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Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

nytimes.com

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Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#201

Post by ameister14 »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #200
ameister14 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I understand you don't like communism but really the hyperbole man... and shame on you for trivializing slavery. These doctors all knew what the Cuban system was, they chose to use Cuba's excellent medical education program which is provided for free and which can only be provided, again, for free because it taxes it's citizens heavily and now that they have received that benefit, want to rescind on it's price. It's…

>It's pretty clear by that statement that you don't understand the government of Cuba or how it has been funded. Fair, fair, it's communist not tax-capitalist. I shouldn't have said "tax." >Ok, so 75% of medical students come from families in the top 50% of incomes. That doesn't seem too absurd to me. Top 40%. It does seem absurd to me, did you look at Figure 2 that I linked? That is the inversion of a meritocracy. >…

>Fair, fair, it's communist not tax-capitalist. I shouldn't have said "tax."

It's not just that. Powerful central governments don't function on the idea of everyone chipping in, they function on the idea that they can oversee the use of resources and allocate them in the best possible way. Normal people don't get a say in terms of resource allocation and don't get a say in who makes up the central government, so they aren't 'chipping in' in a meaningful way, as that implies it was their choice.

>Top 40%. It does seem absurd to me, did you look at Figure 2 that I linked? That is the inversion of a meritocracy.

I am not surprised by the news that 75% of doctors come from families that make over $50,000 a year. To become a doctor, you need to go to college, which costs money, then go to medical school, which costs more. During that period you must also not need to provide for your family so there's also a significant opportunity cost.

That said, the fact that this rate is increasing may be cause for concern, as noted in the article. Frankly, there is also another significant issue: the idea that you can become a doctor at all as a realistic goal, which I think is also a barrier - many people don't believe it is possible for them when it actually is.

As for the 100 medical students, I bet a lot of those doctors did not return to the United States to practice medicine, as they would have to do their residencies here to get licensed.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#202

Post by emodendroket »

alexanderstears wrote: post #189
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #4

You know I can't really feel their plight. Take this: >Hundreds of miles away, in Minas Gerais State, Dr. Jiménez, 34, found the work rewarding, but also began to harbor feelings of resentment. “You are trained in Cuba and our education is free, health care is free, but at what price?” she said. “You wind up paying for it your whole life.” Is that not the point? The communist government allows anybody to attend their…

That is the whole point but the social contract in a communist society is one that you can't really get ahead through working harder / smarter - at least not as dramatically so as one can in a capitalist country. Though that's not to say that no one gets ahead in communist societies, just that those who do tend to get ahead on their ability to amass political power. And there's a nugget about income inequality here -…

The comparison to the United States seems meaningless. Of more interest is how Cuba compares to pre-revolutionary Cuba or to capitalist countries with more similar characteristics as far as population and resources. How well do people live in Cuba compared to, say, the Dominican Republic? I'm not sure of the answer but none of the Caribbean islands (even Puerto Rico) really have US mainland-like economic output or standards of living. Trinidad and Tobago is supposed to be a success story but I'm not sure how it compares.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#203

Post by wooter »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #186
wooter wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

scoreboard really. name a single capitalist totalitarian dictator? Capitalism implicitly does not incentivize centralization of power. Now name how many successful western countries haven't embraced capitalism as, at the very least, their main source of funds to experiment with.

>name a single capitalist totalitarian dictator? Pinochet. >Now name how many successful western countries haven't embraced capitalism as, at the very least, their main source of funds to experiment with. Almost all western countries are capitalist I believe? Usually I take western to mean (1) democratic (2) capitalist. Besides as I'm arguing elsewhere, the failure of many socialist states is due to US intervention.…

> Pinochet.

So just because he instituted some free market policies, hes capitalist? In no way did any capitalist figurehead advocate any of his violence. Also, what was Pinochet's body count? many orders of magnitude less than just Mao right?

> Almost all western countries are capitalist I believe? Usually I take western to mean (1) democratic (2) capitalist.

You are stretching the word capitalist beyond any recognition. It simply does not describe a government embargo nor aggressive government actions by any definition.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#204

Post by partiallypro »

varjag wrote: post #64
nsxwolf wrote: post #53

The SV atitude on communism threads is always interesting. Communism is great, quit whining you greedy doctors. Helping people is its own reward! But for me? No no, I'm a developer! I deserve my salary!

I once reported to a department manager who was an anarchist. He had pretty tight control structure in the org without any disregard to hierarchy.

Anarchy isn't the lack of governance or hierarchy, it's the lack of a government. Not an anarchist, they generally have the worst possible ideas...but he wasn't really a hypocrite for this.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#205

Post by _dps »

dang wrote: post #199
tmccrmck wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we should revisit the idea of a political detox? I for one have been noticing the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year. Discussions have become less about the content of the article and more about the title or some other related fact. Technical discussions are becoming increasingly derailed by bike-shedding, ideology, and flame wars. Hell, I bet even the average word count per comm…

That didn't work, because the question of how to define 'political' is itself highly political. We knew that before we tried the detox experiment but boy did we know it afterwards. And it wouldn't be in HN's mandate (like, not at all) to try to limit it to technical stories. Our core audience, even if it feels like a minority sometimes, is readers who are interested in both technical and non-technical things. > the s…

I agree that defining "political" is itself partly political. Having said that, and just as my 2 cents, I think the experiment was not run long enough to be conclusive.

People always complain with changes. I think it's reasonable to believe that people who actively want politics on HN would be on the noisier end of the spectrum of complainers. Any attempt to get these conversations off HN was bound, initially, to cause a loud and pointed reaction from one subset of users.

