I'm sorry, but you are an order of magnitude out of touch with the average American consumer. Average savings balance under the age of 64 is below $73k.[1] Median savings is below $9k. Most people will, outside of their retirement savings, never have access to an account that has over $100,000 in it.
Never.
Not one day in their life.
Median household income is $80k/yr.[2] Personal savings rate is under 5%.[3] As is noted in the title of the article, there are two Americas.
Yes, generally the only people who would be able to withdraw $50k from a savings account are people who are well-off enough to have $50k in a non-retirement savings account. Doesn't it follow, then, that such a person would be seen by the bank as a "well-off customer" and thus enjoy higher withdrawal thresholds?
I don't think the OP ever purported to be doing something the 'average American consumer' would be doing, just relating their experiences to the linked article.
They don't have access to an account with 100k in it because that would generally be pointless for a normal person. A great deal of people have 100k in clear real estate or stocks. Only a moron leaves 100k sitting doing nothing but wait for it to get inflated to oblivion.
Haha, a bit snide but not inaccurate. Over the year I had that money in there gaining nothing, I lost thousands of dollars of value. Even just putting it into a HYSA would have been better.
Haven't seen anyone mention this yet: there is a difference between "listed employees" vs. "full time employees" (FTEs) vs. "full time employee equivalents" (FTEEs). In this very specific case, physicians/providers often work 0.125-0.875 (i.e. one hour to seven hours of an 8 hour day) for one entity (say, their primary teaching hospital), and the remainder for another entity (the university where they are also an listed as adjunct professor, etc.).
You could have 10,000 employees, however 4,000 of them are physicians/providers, 3,000 of whom work less than full time for that entity. So you are looking at 10,000 employees, but some number between 7,000 and 9,999 FTEEs. These are very different, and very relevant, numbers when looking at healthcare organizations.
"Methodology & Definitions
Staff Headcount
Staff headcounts include all regular, benefits-eligible university employees. With rare exceptions, employees must be appointed at 50% FTE (full-time equivalent) or more for at least six consecutive months in order to be eligible for benefits. The Professoriate and employees of SLAC are not included. Employees with multiple jobs are counted only in the job that is tied to their benefits, typically the one with the largest number of standard hours."
The sibling comments are very relevant, but I wanted to provide a marginally different perspective. You have to take not only what is being said, but _who is saying it_ into perspective.
In this case, this is a government official speaking to the press (i.e. in an official capacity). If they were to say "this was sabotage," that is a definite declaration that the government believes - again, officially and on the record - that an outside party has deliberately done material damage to their country. Given the general situation, it is not a huge leap to come to the interpretation that "this was an attack against our country, and possibly an act of war."
No government official would want to be within miles (or kilometers) of that sort of statement unless they have pretty much already internally decided from the top-down to escalate the situation. Almost no single government agent has the authority to escalate the situation in that manner. So what we end up with is "appears to be." This overtly says 'all available evidence points to this being the case, however something else cannot be ruled out.' (As a sibling comment suggests, it can also act as a type of propaganda). So it is not an official government declaration that another nation has damaged them, but they have reasons (probably both apparent and not) to believe what they are saying publicly.
>>"We don't say negative things about the art or the artist. Our stated goal is to collect, exhibit, and celebrate this art that would be appreciated nowhere else."
Perhaps this is a 'whoosh' moment for me, but it seems that by simply housing the art in the Museum of /Bad/ Art, you are certainly saying something quite negative about the art and the artist.
The "Bad" is just a playful endearment, not an attempt to establish a definitive collection. Discarded as they were, van Gogh's or Kafka's works could have just as easily been part of this... had they been found behind dumpsters or at flea markets in the Boston area.
So I actually shave my beard every time I get a haircut (so, let's say every 8 weeks).
What does 'recent' mean, since you have already acknowledged that temporal recency is irrelevant? When am I traveling? What's accurate to my current appearance? What if I started a cancer treatment that renders me unable to grow a beard?
Your flippant reply ignores reality, and these aren't even edge cases.
If you are applying for a new passport where you are needing these photos, the common sense logic from the person accepting/rejecting them would be do the photos look like the person in front of them. No? Reject. Yes? Accept. The flow chart is pretty simple.
The frequency of your grooming habits AFTER receiving a passport are irrelevant to the actual approval of a passport. This doesn't need to be hard.
> do the photos look like the person in front of them
To what ridiculous extent do you take that, though? You must be wearing the same clothes? You must be made-up in the exact same way? I think it's pretty clear that the test should be "is it obvious that the person in the photo is the same as the person in front of you" and somebody with a beard does look like themself, even when they shave that beard.
Of course, this raises other interesting questions: is it OK for you to use a photo of your identical twin?
I'm not a cuber or a puzzle guy or a math guy, but I am curious: how do you know when it's solved? Or is this a 'whoosh' moment and I'm missing the obvious?
when it's solved you look at all blocks on a face from the same angle, so they all have the same color. the problem is, while you are solving you don't know from which angle you need look at one block. you see a red one on one face, and another red one on another, and when you bring them together you realize that you looked at one of them from the wrong angle and they don't actually match. so effectively you need more moves until you find the right block.
>>I wonder though what things look like with super high dimensions.
