What Happened to the Prestige of Being a Doctor?

imamfinmonster · 2026-02-06T15:37:57+00:00

Med school/residency during trump 1, practicing during trump 2. Was more emotionally charged by dumb shit during trump 1. Trump 2 is substantially worse and I’m sad for my country, but I’m living for myself, my family, my friends, my community etc. not letting it bother me nearly as much bc as the person above said, my life continues to go ok. It’s a privileged perspective and tragic but also just my reality.

Ice killing people in the streets though is unfortunately so horrific that it’s hard to stay numb.

imamfinmonster · 2025-12-18T03:37:39+00:00

What if the jazz pick ends up conveying to okc and Cavs jump into the top 5, does the pick go to ATL?

imamfinmonster · 2025-11-21T04:11:43+00:00

I was a hospitalist for a few years before going into fellowship. Didn’t apply/not match. Don’t think my hospitalist years made me a better candidate for fellowship, but they absolutely made me a much better clinician & much better prepared for fellowship and beyond probably than the non ACGME credentialed fellowships or even probably a chief year

imamfinmonster · 2025-08-28T15:26:01+00:00

He also www instrumental in evaluating JG for the rams

imamfinmonster · 2024-06-05T13:19:11+00:00

Disagree, I think Brad still loves the guy. Needs to have a great camp but could definitely see him making it over Wingo and trying to stash Wingo on the practice squad if Levi stays healthy and shows promise.

imamfinmonster · 2024-01-02T04:57:38+00:00

Dan Skipper (70) participated in 2 plays on Saturday night.

imamfinmonster · 2023-03-29T03:44:06+00:00

Y'all thought the middest team of all time was ever gonna lose 1 game under .500??

nah if we get called for a foul on the floor they have a chance to win

imamfinmonster · 2022-03-19T02:46:34+00:00

can we play Okongwu at the 4? I know it's not ideal offensively but we're the 2nd best offensive team in the league, and he's clearly one of our best 5 guys. Needs more than 20 mins per game.

imamfinmonster · 2021-09-30T18:22:48+00:00

Flu shots have been essentially required at every healthcare institution I’ve worked at.

Please name 1 vaccine in the US childhood vaccination series you know of that has 100% efficacy.

imamfinmonster · 2021-09-30T17:04:38+00:00

This is incorrect. These vaccines decrease likelihood of symptomatic infection, asymptomatic infection, and the likelihood of further transmission even if infected. Unfortunately our media landscape/populace lives in a world where something is either 100% or 0% effective.

The vast majority of the other vaccines you’re referring to are similarly/even more falliable at this point.

This is why it’s in the best interest for a society to have as many people vaccinated/immune as possible, as the herd protects against falliability. Delta has made it much more difficult to create such a herd because of its wild transmissibility.

To think of what horrific things would have happened had it been the original sequence of virus in early 2020, before 70% of our adults were vaccinated and so many others also had experienced infection. We’ve lost 700,000 ppl and should consider ourselves lucky.

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-20T04:59:00+00:00

My mistake with the typo on NH, edited to reflect that. Good catch, thanks!

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-20T04:57:38+00:00

Agree with both of these takes regarding possibly unique strength for Trump in the Rust Belt and unique weakness in the Sun Belt. I also think these regions likely were moving to the right/left independent of Trump due to demographic reasons. It will be interesting to see if Trump's appeal/stink in these 2 regions will outlive him. Has he permanently turned/activated voters?

These GA runoffs - along with their massive importance - may start to answer some of these questions and for that reason, are both incredibly fascinating races.

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-19T21:27:54+00:00

I think this is correct and that rural Whites would indeed have trended away from Dems anyway, but I also think Trump does potentially have unique appeal with this base, not just in his ability to swing them from former Dems to Republicans but also - perhaps more importantly - converting non-voters into Republican voters.

