Tag: civil engineering

The complexity of Death Panels

For those that don’t know, I have asthma. No biggie, I just use my medicine as I should and I’m OK. The symptoms come on, seemingly in a random fashion. In other words, I can’t (nor can doctors) predict when or why I have a flare up and have to have these medicines at hand.

Want to know why that matters to me, and will to you, eventually?

The first issue came about on obtaining the medicines. In an effort to curb the rapid rise of health care costs and to stop evil patients from abusing the Medicare/Medicaid/private insurance industry, Congress and Obama decided to put the crunch on wasteful prescribing and use of medicines.

This is the pharmaceutical side of death panels, by the way.

This is how it works. The doctor sees the patient and prescribes medications that are felt to be needed for up to the next 3 months. At the time of the doctor-patient visit, the doctor is under pressure to prescribe for the symptoms or diseases that need treatment, and in some cases, may need treatment in the next 6-12 months. As I pointed out to my doctor one year, he/we were dead wrong in our predictions on the degree the asthma would affect me that spring. I ran out of medicine, couldn’t get an appointment to see my doctor and had to resort to all manner of probably illegal methods of obtaining what I needed. I survived and we talked about this and he offered a solution.

Horde!

So my doctor’s solution to this congressional-caused chaos was to cheat the system. So I did. I insured that I had several inhalers on hand, in case the asthma symptoms returned at an inconvenient time for my doctor. But, here is a white elephant in the room. Packaged medicines don’t have an infinite shelf life. They expire. The co pay for the drug may be nothing or $75.  Now what does one do? Use the expired drug and hope it works, or at least doesn’t kill you? Or, try to replace the expired drug with an unexpired unit?

The prescribing pharmacy refused to replace the unopened, unused and expired drug.

Enterprising fellow that I am, I decided to trace down the manufacture. In the old days, whenever that was, it was common practice for the pharmacy to replace expired, unused medications. The manufacture of one particular drug that I needed was GlaxcoSmithKline of Canada. I googled (which makes it official that I’m a google doc) GSK and read their online replacement policy.

Great, “No return authorization required.”

Just send the drug(s) to the address provided.  So, I grabbed up the 4 unopened, unused units of medicine and went to the post office. That’s the United States Postal Service. The one that requires me to fill out a United States Customs Service form to declare what I was sending to this foreign country. Oops, another white elephant in the room. As of just recently, they, the USPS, will not ship prescription drugs through their service, by act of Congress. Sorry bud.

Do you know why our august Congress decided to make it illegal to ship prescription drugs?

Well, let me tell you. It’s for a variety of reasons but the last straw is the opioid crisis. Truthfully, a little more than just opioids, but drugs of abuse in general. See, one of the major avenues of illegal drugs into the US is only partly due to the absence of a wall on our southern border. Other major avenues include the USPS, UPS, FedEx and the like. The WWW, the Internet, Google. K2 (synthetic marijuana), anabolic steroids, opioids, Viagra and a host of other medications have been flowing south for years. It’s a cost issue as well as an access issue.

My expired, unused asthma medication cost me a pretty penny in co-pay ($300). It was prescribed by a US doctor, dispensed from a US based pharmacy (probably the largest in the US) that had obtained it from a Canadian based USCS approved importer of pharmaceuticals into the US and I can’t get it replaced through the company approved system because our US Congress thinks I’m importing (exporting?) illegal drugs, or at least facilitating others to do so!

Now we are down to the point of all this.  We’ve all heard the phrase, “Be careful what you ask for, you might get it and then what would you do?”  There are versions in all the major religions and folklore.  In the mid-twentieth century, Robert K Merton, an American Sociologist, coined, “The law of unintended consequences.”  Plagiarism at its best.

Another witticism.  We want to stop illegal drug abuse, illegal immigration, gun violence, rolling stops at busy intersections or whatever.  Just pass another law, that’ll fix it.

Your grumpy Uncle Dave.

Weary.

Alarm clocks, the bane of mankind

It seems that the world has gone crazy.  Divorce is at an all-time high, over 50%.  Mass shootings, suicide bombings, genocide, postal workers going “postal”, and all sorts of murder and mayhem.  What has this world come to?  It seems that these things didn’t use to happen, or at least happen with such frequency.  Why are these terrible things happening?  Is it global warming?  Is it too many nitrates in the foods we eat?

