It’s not a bad measure but I don’t think it’s the best, I’m currently working my way through Spirit Level and so I think some measure like the Gini coefficient would be important.

I think that median income, Gini coefficient, poverty rate and something like the human development index would give a decent overall picture. I don’t think a single metric really does the job.

In much the same way that almost no one has perfect physical health, almost no one has perfect mental health.

You don’t need to be a complete wreck to be able to benefit from paying attention to your mental wellness.

Eating well, regular exercise, mindfulness, forgiveness, good sleep practices are all worth practicing whether you feel unwell or not.

I’m a huge advocate of gardening. It gets you outdoors and active, gives a sense of achievement, you learn and improve over time, it’s popular enough that you can get involved in a community, if you’re growing veg it promotes healthy eating.

It should be mandatory.

I’m lucky to have been able to experiment a bit with this as my work is flexible and I’m in a pretty good bargaining position. I also do a fair bit of unpaid work out of hours.

Having either Friday or Monday I’ve found to be little different. Having alternating Fridays and Mondays is pretty awesome, 4 days on, 2 off, 4 on, 4 off.

There’s a lot to be said for a mid week day off too. I’m looking at moving to a new employer and hoping to go negotiate a 3 day week, maybe Mon-Tues-Thur for example which will be heaven if I can pull it off.

It made me laugh, it’s not silly per se but the idea that such an esteemed title as blue zone was earned through pension fraud is hilarious.

The more schadenfreude version is that the idea of these blue zones has been trotted out ad nauseum by longevity nuts for at least a decade and now they look like fools.

I can’t say that I’m very familiar with the UK laws in depth other than that they have been in operation for many years and are generally considered effective.

For referenda there’s no reason you can’t have a publicly funded campaign for yes and no and limit private advertising, we have something like that here in Australia.

Sortition, random selection, when combined with an elected body has a lot of benefits. It has the advantage of having professional politicians with institutional knowledge and relationships while also having a body the that is actually representative of the larger population.

100% agree!

As an addition to this I firmly believe medical marijuana is a phase.

Now I’ve made people angry here’s the nuance.

CBD/THC combinations certainly have a role in some patients with chronic pain, especially where it’s use can avoid or reduce the use of opioids.

There are clear specific uses such as intractable epilepsy where it is clearly the best treatment. It is effective for glaucoma but there are better treatments available.

I’m highly suspicious of marijuana having any role in mental health and there are, in my opinion, no convincing studies published showing that it is useful at all despite the fact that large studies have been done and presumably file-drawed.

The idea that smoking is an appropriate delivery method for a medication when other methods are available is insane. Very few things are as bad as tobacco smoke but inhaling smoke is bad for you.

My prediction is that in 20 years we will have cannabis derivatives in capsules that fulfil the specific purposes and the idea that any doctor prescribed marijuana to smoke will seem insane to younger doctors.

A bicameral legislature, one house elected by mixed member proportional system and the other selected at random from the voting age population. Legislation must pass both houses, if it passed one house but not the other it can go to referendum at the same time as the next general election.

You can also have things like citizen initiated referenda. Campaign finance laws similar to those in the UK are also desirable.

No. This sort of arrogant rubbish needs to be shut down.

In my job - a doctor - I routinely discuss difficult and complex topics with people of all backgrounds and education levels. With very few exceptions people are able to understand difficult topics.

It is my experience that the most difficult people to work with are not ordinary people but those who hold the opinion that everyone else is stupid.

With very few exceptions sortition save participatory deviously have worked well whenever they’ve been tried.

I’m a doctor and my partner is a nurse and the size of the difference is straight up injustice. Join your union and vote for militant leaders that will push for better conditions and salaries. If you don’t fight you lose

I have an idee fixe that I could set up a non profit that bought homes and rented them at a price somewhere between the maintenance cost and the market price. It would make a profit and slowly expand providing more and more affordable housing. Ideally it would start with more than 1 million but doesn’t need to.

Also anything potentially breakable. Crockery, glassware etc. Best to have something that’s already been stress tested in someone else’s home.

Australian doctor here, certainly in Australia There are dozens of jobs for nurses that require minimal or no patient contact.

Things like administration and management would usually require at least a reasonable amount of experience but clinic work is very different to hospital work.

My own fiance works in infection control which is a lot of reviewing charts, advising ward staff on isolation protocol, ensuring staff vaccinations are up to date.

Just quit nursing is a little otp.

I know some nurses that know them pretty good, it’s not that outrageous to know the schedule by heart if you use it most days. I don’t use it most months though.

Nearest thing I can think of is a running file with medical guidelines I use occasionally but not often enough to want to learn, childhood vaccination schedules, colonoscopy follow up timelines, lots of imaging follow up guidelines.

I grew up on a small family farm in southwest Western Australia, both my parents are university educated and expected me to go to uni, but as the oldest son I was also expected to take over the farm.

