Divemedic

Working

Working a tough shift this week because I get home just in time to go to bed and get up to do it again. Makes posting tough. I’m working with pediatric patients this week. My last shift looked like this:

  • a 14 year old with developmental delays who admitted to being sexually active. Her mother knew and was OK with it. She was my sickest patient of the day.
  • an entire family (2 adults, 3 kids aged 9 months to 8 years) who came in with body lice because they are homeless
  • a 15 year old and her mother who came in with bed bugs from the long stay motel they are living in
  • A 3 year old who fell out of bed and broke her collarbone.
  • A 17 year old who had a bruise across his abdomen from a dirtbike accident
  • a 16 year old with chest pain that gets worse when he breathes in
  • plus a parade of sniffles, fevers, and sneezes that cause screaming children, which are the reason why I don’t like working pediatrics, but it’s my turn. I think I had around 25 or 30 patients overall, but I lost count. Most were easy- in and out in about 90 minutes or so.

One of the things that makes pediatrics hard is that all of the medication dosages are weight based. Because of that, it’s easy for people to screw up. Last night, 5 minutes before my quitting time, a Doctor ordered medication and discharge orders for a child. The dose appeared to be too large. I sat down and did the math. This is what my day was like:

The Drug Reference says that the dose is supposed to be 20-50 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day, divided into three doses. The ordered dose was 1080 milligrams to be administered to a 5 year old child who weighed 27 kilograms. It required calls to the pharmacist, messages to the doctor, cancelling the original order, getting a new order, administering the medication, returning the excess to the pharmacy, processing the discharge, and I finally got off work, 30 minutes past my scheduled time.

Nursing.

By Divemedic, ago

Fear

Below is a sign that governments know that an armed population is far more difficult to defeat. They are afraid of their citizens until a greater threat presents itself.

The truth is that an armed populace can’t be enslaved or subjugated. The most that an enemy can do is try to wipe them out- and whether that enemy is an outside force or their own government, an armed people is a formidable foe.

By Divemedic, ago

AI Knows the Truth

The left has their panties in a bunch because Amazon’s AI system has been telling people that the 2020 election was rigged. They have since overrode the AI and instructed it to no longer believe this. It isn’t as though the fine people at Time magazine didn’t already admit that this is exactly what happened.

They claim that they are trying to keep the AI from making false claims. What they are really doing is trying to stop even computer systems from realizing and distributing fraud. .

By Divemedic, ago

Iran Hostages and Democrats

Stop me if you have heard the story about a Democrat President being made to look like a fool when Iran takes some hostages. This post is your reminder that, on September 11, Biden gave the Iranians $6 billion in ransom in exchange for the return of 5 American hostages. Republicans at the time criticized the President for cutting the deal and declared that trouble would result.

Now it comes as no surprise that the money was used to fund terrorist attacks.

Biden was played for a fool by Iran. Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel… next up is Taiwan.

By Divemedic, ago

The Camps are Coming: Time Grows Short

HRC says that Trump supporters should be put into “reeducation camps.” She is citing the Republicans who are going along with Democrat talking points as being pragmatic enough to make this happen. Watch this segment. It’s worth a few minutes of your time, trust me. If you aren’t terrified and angered by this, you aren’t paying attention.

MAGA extremists, according to her, are taking their marching orders from Trump, and are the tail wagging the Republican dog. According to her, Trump supporters have been psychologically and emotionally manipulated and need to be reprogrammed in order to be brought back to their senses. It’s a cult, according to her, and Trump being defeated will permit Republicans to get back to fighting about issues among themselves. She goes on to say that a formal deprogramming of these extremists needs to happen.

She says that Democrats need to empower the “right people” within the Republican party. Make not mistake, what she is talking about is the complete takeover of the government by ensuring that both parties are singing the same note. This means that they are going to put Trump into prison or kill him before eliminating anyone in the Republican party who doesn’t vote in the approved manner. Then, they are coming for the individuals who disagree with the uniparty line.

The fact that mainline Democrats are talking like this is quite frightening. That they are willing to come right out and say what they are going to do is an indication that they are certain of a win, and they don’t care who knows it. When a person says that they are willing to put Americans into concentration camps, they need to be believed.

Nothing will make me angrier and more likely to use violence in opposition than people knocking on doors and hauling their political opponents off to reeducation camps. You want to see the violence begin? Do it.

People have called me a paranoid asshole for over 30 years because I have taken the position that gun ownership means being able to resist government tyranny. Now the left is coming right out and telling you their plan to haul you off for reeducation. Do you still think I am paranoid?

If you still don’t believe it, why not? They have been doing it to the J6 defendants for years.

To the police and others who would be the ones enforcing this: Are you willing to die to take us to the camps? Because I am willing to die to stay out of them, and I will take as many of you with me as I can. I hope to make it as expensive as possible.

