Divemedic

Our Politicians are Criminals

One of the Democrat Senators from Minnesota, Nicole Mitchell, was arrested inside of her stepmother’s house during what appeared to be an attempted burglary. When caught, her statement was “Clearly, I am not good at this.” Below is a copy of the probable cause affidavit:

Because of the recent history with my mother and her husband, I can sympathize with her, even if I don’t agree with how she handled it. However, she didn’t just take stuff that belonged to her deceased father. She was stealing other things like laptop computers, and that is where my sympathy ends.

By Divemedic, ago

Your Money

This man racked up $250,000 in student loans going to college getting a Masters Degree in Music, Violin Performance. Then he chose to live a life pursing music as a professional meditation musician, but it didn’t pay him enough to make the payments on his student loans. In his own words he did not want to give up his dream of being a musician to get a job that would allow him to pay off his loans. (This is the perfect example of a useless college degree.) Here is his Linked In description of his job:

I am a meditator, musician, and web developer that is interested in finding ways these things can be combined and applied to make people’s lives more peaceful and fulfilling. My work in music technology and longterm cultural outreach has taught me just how great an impact opening perceived barriers to knowledge can have on individual lives and communities. It is meditation and this impact that motivate all of my work.

His “web developer” credentials, as posted on Linked In? He attended a single 18 week web developer boot camp. His job as a musician is for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in NYC:

I develop chamber music focused classes for public school children that introduce general musical concepts and highlight its contemporary relevance.

He also gives private violin lessons to kids that want to be just as successful as he is.

His student loan debt was just wiped clean by Joe Biden. With your tax dollars.

Now he is planning a sabbatical to study with his meditation teacher in India. It’s amazing what a $250,000 gift from the taxpayers of this country will enable a spoiled New Yorker to do with this spare time.

Charles Cook from the National Review summed this up for me, and I can’t say it any better:

This year, though, I feel unusually great about paying my taxes, and for that I have to thank a 49-year-old American named Joel Lambdin, who, thanks to President Biden’s remarkable generosity with other people’s money, was recently given $250,000 from the Treasury as a reward for being a financially illiterate dilettante. As Business Insider reports, Lambdin left graduate school in 1998, but, since then, he has chosen to make almost no money. “The only way he could make a significant dent in his student loans,” Business Insider notes, “was by switching careers.” Lambdin “didn’t want to do that because he loved working in music.” So he didn’t.

He loved working in music so much, he didn’t want to pay his bills. Now that he has no bills, music can go fuck itself, he’s going meditating in India.

By Divemedic, ago

Work Pharmacy

I work for a hospital, and I think all of my readers know that. With that being the case, our employee insurance requires us to use the hospital’s mail in pharmacy to fill all prescriptions. That pharmacy is run by corporate, and they suck royal donkey balls.

I am a diabetic and have been taking Mounjaro for the past year. In order to get the drug, you need to get approval. To get that approval, you need to prove that you have tried other remedies for at least a year, and that those remedies failed. I met that requirement, as I have been a diabetic for over 15 years, have taken those other medications, and they no longer work. So it was approved, but it took weeks.

This pharmacy sends prescriptions 90 days at a time. When it is time to refill that prescription, it’s always a hassle. You would think that a pharmacy owned by a hospital would be decent, but it isn’t. I suspect that this is because they are trying to control costs at the expense of their employees. Let me explain:

Now, every time I go to refill, there is always an issue. They claim that they are out of Mounjaro, and try to convince me to switch to being an insulin dependent diabetic. I know how fragile diabetics are once they go on insulin, so I always have to fight them on it. The first time, they blamed it on a supply shortage caused by people using it as a weight loss drug. So this time, I ordered the refill a month ago.

It wasn’t filled because they had an issue with my credit card over the $25 copay. I corrected that, and now they are saying that the medication is out of stock. I just took my last dose, and my next one is due in six days. Since it must be shipped to me, it has to ship by Friday. Any bets on whether or not they make it? Assholes.

It’s complete bullshit. My last hospital required us to use the in hospital lab for all of our lab work, and I suspected that they were doing that so the bosses could see your medical history.

If you have a problem with modern healthcare, it shouldn’t be with the actual workers. The administrative bean counters are the problem.

