Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Recently, Nicola said this…

Wow doctors are selfish or stupid. The rising life expectancy and massive deficit means they need to work longer and get a reduction in pension.
£68,000 on top of probably huge savings isn’t too shabby, but they’re striking!

I really rather wish she hadn’t, because it lead to a huge amount of comments, some of which were nonsense and as such, I am now unable to sleep because people are wrong on the internet and I can’t just let that be.

I don’t really have a problem with the strikes. They’re not putting people at much risk and they have a right to strike if they want to. But I don’t think they should expect a great deal of public sympathy for their cause.

While Nicola quoted £68,000. The BBC News article I read put the figure at £58,000. But that is still a huge amount of money. To retire on! That is more money than I earn while I’m still working. That is more money than my mum earns having spent twenty years tirelessly working as a teacher at an inner city school – surely an equally noble profession?

Ashwin chipped in…

Seriously though, speak to other Doctors and Medical students, and find out just how hard and long (that’s what she said!) a Doctor works and then you’ll appreciate our perspective much more.

But I probably won’t. Why? Because we don’t live in a society where hard work equals more money. You want to know about hard work? Go to my friend Eric who works 60 hours at week scrubbing floors at McDonald’s for a pitance. I’m sure a lot of doctors do more hours than that. But with the average GP earning a six figure salary, do they do ten times more hours than that? Of course not, because that is more hours than exist.

Paul I think you’re grossly confusing Doctors with Footballers. Also, this may be news to you, but Doctors do have loans and mortgages to pay off!

Which is probably true, as doctors are probably the only people who can afford to get on the property ladder these days. The rest of us have to rent.

Moz adds some good points…

I think the difficulty in debates like this is the gross inequality that people see between salaries across the various sectors. At the end of the day there are people in each sector who work just as hard as each other and do very difficult jobs, but receive vastly different salaries/pensions. In the private sector (e.g. bankers) you get people earning obscene salaries doing non-specialist jobs that don’t even benefit society that much. In the health sector you have people also earning obscene salaries, but at least doing a highly-skilled job that greatly benefits society (I wouldn’t include dentists in this – how they demand the salaries they receive is beyond me). Whereas in academia you have people earning very little to do a very difficult highly-skilled job. As an academic, I don’t moan about not being paid enough (well not much at least). But tbh I would love to see other people who have easier jobs than me earning less than I do. Its selfish but it would make me feel a lot better and more valued. Overall I think there should be a salary/pension cap that applies to everyone including doctors. Afterall no one person can be *that* much value to society.

But this just reinforces the point that you’re not paid in proportion to how much work you do, it’s how much value you are to society. In Moz’s case, that isn’t that much value. Not because Moz doesn’t do important stuff, he does. But because it would be fairly easy to replace him, because lots of people would like an academic research drop, which drives wages down.

But the important point here is that we live in a free market economy where you enjoy a choice of careers. If you don’t think you’re getting a fair deal, go do something else. If people vote with their feet, the government will be forced to offer higher wages. But actually almost nobody does, because people are actually still quite happy with the sweet deal they get as a doctor, so the government can cut their pensions.

No they are different points. How about going to a cornershop and buy a packet of sweets worth 50p and offer 45p. It’s only 5p difference. But you’ll probably be told to bugger off. Principles at stake

No, there isn’t a principle here. If everyone turned round and said “I’m only paying 45p” any half intelligent businessman would drop their prices. Similarly, if they were constantly selling out at 50p, they would put their prices up to 55p. That is how supply and demand works.

If doctors aren’t happy with their pay they need to vote with their feet – don’t work for the NHS (you can practice privately in the UK), go work in a different country (you have the right to work in any other EU country and as a doctor will get a visa for almost any other country too) or change career entirely (why not become a banker, for example).

In the IT industry we offer some really high wages (though not as high as doctors, I might add) because you simply can’t get the staff. They’re like gold dust, there just aren’t enough of them. That drives up wages. We can get the doctors (say what you want about the shortage, we still have a world class healthcare system and the government is so confident in our ability to retain them it’s even slashing pensions), but if there is some point where we can’t, we will have to start offering more money and benefits.

Strikers always make out they are the victim. But you’re never a victim in the free market unless you choose to be.

Recently, there has been news coverage regarding the cost of car insurance for young drivers.

Everyone is asking how we can bring down the price for young drivers. Nobody seems to be asking whether the price is legitimately high because that is just how much it costs, but lets ignore that obvious question and assume that the prohibitive costs for young drivers are an issue that needs to be addressed.

If so, one easy way to bring down the cost for young drivers would be to ban insurance companies from discriminating based on age.

What way, everyone would pay the same regardless of how old they were. Of course, insurance companies would still be free to charge people higher premiums based on their driving history – if you’ve had an accident you pay more, if you have no claims you pay less. But it stops the companies charging people more just because of their age alone.

You can argue that it makes sense to make young drivers pay more because they are more likely to have an accident, but this is not a fair system. Why? Because it is entirely unfair to the young drivers who do drive safely. Why should they pay more for other people’s reckless behaviour?