No, its the alarm clock.

There is a direct correlation with the invention of the alarm clock, the increased use of alarm clocks in general and enforced punctuation of time on society and these awful travesties.

The industrial revolution has brought a form of scheduling to society that does not correspond to nature’s calling.  A 7 am – 5 pm workday may be compatible with the circadian rhythm’s of some (larks) but not all (owls).  Throw in 1, 2 or 3 shifts per 24 hours and compatibility is about 100%, not.

So what happens when a human is sleep deprived?  Besides being grumpy, inattentive, short-tempered, confused and generally in poorer health.  There are a lot of opinions as well as differing experiences.  But, because of societies mores, we don’t know because experimentation on human subjects to a degree of permanent damage is not too common.  But, we do know that there a lot of researchers that consider sleep deprivation to be a form of torture.  It has been used since the beginning of time and only recently been outlawed for human rights reasons.

Think of primitive man.  Eat when your hungry and have food, sleep when your sleepy and have shelter.  Yawn, “I’ll go slay the dragon after a couple of hours sleep,” says primitive man safe in his cave.  No supervisor to demand that he do it at 7:18 am every morning, Monday through Friday, so that the rest of the clan can get on with this year’s worth of meat-processing assembly line.

Alarm clocks are thought to have been around since Plato’s time (circa 400 BC).  An alarm clock, most of the modern ones anyway, are very accurate in waking us up at the preselected time we set. Chronologically.  But, they are almost always wrong with regard to our circadian rhythm.  We either wake up before the alarm goes off or we are dragged, painfully, up from deep slumber nirvana to the explosively and  irritatingly obnoxiousness some engineer somewhere thought could not be ignored by most sleeping humans.

Now do this 5+ days a week for 50 years.  About 13,000 times in our life.  It’s no wonder that humans are a bit touchy, at times.

From your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary

Stoned and Stupid

January, 2018

Do you know why California legalized recreational use of marijuana?  No, stop.  Don’t answer that question.  At this point it is a rhetorical question.

Did you know that California is one of the highest state income tax states in the US.  Yeah well, they just instituted a new Gift Tax Relief Program.  Here is how it works.  For every dollar you earn, California normally takes about 13.3 cents.  But under the new Gift Tax Relief Program, if you give that dollar to the state, California will not tax that dollar. What a deal!

The 2018 California state tax rate table shows that for a single head of household earning $0, the effective tax rate is 1%.  (Yup, California is right up there with the Common Core Math Method that is driving everyone crazy with it’s stupidity.)  And the top California state tax rate is supposedly 13.3%.

Oh yeah, and something else you probably didn’t know. The spokesman for the new Gift Tax Relief Program mentioned above commented that what is good for California is good for the US, because California is the driving force for the US economy.

Now we can revisit the original question. Do you know why California legalized recreational use of marijuana? Well yes, the sanctioned sales of all that weed does generate more tax dollars, but…

To enforce this madness, California needs to keep it’s population stoned and stupid.

Just your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave’s opinion.

Our Cars, and Our Guns

December, 2017
They are coming after your guns, but did you know they got your car first?

Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President of the US (1963-69), was responsible.  He felt that there was a need to fix something, as all Presidents do.  Not only did he bring us the “War on Poverty” (which we are loosing/have lost) but he brought us the “War on Highway Disease.”

Betcha ya haven’t heard of that one, have you?  But, you probably are very aware of the effects of this major government boondoggle.

I doubt that ‘ol Lyndon was even aware that highway fatalities were a significant issue and I believe that a staffer told him something like, “Hey Pres, here is something that you can use as a legacy and endear yourself in the liberal heart for evermore.”  Or something to that effect.

He/they felt that there were entirely too many deaths occurring on our nations highways and started a campaign to correct the problem.  Things like raising the drinking age to 21y instead of 18y, seat belts, padded dashboards instead of metal, collapsible steering columns, break-away/collapsible plastic bumpers, head rests and a host of other expensive improvements.  And, crash dummies to test these innovations.