But people also adapt and forget. I think there's a real chance that after, say, 6-8 weeks, HN would have established a "new normal" and people would know that it's not a place to discuss the outrage of the week, just as it's already known it's not a place to discuss the latest celebrity-dancing-baking-show scandals.

I'll reiterate that it's a very tricky problem. But I don't agree that there was conclusive evidence that the political detox "didn't work" -- it was canceled long before a steady state was reached.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#206

Post by throwawayknecht »

wooter wrote: post #203
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>name a single capitalist totalitarian dictator? Pinochet. >Now name how many successful western countries haven't embraced capitalism as, at the very least, their main source of funds to experiment with. Almost all western countries are capitalist I believe? Usually I take western to mean (1) democratic (2) capitalist. Besides as I'm arguing elsewhere, the failure of many socialist states is due to US intervention.…

> Pinochet. So just because he instituted some free market policies, hes capitalist? In no way did any capitalist figurehead advocate any of his violence. Also, what was Pinochet's body count? many orders of magnitude less than just Mao right? > Almost all western countries are capitalist I believe? Usually I take western to mean (1) democratic (2) capitalist. You are stretching the word capitalist beyond any recogni…

> In no way did any capitalist figurehead advocate any of his violence.

You should really do some research before you make claims like this. One place to start would be Marvin Liebman and the American-Chilean Council, which planted pro-Chilean propaganda in several high-profile conservative press outlets.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#207

Post by baby »

dlokshin wrote: post #108
baby wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about capitalism America where you don't deserve healthcare if you can't afford it? People are dying because of this shit too.

45 million people died over 4 years in Mao's Great Leap Forward from starvation and execution. 10+ million people died in Stalin's gulags alone. Are you really trying to equate this with healthcare in America?

Totally, we're past these times and living in a more stable and richer world, how is it that we're still letting people die because of competition? I think it's a fair comparison in today's standards.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#208

Post by stretchwithme »

oh_sigh wrote: post #125
emodendroket wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even before taking that into account, an embargo with what would otherwise be their most obvious trading partner seems like a big impediment.

There's always Canada, Netherlands, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, the west coast of Africa, etc.

Exactly. I never bought that argument. They can trade with everybody else, so that embargo doesn't have much of an impact.

Especially with the rise of containerized shipping. The US gets a lot of stuff from China and ships can get to Cuba for less than it costs to reach any city on the east coast of the US.

It's their rejection of the free market that makes them unable to procure goods in the free market. It's ironic that some people want the free market to serve a system that denies its citizens access to that same exact marketplace. They don't seem to question the ideas they are repeating.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#209

Post by throwawayknecht »

tmccrmck wrote: post #188
dang wrote: post #165

All: Generic discussions about communism and other grand ideological themes are off topic here. Because we're communists? No, because there's nothing new to say about them, at least not on an internet forum—if you've really found some, you should write a book. As a topic gets bigger and bigger, what one can say gets less meaningful. We end up in the space of 'what's new is not good and what's good is not new', and th…

Perhaps we should revisit the idea of a political detox? I for one have been noticing the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year. Discussions have become less about the content of the article and more about the title or some other related fact. Technical discussions are becoming increasingly derailed by bike-shedding, ideology, and flame wars. Hell, I bet even the average word count per comm…

The last political detox week occurred at the height of first evidence of social media's influence on the election, and the same week as YC partner Peter Thiel built out his influence on Donald Trump's transition team.

It would be implausibly coincidental for the second attempt to happen at the same time Facebook and Twitter are being directly investigated for their role in electoral propaganda and Thiel is a frontrunner for the PIAB position.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#210

Post by mercer »

dang wrote: post #199
tmccrmck wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we should revisit the idea of a political detox? I for one have been noticing the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year. Discussions have become less about the content of the article and more about the title or some other related fact. Technical discussions are becoming increasingly derailed by bike-shedding, ideology, and flame wars. Hell, I bet even the average word count per comm…

That didn't work, because the question of how to define 'political' is itself highly political. We knew that before we tried the detox experiment but boy did we know it afterwards. And it wouldn't be in HN's mandate (like, not at all) to try to limit it to technical stories. Our core audience, even if it feels like a minority sometimes, is readers who are interested in both technical and non-technical things. > the s…

While defining 'political' might be too difficult, isn't detecting 'noise' on a comment-level quite a bit easier?

There are still many comments that, even when they often end up 'dead', spawn entire pointless discussions or just clutter up the rest of the discussion in the time that they're up. Quite possibly they affect the general conversation in ways that are difficult to measure.

The thing is that many of these comments appear to me as either immediately and obviously noise, or obviously so after a cursory check of the poster's comment history. In fact, I'm very often surprised that you or your colleague(s) leave a "don't do this here" message, when after clicking through to the commenter it's obvious that they're probably going to keep doing this until they're banned (and trivially create a new account).

I'm wondering if perhaps a stricter zero-tolerance to low-quality posts, or at least repeat offenders, might not be necessary to offset the inevitable growth of 'noisy' accounts.

I'm very impressed with the moderation here, to be clear, so I'm sure that it's more difficult than I think it is, or that I'm missing something. But I guess I'm just how often I come across an active, unbanned account that clearly hasn't been commenting in good faith for quite a while. Considering how little these accounts are 'worth' (as in, if there's any association with the username, it's negative, and karma is low), and how cheaply new ones can be create, a slightly swifter 'banhammer' might not do much harm?

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