BBO Discussion Forums: The Totally Useless, Non-Scientific BBO Opinion Poll for Current Events - BBO Discussion Forums

I found a couple of different trials mentioning this 3.3 hour figure but I am guessing you are referring to this one, which is a study of 2687 patients after filtering. As far as I can tell, one of the selection criteria is that their initial usage of the CPAP device was at least 4 hours per night for the first 2 years. Thus it is something of a mystery how the mean after 12 months can be 3.5 hours per night but presumably the usage in the first year was far enough above 4 hours to allow for this drop off. The report also acknowledges that the long-term mean of 3.3 hours per night may not be enough to show positive cardiovascular effects and mentioned some analysis of mild positive outcomes for patients of >4 hours per night. It also supported the primary benefits of CPAP for sleep apnea and "quality of life measures".

It does seem clear that some further studies need to be done to determine the benefits and side-effects attached to different levels of use though and perhaps also between usage at the start of the night (mostly deep sleep) against the end of the night (mostly REM sleep) and for different groups of patients (obese, diabetes, high-risk, etc).

Naturally the CPAP and sleep apnea groups are less than impressed with reports such as this one. It seems fine as far as it goes. You just have to accept that the scope of the trial was quite limited and not take the headline at face value. Sadly, as this is an area with less money in it than some others, it might take a while before we can obtain a full analysis.

Even a casual observer might ask "How many of the subjects used the CPAP throughout the night, (almost) every night, and how did it all go for those who did?".

Free trade is not really free trade. Is country a makes a potato for a dollar but taxes that potato $0.40 and has an additional $0.10 Environmental Protection cost then the end result is that the potato cost a dollar fifty to make.

If country B cost the same a dollar to make a potato but has a $0.10 tax and no environmental costs then that potato cost them $1.10 to make. Free trade then makes country a on an unequal playing field.

Country I could put a tariff on the potatoes to ensure that there is an equal playing field. That might seem unfair. But perhaps the end result is the country be should increase their tax rate or the country a should decrease their tax rate to have an equal playing field. One could say them that the free-trade causes a tendency toward lower tax rates. It also causes a tendency to competitively lower environmental costs.

Those who want to reduce taxes and those who want to increase environmental expenditures but do not want to have tariffs to equalize the playing field end up creating a problem. This will only work if country a has incredible Machinery that maximizes the productivity of its workers or if country a find a way to pay his workers less. Free trade offers the ability however for the corporations to not worry about country a or country B and just make the potatoes in Country b.

The end result seems to be that the thing/person harmed to equalize the quote free trade is the country b environment and the country a workers.

This seems so obvious and it should have seemed obvious from the get-go. We as a country have known this for a long time as have all countries. So why do this?

It's A Dance with the Devil. The Democrats get to appease the environmentalists by blaming other countries for environmental problems but bragging about how good they do in their own country. They also enable the corporations to make lots of money off of the foreign workers so that the tax rates can be kept at a high level. Big kid votes because they provide goodies to the displaced workers even though the goodies are not as good as what they would get if they had a real job. Then they get to yell at the Republicans for making this so bad.

The Republicans get to have their corporation to make lots of money and appease the displaced workers with lower priced products.

US manufacturing is at an all-time high, but is so efficient that many fewer jobs are needed. The problem is the increasing inequity in the distribution of the wealth created by that efficiency. Countries with much less wealth provide health care for all and free college tuition for all (even for US students).

Trump's proposals to eliminate inheritance taxes and cut taxes further for the rich will only make the problem worse. The real solution is to use some of the US wealth to provide good education (of all types), to provide health care for all, to rebuild the infrastructure, and to make sure that everyone who works can have a decent life. That's a political problem completely within the borders of the US.

Of course those who siphon off almost all of the wealth want to direct the attention of voters elsewhere: to immigrants and trade deals. Trump has been a con man all of his adult life, and he's at it now.

From time to time I express skepticism of the reliability of data based conclusions. Robert Samuelson has an column supporting this skepticism. I applaud his agnosticism about what conclusions can be reliably drawn.

Becky and I discuss medical things from time to time, we are of that age. Our GP, or basic doc, or whatever he is called, has recently separated from his group practice. As a side effect, he has dumped the online medical records that the group practice was using. Thank you doc! God forbid that anyone make any decision on the data that squatted, and refused to be dislodged, in those files. He has a new system, hopefully better. It would be impossible for it to be worse.

The Post has an article [link fixed] today about a study that supposedly casts doubt on the effectiveness of CPAP usage in preventing strokes, heart attacks, and so on. This was of direct interest to me since I use a BPAP machine (BPAP is a variant on CPAP). Some paragraphs down we find:


What?!?!!
Is this 3.3 hours an average or was it a required part of the study? It would be bizarre for it to be a required part of the study, to go around disconnecting the machine after 3.3 hours. Bizarre and irresponsible, both on simple general good sense and on previous studies that show partial usage doesn't seem to do all that much good. So I suppose it is an average. But this is a five year study of over 2,000 people. Did it not occur to anyone to see if those who use the mask for the full night (as I do) had better results than those who used it for only a couple of hours?
And who says 3.3 hours is consistent with the real world? And what does it mean? Some people get the machine and don't use it at all. If half use it for 8 hours and half don't use it, that averages to 4 hours. Does anyone think that this is equivalent to the entire groups each using it for 4 hours?

Whether the subject is Economics or Medicine, whether the article is in the Post or elsewhere, journalists report some numbers that someone gave them and then maybe they repeat, often inaccurately or incompletely, what someone said these numbers mean.