Believe it or not, LBJ started the FARS (sounding very close to farce, but its real).  Fatal Accident Reporting System.

The concept was that cars cause injury and death, not accidents.  Heard anything  like that before?  Its kind of like, “Cars don’t kill people, people kill people” was a phrase that just didn’t make sense to them.  The problem was not that cars were being used inappropriately, such as under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or that poor judgment/skill was a factor in the accidents and injuries.  The problem was that cars were unsafe.  Cars were the inherent problem.

Slowly, very slowly, the effects of this campaign became more noticeable to the masses.  For instance, the crash-test dummies became public figures.  Caricatures of these inanimate objects were used more and more in advertising campaigns in wildly satirical manners.  They became the joke.  People began to realize that there was a price to pay for all these “improvements” in the safeness of their cars.  The masses came to realize that while nice to have, some of these improvements were not worth the increase cost of the vehicle.  These “improvements” became the joke.

Not to change the topic, but a pickle suit or an anti-suicide smock, Ferguson, turtle suit, Bam Bam suit, or suicide gown is a tear-resistant single-piece outer garment that is generally used to prevent a hospitalized, incarcerated, or otherwise detained individual from forming a noose with the garment to commit suicide.  Read straight jacket.
Back to the “War on Highway Disease”, we will soon have the NERF car, the highway version of a pickle suit.  NERF being the trade name owned by Hasbro of the foam impact toys that can be used by children (or children-like adults) unsupervised without risk of harm.  Then our cars won’t be dangerous and traffic fatalities will plummet.

So, when you hear, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” you’ll understand why I get a little nervous.

From your crash-dummy, grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Turtle Beer Rings and Other Edible Thoughts

February 6, 2017

One can immediately see the benefits of using crop byproducts to make beer rings that are edible by both turtles and humans.  Consider the boost to the sagging agriculture industry in the Midwest.  Newly elected President Trump is looking to bring jobs back to America and specifically from the Pacific Rim.  Let’s look at this a little closer.

These edible beer rings, as a novelty, are sure to become a fad.  What do Americans need more than a fad food?  Right!  This will just contribute to the problem of obesity in Americans (despite popular belief the largest consumers of canned beer in the world), and turtles.  So now we have to tackle the problem of turtle obesity.

In my ongoing discussion with my nurse friend about saving the sea turtles, we have a new development.  I’ve written about this before, how I got slammed because I tossed a 6 pack-canned-diet-drink-plastic-ring into the trash without breaking all of the rings.  I was responsible for the death of thousands of sea turtles by just that one act.  Well, she sent me this link to show that maybe I would be off the hook if this invention came to fruition.

http://time.com/4341726/saltwater-brewery-edible-six-pack-rings/

If you scroll down it tells you that a microbrewery in Florida is developing an edible retaining ring thingy for canned drinks that is palatable to humans as well as turtles.  I just had to respond… .

These edible products are made of the fibrous portion of the most commonly grown grains in the Midwest.  Of course, these polysacchsrides are known to cause flatulence and will thereby increase CO2 production doing untold damage to our precious ozone layer.  Think sunburned turtles.  Don’t worry about humans because the smart ones already use sunscreen and the others never have and never will.

But as to the science of this new product, I want to know how many turtles were sacrificed to find just the right product that is a biodegradable substance that is edible for humans and turtles.  If you’ve taken comparative physiology, you know that the differences in the function and physiology of the gastrointestinal tract of Homo sapiens and those of Chelonioideais differ vastly.  Or, maybe you didn’t.

Consider yet, if humans wore ready-to-eat clothing, well it would be embarrassing.  I mean, chewing on your belt is much easier, faster and maybe even better than a Snickers and Diet Coke.  So, now what is going to hold your pants up?  Oh well, they are edible, too.

Lastly, we all know that there isn’t a good deed that can’t be improved upon or expanded.  Consider Reefer Beer that is made out of marijuana and it is essentially legal everywhere.  The munchies are sure to come, the beer rings are edible, cause flatulence and a hunger that is insatiable.  And, the clothes are edible also!

Need I ask the question?

Where ‘o where is our culture going?

More food for thought (pun intended) from your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary