hedgehog
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Post by hedgehog on Mar 18, 2017 11:27:30 GMT
This is the same attitude I take when it comes to wanting to stand for the council. No one asks you to stand for the council, it is decision you make on your own and your employers are the local electorate. I agree with that up to a point, but for most people this wouldn't be their main employment or career, whereas in medicine it certainly would be, with a long training period and an enormous amount of personal responsibility for the wellbeing of others. You could set that against job security, a high demand for your services and the sense that you are saving peoples lives. Medical students should receive a basic income during training, but I don't feel that salaries need to be that much out of kilter with the average wage. Ideally I would want people going into medicine for the right reasons, given job security and treated well and with respect. A society where people are judged by their pay packets is unsustainable, quality of life has to be given more importance.
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iain
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Post by iain on Mar 18, 2017 11:42:44 GMT
I agree with that up to a point, but for most people this wouldn't be their main employment or career, whereas in medicine it certainly would be, with a long training period and an enormous amount of personal responsibility for the wellbeing of others. You could set that against job security, a high demand for your services and the sense that you are saving peoples lives. Medical students should receive a basic income during training, but I don't feel that salaries need to be that much out of kilter with the average wage. Ideally I would want people going into medicine for the right reasons, given job security and treated well and with respect. A society where people are judged by their pay packets is unsustainable, quality of life has to be given more importance. I want the best person available to do my surgery; I don't care about their character.
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hedgehog
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Post by hedgehog on Mar 18, 2017 12:00:54 GMT
You could set that against job security, a high demand for your services and the sense that you are saving peoples lives. Medical students should receive a basic income during training, but I don't feel that salaries need to be that much out of kilter with the average wage. Ideally I would want people going into medicine for the right reasons, given job security and treated well and with respect. A society where people are judged by their pay packets is unsustainable, quality of life has to be given more importance. I want the best person available to do my surgery; I don't care about their character. Do you think the best person will be someone who sees medicine as a vocation or someone who sees it as a way to own a porsche though.
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iain
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Post by iain on Mar 18, 2017 12:09:16 GMT
I want the best person available to do my surgery; I don't care about their character. Do you think the best person will be someone who sees medicine as a vocation or someone who sees it as a way to own a porsche though. Could be either. If you pay higher wages then more people will want to apply. We will have more good people applying, being successful, and becoming doctors. So long as they're good, their motivations are irrelevant to me.
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Crimson King
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Post by Crimson King on Mar 18, 2017 12:15:28 GMT
getting a bit o/t, and being concious of the risk of over generalising, I'm sure most doctors are driven at least initially by a sense of vocation, and a desire to do good. There is also probably more than a bit of liking being well thought of and needed if I'm honest. Given that medical students are right at the top of the A level grade pile they could probably earn as much if not more by making other career choices. Most doctors don't complain about not being paid enough (apart from the specific case when GP partners were taking home less than the salarieds they employed) but what is cited by those getting out are things like belittling from government and the media, work load, especially when combined with complaints that we are not availabe enough, or that GPs are not doing enough about (pick this weeks special interest groups pet disease), things that go to the reason they want to be doctors, not money
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Post by carlton43 on Mar 18, 2017 12:23:52 GMT
I want the best person available to do my surgery; I don't care about their character. Do you think the best person will be someone who sees medicine as a vocation or someone who sees it as a way to own a porsche though. Nearly certainly the latter. He will be very closely focussed on giving absolute satisfaction to me because I shall be paying his fee an I will sue the balls off him if he gets it wrong. The former will work too hard and too long and be too emotional, so will be tired and possibly stressed and more likely to cock up from time to time. Always go for a closely focussed expert who takes his time and charges a lot.
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Post by greenchristian on Mar 18, 2017 14:57:52 GMT
am I the only one who thinks it rather demonstrates how poorly paid our MPs are Am I the only one who thinks that the people who think £74,000 per annum can be described as "poorly paid" are massively out of touch?
