patrick.net

Compare the average physician’s salary to that of your average corporate bigwig or RE developer. Not very impressive and and it requires far more formal education, brains, effort & liability.

Doctors don't own Learjets etc

the thing is, many people in medicine don't have the front to be a corporate bigwig or RE developer, it just doesn't fit their personality. many practitioners are virtual science nerds. it's a nice, safe, protected job in certain respects. medicine is still the most rarefied, sought after and competitive entry course in universities here, as it is the only guaranteed way to a good consistent salary with guaranteed 100% employment and an interesting career with a range of meaningful advancement options, e.g. in hospitals, administration, govt, academia or private practice. corporate bigwigs and developers can easily get fired or go broke.

what they do get is varied, interesting work. they don't have to work in a cube farm with weekly blame sessions. they don't have an oppressive, bullying, arbitrary and capricious boss or do meaningless, atomised, soul-destroying work. they get to be autonomous, self-employed service providers. they hopefully get the satisfaction of fixing people up. they are paid well above average salary to do so. they have the monopoly of being able to write scripts and perform procedures and having the AMA behind them. they have a constant stream of sick people that doesn't run out.

i feel sorry for the very talented graduates in biological or medical sciences who can't get good work or solid employment, some of whom are much smarter than the docs, who didn't realise they should've angled for a career in medicine instead of general science.

LILLL,

Although I've often said "friends don't let friends buy houses" I will applaud if your LB is accepted! In ways I understand. Part of me says this WILL get chaotic! VERY chaotic. Who knows what might happen in 2007 if mortgage $'s evaporate? We realize you could probably just buy it outright but what becomes of your "cushion"?

O.K, great I paid my house off and actually "own" it but if there was a family emergency (God forbid) and I need to draw on my equity and HELOC's are at 14%! Now what? What if MID is scaled back?

As bearish as "I" am there's still this "intersection" where:

1. Incentives evaporate

2. Price reductions might be taken off the table (pffft, what's the point?)

3. Mort. money gets scarce (remember, "liquidity is a coward")

4. Comps fall (but property taxes don't)

Just b/c prices crash and we see an inviting entry point doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.

Now if somebody can tell me why the Aussie Dollar is so strong

is it? 8O

been at 75c US for ages now. WAS 54c in a remarkable downturn for some years, which exporters just loved, as they benefited, but it hurt importers. nobody knew why it fell (ha). open to conspiracy theories here.

commodities in the form of iron ore to china, uranium, primary produce etc have propped up the economy in recent times.

A$ used to be worth US $1.20 (!), when A$ was pegged to the GBP, until the 80s, when it was floated on the currency market and sank like a stone...

Robert Coté Says:
Their economy is tanking, their housing crash is worse and ahead of ours, they are tied to commodities including natgas. Despite all this the central bank hinted that interest rates would go up to contain inflation thus the carry trade flow.

oops, i'm not scrolling comprehensively enough. just on this, the housing market is kind of 'soft landing' with the potential for a crash, but it appears to be tanking at about the same time as the US market, altho the boom started earlier. my own blog has some recent tanking stories on it, in fact, but it's hard to read between the lines and the hype in the press. realtors are saying off the record the market has been dead for some months, but prices have not corrected down significantly (yet). i think it is all brewing tho.

on commodities, they have been more of a strength than a weakness of late, especially with demand from china. the australian economy has always been weak on value-adding and manufacturing, more interested in exporting raw materials and ag produce, so in some ways there has been less to offshore at the present time, which is also an accidental strength. (this reliance has been a hallmark for more than 100 years tho.)

interestingly, there are differences between the GD relationship between US and UK and today's world and china, because US and UK were both high cost 1st world countries back then. the relationship today is high cost-low cost, which is what makes the goods attractive.

the heightened interest rates to combat inflation problem is interesting, i actually see that as mainly an artifact of the overheated domestic housing market. while this is a somewhat monolithic theory, i see increased housing repayments leading to higher prices for goods and services leading to increased demands for wage rises. hence general inflation, caused by widescale attempts to exploit a single asset class when rates were low, including a boom in purchasing 'investment' properties. am i right, or am i right?

