just accelerate the genocide in Gaza, expand it to the West Bank (more noticeably, anyways), and likely start new genocides here in America. I’ve been writing to my representatives and sending them articles about the atrocities being committed by the IDF and imploring them to do something about it…but I’m not dumb enough to withhold my vote from the Centrists and allow the Fascists to take over.

I repeat: withholding your vote from Harris is effectively a vote for Trump because America is a two party system, and there’s only two options to pick from.

(To be fair, I did manage to run Half Life: Alyx and Beat Saber on a 1060)

I think there are some techbros out there with sleazy legal counsel that promises they can drench the thing in enough terms and conditions to relieve themselves of liability, similar to the way that WebMD does. Also, with healthcare access the way it is in America, there are plenty of people who will skim right past the disclaimer telling them to go see a real healthcare provider and just trust the “AI”. Additionally, there’s enough slimy NP professional groups pushing for unsupervised practice that they could just sign on their NP licenses for prescriptions, and the malpractice laws currently in place would be difficult to enforce depending on outcomes and jurisdictions.

This doesn’t get into the sowing of discord and discontent with physicians that is happening even without these products existing in the first place. Even the claims that an AI could potentially, maybe, someday sorta-kinda replace physicians makes people distrust and dislike physicians now.

Separately, I have some gullible classmates in medical school that I worry about quite a lot, because they’ve bought into the line that chat GPT passed the boards, so they take its’ hallucinations as gospel and argue with our professor’s explanations as to why the hallucination is wrong and the correct answer on a test is correct. I was not shy about admonishing them and forcefully explaining how these “generative AIs” are little more than glorified text predictors, but the allure of easy answers without having to dig for them and understand complex underlying principles is very alluring, so I don’t know if I actually got through to him or not.

There are way too many techbros trying to push the idea of turning chat gpt into a physician replacement. After it “passed” the board exams, they immediately started hollering about how physicians are outdated and too expensive and we can just replace them with AI. What that ignores is the fact that the board exam is multiple choice and a massive portion of medical student evaluation is on the “art” side of medicine that involves taking the history and performing the physical exam that the question stem provides for the multiple choice questions.

I once had ideas about building a machine learning program to assist workflows in Emergency Departments, and its’ training data would be entirely generated by the specific ER it’s deployed in. Because of differences in populations, the data is not always readily transferable between departments.

People just need to understand that the true medical uses are as tools for physicians, not “replacements” for physicians.

“Tachycardia” is a sign. “Palpitations” or “heart racing” are symptoms. Signs are the objective things that can be measured and recorded as hard data. Symptoms are what the patient reports feeling that are not measurable. In taking a history and physical, the symptoms tell the physician what signs to look for.

And as long as CPR machines are obscenely expensive and difficult to obtain and maintain for a lot of smaller hospitals and EMS systems.

Here’s the problem with that: it relies on things like the LUCAS CPR assist machine which doesn’t fit on a lot of people. I’ve done CPR on a lot of people, and only a handful of them would have even fit in a LUCAS in the first place.

In this case, it’s the medical ethics standards that have been discussed, litigated, and debated to hell and back before landing on the accepted standard. So it’s the physicians, lawyers, ethics experts, legislators, and judicial system that agreed on what is best.

The issue is that we do provide education and try to have these conversations, but the information is also available in layman’s terms from reputable organizations like the CDC. It all falls on deaf ears though. There is no evidence that shows any benefit for a delayed vaccination schedule with just a tiny number of exceptions for rare immune disorders. The other part of it is that it can become a burden on the clinic to deal with a bunch of extra appointments and having to fill out all the paperwork for the school/daycare explaining why the under/un-immunized child should be allowed in school anyways…and when you see 20 patients a day in the office and have another couple dozen phone calls, messages, and consults to deal with every day as well, spending the time to convince someone to accept scientific consensus in the place of the facebook posts they read is a tall order.

The problem with the “delayed” vaccination schedule is that then you get un- or under-immunized babies in daycare because the maternity/paternity leave runs out and the kid has to go to daycare. The way the vaccination schedules are currently implemented are done so to provide the best protection for the child on a timeline that would match up with the physiologic development of their immune system, the loss of immunoglobulin transfer from breast milk, and the exposure to more pathogens in environments outside the home.

Medical professional giving my two cents here: physicians and healthcare providers are allowed, and in some cases even required, to disregard the expressed, voiced, or even written wishes of the parent if the parent’s wishes would endanger the child’s life. The classic example is with Jehovah’s Witnesses: if a child of a Jehovah’s Witness is getting surgery or suffered an injury with significant blood loss, the child will be given life-saving blood transfusions irrespective of the parents’ religious beliefs or wishes.

This is not a breach of informed consent taken lightly, but physicians and other medical professionals will ignore what the parents did or did not consent to if it means that the child or vulnerable adult would die or suffer grievous harm otherwise.

I think the bigger issue is the lack of scholarships for non-athletic activities. There are many other things that colleges and universities could give scholarships for that would foster a more diverse and inclusive student body, but the preferential treatment given to athletes actually impedes that through diversion of funds.

I was rather happy when my alma mater decided to use a pile of alumni association money to build a massive LAN center and start pro e-sports teams instead of starting a football program. The e-sports program will give scholarships not just for the gamers, but also for theater kids that become shoutcaster personalities, and they use the LAN center as a way to beta test the games coming out of the game development programs. They really emphasize the educational aspect of it as well and push the gamers to get involved in game design or creative writing majors/minors so that their scholarship activity can actually benefit their career after school. It does help that the school is down the road from Acti-Blizz, so internships are plentiful.

There are other ways for the schools to support potentially profitable student activities that don’t exclude people unable to participate in sports.

Mayo, Stanford, University of Michigan and University of Minnesota all turn out more research than Harvard does, and those are just the tip of the iceberg. Harvard is a big name, but they aren’t making the big breakthroughs anymore.

Also the ivy league medical schools don’t provide as much in the way of community medical services as the others do. To my knowledge, Harvard isn’t out there running critical access hospitals in rural communities at a loss like Mayo and University of Minnesota are.

(And I’m absolutely positive that there are a bunch of other state universities and medical programs that do just as much as Mayo and University of Minnesota in terms of community medical services, but I’m just not as familiar with them )