To everyone: Please take this as one of the final warnings. Trump is delaying them for now. All of their attention is focused on defeating him. Once he is out of the way, it won’t be long before they start working down the list. My theory is that Trump will be defeated in one fashion or another, and then there will be an enabling incident that will occur organically, or will be staged. That will be all of the excuse that they need.

They have been making their lists for years. Here is a story about their Florida efforts.

Rush your preparations to completion.

  • Make sure that you have guns, body armor, magazines, and ammunition.
  • Cache some of them off site. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
  • Know who the people in your area are. Know where the liberals live. Try to figure out who the informers are.
  • Know how to escape your home neighborhood and your job on foot. Have a BOB in your vehicle. They may come for you while you aren’t home.
  • Practice an escape and evasion plan.

Do it. Your life will probably depend on it. If they DO come for you, don’t go quietly in the hope that they will let you go or kill you last. The Soviets have a road built by the residents of the Gulags- there are a million people’s bones in the pavement of that road.

By Divemedic, ago

Not Woke Enough

Andrew Branca was providing expert testimony on self defense law, free of charge to defendants that were being defended by the Colorado Public Defenders office. Then they found out that he wasn’t woke enough. I will let you read about it from Branca himself.

By Divemedic, ago

The Economy

A couple of you asked that I talk about the squeezing of the middle class. When the left first began screaming about increasing the minimum wage back in 2013, I explained that employers would respond by compressing pay, because economics forces them to.

Employers can respond to wages that are rising through one of two means. The most obvious way is by increasing prices. The problem with increasing prices is that there is a limit to how much that can happen. Let’s say that the minimum wage is increased to $26 as the left is now requesting, or even the $33 an hour that New York City is looking for. McDonald’s will just increase the price of hamburgers, right? That works, but only to a point before people shop elsewhere for their burgers. Still, the left will argue that, since EVERYONE will get this new wage, all of the restaurants will increase, and people will have no choice. The people who say this forget that McDonald’s isn’t just competing with Burger King and Wendy’s; they are also competing with people simply brown-bagging their lunch to save money. There is a price point where people simply stop eating out. This greatly reduces economic activity and creates things like stagflation. Soon, it is only the upper half of the income scale that can afford to eat out.

The second way that businesses fight rising minimum wages is through pay compression. The business only raises wages for those whom they are legally required to increase. This causes the skilled laborer to make the same money as an unskilled one, thus removing the incentive for skilled labor. This incentive for people to remain unskilled soon squeezes some from the median of the middle class towards the bottom.

So how do we fight this? We can’t keep thinking that we can vote or legislate ourselves out of this. Instead, we need to be ready for the future. How do you prepare for the things that are coming? We aren’t going to see some Mad Max type of nationwide collapse. That just doesn’t happen when a country’s government collapses. What happens is that governments get replaced with something else, and building wealth is usually going to do more for you than wasting your time complaining about how rich white guy boomers are stealing the jobs from you that you weren’t qualified to have in the first place.

You need to recognize the trend. Look at the facts: right around 4 million teens graduate from high school each year, with half of them directly entering the work force. If all you have is a high school diploma, what are you doing to make yourself more employable than they are? What makes you special?

To make that even worse, there are currently about 10,000 illegal immigrants entering the country every day. A good portion of them have skills like construction and landscaping, and let’s be honest, are willing to work for less than minimum wage.

Your labor is a product being sold on the free market, so what makes your application look better than the next guy’s? It’s even harder if you are not one of the special class of people that the FedGov is telling employers that they must favor. That doesn’t mean you need to go to college, it means that you need to have job skills that will make you more employable, and you need to make sure that those jobs skills are in a field that will land you at the median income to start, and will allow you to make more money as time goes on.

In some cases, that means college. Not any college degree will do- you need a degree in something that is actually useful. STEM fields are good choices, so is a degree in human resources, but the field there is crowded, so be careful. Firefighting was a good career for me, but that depends on where you live. You could learn a trade. The Mike Rowe Works Foundation is a great place to start.

Mike Rowe says, and I agree with him, that we in this country have a problem: We have made work the enemy. It takes hard work and self control to become financially successful.

When I was a teacher, I would try to give my students this talk. I would ask them what they wanted to do, and I would get replies like

  • video game designer
  • Social Media Influencer or Youtuber
  • Professional Athlete
  • Doctor

I would then ask them how they were going to achieve that:

  • Have you designed any simple ones yet? Like perhaps an app?
  • How many videos have you made already? How many have gone viral? Do you already have more than 100,000 followers?
  • How many hours do you practice your sport each day?
  • How are you going to become a doctor if you can’t even manage a grade higher than a C in high school biology?