All of you (DinOR, HARM, Peter P, austingal and anyone else I forgot),

A sincere thanks for standing up for the medical profession! For me, the vast majority of fellow MD's I know went into this profession for all the right reasons: wanting to help others, intellectual curiosity, even yes, the prestige. I honestly don't know many who did it for the money. These days especially, anyone who looks to go into medicine looking to become rich is stupid, IMO. There are a lot of easier and more straightforward ways of doing that than being a doctor. No one tells you in med school, but it can often be frustrating and disheartening practicing in today's environment. Paperwork, dealing with insurance companies, fear of litigation, huge school debt, it's all too real.

I should have been a realtor.

; )

Jon Says:
That’s nothing. I’m assuming this guy you know is doing more than that (such as system/network admin and other, more comprehensive support). I don’t know anyone who could earn a living solely running ad aware.

I could hardly believe it myself. Here is what his lackeys do at the monthly house-call - run AdAware, Hijack This, Norton Security Update, and M$oft patches. A couple other utilities that clean the registry. Run a disk defragmenter, and a script that collects statistics on disk usage and other useless crap that he puts in a nicely formatted "System Assessment Report". And oh yeah, wipe the monitor and blow crumbs out of the keyboard with a compressed-air thingamajig.

System-setup, OS-upgrade, Backup, Network-setup, etc. is all extra charge. A-la-carte prices. He also has a high-margin home-entertainment 'consulting' business - works with architects who call him in to wire up McMansions.

Without any extras, the monthly computer service costs more in a year than a decent computer. As far as the tech-work is concerned, it is a complete rip-off. However, the perceived value is in the service aspect, where I must admit he does a very slick job. His clientele is mostly folks who pay hundreds a month for landscape/pool maintenance, so his prices don't seem outrageous. He has grown up around really wealthy professionals, so he has a pretty good understanding of how to present himself and what buttons to push to get their business.

SP

A sincere thanks for standing up for the medical profession!

i didn't :P

further, doctors are more in demand in rural, regional and remote areas than many other professions, but they choose to operate preponderantly in well-heeled areas in cities, to the point where the govt has to bribe them to relocate. they also get a bribe to spend more time with each patient. funnily enough, i've never been offered extra bribes in my desk jobs to do satisfactory work...

my working life perspective is as a sociology graduate, a labour activist and someone who has worked in their fair share of cube farms and seen the pathologies of the modern workplace...

having said that, my sis is a doc, as are many of my friends, and i am swotting to sit the GAMSAT in march next year, as i would prefer to be busy as a doc than perennially bored and compromised as a public servant...

LILLL Says:
I am going to make a lowball tomorrow.

Pictures. Don't forget to take pictures of the seller's face when you submit your offer. You can borrow my camera. :-)
SP

Man, I have a bad feeling about this. If LiLLL and SQT both end up buying houses, what if they become bubble-deniers and start batting for the other side... :-)
SP

Man, I have a bad feeling about this. If LiLLL and SQT both end up buying houses, what if they become bubble-deniers and start batting for the other side…

Then I may join them too. :)

We've been lowballing for a while now. We actually would like the homes we're bidding on; this isn't just for fun. I'm coming in about 35-40% below asking in most cases, but it's really a function of utility, as they say...

@chuckleby,

Thanks for the link. I'll just go and weep quietly in the corner now.

Just a couple of observations of why things are screwed up in the medical industry.

