I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to look for a new doctor in Austin. My current guy is not the best. The appointments are frequent but unhelpful, the office staff isn’t that nice…but the worst thing is that the doctor doesn’t really pay much attention to me or my own personal symptoms. For example, he wants to put me on a bunch of supplements that he puts all his patients on; he even has a stock form that says “take all these things.”
I think part of the problem is his clientele; every other person in the waiting room is older than 65. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I am in my late 20s and I want to be medically treated that way (meaning I want a lollipop after my shots).
I’m sitting here right now waiting for the results of a physical. The other patients are commenting on people’s shoes. One man said “that working girl is wearing tennis shoes” in reference to a nurse who walked by. Another said–in reference to a patient who left: “do you see the way she puts one foot in front of the other, heel to toe? That is a confident woman.”
So in summary, my doctor’s office is in the 1940s.
Anyone know of a good primary care physician in Austin?
I do more than my fair share of complaining, especially with regards to college football–heck, I did some more of it last night on my Alabama friend’s Facebook status, which is never a good idea. I also read a lot of complaints (again, about college football) in the form of articles, tweets, blogposts, etcetera. And by complaints, I don’t mean whining (although there is plenty of whining going on); I mean the expression of valid frustrations that we want to see changed.
But sometimes complaining gets tiresome. We start to repeat the same arguments, and we have to move past that and start offering tangible ideas. This is something I tried to do with the BCS by offering a simple, practical playoff solution, which I have since updated a few times when it made sense to do so. Of course I’m just a guy with a blog readership of about 7 people, so I’m always happy when I read something mainstream that pushes a sensible idea along.
An article in New York Times Magazine from last Friday lays out a five-point plan for fixing some of the problems with college football. I liked the article–and I’m linking it here–because it demonstrates a simple, doable, practical plan for considering college football players to be employees.
There are five elements to my plan. The first is a modified free-market approach to recruiting college players. Instead of sweet-talking recruits, college coaches will instead offer athletes real contracts, just as professional teams do. One school might think a star halfback is worth $40,000 a year; another might think he’s worth $60,000. When the player chooses a school, money will inevitably be part of the equation. For both coaches and players, sweet-talking will take a back seat to clear-eyed financial calculations.
The second element is a salary cap for every team, along with a minimum annual salary for every scholarship athlete. The salary caps I have in mind are pretty low, all things considered: $3 million for the salaries for the football team, and $650,000 for basketball, with a minimum salary of $25,000 per athlete. I would keep the number of basketball scholarships the same, at 13, while reducing the number of football scholarships from 85 to a more reasonable 60, close to the size of N.F.L. rosters. Thus, each football team would spend $1.5 million on the minimum salaries, and have the rest to attract star players.
You can read the rest of it at the link above. It’s a good read. And it’s especially good at moving the conversation past “this system sucks” to “here is the plan.”
Combine athlete compensation with a reasonable postseason, and we’re getting somewhere.
My brother thought it was funny that they had to contextualize their Texas map with a world map.
I’m fooling around with publishing from my phone. This picture was taken on New Year’s Eve, and the saxophonist was playing Auld Lang Syne.