By Divemedic, ago

Lessons from History

About 20 years ago, I was sent to participate in an anti-terrorism exercise at the Disney Resort complex. The idea was that they used off duty personnel to respond to a simulated terrorist attack at one of the Disney resorts. Some of the people were there as responders, and some were chosen to be the terrorists. They had government employees who had been voluntold to be resort guests and serve as victims.

I was chosen to staff the one ambulance that they had for “real world” injuries, in the event that someone really got hurt, so they wouldn’t have to stop the exercise. It was great, because I got to stand around and learn, without having to worry about doing anything.

It started with a mass shooting. The initial response went well. Initial officers arrived, then SWAT, and SWAT began clearing the area. No shooter had yet been found. Then the command team got there and began coordinating everything. All was going smoothly, and according to procedure.

An hour into it, the exercise had to be stopped and then restarted because the OPFOR had figured out where the command post was likely to be (the parking lot where there were few cars) and placed a command detonated IED there. It wiped out most of the command post. The two guys who had command detonated the device (a car bomb) then strolled through the command post and shot every single person who was left.

The incident commander complained that it was unrealistic for terrorists to know where his CP was going to be, so they started over.

That entire thing reminded me of the tabletop exercise that the Japanese had carried out in May of 1942, where the Japanese Navy was wargaming out the Midway attacks. Admiral Yamamoto hosted the exercise and invited all of the senior commanders involved in the Midway operation to participate.

His chief of staff ran the game and served as the chief umpire. The purpose of the exercise was to fight out the battle on paper first and expose any flaws in the Japanese plan so they could be corrected before launching the actual operation. The game was treated as a formality, and not a serious tool.

The player controlling the U.S. forces sent a flight of land-based bombers from Midway to attack the carriers. The game umpire rolled a pair of dice to determine how many hits were scored. The result of nine was enough to sink two carriers, Akagi and Kaga. The chief umpire did not believe the Americans would be so aggressive. Even if they were, he was confident the Japanese carriers would be up to the task of defending themselves, so he overruled the umpire and reduced the result to just three hits, meaning that Akagi was still afloat.

Every operation carried out by the Japanese Navy from the invasion of Midway and the Aleutians, down to the assault on Johnston and Hawaii, was carried out in the games without the slightest difficulty. The Imperial Navy handily won every engagement in these tabletop games. This was due to the conduct of Yamamoto’s Chief of Staff, Rear Admiral Ugaki, who was the chief umpire and who frequently intervened to set aside rulings made by the umpires.

How can we apply those lessons to the current day? I leave that to your own imaginations.

By Divemedic, ago

It Isn’t Gouging

Peter and I usually see things from a similar viewpoint, and I generally respect and listen to his opinions. Not this time. He is saying that:

Businesses aren’t pricing their goods according to what they pay for them, plus a fair and reasonable profit.  Instead, they’re pricing them as high as they think they can get for the product. 

Then goes on to call this “price gouging. This is where I disagree with Peter.

Pricing things according to what people will pay is what everyone does. Let me explain. Let’s say that paying your bills costs you $40,000 per year. Adding on 10% for retirement savings, and 10% for discretionary spending would make your total $48,000 per year.

Now let’s say that your employer offers to pay you $60,000 per year. Do you say, “No thanks, boss. I only need $48,000, so me taking more would be unfair and unreasonable.”

Of course you don’t. So why would you expect a business to act any differently?

Prices are set by supply and demand. If customers are willing to pay $7 for an apple, then businesses will sell apples for $7. That’s what Whole Foods is selling apples for in Peter’s example.

Now let’s say that another business, call them Winn Dixie, is selling apples for $1. Now consumers have a choice: they can go get the $1 apples at Winn Dixie, or they can go get them from Whole Foods.

So why don’t consumers go to Winn Dixie, rather than Whole Foods? There are a number of reasons, which can include what the consumer perceives as the quality of the apples at Whole Foods, or perhaps the shopping experience (maybe one store is cleaner), or other issues like organic foods, the store supports causes or social issues that the consumer also supports, or any number of reasons not directly related to the costs of the apple itself. In other words, Whole Foods isn’t just selling apples. They are selling a shopping experience that some consumers are willing to pay more for.