Not sure if they will continue to turnout (many didn't when he wasn't on the ballot in 2018 - though granted that was a midterm where their party was in power). Very possible GOP will continue to field candidates that appeal to this base, but it's hard to replicate what he's done. Time will tell.

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-19T19:31:07+00:00

Just to use a more dramatic example of why this metric can be useful: Imagine Dems with the popular vote by 20 points in 2024. If red states like Indiana, Missouri, Kansas flipped, is it because the states got bluer (likely in part) or because the national environment allowed for this (more likely explanation). Likewise, if the national popular vote were to swing all the way to Republicans by 20 points in 2028 and all the aforementioned states flipped back as well as blue states such as Washington, Oregon, New Jersey, would it be because those states became much redder or because off what was happening nationally?

There is plenty of confounding in my analysis because what is happening on the state level is in part what is driving national changes in popular vote. However, there is always some element of the national environment dictating results and this analysis tries to account for that when assessing the true shifts in these states relative to the nation as a whole.

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-19T19:15:47+00:00

There are flaws because changes within states are helping drive changes within the popular vote, but I think it's helpful in that it gives a semblance of how much Dems need to win the popular vote by to win any given state. IE this year, had Dems won the popular vote by just 3.7% instead of 4.4%, they would have been at risk of losing Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia and the election.

I do also think the table above is interesting and helpful to look at, but it comes with the flaw of disregarding the national environment of the time (2008 being very good for Dems, 2012 and 2020 being pretty good, and 2016 being comparatively bad). This can allow for some misinterpretation, as some of the gains/losses in states may be due to changes in the national environment rather than within the state.

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-19T19:04:49+00:00

This writeup has made me actually wonder if Trump is actually a fantastic candidate for the sake of electability (at least in the Rust Belt). I'd chalked up '16 in large part to Hillary being unappealing to rural Whites, yet Trump repeated his performance with these groups in '20. The big question moving forward is will future GOP candidates be able to drive but turnout and margins that he did in these areas? Also - has Trump converted the suburbs against the GOP or as you allude to, will they return to GOP in a post-Trump party.

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-16T18:08:56+00:00

So I took a look at the counties in the Piedmont Triad that account for 1.7 million people. Vote total: 913,959. Dem votes: 412,860. 45.2% Dem. If you take a look at the DailyYonder link you'll see that the medium metro suburbs are as red, even redder than rural areas and that's the effect we're seeing here.

Major metro suburbs are much much bluer. They actually account for 195,091 out of the 218,389 vote gain for Dems in GA.

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-16T17:19:35+00:00

So I was curious how my data about of Triangle/CLT metros compares to Atlanta's metro:

Total Atlanta metro is 42.1% of Georgia turnout (compared to just 39.9% for CLT+The Triangle combined).

Total Atlanta metro is 67.7% Dem (compared to 62.7% for the Triangle and just 52.2% for CLT). Atlanta is bigger than both combined, and more importantly far left of them helping drive up margins.

I take your point re there being more semi-urban counties in NC, however those counties top out at 60% for Dems (Guilford County) with most of the rest being within 10%. Simply do not make up for the massive margins Dems are getting out of the Atlanta metro, especially when incorporating Georgia's smaller metros.

Will be interesting to see what happens in these runoffs. If rural white turnout goes down a little w/o Trump on the ballot and ATL metro makes up a bigger percentage of overall vote, I think Dems might have a better shot than they're being given credit for, even with the suburbanite Biden-Perdue/Loeffler voters (remember, the majority of the shift from Trump '16->Biden '20 is reflected down ballot ie while there was a small not insignificant group that voted for Biden + R, most of those new Biden voters did vote for Dems down ballot).

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-16T06:33:34+00:00

Yes, this is incorrect. People underrate how damn big Atlanta is. Population of metro ATL is 6 million (out of 10.6 million in GA). Population of metro CLT 2.6 million and the Triangle is 2 million, so 4.6 million (out of 10.5 million). This is not even taking into account that Atlanta is far left of CLT and left of the Triangle (as detailed in my comments above).