I was accompanying my father-in-law to El Camino Hospital (it calls itself the first magnet hospital in the Bay Area, what the hell does that mean??), and found an interesting situation with how the doctors operated there in emergency room. There was a big cabinet with with all sorts of equipment and supplies locked up under key, not everything lying there was expensive, it ranges from scissors to bandaids. Anyway, in order to get to the item, the doctor needed to punch in some sort of secret code to open the cabinet, then after use, put it back, punch the code again. I was very amused by this much-ado-about-nothing process. The doctor told me that it was a part of their new accounting system (I suspect this must be another MBA-initiated activity based accounting circus), the cabinet seemed to be installed with some sort of automatic recording mechansim which records everything that the doctor or nurse uses, so as to keep track of who used how much. The doctor himself was very frustrated with the process, because he accidentally got the wrong code and had to call the nurse in to get the right item. I mean, how much can a band-aid cost as compared to the consultation time charged by a doctor? So if he uses 10 more band-aids than the next doctor per day, so what???

And then, in another couple of doctor visits up in the Peninsula, I almost always encountered salespersons from different pharmaceutical companies or equipment sellers visiting the doctor's office at the same time. You can spot these salesmen type right away, typically in dark suits with a troller suitcase. Think about it, how much should the medicine cost if they are flying their sales force around the country visiting every single doctor? No wonder these pills cost $10 a piece.

Coupled with the insane lawsuits and the expensive test that doctors must order to protect themselves, this medical industry is doomed for a reset, since we are just spinning out of control. I have a lot of respect for doctors because they invest tremendous amount of time and energy to become what they are, and they deserve every single penny they earn, as compared to a lot of other industries. But it is just very sad that they themselves are also victims of a rather sick medical system that is heading for a train wreck some time down the road.

SP,

do you mean that the UK retreat from its colonies overseas also contributed to the cushioned blow in Great Depression? Does that mean that once we start to withdraw troops from the current military base from around the world (i.e. cutting military expenditure), we should also enjoy some windfall gain?

Defense has always been a big employer, I am actually not sure if a smaller military presence of the US will help our economy.

OO Says:
do you mean that the UK retreat from its colonies overseas also contributed to the cushioned blow in Great Depression?

No, I mean stealing from the colonies helped the UK cushion some of the hardship.

SP

ah....makes sense.

Do we have any defacto colonies to steal from?

Probably I have missed some of the discussion on this thread and related ones but, given the pool of competence and insight here, I am curious what defensive moves others consider to be prudent if some of the darker scenarios painted here play out as described.

At least some of us, I imagine, have assets in addition to our houses which will be affected if some or all of the macroeconomic negatives we've been discussing continue or worsen. If housing prices, credit, unemployment, inflation, currency exchange, balance of trade, the deficit and offshore willingness to assume US paper take a turn for the worse, what are the options for a forewarned individual?

Seems to me we have several elephants in the room.

Or am I OT? Sorry, if so.

I have also been considering a major lowball. This week I will visit three nice homes within 2 miles of work that are in foreclosure or bankruptcy. There are plenty more, but these have lots of equity.

One was bought for 89K in 1991 and foreclosed on Monday for $159K. See if this sounds familiar...

RENOVATED & UPGRADED! This 2280 total SF home has major interior renovations. Kitchen: new maple cabinets, new wood floor, new smoothtop range, new sidexside refrig, new built-in micro, Corian countertops. All new flooring: wood, carpet, tile. New lighting. New plumbing fixtures. Redesigned master bath w/beautiful new tile, new oversized tub, new champagne fixtures. Fireplace. 10,500 SF fenced yard w/mature trees, est. neighborhood, VIEWS. Landscape allowance. MOTIVATED SELLER. MAKE OFFER!

Two possibilities there. One is of course that zillow.com just didn't pick up a flipper purchase in the last few years. The other (more likely) scenario is that they HELOC'ed the heck out of the place, made massive upgrades to everything and then got nailed by something like the layoffs that swept the area in 2000-2004.

In Northern Colorado, things really didn't spike until 2000-2005. So I figure that I should shoot for the 2000 estimated price, +5% for each year since then. That would basically revert any given house to a normal median appreciation without all this bubble bullsh*t.