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Mar 18, 2017 19:59:40 GMT
I want the best person available to do my surgery; I don't care about their character. Do you think the best person will be someone who sees medicine as a vocation or someone who sees it as a way to own a porsche though. What is actually wrong with you? So far as I understand it, you are a junior manager at a garden centre. Would you care to explain to me precisely what gives you the standing to criticise the motivations of somebody working a night-shift in A&E? You describing anyone as out of touch is brave. I would like no one to be excluded from the political process by being unable to affords it. Now, that comes in many forms. When I was a councilor, the cost in lost overtime, lost promotion prospects, unpaid days off, the constant raffles/sponsorship you can hardly refuse was just about covered by my supposedly massive pay, which amounted to about £12k pa. But then I was in a middle paid job as befitting my middling intellect. The likes of CK or George Osbourne would be doing it out of noblesse oblige. Now the likes of Hedgehog may feel that folk should do politics out of conviction even at a financial cost to themselves, but there comes a point where a person with family commitments has trouble justifying the financial cost to kids for whom the boring social events and the abuse at school seem to provide little to compensate for the lack of a Xbox, skiing holiday, or whatever it is that their peers seem to get out of their parents simply earning money. This is similarly out of touch. £12k pa is massive pay for a councillor (and let's not pretend the job is substantially more demanding in Scotland - unless you're on Bolsover DC, I suspect the average English councillor pulls in way less per hour of actual work done than their Scottish equivalent.) The issue is not the harm suffered by the well-off middle-class councillor who can only go to Normandy instead of Provence for their two-week holiday. The issue is that if your main job is minimum wage, in a lot of places you simply can't afford to be a councillor. There is a reason most of the councillors I know are either under 25, long-term unemployed or well-off and middle class.
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hedgehog
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Post by hedgehog on Mar 18, 2017 20:16:44 GMT
Do you think the best person will be someone who sees medicine as a vocation or someone who sees it as a way to own a porsche though. What is actually wrong with you? So far as I understand it, you are a junior manager at a garden centre. Would you care to explain to me precisely what gives you the standing to criticise the motivations of somebody working a night-shift in A&E? You describing anyone as out of touch is brave. I would like no one to be excluded from the political process by being unable to affords it. Now, that comes in many forms. When I was a councilor, the cost in lost overtime, lost promotion prospects, unpaid days off, the constant raffles/sponsorship you can hardly refuse was just about covered by my supposedly massive pay, which amounted to about £12k pa. But then I was in a middle paid job as befitting my middling intellect. The likes of CK or George Osbourne would be doing it out of noblesse oblige. Now the likes of Hedgehog may feel that folk should do politics out of conviction even at a financial cost to themselves, but there comes a point where a person with family commitments has trouble justifying the financial cost to kids for whom the boring social events and the abuse at school seem to provide little to compensate for the lack of a Xbox, skiing holiday, or whatever it is that their peers seem to get out of their parents simply earning money. This is similarly out of touch. £12k pa is massive pay for a councillor (and let's not pretend the job is substantially more demanding in Scotland - unless you're on Bolsover DC, I suspect the average English councillor pulls in way less per hour of actual work done than their Scottish equivalent.) The issue is not the harm suffered by the well-off middle-class councillor who can only go to Normandy instead of Provence for their two-week holiday. The issue is that if your main job is minimum wage, in a lot of places you simply can't afford to be a councillor. There is a reason most of the councillors I know are either under 25, long-term unemployed or well-off and middle class. We all pay the wages and rely on the services of medical professionals, we are all part of the same society, I am perfectly entitled to express my opinion, just as you are. I don't believe that things necessarily get better through chucking money at them, some things done during Tony Blair's premiership did as much damage to our health service as Jeremy Hunt is currently.
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Post by Arthur Figgis on Mar 18, 2017 20:23:53 GMT
You could set that against job security, a high demand for your services and the sense that you are saving peoples lives. Medical students should receive a basic income during training, but I don't feel that salaries need to be that much out of kilter with the average wage. Ideally I would want people going into medicine for the right reasons, given job security and treated well and with respect. A society where people are judged by their pay packets is unsustainable, quality of life has to be given more importance. I want the best person available to do my surgery; I don't care about their character. I liked my old GP but he was shit- he missed some fairly basic diagnoses with my husband. Whereas my current GP is a twat but seems pretty competent.
