> Students getting caught in mass cheating or deploying sly means to not get caught is not uncommon in India where competition is fierce as aspirants outnumber the number of vacancies for a job and seats in colleges for courses.
I'd like to read a long form piece on this subject. What's being done about it? India is a huge country, they need specialists no doubt!
The hyper competitiveness seems to be a problem. I'm not sure what the answer is, but students need a way to be able fail honestly without shame so that when they do succeed, they do so without needing to cheat.
It's a cultural thing. It's literally a do or die situation for everyone to do well in school. Or you would have shamed your family. But, things are getting better, as cultural expectations are subsiding. I think in the next couple decades, India will be on par with the West in terms of social expectations as the average gross income and GDP of the country continues to go up. I think China is starting to see the same thing now.
It’s unfortunate because the exam cheater is such a prevalent stereotype, yet I have worked with many people from India who were deep thinkers with a love of their subject.
I wonder how many potential visionaries get filtered by association with these cheaters as well as more traditional racism.
Economically, this puzzles me. I'd think that if quantity supplied were so high the equilibrium wage would drop to the point where excess people would stop trying to become doctors, or at least to the point where surgically implanting things wouldn't be worth the hassle. Is there something in India propping up wages for those professions?
You'd also think the 40 hour work week would be a thing of the past with automation. People are just very good at building walked gardens and elite communities while forcing others to be "lower class"
I would bet the demand for people highly educated and trained in medicine far exceeds the number of people able or willing to become highly educated and trained in medicine.
What would make you think that? The supply of doctors is artificially restricted in every country that I know of; it's pretty much a universal mark of privilege. In the United States, residency spots basically don't grow and it's very good for over-allocating doctor's salaries. Same in Germany, where they love their well-paid doctors and big hospitals.
Based on how much discipline (or lack thereof) people have to learn. Or maybe simply lack the innate ability. Not even all the people motivated enough to pass all the hurdles to get into medical school graduate from medical school.
That is not the perfect proof, but I am also coloring it with my anecdotal data about which percentage of kids were enthusiastic to learn any advanced topics in school such as math, physics, chemistry, much less memorize a metric ton of advanced biology information.
It is true that supply is artificially restricted in the US, of course. In many ways, not least which is an unnecessarily expensive and lengthy certification process. But I cannot imagine anyone with the average discipline being able to come close to a full fledged MD.
I can understand why you might think this, but you're factually incorrect in this case.
In the United States, the supply of medical doctors is artificially limited by state laws that prohibit the practice of medicine without a license. Licensing requires successful completion of an accredited medical residency program, which on turn requires completing an MD degree from an accredited medical school. The American Medical Association and similar state-level groups effectively control the number of residency and med school slots by controlling the accreditation process.
Most of the rest of the world has similar systems in place, including India.
On the one hand, the AMA system has been described as a means of guaranteeing the quality of doctors, and preventing unsuspecting patients from being hurt, killed, or defrauded by poorly trained doctors.
On the other hand, it's also been described as cartel designed to allow doctors to charge inflated prices for medical care, by limiting the supply of doctors, and extracting unreasonable rent from the public.
Most economists would agree that both descriptions are basically correct.
In Chile it's not artificially restricted, or to anything nearly the same level. Doctors can still make a lot of money, they just have to be really good. Medicine then becomes 10-100 times cheaper, in that range.
Before specialization, yes. And private practice is a lot more, but getting the license is a pain. However, that is still very well paid in a country where you have such great benefits. The American sticker price salaries are not honest when you have to pay for so many things out of pocket (healthcare and education, just to start). I have lived and worked in the US and EU.
Because it's not a "free market". The supply of doctors is legally limited... It's illegal to practice medicine without being licensed. And the number of licenses granted is limited.
The license limits could be direct, like taxi medallions in New York City... Or the limits can be indirect, like how the AMA defines the number of medical residencies in the United States.
Even in supposedly "free market" countries like the United States, we often have significant restrictions on all sorts of markets. The reasons vary.
The ability to immigrate elsewhere with incentives skills from countries not incentivizing the growth of their own medical field for a number of reasons.
The doctor shortage in the US is because current law effectively limits the number of residency slots to 100k, pushing out foreign graduates who may have earned a spot and causing medical schools to expand slower than they would like due to fear of not matching graduates.
region locks are such an absurd leftover from the entertainment industry, and likely at least in part because they’re not going to improve the systems they put in place to hypercharge folks based on country/local market effects, etc. Really all I have to say it’s just stupid to have them in the streaming age unless you’re pulling in the checks.
