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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • On July 23, 2016, ahead of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the 2016 DNC Rules Committee voted overwhelmingly (158–6) to adopt a superdelegate reform package. The new rules were the result of a compromise between the Hillary Clinton and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns

    Ultimately, the DNC decided to prevent superdelegates from voting on the first ballot, instead of reducing their numbers

    People keep seeming to forget about the super delegate reform Bernie fought for. They are still there now, 15% of all the delegates (a lot of the super delegates being democratic elected officials like members of congress since that automatically gives the status). But they can’t vote in the first ballot any longer. They could only vote in a contested election in subsequent ballots, after all the other pledged delegates are unbound as well.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate

    Even before those reforms, they never really made a difference in any convention, except possibly 1984 when they helped push Mondale from a plurality to a majority by voting for him on the first ballot.

    I’m not personally in favor of them at all, but it’s not nearly as bad as it’s made out to be sometimes. If we go to an open convention though, unless there’s a majority choice on the first ballot, they may play a role on subsequent ballots.



  • Yes, that’s true. The poll averages themselves haven’t moved much either though. And the reliance on the fundamentals forecast has me nervous, but they definitely do it for a reason. When they developed the models and looked at poll history the pattern they found was the fundamentals had a big influence on what the polls would look like closer to the election and the eventual result. Polls closer to the election are more predictive than the fundamentals. Polls farther away from the election less so. There’s at least some reason to think things have changed enough maybe the fundamentals aren’t as fundamental for this race, but I guess we won’t know until afterward.


  • Exactly, I think because races have been so close lately, and the probabilities are ending up close to 50% often, people sometimes unintentionally conflate them with poll numbers. 53% to 46% would be a massive poll lead. For probabilities though in this situation it’s the same as saying they have even odds of winning. Look at those massive 95% confidence intervals, the race is in a statistical dead heat. It’s kind of remarkable how steady it has been despite all the wild events that have happened.







  • Apparently these judges can’t read:

    https://natlawreview.com/article/supreme-court-holds-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-are-protected-title-vii

    Even by their own facist supreme court, discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity inherently involves discrimination on the basis of sex (ie, if someone assigned woman at birth can wear a dress but someone assigned man at birth can’t, if an assigned woman can kiss a man but an assigned man can’t, these are both discrimination on the basis of sex). So any law that bans discrimination on the basis of sex will logically have to apply to gender indentity and sexual orientation as well. While the ruling was about title vii, there’s no reason the same logic wouldn’t apply to title ix as well. Title ix can also protect sexual orientation and gender, because there’s no way to discrimate on that basis without discriminating on the basis of sex at the same time.

    It’s totally ridiculous to try and say otherwise. Like take a cis woman being fired from her job because her boss hates women: “No I didn’t discriminate against this person because they were assigned woman at birth, I did so because they identify as a woman.” “oh well that’s alright then I guess”/s

    Opponents who try to seperate sex from sexual orientation and gender indentity definitions when this is logically impossible, will essentially neuter the power the law has to help anyone, whether cis or trans, straight or gay, from discrimination. But that could be the object of some of their intentions as well I suppose.

    Let’s hope the supreme court keeps the same reasoning as their previous ruling when this is inevitably appealed up.






  • The problem is there is no recourse like in a normal job. It’s not like you can just say, working conditions here are bad I’m going somewhere else. Working conditions are miserable everywhere for residents, 80 hour weeks are a norm not an exception, and switching to other programs is near impossible. There’s a specific exception in US anti trust law that helps keep this all going and make it so programs effectively don’t need to compete with each other on things like pay and benefits. If a resident were to leave their program, they’d be saddled with 6 figure student loan debt, be unable to use their degree for the most part, and be very unlikely to be picked up by any other program. And if they did, it’d likely be an even worse situation (why else would the position be open?). Though some programs may be better than others, even the best case scenarios are ridiculous and unsafe to any reasonable person looking at them. It’s this bizarre case of group insanity where people figure it must be reasonable if so many people put up with it, but anyone outside of medicine would be horrified. The entire residency system is broken, has been from the start, and all the external incentives on the residency system are pushing it to get even worse, not better. Need change forced by law from above, the monopoly ended, or resident unions, all three really.