You need only look to healthcare in the USA. Many, many professionals (some of which you never interact with) handing off patient cases to each other in a very carefully choreographed dance designed to meet legal and regulatory requirements; quality, safety, and care standards; financial responsibilities; and each individual's own personal standards for the quality of care they believe they provide.
In healthcare, we often view risks using the Swiss Cheese Model [1]. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but the system of checks and balances catches most of them before they reach the patient. Prescriber ordered the wrong dose of medicine in the inpatient setting? Pharmacy intercepts and starts making calls or sending messages to verify. Pharmacy approves the order because "that's what they ordered?" Nursing lays hands and eyes to every medicine administered and can 'stop the line' if they deem appropriate. Not to mention the technical safeguards and guardrails (e.g., clinical decision support systems) that are also supporting everyone involved.
But still, failures happen, and they can be catastrophic.
This was just my understanding from seeing my grand-father 40 years ago having to drop his pants to use insulin syringe + needle, to the use today where you can lift your shirt and use a insulin pen in a couple of seconds.
The infection risk is real. What's the relative risk increase regarding death with (with, not from) Hepatitis B infection (not diagnosis, infection) between people who've never injected themselves with anything and injection drug users?
GLP-1 => weight loss => decreased obesity, improved cholesterol, improved blood pressure, improved glucose control, etc. etc. => better survival rates (all causes)
There is no presumed clinically relevant mechanism for GLP-1s to be protective specifically against COVID death. It is simply protective against all death, of which COVID is a type. Healthier people are less likely to die, statistically. The same benefit can be (and is being) said about GLP-1s and heart attacks, heart failure, stroke, kidney failure, etc.
Rather arrogant of you to spew forth unfounded conjecture without even bothering to skim the high-level details of a six paragraph article.
> the protective effect occurred immediately — before participants had lost significant amounts of weight.
> the participants taking the drug were not healthier than the others, said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale and the editor in chief of the journal.
I understand how you came to your conclusion, however what you are quoting is journalism (and it is factually incorrect). I read the actual peer reviewed article.
The patients in the COVID group, _when they got COVID_ had already begun losing significant amounts of weight. The NYT article is 100% incorrect on this matter. See:
>>The change in weight between randomization and reported COVID-19 in patients who died of COVID-19 according to treatment was −6.4 kg in the semaglutide group vs −0.9 kg in the placebo (P < 0.001) group and −8.4 kg vs −1.25 kg (P < 0.001), respectively, in patients who did not die.
They go on to say that there is a correlation between obesity and adverse COVID outcomes:
>>There was an associated increased risk of respiratory decompensation and mortality in patients with COVID-19 and obesity16,17 and plausible biologic hypotheses associating obesity with adverse COVID outcomes, including impaired respiratory status, lower cardiometabolic reserve, or immune hyperreactivity or dysregulation.18
And they double down on the fact that the patients absolutely had weight loss at time of COVID.
>>Accordingly, it is plausible that the decreased risk of infectious deaths is caused by weight loss, which was 5 kg greater in patients assigned to semaglutide compared to placebo by 1 year, the average time to COVID-19 diagnosis after randomization.
I will leave you with the note that nowhere in the journal article do they make any claims whatsoever about semaglutide's effect on COVID outcomes. They exclusively discuss outcomes as related to metabolic health. Semaglutide is a means to an end. The means is weight loss. The end is better health.
I read the JACC article too, and thought the NYT claims were decently supported:
> The second unexpected observation was the lower rate of non-CV death with semaglutide vs placebo, particularly infectious deaths, including in patients with reported cases of COVID-19. The mechanism by which semaglutide is associated with lower CV or non-CV mortality is unknown. Weight loss improves traditional cardiometabolic and kidney risk factors,3 such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, renal function,26 and dysglycemia. However, the blood pressure and lipid reductions in SELECT with semaglutide were relatively small compared with those in dedicated risk factor–lowering trials, and the observed reduction in major adverse cardiovascular events is more than would be expected based on those changes.
You could absolutely be right that body weight is a lagging indicator, and these patients are getting a bigger improvement in systemic inflammation/their hematologic profile than weight loss alone would suggest… but running immediately to that conclusion is major hubris in my book. I don’t think it’s remotely implausible that there are one or more yet-unknown metabolic pathways tweaked by GPL1 agonists that could explain the effect.
You're absolutely right. CEOs (and other execs) need measurable workload, just like the rest of their staff. If you're not measuring it, is the CEO landing deals, or are they just playing golf with other members of the managerial class? The inquiring mind wants to know.
Get over it. Until you earn yourself a seat on the board, your inquiring mind will likely remain inquiring. Not sure why you expect that the CEO needs to justify his/her schedule to rank-and-file employees.
I'm sorry, but you are an order of magnitude out of touch with the average American consumer. Average savings balance under the age of 64 is below $73k.[1] Median savings is below $9k. Most people will, outside of their retirement savings, never have access to an account that has over $100,000 in it.
Never.
Not one day in their life.
Median household income is $80k/yr.[2] Personal savings rate is under 5%.[3] As is noted in the title of the article, there are two Americas.
[1] https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-savings-... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28... [3] https://www.bea.gov/data/income-saving/personal-saving-rate