Nov

1

Today was a good harvest day in my backyard. I have about 20 pounds of sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I filled two five gallons buckets with tobacco leaves for my year's supply of chew. This is all coming off a poor summer. I harvested maybe five green peppers the whole year, and my canteloupes and cucumbers all came to nothing. This was my first summer in this house, and I have found that every yard has different characteristics for bugs, drainage, etc. that makes the first year difficult.

David Higgs adds:   

True for yard to yard. But potatoes are easy anywhere as long as the soil isn't concrete. And I concur, this summer was the pits — couldn't get okra to grow, the cucumbers were bitter, the tomates got the black spot and my peppers were small. But I will tip my hat to you on your tobacco harvest. Growing that stuff really takes a green tumb! Never would of thought you were a chewer — ever hear of lip cancer?

Oct

10

Wednesday, 19 September 2007, 11:05 GMT 12:05 UK

New burial powers come into force

Graves filled at least 75 years ago can now be re-used under new powers to ease pressure on London's cemeteries.

The plots can be deepened with room for up to six new coffins to be placed on top of the older remains.

I don't want to be buried. Sooner or later, somebody is going to dig you up. Plus, I think its weird when people talk to gravestones, and I don't want my kids to feel guilty for not doing it.

Cremation has its problems. For example, my great grandmother was cremated back around 1990. My aunt took her ashes. One day a package showed up at my dad's office, and it was a bag of ashes in a carboard boxes. It's been shuttled around ever since, and I think is in my dad's basement.

Also, if you go into an urn, someday one of your relatives is going to knock you over and feel guilty about it.

Cremation could be cool under circumstances. I think it would be cool if McSorleys mixed my ashes in with the sawdust on the floor.

But ideally, I want a Viking funeral pyre.

Oct

4

Triage TagOverheard at the deli last week, paraphrased to give you the gist of the conversation. Two local hospital administrators:

Hospital admin #1 "No, it's good these people are coming to us"
Hospital admin #2 "What are you talking about — they have no insurance"
Hospital admin #1 "Right, so AHCS picks up the tab"
Hospital admin #2 "Oh yeah, right"
Hospital admin #1 "And the state pays faster and never argues unlike those a$$h&les at Aetna, United and Pacificare"
Hospital admin #2 "Great"
Hospital admin #1 "You just triage them a little lower in the ER to keep the paying customers happy"

J.T. Holley responds:

Here's my neighbor's response; he's a ER doc here in a Richmond, VA hospital commonly referred to as the "Gun and Knife Club of Richmond."

Probably goes on, but it is illegal and if anyone had good data that this happens, then that hospital is at risk of losing every last Medicare/Medicaid dollar. Usually not worth that big of risk. EMTALA law forbids the ER triaging based on insurance status.

There are pretty straightforward criteria to triage patients based on vital signs, chief complaint, etc. It really isn't worth the risk to get you're a$$ sued or have an EMTALA violation for one or two "satisfied" customers.

Don't know who those admins were, but they sound like dumba$$es as well as unethical — both no big surprise.

Tom Ryan extends:

RaytheonIt's not about the healthcare, it's about the money. Healthcare is just a small microcosm of the bigger picture problem which basically boils down to this: Once you create a system where a substantially large portion of your population derives their paycheck either directly from the government (in my community that would be the University, the Air Force base, the Border Patrol, the list is endless) or say one degree removed (again, in my community one of our biggest employers is Raytheon), once that group gets large enough as a proportion of the total population, you reach a turning point from which there is no going back. That group will simply just keep voting in their economic interest and expand like a virus. More programs, more jobs, more money, bigger budgets, larger departments, War on Drugs, War on Immigration, War in Iraq, War on Terror — Now we will have a war on healthcare and a government sponsored healthcare industrial complex - the list is endless and expanding. It will never stop until we are bankrupted and have to show ID just to get across town. My friends who call themselves "conservative" are just as responsible for this expansion of government as the liberals. They may be "conservative" in a gods-guns-gays way of thinking, but in my book they are proponents of big nanny government just like the liberals.

Gary Humbert explains:

Rent-seekers become successful by rewarding special interests at the expense of the general public, since the amounts are huge to the special interests, but the costs are spread around over the general public.

Hillary's mistake the first time was to take on the healthcare industry as a whole.  She will not make the same mistake again. She will simply raise taxes to spend on a nationwide health insurance program, getting industry to agree by promising to spend a ton of money on them.

Sep

24

My in-laws, who own cotton land near Lubbock, report local buyers are going direct to farmers to try to contract with them to secure their cotton.  This happens only when there is great fear of buyers' inability to deliver to their end users. My uncle-in-law says it's been years since there was this much activity by the buyers.

Sep

11

16:03 *PIMCO SAYS EL-ERIAN TO RETURN AS CO-CEO, CIO FROM HARVARD

Perhaps he found that the 20% returns of last five years were in fact the result of pushing into illiquid markets, with an amount of capital that allows one to set prices. I don't know that to be the case, but the opportunity is there, and I wouldn't want to be around when the house of cards collapses.

Archives

Resources & Links

Search