The above house is 2200 sq.ft. 3 bed, 3 bath, 2 car garage in a pleasant neighborhood with good schools. All new appliances and upgrades, the lawn's kinda crisped, and they're asking $215,000. If I do the math, lo and behold that property has reverted to the mean! It basically tracks the Northern Colorado RE appreciation graph dead on if you ignore the past 3-4 years of bubble.

There's also another one where the folks are in bankruptcy. 5 bed, 4 bath, 2 car with 2700 sq.ft. in an even nicer neighborhood and closer to work. This hime is one block off the 600K+ lakefront palaces that are 4000 sq.ft. Obviously those people are sending their kids to top-notch schools; I might even have lake rights so I could have a small sailboat. :) Purchased in mid-2005 for $268K, asking price is $284K. Sold as-is with no pictures on the MLS listing. Maybe could be lowballed, maybe not (depends on their financial flexibility).

I have a lot of interest in the first place. The comps from this year are all in the $240K range, which means $215K has more or less busted the bubble on that property after all the upgrades. But I'm kinda stuck on a moral question. And I know which way most of ya'll are going to lean, but let's set aside the cliches and glee for a second. I don't personally believe that everyone who gets in over their heads in a HELOC deserves to be hanged. I know lots of dumb, nice people. Is anyone else disturbed by the thought of buying a property in foreclosure? You basically end up researching the situation via web sites and lawyers, and then make a lowball offer to someone in brutal financial distress. On one hand all the research is being an educated buyer, and the property is going to be REO anyway. But on the other hand, let's not kid ourselves, I went hunting for these specific opportunities. Is that wrong on some moral level? I'm obviously not going to bid $215K, which I think is probably a fair price. I would open somewhere about $185K, which is the same price as an expensive condo a few miles away, just because I know the situation.

Also, what are the practical implications for buying a house in these circumstances? For instance, what if the current owners trash the house between closing and moving out? If they are declaring bankruptcy, then am I out of financial recourse and my only threat is criminal?

Correction: stated the comps were $240K. It's a typo, the comps are $230K.

OO Says:
Do we have any defacto colonies to steal from?

you nearly got one, but it's gone a bit pear-shaped...

england didn't pull out of india until just after WWII -- the war weakened the hold european countries had over their colonies, so there were loads of independence uprisings at around that time... some of the relinquishing may have even had to do with morality...

danville woman,

Welcome and congrats on your "sell into strength"! Sometimes I have to remind myself, buy on weakness, sell into strength". It's still nice to be reminded of that once in a while.

I'm just not sure I see "good karma" in overpaying. Regardless of the state of affairs for the seller. Most of these folks HAD the same options that were laid before you, did they not? They had their window to sell into strength. They declined b/c they KNEW if they held out either "a little longer" or treated it like money in the bank they would pocket even more!

At 56 I respect the fact that you well remember a time when the objective in America was to have your home paid off by the time you retired. NOT have your home pay for your retirement.

Since as a nation we've declined on this dated notion of "saving" we've put all our marbles on housing. We've made it an "all or nothing" proposition and there will be winners and losers. I didn't start it and I damn sure ain't gonna agonize over it.

I love the melanoma story posted. Now, there is zero discretion when it comes to skin lesions- everything is removed and everything is sent to the lab! For massive escalation of medical costs. And dermatologists diagnostic skills are made meaningless because "its going to the lab for diagnosis anyway". I know a dermatologist who is the pre-eminent person in his field and is perhaps the most published MD in the WORLD. He misdiagnosed a melanoma. Whatever he called it, the patient was going to die and soon. The MD lost the case. Estimated 8 million$ in damages. The premier person in the field. The best/brightest have left medicine or are no longer selecting it as an occupation. I have a a neurosurgeon friend who is both a genius and compassionate. He used to volunteer for trauma service. After several lawsuits he quit volunteering and no longer practices. Nice, US and A.

Alot of funny things are afoot. Wall street is doing the sunshine and roses dance proclaiming at 12k highs the economy will definately have a soft landing. Defection or thoughts thereof are starting to show on this blog. I wish I had a crystal ball don't you? Home buliders are showing resilience, sellers are pulling there home off the table. Could they Fed and Wall Street manufacture a "all is well in America" illusion that the masses buy? I don't see the exuberence of the bears lately.

Sylvie says:
I don’t see the exuberence of the bears lately.

I don't know about you, but I break out in profuse exuberation every time I check out my saved-searches in ziprealty.

SP

Iraq and Afghanistan aren't really the US's colonies, rather, we are, in 1960s jargon, the satellite of these satellites.

I suppose we can oppress Puerto Rico or the US Samoas extra hard...

If the San Gabriel Valley area comes down at least 20% I'm moving back in 07. I did something dumb last year because of the unaffordalbility factor. I panicked and moved 2500 miles away to an area where I know no one and pop. 34k. Suffice to say it is evident to me after almost a year that I made a bad choice. Even with a decent job and the cost of living at least 35% lower there are no amenities or cultural life to stimulate my long term interest. Luckliy for me the company that hired me payed for my move.

Even with all of this housing price crap, commuter congestion, high cost of living, and immigration nightmare I miss it more than I thought. Is there something wrong with me?

Without any extras, the monthly computer service costs more in a year than a decent computer. As far as the tech-work is concerned, it is a complete rip-off. However, the perceived value is in the service aspect, where I must admit he does a very slick job. His clientele is mostly folks who pay hundreds a month for landscape/pool maintenance, so his prices don’t seem outrageous. He has grown up around really wealthy professionals, so he has a pretty good understanding of how to present himself and what buttons to push to get their business.

Time has a very different value for those in the high 6 & 7-figures club. When you consider the time required to perform or automate those repetitive tasks (esp. for computer illiterates), and someone who works 60-70 hours/week with little free time to spare, it may actually make economic sense for them. I work in IT, have plenty of free time, so of course do all my own cabling, setup & maintenance. If I were a time-crunched non-tech CEO, such a service might actually look pretty reasonable.

“friends don’t let friends buy houses”

I DO like this, but let me tweak it a tad:
“friends don’t let friends buy overpriced houses”

I am personally praying for divine intervention into not having a soft landing.

How else can nature teach us all a hard earned lesson about greed and return this basic commodity (housing) within reach of the young, rather than all the fat oldsters who possess most of it now?

I mean, 2-3 homes each while most youngsters can't afford to buy a tin can to live in?

I pray for a hard landing as soon as possible!

;>

LiLLL

I moved to South Carolina Jan 06. After my divorce (2001) I got bought out by my ex renting since then. Have the money from the buy out however prices more than doubled in my area. That left me feeling very defeated and hopeless. I took a job in SC and my nestegg wouldn't you know it six months later this bubble started to unravel.

How else can nature teach us all a hard earned lesson about greed

Who says Nature is not morally neutral?

This blog has made me feel less homesick. I left my adult children there and my base (friends). I'm hoping the So Cal market shakes out alot next year. I use to live in the Claremont area.

Home of the Claremont Colleges cute little town near the San Gabriel Foothills. With a eastern Ivy League feel.

Trial lawyer here (though I'm an entertainment lawyer -- I don't do medical malpractice) -- I have to stick up for my profession.

First of all, medicine is the profession that I admire and respect more than any other. People always view doctors and lawyers as roughly equivalent, but the truth is that they aren't. There is no comparison. Lawyers aren't responsible for people's lives. I've never been working frantically to save someone, only to see them die while my hands are inside them. I've never had to tell a family that their loved one has a terminal disease and isn't going to make it. Doctors have to do those things, however.