Did okay in high school, wasn’t all that dedicated of a student. I was accepted into a double degree studying environmental biology and cultural anthropology, because why, not the point was to get an education, not a job. I did fairly well at school but I struggled to get a part time job as a shy 18 year old, I couldn’t get student allowance as I was technically part owner of several million dollars of land through a family trust, and my parents couldn’t support me because of a couple of bad seasons and anyway it’s a pretty asset rich/cash poor business.

Because I liked science I applied for a job as a lab tech at a winery, failed to get that but the offered me a job as a cellar hand and I spent 4 months working 12h shifts. Left that job with more cash in my pocket than I’ve ever had before so I spent the rest of that year travelling around Australia and then Europe.

Running out of money I came back to Australia, I had a friend who was washing dishes at Ayers Rock resort, I joined him. Someone in HR noticed on my resume that I had a truck license and forklift ticket and I was promoted to delivering in-flight catering to the airport. Got sick of the bosses nonsense so a girl I was seeing got me a job doing stargazing tours, spent the next several years in various tourism jobs.

Decided at that point I might as well get that education I was wanting. I enrolled in a double degree again, this time in Economics and International Development, it turns out International Development is code for tedious human geography so I changed to Political Science. During my final year a friend of mine was applying for medicine, I thought that sounded interesting, decided to sit the entrance exam and drop economics as I didn’t want maths heavy, complex Econ to tank my GPA.

Didn’t get into my first choice of med school so moved across the country to study, wound up in the rural and remote medicine track. After doing my hospital time I started working in general practice, I found the culture of GP so disgustingly focussed on manipulating Medicare that patient care took a back seat, also on one occasion I was told I needed to start charging a patient a bigger rate because “having patients like that in the waiting room isn’t a good look”.

I decided to leave GP and return to the public hospital system, a mentor of mine thought that’d be a shame and found a small town practice owned by portly British West country ex-navy surgeon who described himself as a cloth cap socialist. I obviously took that job.

He sold the practice a couple of years later, the new owner is as penny pinching and money grubbing as my first GP employer but I now have the confidence to stand up for my patients, I also now know that management telling individual doctors how to bill is considered price fixing by the ACCC. I also have enough experience and reputation within the community that it is best impossible for them to get rid of me.

I probably would have been happy as a farmer, or as a medical specialist or a surgeon although the training might’ve killed me(at the time it was common for surgical trainees to work 24h shifts). As it is I don’t my time between chronic diseases, preventative care, palliation, paediatrics, mental health, and emergency. I can’t imagine a better place to end up.

I agree and I’d like to add that education systems that treat WW2 as the war to understand is actively harmful.

In part due to characteristics of the war and in part due to how it is taught and remembered.

Just 2 examples

• WW2 can be quite easily presented as having clear good guys and bad guys which makes it fairly unhelpful to study to understand modern conflicts.
• Chamberlain is consistently painted as a naive idiot for trying to prevent a war through diplomacy. Whether or not it was futile in that case isn’t really relevant, when WW2 is the only war most people study in any depth then all attempts at avoiding conflict get characterised as naive appeasement.

I’m by no means an expert but I was briefly obsessed with comparative religion over a decade ago and I don’t think anyone has given a great answer, I believe my answer is correct but I don’t have time for research beyond checking a couple of details.

As a few people have mentioned there is little physical evidence for even the most notable individuals from that time period and it’s not reasonable to expect any for Jesus.

In terms of literary evidence there is exactly 1 historian who is roughly contemporary and mentions Jesus. Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus mentions him twice, once briefly telling the story of his crucifixion and resurrection. The second is a mention in passing when discussing the brother of Jesus delivering criminals to be stoned.

I think it is reasonable to conclude that a Jewish spiritual leader with a name something like Jesus Christ probably existed and that not long after his death miracles are being attributed to him.

It is also worth noting the historical context of the recent emergence of Rabbinical Judaism and the overabundance of other leaders who were claimed to be Messiahs, many of whom we also know about primarily(actually I think only) from Josephus.

This is the correct answer. At some point paediatricians and other folks interested in child development standardised the meaning of infant as above but unless you’re a paediatrician they are completely interchangeable.

I have a personal website, not a business one but if all you want is to display some information and contact details etc then Hover for domain hosting and Squarespace for the website, they are easy to use and relatively cheap for a simple website that looks professional. If you want things like e-commerce or online booking you might want something else although linking to another service from a Squarespace site could work.

I’m currently shifting to self hosting and having troubles with Hover, but for an easy to use service that doesn’t require any technical knowledge it works fine. They also offer email@yourdomain.com which I use as my main personal email with no worries.

Please don’t just have a Facebook page, it becomes a real pain for non-facebook users, especially on mobile, and it makes you look like a complete amateur.