This is almost the same situation as it was with insurance companies discriminating based on gender, and this has now been recognised by the EU and will be illegal from the end of this year. You can’t charge someone more for car insurance because of an arbitrary characteristic, such as gender or race.

People get angry when they think about young drivers costing them more money on their insurance premiums. But this isn’t the case! Young drivers don’t cost you any more money. Only reckless drivers do. A young driver who never crashes and doesn’t claim on their insurance doesn’t cause your premiums to go up. Whereas a 50-year-old who does crash, does cause your premium to go up. To blanket blame an entire demographic because of the actions of a minority is both ludicrous and morally wrong.

The one argument I think might carry some weight is the argument that it is fair to charge young drivers more because we’re all young at one point and then we all get old, so everyone gets the same fair deal in the end. However, I’m not sold on this being a better solution than banning age discrimination altogether, in which everyone gets the same fair deal, all the time.

It boggles the mind that people still use imperial measurements.

They just don’t make any sense in a decimal number system (which is the number system we all use – based around tens). I mean what is it? You have an inch, and there are 12 of those in a foot, and there are three of those in a yard and there are 1760 of those in a mile? Nobody can make an argument for that being a better system of measurement!

But if you ask people how tall they are, or how much they weigh, you often get an imperial measurement back. Or a slap if you’ve just asked a fat girl. But mostly an imperial measurement. Once you make the leap, you realise how silly it was, but we’re never going to win hearts and minds by lambasting people; we need a positive approach.

So here are five great reasons to make an effort to use the metric system…

1. Your penis is longer. Why settled for a six inch penis when you can have a 15 centimetre one?

2. Why have a pint of beer, when you can have a litre?

3. Using the metric system annoys the Bible Belt who believe it is a Communist plot.

4. You can drive at over 100 kmph legally, you can’t do that in mph without risking instant disqualification.

5. Even drug dealers have started to use the metric system now. How will you know if you’re getting a good price if you don’t know what 50 grams are?

I really enjoyed Louis Theroux’s recent two documentaries, Extreme Love, even if they were both heartbreaking.

The first, which looked at autism focused on a specialist school in New Jersey. What struck me first though was that I was somewhat thrown as to what I was watching. Was this a special school for autism, or a special school for fat kids?

It sounds like a joke, but I was genuinely shocked as to how many of the children at the school were significantly overweight. Has obesity in the United States become such an epidemic that it has now become so shocking to the rest of the world?

Probably not. A quick google around suggests that obesity is particularly prevelant in children with autism. They use data which is now eight years old and even back then, over 30% of children with autism were reported to be overweight.

This compares with 23% of children who do not suffer from autism – still a very high number though.

I’ve started to pile on some pounds (we really need to come up with an updated term that reflects the metric system I know and love) recently, to the point where I’ve gone from the most perfect weight a human being has ever weighed to having only four kilograms of wiggle room before I’m no longer in my target BMI.

It’s very distressing because I lead, on the whole, a very healthily lifestyle and if Rob Lyons is to be believed you could probably even drop the “on the whole” qualification.

Still, after a long day of carrying my fat body around, I do enjoy sitting down and catching up on Stuart Ritchie’s Twitter feed, which provides a refreshing change from the normally interlectually void stream of inane nonsense that normally comes through (Alex, Lil and George while at Fab, though I enjoy that stuff as well).

Recently, he tweeted about a new report which suggests that female body dissatisfaction is primary caused by inter-peer competitiveness, and not the media.

Based on the results of the study, the report concludes that media exposure actually has minimal impact on how unhappy women are with their bodies, in comparison to the significant effect that inter-peer competitiveness has.

So why are we always being told that it’s the media that are ruining our teenage daughters?

This reminds me the video games cause violent crime argument. It was a fact that a lot of people spread, and then we looked at the actual evidence and it turned out that video games do not cause violent crime. Though even after that, people continue to toot that horn.

In both cases, you have to wonder who is spreading this? Presumedly, it isn’t the media trying to give themselves a bad name (of course it could be different sectors of the media attacking each other). Is it just genuinely honest but misinformed people running pressure groups? Do we just assume that it is the case because it seems to fit the puzzle?

Recently, I undertook my first session of EMDR.

It’s a relatively new form of therapy (albeit, older than Elina), which in it’s full title is named “Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing” originally developed to help trauma victims and has since expanded into other areas.

So far, I’m quite torn about it. On one hand, EMDR is now approved and recommended by The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and has shown to be affective in dozens of randomised controlled trials.

On the other hand, it really, really sounds like Dianetics.

For those not familiar with it, Dianetics is a concept developed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard which divided the mind into two parts – one of which is the reactive mind that stores traumatic memories, and anything associated with those memories, related or not.

This is why Scientologists are very quite around people who have been knocked out – because anything they say will be linked to the memory of being knocked out in the reactive mind. These are stored as negative engrams and the only way to get rid of them is to pay for Audit Counseling.