Also, medicine is a profession that, by and large, helps people and contributes something of real value to the community. The same, unfortunatley, cannot always be said of lawyers. i am proud of the cases I handle, and i have never done anything that I am ashamed of. But let's face it -- there are a lot of sleazy lawyers out there, and many are basically parasites who contribute nothing of value to our society. And to the extent that the legal system is one of the three branches of our government, sleazy lawyers don't just bring shame on the legal profession -- they bring shame on our entire society. But aside from a few quacks pushing diet supplements, natural remedies, etc., there really aren't too many sleazy doctors out there.

I also have a great deal of sympathy for doctors from a financial standpoint. I myself still have $130k in student loan debt, so I know what that burden feels like. And I also know that, like lawyers, doctors don't make nearly as much as people think they do. And I know that a lot of this is a fairly new development -- over the past 20-30 years, doctors' incomes have not kept up. The same is true for lawyers.

And as a member of another learned profession, I know that people sometimes make mistakes. When you are dealing with enormously complex subjects, like law or medicine, it is impossible to get the right answer 100% of the time. Especially when you have just a few seconds to find the answer. I cannot guarantee that I will win my clients' cases, and doctors cannot guarantee perfect operations, deliveries, etc. Yet whenever somethign goes wrong, some people are ready to sue.

But it's the repsonsibility that doctors are forced to shoulder whcih makes the job so hard. I wish doctors made a lot more money, althoguh no amount of money can ever truly compensate someone for the emotional toll that dealing with someone who has just become paralyzed takes on you. That is why I admire doctors so much. You really do have to be a special person -- frankly, a superior person -- to shoulder that burden. I am in awe.

That said, I have always been skeptical of arguments that lawyers are responsible for all of the problems that plague the medical profession. I don't want to get into it too much on this forum, as this discussion could go on for days, but suffice it to say that there are very few medical malpractice lawyers out there, and it is suprsingly hard to win med-mal cases. The idea that there is all sorts of "frivilous" litigation out there is something I just do not buy.

This is also why I am skeptical of "special" courts, consisting of doctors, for medical malpractice cases. I can be sued for malpractice, and I don't get that sort of special treatment. Why should they? Also, while I beleive that the medical profession does generally try to maintain high standards, we all know that there are plenty of quacks out there who nonetheless manage to keep their medical licenses. If doctors were reguarly forced out of the profession -- for committing malpractice, not for doing things like having sex with patients or abusing drugs -- I might have a little more faith in the idea of "self-regulation."

Caveat: there is one group of doctors that really do get hit with a lot of frivilous litigation. That is obstetricians. The reason for this is becuase medical malpractice cases against OB/GYNs involve the world's most sympathetic plaintiffs -- injured and crippled children. Juries tend to let their sympathy overcome their reason when they see some kid with CP twitching in a wheelchair, and as a result there really is a med/mal crisis re: OB/GYNs. But one of the reasons why you always hear about the OB/GYN crisis is becuase it's a special case, one that the tort reform groups are always trotting out as their example. But dermatologists don't pay nearly as much for their malpracitce insurance, and they aren't leaving the practice of medicine due to litigation costs

But I think the problems of medicine are due to a lot more than frivilous lawsuits. Medicare reimbursement rates. Administrative costs. The growth of the uninsured population. Drug costs. PPO's and HMO's. These things have a lot more to do with the problems doctors face than the handful of med/mal lawyers out there.

Finally, as a lawyer, I think that a lot of doctors frankly have a sort of irrational hatred for my profession. I don't know why, but I've noticed this about my doctor friends -- they are always bashing lawyers. I think lawyers have sort of evolved into the all-purpose bogeyman of the medical profession. Everything that goes wrong is attributed to us.

I have a theory as to why. People alwyas accused doctors of having a "God" complex, but I don't think that is fair. But if you are an attending physician at some suburban hospital, you sort of are God. There are hundreds of people at the hospital whose sole purpose is to carry out your orders -- instantly. Your patients are from all walks of life, which means that most of them never second-guess or question you. Yes, you have to report to the hosptial staff if something goes wrong, but most days, you don't have to. You are pretty much the ultimate authority all the time. No one ever talks back or sharply questions your competence. Let's face it, after 20 years of this, your ego is affected. How could it not be?