That’s a choice we each get to make every time we purchase something. That isn’t gouging, it’s the market at work. Even when something IS considered price gouging, I maintain that it isn’t unfair. Let’s say that a hurricane hits my area. The law says that charging more than normal for products like gasoline is price gouging, and that is illegal.

Let’s say that before the hurricane, I was selling fuel for $4 a gallon, but buying it for $3 a gallon. So what happens when the hurricane hits, and everyone wants fuel? I could continue to sell fuel until I run out, then wait for more fuel to come in from my regular supplier, in which case no one gets fuel from that point forward.

Or, I can pay someone to haul more fuel in, even though it takes longer, and I may have to outbid someone else to get that supply from a different supplier. So now I can buy fuel at a higher price, pay more to have it hauled in on a chartered truck, and my cost to have the fuel delivered is now $7 per gallon. The only problem is that the law says that it is price gouging for me to sell that fuel for more than the $4 I was charging before the storm. So I stay home and don’t sell any fuel. Now there is none available at any price.

How did that help anyone, except the 10 guys who came to my establishment before the storm and bought up all of my fuel in anticipation of a shortage?

So how does the market respond? The black market comes in and makes a new, underground market. Now those ten guys are selling fuel for $20 a gallon because they are the only ones with any gasoline to be had.

This is why price controls cannot, and will not ever, work. It’s called the LAW of supply and demand for a reason.

By Divemedic, ago

Thought Exercise

Imagine that the US is in a second civil war. The left thinks that the military would simply use jets, tanks, and nukes to wipe out its own citizens. We all know that nukes are useless against your own people. Jets and tanks are only useful if the opposition is stupid enough to stand around in large groups, waiting to be wiped out.

What if instead, those opposition forces are doing things like this? The cops are not going to catch the people who did it. The fact that airports are “one of the most heavily surveilled areas possible” doesn’t matter, because the wires that were cut are more than 2 miles from the nearest terminal. Surveillance doesn’t extend that far in most cases.

Imagine that there was a simultaneous cutting of similar lines at four or five major airline hubs all over the nation. It would cause nationwide delays that could stretch for days.

This sort of action is something that the military calls a “force multiplier.”

By Divemedic, ago

Trump Wins Again

Trump’s Presidency will turn out to have been one of the most positively impactful events in recent history. The fact that he was able to put a right leaning SCOTUS in place is going to have a positive impact on the US for decades. In a landmark 9-0 ruling on Wednesday that you will never hear about in the media, the US Supreme Court has undercut all DEI-based discrimination, sending the Marxists into a tizzy. The case Muldrow v. St Louis, was decided on April 17 and can be read in its entirety here.

The US Supreme Court’s ruling that a St. Louis police sergeant can sue over a job transfer she claims was discriminatory because of DEI policies lays the foundation for legal action against employers who push discrimination against white people in job hiring, work assignment, and promotion.

That’s right, those “diversity-preferred” job postings, the practice of passing over whites for promotions, discriminatory job transfers, pushing unfair diversity trainings, etc…all of these are now legally actionable. The ruling was championed by human rights groups as “an enormous win for workers,” but has lawyers for companies like Disney warning that it could have a chilling effect on employers’ diversity initiatives.

Disney’s “Pale and Male is Stale” policy is a prime example. Disney has allegedly used it to drive out white animators by giving them the worst assignments, even though they have the most experience, skill, and seniority, in order to make the job humiliating enough that they quit…which many of them have done. The same companies argue that there is ‘good discrimination’ and “bad discrimination’, that white people should be purposely disadvantaged to pave the way for diversity. The lawyers stated that the decision will ‘complicate’ DEI programs and limit their ability to discriminate against white men. (Good) The Supreme Court torpedoed these claims, re-asserting that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law.

By Divemedic, ago

Warning Signs

Joe Biden’s economy is claiming more victims. I have been saying that restaurants don’t just compete against each other, they compete against home kitchens. When it becomes too expensive to dine out, people begin cooking more at home. That is what it looks like is happening.

Just in the last year, franchisees and chains under the umbrellas of Red Lobster, Chipotle, Taco Bell, Tijuana Flats, Burger King, Hardees, Popeye’s, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Denny’s have filed bankruptcy.

It’s getting worse.

By Divemedic, ago