The answers were predictably disappointing. There was nothing for the game designer except the love of playing video games. The Youtube and social media fans hadn’t made any videos yet, or if they had, those videos had less than 1,000 views. The athletes didn’t practice outside of what the high school required for their sport. Everyone wants to be rich and successful, but far too many people aren’t willing to go the extra 5 miles that it takes to truly get there.

The point here is that you should treat yourself and the labor you produce as a product. Make your labor something that you can sell for a good price. Don’t sit on your ass waiting for someone to knock on your door and offer you big money to play video games and write crappy leftist poetry. There aren’t enough of those jobs for everyone. If you want to make more than average, you and the product you are producing have to be more valuable than average.

I can’t tell you what job you should be doing, or how you should do it. I am just telling you what you have to do- you have to put in the effort, work hard, and be patient. It takes decades to become financially wealthy.

  • Your 20s are going to be a struggle. You are learning skills, or should be. Don’t be paying for $2,000 in tattoo work when you could be investing that money in your future. Education, financial investments, and other things that pay off later. Not useless baubles that will not do a thing for you. Most people don’t have an earning problem, they have a spending problem. Control spending and invest.
  • Your 30s will be a bit better, but you have to resist the temptation to spend your money and take out loans against your future earnings to buy things that will be gone in a year or two, or in buying useless items like a Rolex or flashy clothes.
  • Your 40s is where you really begin to build wealth. You can relax a bit on buying things for yourself, but you still need to keep the useless spending under control.
  • The 50’s is where you hit the peak of building wealth. By age 50, less than half of Americans have a net worth of more than $315,000. Try to be one of them.
  • The median wealth of a 60 year old in the US is $500,000. The mean net worth of a 60 year old is $1.6 million. You can get there, but it requires that you be smarter, work harder, and avoid useless spending when you are young.

Above all, don’t waste your time bitching about what others have. The fact that others are richer than you isn’t hurting you at all. One man being rich isn’t preventing you from being rich as well. Instead, you should be asking yourself why you aren’t doing better. Are you wasting your time instead of working to make more money? If you have 10 hours a week to play video games or surf the web, perhaps you could put away the child’s toys and take some classes.

Or is it that you are wasting your money on $5 Starbucks coffee, a $400 tattoo, or designer clothing? How is buying things that make you poorer going to help you become financially richer?

Be honest with yourself. Don’t fall into the trap of making excuses for your lack of work and thrift. The only person who will be harmed by those behaviors is you.

By Divemedic, ago

Reader Comment

I usually toss comments that resort to insults directly into the circular file. Reader AZFloyd made a comment that I really want to respond to. AZFloyd’s comments are italicized, mine follow in red. So here goes:

No disrespect. A boomer who has finally figured out that cops are not on our side should be applauded. But, You don’t get it Boomer.

First, a boomer refers to a baby boomer, those born between 1946 and 1964. I am not a boomer, so you miss the mark there. You did intend to disrespect me, but reading the rest of your comment, I understand why. Even so, I get more about your situation than you know.

Many of of live hand to mouth. We already lost everything. We don’t bitch about property taxes because we don’t have any property. We don’t whine in the internet about our troubles with passive income because we have no income. A civil war might makes us truly equal. I don’t think you have any idea how many white men have been thrown into this oblivion. If you did, you would retire so a young white man could have your job. But you still have to make your wife happy instead of looking out for your posterity. You are part of the problem.

That’s because you would rather sit on your ass in your mother’s living room, wait for someone to retire or quit, so maybe as the last man on earth, you could get their job. That isn’t how the world works. You have to compete, and no one is going to give you shit. I know more about poverty, picking yourself up, and going out there to get a job than you will ever know, champ. Instead of sitting around complaining about how old white guys are stealing your future employment, why don’t you go out there and make yourself more employable?

Tell you what, throw away your permission slip to earn a living (Inlost my law license) throw away you house, the Chinese made crap it is full off. Ditch the wife, the cars, everything. Everything! Then figure out how to survive. After you spent a few brain cycles looking for a place to deficate instead of self actualization, we can talk.

I did that already. I have been homeless, twice. Instead of going on line to bitch about it, I went to school, got a better job, and now I get to listen to little immature assholes complain about how I am stealing a job from your unemployed, worthless ass. I also don’t believe for a second that you had a law license. In fact, your IP indicates that you are in Seattle, not AZ.

At least in a war, I can fight. Truly fight. Sir, I am not trying to disparage you. But you obviously have no idea about the degree of misery going on out here.

You could fight, but you won’t. Instead, you will sit behind your computer and complain that old white dudes aren’t doing your fighting for you. Why don’t you try to learn how to do something other than whine? It takes three years to become a registered nurse, and they are in such short supply that many hospitals are paying $20,000 sign on bonuses for licensed nurses.

By Divemedic, ago