I’m not a subscriber to Dianetics, and even though EMDR has a lot of key differences (for example, the traumatic memories don’t just pop out of existence in a second), it’s similarities have thrown me somewhat, despite all the evidence to show EMDR genuinely does work. It’s like some kind of reverse-placebo affect, is there a term for that?

Rachel Khoo is a business genius. If you’ve seen her BBC Two show, The Little Paris Kitchen, you may have heard her claim she opened her own restaurant. You’ll then no doubt notice that what is has actually done is put a table in front of her sofa and put a few chairs round the other side of it, in her living room.

So, she is basically just having people over for dinner. And charging for it!

In a recent episode, she made Beef Wellington, explaining that both the English and the French have their own version of the dish. This strikes me as odd.

The English dish Beef Wellington is named after the Duke of Wellington, the man who led us to victory against Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. We celebrate him for that, hence why we created a dish full of steak in his name.

But the French were on the losing side of the battle. Why have a dish named as such?

Hey, remember ten years ago when everyone smoked in pubs and it was rubbish?

I just thought I would remind us all because it’s a good example of a paradigm shift. A decade ago most of us thought that it was acceptable to smoke on confined spaces, now most of us think that it isn’t OK because the evidence shows that passive smoking does genuinely kill people^[1].

Actually, it feels, at least to me, like a hole different world now. It’s not just that I’ve changed my opinion, but society itself has now fundamentally shifted its opinion to the point where I simply can’t imagine going back to the dark ages where everything smelt of smoke and your pint was served with a free topping of lung cancer.

Recently, Jack Straw was sued for being complicit in torture.

It’s a difficult issue – one one hand, torture is very bad. On the other hand, if you are able to extract information that could save lives, perhaps sometimes it could be justified? Or at least that is the argument that has been proposed by many people, including Sam Harris. At least that is the argument he made in 2005 when he published “In Defense of Torture” in the Huffington Post, though he qualifies this extensively on his website.

I personally think the argument is far more clear-cut, however.

Firstly, the evidence just isn’t there that torture works. I would like to say simply that “torture doesn’t work” but that is perhaps an unjustifiable claim. It’s very hard to do controlled trials of torture (thankfully) but there is evidence on both sides to suggest the efficacy of torture. Ultimately, it probably does yield information, that information is almost certainly unreliable, but if you are able to verify what is true and what isn’t, you can then argue there is some advantage to torture. Then again, you can argue there isn’t. We can’t conclusively say either way.

More importantly, however, even from a utilitarian perspective, which is similar to the position put forward by Harris in The Moral Landscape, torture is not justifiable.

The reason is, in order to allow torture in a utilitarian world, we all have to live in a world where people are tortured. So yes, the needs of the many may outweigh the needs of the one, and extracting information by force to save more lives could seem like a good idea at first. But what you’re actually doing is making everyone suffer because then everyone has to live in a world where we torture people.

This isn’t a nice world to live in. I really, really don’t like the idea that the government could wrongly suspect me of something and try to torture information out of me. But even if I knew it was never going to happen to me, someone has to actually do the torture as well, and someone was to authorise the torture. That’s a horrible job in itself. I don’t want torture to be any part of my world, no matter what side I’m on.

From that perspective then, the lives we would save from torture (which as we’ve already discussed, there is no conclusive evidence we would save anyway) are outweighed by the needs of the over six billion people on this planet who should have the right to live in a torture-free world.

If there is one thing we need to be embarrassed about as a nation, it’s Sunday trading laws (you know, if you ignore complicity in torture, public transport, lack of a constitution, etc). Some of us need to be able to buy baking ingredients at 3am on a Sunday. I say as a nation, but I don’t wish to tarnish Scotland’s good name with this as they have long since abolished such nonsense.

I for one am very excited about the start of the Olympics, as it means these restrictions will be temporarily suspended to allow businesses to cash in on the hype as much as possible.

How this really works I’m not sure. I could understand if the limits were just being relaxed in London around the Olympic Village, but they’re not, they’re being relaxed everywhere. Why? What is the point of allowing B&Q to open until 10pm on a Sunday in Newcastle, during the Olympics? But as I said, I’m not complaining. It’s incredibly irritating having my Sunday shopping limited to 11am-5pm.

The question is though – once we do this for the duration of the Olympics and see that we can indeed buy a loaf of bread and a mango from Asda at 7pm on a Sunday without god smiting us, what is the argument for bringing such restrictions back into place?

Of course you can argue that we should have one day a week where shops are closed so people spend time with their families (which is of course strictly forbidden at all other times; god help you if you wanted to have family time on a Wednesday) but if this is the case, how does this fit into letting shops open for the first six hours? The answer is, it doesn’t, nor so it fit with the idea that only large stores are restricted from opening on a Sunday while smaller shops, offices, call centres, pubs, restaurants and many, many other business types do open because whether we like it or not we’re now living in a 24/7 society (and I do like it).

Sunday trading laws need to go the way of fox hunting and smoking in pubs – an archaic practice that is detrimental and unjustifiable in modern society.