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peterl
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Post by peterl on Mar 18, 2017 20:29:55 GMT
MPs are paid £74,000 pa. That is roughly three times the average national wage. It may not be what an investment banker gets paid, but anyone can have a reasonably comfortable lifestyle on such a salary. It is by no means poor pay.
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Post by gwynthegriff on Mar 18, 2017 20:41:52 GMT
I find his views vile, yet adore Lord Prescott. He's a chippy yob who claims a working class background he really doesn't have.
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Post by greenchristian on Mar 18, 2017 20:47:49 GMT
You describing anyone as out of touch is brave. How so?
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Post by gwynthegriff on Mar 18, 2017 20:48:17 GMT
What is actually wrong with you? So far as I understand it, you are a junior manager at a garden centre. Would you care to explain to me precisely what gives you the standing to criticise the motivations of somebody working a night-shift in A&E? A Green working in a Garden Centre? Surely not! Short of being Sales Manager for a Panda Canning Factory I can think of few more inappropriate roles.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 18, 2017 21:18:03 GMT
I find his views vile, yet adore Lord Prescott. He's a chippy yob who claims a working class background he really doesn't have. His dad was a railway signalman, he was a steward on a ship.... upper-class oik!
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Post by gwynthegriff on Mar 18, 2017 22:07:30 GMT
He's a chippy yob who claims a working class background he really doesn't have. His dad was a railway signalman, he was a steward on a ship.... upper-class oik! I always understood that he (father) worked in the District Control Office in Chester.
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Post by Arthur Figgis on Mar 18, 2017 22:13:07 GMT
You describing anyone as out of touch is brave. How so? You define yourself around a book from the fiction section.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 18, 2017 22:46:34 GMT
His dad was a railway signalman, he was a steward on a ship.... upper-class oik! I always understood that he (father) worked in the District Control Office in Chester. By this time, I think John Prescott was in his early teens (or nearly), and his dad had been promoted. Does being promoted mean he was no longer working class?
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Post by Adam in Stroud on Mar 18, 2017 23:27:28 GMT
. Does being promoted mean he was no longer working class? that pretty much how it works, yes. Any other foolish questions? Now I think of it, wasn't that pretty much what John Prescott said of himself? Though on this whole issue of the definition of "working class" (or "middle class, come to that) J D Taylor had a good line in the New Statesman a month or so ago: "This understanding of class as primarily cultural...obscures what is the original and more obvious economic definition of "the working class": those who must work, will work, or who have had to work full time for a basic living." What Taylor missed out is that in the original definition "work" meant physical labour. Now that has gone from most jobs - and where it remains it increasingly means operating machinery rather than using your own muscle power - we have to fall back on the cultural, which was always perhaps the most important element, but which is so much more subjective. We live in the age of subjectivity. Absolutely everything is in the head. Maybe it always was but at least there were marks on the ground (as it were) to refer to.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 18, 2017 23:56:58 GMT
that pretty much how it works, yes. Any other foolish questions? Now I think of it, wasn't that pretty much what John Prescott said of himself? Though on this whole issue of the definition of "working class" (or "middle class, come to that) J D Taylor had a good line in the New Statesman a month or so ago: "This understanding of class as primarily cultural...obscures what is the original and more obvious economic definition of "the working class": those who must work, will work, or who have had to work full time for a basic living." What Taylor missed out is that in the original definition "work" meant physical labour. Now that has gone from most jobs - and where it remains it increasingly means operating machinery rather than using your own muscle power - we have to fall back on the cultural, which was always perhaps the most important element, but which is so much more subjective. We live in the age of subjectivity. Absolutely everything is in the head. Maybe it always was but at least there were marks on the ground (as it were) to refer to. Indeed it was, but I was referring to the original question about his background.
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