All-Purpose NuILX thread for American Politics

K3vin, can I ask you a question? What are you doing going to school for pharmacology? Are you just savvier than the rest of us aimless liberal-arts grads?

― dyao think i'm sexy (jaymc), Friday, December 2, 2011 6:23 PM (4 minutes ago)

ha, is this a compliment? i have very little idea what i want to do with my life and probably wish i was in med school instead tbh

& just for the sake of the .xls it's pharmacy, not pharmacology; i'll receive a professional doctorate rather than a research doctorate

I guess I just think of you as a pretty sharp and passionate guy when it comes to politics, music, and writing, so it's weird to me that you're enrolled in the professional sciences. Not that you can't be genuinely interested in all of it, but I don't know many people for whom that's the case, so I wondered if maybe the pharmacy degree was a way of assuring yourself a reliable income.

Sorry if that's getting too personal or whatever.

k3vin, go to law school.

law is a spiritually fulfilling career.

tbh I prefer k3vin making real money as a pharmacist than as a liberal arts major. The world needs more literate pharmacists and doctors.

I guess I just think of you as a pretty sharp and passionate guy when it comes to politics, music, and writing, so it's weird to me that you're enrolled in the professional sciences. Not that you can't be genuinely interested in all of it, but I don't know many people for whom that's the case, so I wondered if maybe the pharmacy degree was a way of assuring yourself a reliable income.

― dyao think i'm sexy (jaymc), Friday, December 2, 2011 6:39 PM (21 minutes ago)

Sorry if that's getting too personal or whatever.

― dyao think i'm sexy (jaymc), Friday, December 2, 2011 6:45 PM (15 minutes ago)

not at all, and i'm very flattered. it's pretty safe to say that i wanted/want to be a healthcare professional of some sort, though i find myself more drawn to the public health side of things as i've progressed through school. i do wish more of my classmates cared/made time for stuff like literature and public policy (avoiding the word 'politics' but the two inevitably go hand in hand) but i do have a few friends there i can shoot the shit with about that kind of stuff, and that's also what i have ilx for. (coincidentally i was just bemoaning this in an email last night to a friend, one of the the smartest people i know, who works as a pharmacist at a refugee clinic in thailand. hopefully i'll work there temporarily after i graduate as well.) i have taken the occasional undergrad english class to force myself to leisure read and keep my writing skills somewhat sharp, which i've enjoyed doing.

anyway i'm much younger than most of the people who post here regularly and say more than my fair share of dumb things, and consider most of the regular posters here much smarter than me. ilx has made me think about things much differently for sure. don't let the confidence i can affect at times deceive you, ha

sorry for derail

You're one of my favorite posters.

alfred that means a lot, and the respect is reciprocated

consider most of the regular posters here much smarter than me.

you may consider it that way, but it's not so.

you guys are too kind

science sucks

i believe you're looking for the GOP thread!

http://rlv.zcache.com/someone_please_give_president_obama_blowjob_magnet-p147550112145114485qjy4_400.jpg

i believe you're looking for the GOP thread!

― k3vin k., Friday, December 2, 2011 6:48 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

:)

I like k3vin k too!

guys i'm not on a ledge or anything!

becoming a pharmacist is a defensible choice and an excellent career. you can remain a politics/music nerd too!

yes but all pharmacists are far-right republicans.

that is always 100% true in all cases, because my one pharmacist friend is one of those and owns a large gun

healthcare professionals are scum

actually he's not far right, but his gun is p big

proof.

Med school is rad. Especially 4th year of med school. All I have done this week is interviews and hangin' out in Midwestern hotel rooms (some of which are comped).

Also during an interview today I got asked the "if you could change one thing about medicine, what would it be" question, and I was feelin' a lil political and said "I would like to get for-profit corporations out of all sectors of medicine." It seemed to be well-received, even!

lol. you could have said "single-payer," or "public option," or maybe "repeal obamacare"!

actually maybe "public option, no wait! . . . repeal obamacare and end its death-panels" would have worked nicely.

"I would like to pay neurologists more than all other specialties combined."

lol

"i would outlaw all radiologists none of them can be trusted"

george mcgovern hospitalized after fall.

he was about to appear on c-span.

For reals, though, I think it'd basically be impossible to get physicians to fully sign on to single payer, if for no other reason than most of us spend enough time as students/residents/sometimes attendings in the VA system to get the impression that the VA is a place where getting stuff done is sort of impossible sometimes.

that may be. i've been doing a lot of health care-related work over the past few years, and one thing i'm sure of is that the old fee-for-service model is soon to be a thing of the past. everything will be managed care, of one sort or another (whether it be ACOs or HMOs or some other form).

hey C-L are you applying in mpls??

McGovern, 89, helicoptered to trauma unit:

"About 10 feet from the door he slipped and fell and hit his head," Simmons said. "He was bleeding pretty heavily."

Hang in there, big fella.

I am! On Monday! (I woulda posted this but then ILX asploded)

!!!

good luck, duder. say whuddup to my mans dr. fi0l

good luck, c-l.

Thank you! I may have already seen the winner of my Interview Sweepstakes, but it is still hilarious and fun to do interviews. Plus I get to go to Mayo in a couple weeks! BECAUSE I CAN~

healthcare professionals are scum

Bah. This makes me feel shitty for even saying anything. Obv. river wolf is an excellent example of a liberal-arts grad who will be an awesome health-care professional. One of my favorite uncles was a lawyer before he went back to school for a microbiology Ph.D. Obv. there are also dudes like Atul Gawande and Siddharta Mukherjee who are top-notch doctors/writers.

I guess my thing with K3vin was that I'd never encountered him having talked about his pharmacy studies with the same degree of passion that he talked about other things. Obv. ILX as a whole leans more toward humanities-related subjects than toward hard science, but it still felt sort of dissonant to me. But I have a better understanding now!

sorry i was just bein cranky

np dude u know i <3

Humanities stuff is more exciting to discuss and debate and have opinions on, though, I guess. Like, even with medicine, the stuff that starts arguments is political stuff and the squishy humanities/ethics elements. And you get some of that over the course of the day, but when I talk with my friends from school about medicine stuff it is basically a) patient stories, which are kinda awesome, but I feel weird talking about them on the internet in all but the vaguest of terms, b) gossip about other students/residents/attendings, which is SO AWESOME but does not translate well, and c) talkin' bout residency. In the preclinical years it was talkin' bout how stupid certain stupid things were. (Stupid antiarrhythmics HATE YOU SO MUCH)

I am kind of doing c) right now but again I am compelled to be really vague because I decided to post to the internet with my initials and so if someone really cared enough to try, they could figure out my identity pretty quickly.

Panetta to Israel/Palestine: "Get to the damn table." Watch this cause a shitstorm.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/panettas-advice-for-mideast-peace-talks-just-get-to-the-damn-table/

antiarrhythmics are just the worst.

i'm at FVRS (across the river) rotating through neuro's softer lil brother. hope you enjoy our fair burg! how long you in town?

for some reason i've decided to watch the herman cain announcement on two different live feeds at the same time

live feed 1

feed 2

there's a one second delay between the two feeds and the result is extremely psychedelic

here's a third, if anyone wants to completely blooow their miiiind, duuuuude

feed 3

CNN's treating like the Apollo 11 launch.

They've even got Wolf on the phone from Florida.

he quoted the pokemon movie

lol