garbanzo appreciator

The Trump administration put significant limits on the amount you can take out. The last I heard unsubsidized federal loans were capped at $50k total. The average cost of medical school is $275k. You can still take out Graduate PLUS loans but that often requires a credit check and has a higher interest rate insuring you won't be able to easily pay it back. Grad PLUS loans are being eliminated July 1st, 2026. So I'm not really sure how $50k is supposed to cover the $225k shortfall without the option for Grad PLUS loans.

And I know that this will likely happen because it already did. In 2008. When the bubble crashed and banks went under.

I know this because when I transferred to a private college in 2008, taking out a loan with Washington Mutual was my only option to cover the tuition once I met my cap on subsidized loans and a Parent PLUS loan (plus I had a $16k scholarship). WaMu went under a few months later. These three loans were re-sold to pretty much every company under the sun, they had interest rates ranging from 9 to 16% after being resold without my awareness or consent.

I am still paying them off and have been for 16 years. I took out $45k over three loans. After making payments on them since 2010 I now owe $34k. My monthly payments over the years have ranged anywhere from $750 to $1100 a month. When I graduated from medical school in 2020, I refinanced all three of them to have a 2.7% interest rate and a 15 year payment period with SoFi and the ONLY reason I do not owe more money is because my refinancing stipulates that half of my payment has to go to the principle of the loan and half towards interest. Prior to that the payments weren't even covering the interest. Over the last 16 years, I have paid the cost of the initial loans at least three times over. Never touching the principle due to the high interest rates.

I will be paying them off completely within my first few attending level paychecks so I can be free of them for the first time since 2008.

This is what will happen (again, because we learn from nothing apparently) only it will be even more catastrophic because instead of $45k of loans, it will be over $200k.

We are NOT gonna have doctors anymore. Full fucking stop.

Even the most altruistic, driven people are not gonna be willing to chain themselves to fucking Bank of America well into their 80s to pay off these loans, sacrifice their best years (20s-30s), delay having children for financial stability they may never reach, all to get yelled at/threatened with violence by patients and their families and be undermined by fucking tiktok chiropractors because you offered a flu vaccine.

Like, it used to be that if you became a doctor and survived residency you could make a decent living and have good job satisfaction, work decent hours, and generally enjoy life and your job. Now, residency and training is getting longer and longer, insurance companies have managed to eliminate almost all ability to make a living or have any job satisfaction and now you can't even get your loans forgiven to live a comfortable life. And that's not even touching how we are literally criminalizing doctors, like myself, for providing medical care.

There used to be this context of social contracts, right? Like, if you take out taxpayer money to become a doctor and you serve people as a physician, the taxpayers actually get exponentially more value on that investment because they have a doctor who is gonna work for 30+ years and care for them so forgiving the loans makes sense, it also makes moral sense to forgive the loans of people who sacrificed for their country during a pandemic. Companies and billionaires are supposed to give back the tax breaks they get to help improve the country and their communities who support them with, like, benefits and shit. But instead, we've just stopped giving a fuck about the fact that shit is supposed to benefit all of us instead of just rich people. And medicine is no exception.

People in the US, especially those who think a socialized healthcare system is impossible, are gonna have SUCH a rude awakening when in 10-15 years there are ZERO doctors. You think it's a long wait to see a doctor now?

It takes A MINIMUM of 11 years to become an attending board-eligible physician in the US. Financing medical school is going to become impossible starting this next school year. We will start seeing the full effects of these policies in about 4 years. Just in time for a new administration to come in and do nothing to fix it like they have since the fucking 90's when they tied residency funding to fucking Medicare, which they are constantly trying to defund.

Source

Slavery is literally happening now. Police never stopped being slave catchers. People are supporting it now just like they supported it then.

what does fahrenheit have to do with anything, i took these figures from an article that gave its figures in celsius (although i now can't find the article again, that's on me not citing my sources cos i was just talking to myself), but here's a scientific article stating the same figures:

The process of urbanisation alters the thermal balance of an area resulting in an urban heat island effect where cities can be several degrees centigrade warmer than the surrounding rural landscape. This increased heat can make cities uncomfortable places and, during heat waves, can pose serious health risks. This study looked at the role that trees and grass can play in reducing regional and local temperatures in urban areas during the summer within the urban landscape of Manchester, UK. In June and July 2009 and 2010, we monitored the surface temperatures of small plots composed of concrete and grass in the presence or absence of tree shading, and measured globe temperatures above each of the surfaces. The same measures were also recorded at mid-day on larger expanses of asphalt and grass in an urban park. Both surface and shade greatly affected surface temperatures. Grass reduced maximum surface temperatures by up to 24 °C, similar to model predictions, while tree shade reduced them by up to 19 °C.

this is about surface/ground temperature rather than air temperature, if those figures seem high to you: the woodland trust notes that

"However, in a study from Manchester, shade from street trees reduced surface temperatures by an average of 12°C and concrete surfaces shaded permanently by a bank of trees were cooled by up to 20°C in the summer (Armson et al. 2013), although these had no effect on air temperatures." [source]

elsewhere on their website they also reference research in cardiff showing that surfaces in direct sunlight are about 20C higher than surfaces in shade

you might think that that means they don't help in a heatwave, if it's not the air temperature that's impacted, but one thing i really noticed in this one was the impact of the bricks of my flat absorbing heat from direct sunlight during the day -- at night, although air temperatures had cooled, the bricks were still radiating heat like an oven. however, the wall that is shaded by a tree did not absorb as much heat, because it did not get direct sunlight, and therefore that part of the flat did not have this heating effect at night