It's just a command-line tool to download audio/video from youtube (and many other sites). You'd need to setup the iPad thing yourself, maybe using something like Plex?
Plex has shifted over time to present their content more prominently. It got to the point that your own media isn't even displayed on the default landing screen. Had to re-teach the kids how to find their movies and whatnot.
I haven't had it running in about a year though, couldn't be bothered after a move.
Jellyfin looks nice. I'll have to give it a go. I am dreading having to set everything up again if I move off of plex, rather than just grab my docker-compose file and get going.
> Different languages have different failure modes. With Perl, the project might fail because you designed and implemented a pile of shit, but there is a clever workaround for any problem, so you might be able to keep it going long enough to hand it off to someone else, and then when it fails it will be their fault, not yours. With Haskell someone probably should have been fired in the first month for choosing to do it in Haskell.
So much unnecessary hate and stereotyping. And I bet they were thinking they're tongue-in-cheek-but-still-sounding-clever.
Also, interesting choice of programming languages, neither Python, PHP nor C got any flack, Javascript was spared but Java, Perl and Haskell are evil and using them makes you a "mediocre drone that cares only about cranking the lever and spouting code" (I'm paraphrasing the article here).
Choose your technology, learn your tools...
> I enjoyed programming in Java, and being relieved of the responsibility for producing a quality product.
Although, with that mindset, maybe forego programming altogether.
The author makes it really hard to judge his tone, but I don't think you're reading it right. For example, if you peruse his other articles, it's clear he really likes Haskell (he certainly doesn't consider it evil).
I can't say I understand every one of his assertions, and trying to be funny/sarcastic makes it hard to truly understand the point of his article, which I think is: Java lacks focus and is a verbose language, and therefore you should probably pick something else to solve interview challenges. I tend to agree.
I thought he summed up the tone pretty well earlier in the article:
> Java is neither a good nor a bad language. It is a mediocre language, and there is no struggle.
To be more explicit - I think the point he is trying to make is that Java is not very powerful (in sense of expression), which has benefits (making it hard to fuck up badly) but at the cost of pushing the programmer towards mediocre, verbose and inefficient solutions (again due to lack of expressiveness, trying to come up with elegant and efficient solutions is too tiresome).
Perhaps it's the difference between a scalpel and a blunt club. You're not going to cut off your own fingers with the club, but you're not going to be able to perform brain surgery or fix someone's heart either. Not the best analogy because technically Java and any other language is turing complete, but they are not equal in how easy it is to coerce the machine into performing a particular computation, and expressing that humanly.
How do you measure "mediocre"? And what do you mean by inefficient? In any language you can code 99% of the things needed by 99% of most of the systems.
Most of the "I love/hate this language" is usually subjective perception or strong preference for certain programming paradigms: people loving/hating OOP, people love/hating verbosity and so forth.
You don't, it's all opinion, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
We can at least all agree there is difference in the efficiency of writing a program in binary opcodes for a specific architecture vs writing one in C... although quantifying it is impossible, and that's just one quality.
Leaving the low level languages aside, most of the top level one can achieve the same things with similar costs. It's still up to the individual/team skill how those apps/systems end up to be built. If some project fails, is rarely "picking the wrong language" reason...
The author is MJD. He is, among other things, the author of one of the best functional programming books[1].
> I was a professional Java programmer for three years (in a different organization), and I have meant for some time to write up my thoughts about it. I am often very bitter and sarcastic, and I willingly admit that I am relentlessly negative and disagreeable, so it can be hard to tell when I am in earnest about liking something. I once tried to write a complimentary article about Blosxom, which has generated my blog since 2006, and I completely failed; people thought I was being critical, and I had to write a followup article to clarify, and people still thought I was dissing Blosxom. Because this article about Java might be confused with sarcastic criticism, I must state clearly that everything in this article about Java is in earnest, and should be taken at face value. Including:
> I really like Java
> ...
> So yes, I enjoyed programming in Java, and being relieved of the responsibility for producing a quality product. It was pleasant to not have to worry about whether I was doing a good job, or whether I might be writing something hard to understand or to maintain. The code was ridiculously verbose, of course, but that was not my fault. It was all out of my hands.
Why do people keep ascribing high housing costs to some nebulous "greed"? Isn't all economic activity due to greed? Anyone trying to choose a lower priced thing to buy or trying to get paid a higher wage is also doing it because of greed.
The parent is right. Shanty towns are the extreme low-regulation end of housing and they're also extremely cheap. It's a matter of how bad we want to allow people to treat themselves and our standards for safety and comfort keep going up so cost does too.
I'd like to read a long form piece on this subject. What's being done about it? India is a huge country, they need specialists no doubt!