If you don't have high wages, you can't invest enough to expect more than a very modest retirement. You can buy some stock, and lots of people do—America has a fairly large number of people who own some stock, just very few who have accumulated enough to live off their investments while still growing them.
The average American has no particular reason to stick with a "savings account". They could buy equities and ETFs that are as simple as savings accounts.
To be charitable, the Fed runs the money supply, but they don't control who gets the money. It's the job of Congress to regulate corporations and unions and minimum-wage and all that jazz.
When the Fed bailed out the banks with QE1,2,3 they chose a program they allocated money to the banks which let them out of their losses while individual borrowers bore the brunt of the recession.
You have considerable influence over both your income and your expenses. Update your resume. Ask for references and referrals. Apply for different jobs. Make a budget and stick to it. Pay yourself first. Be patient and give it time.
It's not even a relevant comparison. "Corporations" don't spend profits on luxuries for themselves. Their human owners do. Owners pay capital gains tax (which you can argue is too high or low or too easily avoided.)
You are making my point for me. Corporate profits are double-taxed. In 2017 the corporate profits would be taxed at 35% before distribution, and then once again at 20% after distribution (to the shareholders), for a cumulative tax rate from the profit made by a business to the money in the investor's pocket of 48%.
Insurers are paid in premiums, not health outcomes. An insurance company is incentivized to help avoid costly claims, but if you are likely to make costly claims, and they can't drop you, they are incentivized toward healthcare choices that kill you before you need long-expensive term care.
> An insurance company is incentivized to help avoid costly claims, but if you are likely to make costly claims, and they can't drop you, they are incentivized toward healthcare choices that kill you before you need long-expensive term care.
Insurance companies don't make the choices - providers do. In the US, insurers have very little control over providers' decisions in most care settings.
Ironically, under capitated care, the provider acts as the insurer, and is expected to balance both the medical outcomes for the patient and the overall cost to the system directly in their decision-making. For some reason, that's the model that people seem to advocate in this (and other) HN threads about healthcare, which boggles my mind: I can't understand why patients would want their medical provider to have an inherent conflict of interest from the start.
To be clearer: There’s a spectrum between 100% cash market, to indemnify plans where you e.g. you have a flat 10% co-pay, to “in-network” plans like PPOs, and pre-paid plans with corporate employee docs (e.g. Kaiser). Not all HMOs have employee physicians as you noted.
My point is that third-party free medical services are out of reach of most Americans. Even if the doc is separate from the insurer, they have to follow their claims process. You generally have to take your employers plan. The less fortunate take Obamacare and its limited doc networks, or are totally out of luck!
I agree they can’t be trusted but they’re not being evil that way. They’re still trying to pick the low hanging fruit of easing lifestyle disease burden like heart disease, diabetes, and tobacco use.
Ruining your health just means they pay for $$$$$/day hospitalizations. That’s far worse than paying for your maintenance pharmaceutical cocktail and some specialist visits.
The author of the linked article is a math professor.
Additionally, not all math is writing proofs. It's also applying their results (a student doesn't need to prove 2+2=4 to use 2+2=4 in some computation) and developing intuitions about the nature of mathematical objects (which can then be used to guide future development by helping to discover new hypotheses to prove).
Lots of people falsely equate the liberal arts with the humanities. This is a misconception that I try to fight in my in-person conversations with people. Math, chemistry, physics, and biology are all liberal arts. Business, engineering, nursing, and other types of professional training are not liberal arts.
1) Science and math (though not engineering, typically) fall under the liberal arts.
2) The course is offered in "J-Term" (January), it's a supplement and meant to connect dots for students, not explicitly teaching them advanced math theory (in the sense that they'd come out of a one-month course able to understand, intimately, graduate level maths).
>Still I am not very convinced that it is a good idea to teach STEM students that way.
Take it from a math PhD with quite some teaching experience that we do need more of what this professor is teaching, and less of number-mangling and rule-memorization, especially for STEM people. Understanding of what is going on is far more important than the formalism, which always comes later.
Also understand that the contents of a course aren't well condensed into a short article about it, and you won't get much out of the latter.
In the end, some complex mathematical notions have very hands-on representations that are faithful. The beauty comes from realizing that they are the same. Some examples:
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1a)The limit of the iterated dynamical system (f_1(z) = (1+i)z/2, f_2(z) = 1 - (1-i)z/2) in the complex plane
1b)The shape you get if you fold a paper over many times, and unfold keeping the angles at 90 degrees [1]
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2a)The algebraic field resulting from adjoining the roots of the polynomial x^2 + 1 = 0 to the real numbers
2b)All the ways you can move, rotate, and scale a flat shape on a desk [2]
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3a)The problem of classifications of embeddings of S^1 into R^3 up to ambient isotopy (a whole field of mathematics whose primary problem has remained open for over 100 years, and is connected to many others)
3b)Can you come up with a way to tell if you and I are tying our shoelaces the same way? [3]
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4a)The study of the following class: a set S with an associative operation ×, under which it is closed, such that every element is invertible, up to mappings that preserve × (that is, maps F such that F(g × h) = F(g) × F(h)).
4b)Study of reversible operations on an object that don't change the nature of it[4]. Like shuffling a deck of cards[5], spinning a globe on gimbals[6], or maybe swapping left and right children of some nodes in a binary tree here and there[7].
(The last example is more abstract, but hey, I made a thesis out of things like that!).
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The notions described in a) and b) are exactly the same. The way mathematics is taught is often you don't see b) while looking straight at it! And yet the formalisms in a) are much better understood when you know that they really are b).
If you have seen any definitions in part a), but part b) comes as a surprise - it's a problem. And yet that's the state of affairs.
That's the disaster that this professor is trying to fix.