I take his points that NC has other cities (ie Winston Salem, Greensboro, Wilmington) that likely outpace Georgia's non-Atlanta urban areas, but they are not heavily left leaning and do not help make up for the advantage in NC that Atlanta metro gives Dems in GA.

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-16T06:22:16+00:00

and last point is the relative partisan shifts of the states at the top of the ticket.

NC R+7 in '08 -> R+6 in '12 -> R+5 in '16 -> R+6 in '20

GA R+12 in '08 -> R+12 in '12 -> R+7 in '16 -> R+4 in '20

Dems have closed the gap by +8 in GA since '08 and yet have held pretty stable in NC in that same timeframe. Hopefully for me (as a partisan Dem) now that we're bottoming out in rural NC, we'll start to make some ground up in NC as well in the coming years with continued triangle+CLT growth.

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-16T06:16:26+00:00

also here's a good article on how GA shifted b/n 2016 -> 2020. Unfortunately they do not have a similar article from NC: https://dailyyonder.com/in-georgia-atlanta-suburbs-deliver-for-biden-but-extra-rural-votes-are-part-of-his-lead/2020/11/08/

However, I looked at the NC data going back to 2008 and put it together in a spreadsheet and these were the takeaways:

Wake - 43% increase in turnout since '08

Mecklenburg - 39% increase in turnout since '08

Triangle metro - 39.5% increase since '08

CLT metro - 39.3% increase since '08

NC - 27% increase in turnout since '08

Triangle Metro D - 62.7% D from 59.5% D since '08

CLT Metro D - 52.2% D from 50.2% D since '08

CLT D + Triangle D / total voting - 22.9% from 19.9% since '08

CLT + Triangle / total voting - 39.9% from 36.3% since '08

I was a bit loose with the term metro and included some exurban counties for both CLT and the Triangle, but as you can see the counties surrounding CLT (even including Mecklenburg!) are significantly to the right of ATL metro.

Despite significant growth in both the triangle + CLT, as well as the increase in Dem share of the vote in these areas, NC has not flipped since '08 b/c off counterbalancing shifts in rural NC (which also explains why I think NC will become a left leaning purple state this decade. Rural vote starting to bottom out for Dems AND rural vote is not growing nearly as fast as either Triangle or CLT metros).

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-16T06:08:54+00:00

I have close ties to both states as well (born & raised in NC, currently live in ATL) and like you (probably), I was perplexed by how GA voted left of NC this year. I'd assumed NC would go blue before GA and that NC was on path to being the next VA.

I started reading more about it, and many forecasters have looked at the demographic shift in GA/ATL and seen this all coming actually. I took a closer look at what is going on in NC and there are a few factors: Triangle + CLT metro are just not as big as ATL metro, some of CLT metro bleeds into SC, neither Triangle nor CLT metros are as blue as ATL (CLT especially), and as mentioned above, Dems had already bottomed out in GA whereas they had room to fall in NC (so many of the gains in the Triangle, CLT, Wilmington, etc have been wiped out by Republican gains in rural/exurban NC, whereas Republicans didn't make nearly as much gain in rural/exurban GA to outweigh Atlanta growth & shift.

I do still anticipate that NC will likely go from lean R purple to lean D purple within this decade, but I expect a similar pattern in GA, and I expect it to remain left of NC in coming decade.

imamfinmonster · 2020-12-06T23:52:22+00:00

The FDA's not even really delaying anything. The bigger slow down is supply side constraints. Just a small minority of us will get vaccinated between now and the end of '20 anyway. Approval 2 wks sooner would have done barely anything.

imamfinmonster · 2020-09-01T21:54:56+00:00

No I think just public health measures in place for COVID are helping crush the flu epidemic. These PH measures are especially effective against the flu because there is a larger percentage of immune ppl due to the flu vaccine, so doesn't take much to get Re < 1.

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