  • I understand the sentiment but it’s not really helpful. They’re still the ones on call, they need to talk to you, and will be writing your orders and things anyways. Not really like they can just say, oh yeah I am tired I’ll just go home and sleep and abandon all these patients here, why didn’t I think of that?

    Helpful things would be writing congressmen and senators about reform to the residency system, supporting unionization efforts. Change will only come if forced from above or if residents get more of a say. Ideal situation in my mind would be a more typical work schedule capped at closer to 50 hours a week, maybe with increased residency training time overall and increased pay during that time to compensate (need to keep up with cripplingly high student loan debt for those who didn’t have wealthy parents who payed for medical school).

    Even attending physicians will really need to start unionizing if they don’t want to get totally lost in the shuffle, since they’re mostly employed directly now instead of running their own practices or specialty group, they get very little say in how things are done.


  • Unfortunately a common experience. While they don’t tell you to lie, the system is set up to make that the only reasonable option. And even if they were holding to 80 hour max (open secret this limit is broken many places) it would still be too much for any job, let alone something high risk like a doctor in training. If you were on a plane with a pilot in training who’d worked almost 80 hrs and been up for 20 hours straight already, you’d rightfully be very concerned.

    Don’t forget mandatory resiliency lectures after your 24 hr shift to really rub it in and gaslight you that all of this is somehow your fault.


  • Well they can buy puts without margin accounts, since those have a cap on the losses, which would also get more valuable if the stock price decreases. While technically a side bet, the options sellers often want to remain neutral in their risk with respect to movements of the underlying stocks, so buying options may influence stock price as well because of the downstream effects the options seller may undertake.

    The expanded leverage of short term calls, though not directly buying the stock, may have been one thing that helped explode the GameStop share prices, as options sellers had to buy more shares to limit the losses on calls they had sold as the price increased (a gamma squeeze).


  • Residents in the US have 80 hours with maximum of 28 hour shifts, not a ton better. Though average salary is better at 58,000. Still, considering the hours worked and 8 years of schooling up to that point, ugh.

    Residency is just a terrible idea through and through, absolutely insane. Where else could you start a job and be told “right so you’re new here, this is life and death decision making, we’d like you to stay up working for 28 hrs straight doing this. Alright, get to work!”

    If a resident gets two days off, it’s called a “golden weekend.” What most people refer to as, a weekend. It’s just exploitation. Even more so when you consider Medicare pays for residents (and they even pay the hospitals more than the resident’s actual salary! So the hospital pockets that difference and benefits from all the direct value the residents generate too). There’s even an exception in US anti trust law to make the system legal. Glad more residents are unionizing here as well. Residency is horrible and needs to go.

    https://www.acgme.org/globalassets/pfassets/programrequirements/cprresidency_2023.pdf

    There’s even this lovely line:

    The program, in partnership with its Sponsoring Institution, must ensure adequate sleep facilities and safe transportation options for residents who may be too fatigued to safely return home

    So, so tired not even safe to return home (which I mean they’re right, it is not safe to be driving after staying up 24 hours straight) but continue doing patient care while you’re that impaired, it’s fine.

    In a prospective study, new medical interns went from 3.9% meeting criteria for major depressive disorder to 25% after starting. And depression was linked with increased medical errors to boot. Of course mean work hours was a major association of depression too.

    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/210823

    Totally asinine, a whole enormous meat grinding machine that needs to go, but is stuck in place by historical inertia and current profits for large hospitals.


  • Kind of? They call it that sometimes but it doesn’t look like a true no first use policy in the same vein as China’s and India’s. Putin also threatens nuclear weapons if NATO troops were to get involved in Ukraine, and openly questions the policy.

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/09/europe/russia-putin-nuclear-weapons-intl/index.html

    I’m not sure any nuclear country would stick to these policies if they truly faced an existential threat, whether that threat was nuclear or not. Russia’s policy has a carve out for any existential threat including conventional weapons. US and Russian policies are pretty close, basically okay to use for any existential threat. Doesn’t hurt to try and negotiate more no first use policies and reinforce the norm though.

    Looks like the UK, France, and Pakistan also lack no first use policies.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use

    As far as I can tell the article is correct, China and India are the only current nuclear powers with true no first use policies. If that’s incorrect happy to learn more though. Israel not on here cause officially not a nuclear power, but hey we weren’t born yesterday.