I have come to view my skepticism as well founded. No doubt I can find data to support this view.Or, if I prefer, data to refute this view. Or any other view. About anything.

I do not mean to disparage the use of data in the search for truth. I am recommending caution.

Can we get you to run for office?

Can we get you to run for office?

The future of the economy may be better explained once you accept that more than 50% of us do not work full time outside the home. I am not sure how soon we will reach 90% as one poster worried about but 60-70% seems very possible within our or our kids lifetime.

My son, who is now 48, now works in two part-time jobs (20 hours + 12 hours) and one other zero hour contract, and his wife works part-time (24 hours) too, to keep a roof over their family's head (3 teenage children). Both have degrees, and both are now working for less than £2 above the minimum wage. They have a mortgage, one car, a cat and a dog. They have just one yearly two week camping holiday in the UK - the last time they had a family holiday abroad (Spain) was 7 years ago. My son sold the second small car and now cycles 10 miles to one job (and 10 miles back too.) They are not wasteful with money, shop economically, and do not have all the luxuries (big TVs, latest phones, free housing) that people on social benefits seem to possess. I admire their fortitude, but things would be easier if both still had full-time jobs that paid well. Both have suffered redundancies over the past 15 years, and now have to tailor their lives to what work is available. That's the reality of living in the UK, as some of his friends have suffered similar hardships, one ending up homeless through no fault of his own. Bringing in cheap labour from European countries has made some people very wealthy at the expense of the indigenous population. If that how capitalism works, and I confess I don't take much interest in politics, then I doubt if I'll ever vote Conservative again. I always believed the Conservative Party were there to support decent, hard-working families: how wrong I was!

This article has some interesting points made by a billionaire (not Buffet) about inequality.

This article is the opinion of another billionaire that inequality is dangerous.

I often feel that by now we all know each others views so well that we can predict what we will see. Most definitely including me. But them's the breaks. So:

The bad part, for me, about people having a great deal of wealth is not that they can buy yachts but that they can buy Congressmen, Congresswomen, Senators, and so on.. I rarely eat out in D.C, just about everyone who does is on an expense account trying to impress a client and this drives up prices out of my comfort zone. Big deal, I have a garden, I eat at home. But I really think it is a huge problem for the zillionaire class to have the extreme power that they have.

For everyday living, the problem is that many people simply do not have enough. They work their butts off and they still come up short. This is connected to the fact that some people have too much, but it is not the same thing. Related, but not the same. So if the problem is the hardship of many, then we need to address that. The pitchforks Hanauer imagines will not be because Hanauer buys a yacht, or two yachts, or eats at $300 per dish restaurants, they will come because people are putting their kids to bed hungry.

Introduction
The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers
paid vacation. European countries establish legal rights to at least 20 days of paid vacation per year,
with legal requirements of 25 and even 30 or more days in some countries. Australia and New
Zealand both require employers to grant at least 20 vacation days per year; Canada and Japan
mandate at least 10 paid days off. The gap between paid time off in the United States and the rest of
the world is even larger if we include legally mandated paid holidays, where the United States offers
none, but most of the rest of the world's rich countries offer at least six paid holidays per year.
In the absence of government standards, almost one in four Americans has no paid vacation (23
percent) and no paid holidays (23 percent). According to government survey data, the average
worker in the private sector in the United States receives only about ten days of paid vacation and
about six paid holidays per year: less than the minimum legal standard set in the rest of world's rich
economies excluding Japan (which guarantees only 10 paid vacation days and requires no paid
holidays).
The paid vacation and paid holidays that employers do make available are distributed unequally.
According to the same government survey data, only half of low-wage workers (bottom fourth of
earners) have any paid vacation (49 percent), compared to 90 percent of high-wage workers (top
fourth of earners). The same is true for part-timers, who are far less likely to have paid vacations (35
percent) than are full-timers (91 percent). The problems of low-wage and part-time workers are
magnified if they are employed in small establishments, where only 69 percent have paid vacations,
compared to 86 percent in medium and large establishments. Even when low-wage, part-time, and
small-business employees do receive paid vacations, they typically receive far fewer paid days off
than higher-wage, full-time, employees in larger establishments. For example, low-wage workers
with a vacation benefit received only nine days of paid vacation per year in 2012, compared to 16
days of paid vacation for high-wage workers with paid vacations. If we look at all workers ― those
who receive paid vacations and those who don't ― the vacation gap between low-wage and highwage
workers is even larger: only four days for low-wage workers, compared to 14 days for highwage
workers.

Capitalism with no bounds is not about assessing blame - but it should be about redistributing the benefits to all that contribute.

Right, that sounds fair enough, so what do you suggest should happen to those who for one reason or another, don't or can't contribute? And what constitutes contributing?

It's hard to see parenting being given much credit by politicians. Although they all give lip service to it the details of raising healthy children in body and mind are hardly a high priority or more parents would be able to choose to stay home and do it, without the stress of income vs expenses being almost overwhelming if they end up..by choice or circumstance,in that situation. Notwithstanding the shrieking of some modern feminists, not every woman..or man, for that matter..prefers to go to whatever job they can find instead of raising their kids.

Someone above mentioned, staying home to look after aging parents. What about those aging parents? Or a severely disabled child? Or someone with, say schizophrenia? You could say that the parents contributed previously, but the disabled child... or the person who is psychotic...and at what point does the soldier who comes home with ptsd become a liability instead of a "hero"?

This election was lost four and six years ago, not this year. They [Republicans] didn’t start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.