But if you are sued for malpractice, all this suddenly changes. Not only is the plaintiff's lawyer more than willing to second-guess you and question your competence, he's actually trying to make you look bad. Suddenly you experiencing things you haven't had to deal with in years, like someone accusing you of doing something wrong, questioning you, and pressuring you. Your deposition is one of the worst experiences of your life, as some slick, arrogant lawyer makes you look like you didn't do the necessary tests. The fact that this experience is so jarring makes a lot of doctors who have gone through it really hate lawyers, especially if they believe that they did nothing wrong.

Anyway, this is just my $.02 worth of amateur psychiatry.

In closing, I would very much like to once more express my admiraton and thanks for doctors. They're better men and women than I am and their job is a million times harder. If I didn't have student loans of my own I'd gladly pay more for medical services if it meant that doctors would have higher salaries.

I think we have a few economic colonies out there, just not sure how much MORE we can steal from them.

China, for one, is our economic colony. They subsidized their export to such an extent that they can only recoup the incremental cost of production. For example, recently the shipping charges of Chinese companies serving the inbound and outbound China routes are quoting NEGATIVE shipping charges, you heard me right, negative (well, they still charge some port stocking fee). They will pay YOU for keeping their ships running. However, I think we have repetitively challenged their limits of subsidizing our consumption, so I am not sure if we can steal much more incrementally in the upcoming crisis.

Japan, to a certain extent, is also an economic slave of the US. By manipulating their Yen at a "comfortable" bound vs USD, they are essentially subsidizing our lifestyle with their exports. They just didn't build up such an excess capacity as China because at least their stuff can command higher premium. Can we steal more from Japan when we head into crisis? Not so sure, because Japan is apparently ramping up their export share to Europe (perhaps they sense something, huh?).

i suppose there's both economic and cultural imperialism in the form of banana republics as an instance of the former and saturating the world with coca-cola and mcdonalds and hollywood output as the latter...

OO,

China tries to get more export to Europe and Asia, the problem is that the main business drivers are still ethnic Chinese business people out Taiwan and Malaysia. I'm beginning to think that Mainland China will be more resilant than I've thus far given it credit for. They seem to actually comprehend the need to diversify and build up the internal market. The new CCP politburo appears to be a collection of pretty astute people - they might actually make some good economic decisions that'll really show itself in another 5 or 10 years.

But then, I read about the absurd construction projects posed by their water and electric bureau and it's like WTF. Those guys make the army corp of engineers look like genius auditors in comparison.

Time has a very different value for those in the high 6 & 7-figures club.

I saw a GP for a consult the other week, and when he learned I work in IT, asked me how to install Office or similar on his PC at home. I said 'just put in the CD and wait for the setup routine to run and follow the prompts'. He said 'wait a minute. slow down, that sounds a bit complex', heh. Note that children can do this. And 10 years of med training isn't complex? Maybe I should start that PC servicing business over here for doctors... (I should point out I currently do general sys admin work across s/w and h/w, including Oracle, Unix, M$ products, an ERP and so on)

Joe Schmoe, the # of frivolous lawsuits is significant. The mere threat of a lawsuit changes the nature of practice. I have some contacts ( I would hate to call them friends) who are exactly these pitbull malpractice attorneys. They have little to no regard for the medical profession and purely interested in the $. This is a profession? Juries? They routinely poll juries after malpractice cases. Guess what? The jury was either not listening or unable to comprehend the issues. Typical responses from the "jury of our peers": "I just didnt like the way they argued with each other". Does the ABA ever admonish the trial lawyers to bring forth legitimate cases? No. And I know lawyers that are on state legal boards. they couldnt care less about a cases legitimacy. When people tell me "My daughter is in law school", I say "where do you think you went wrong?"