Divemedic

Up To… As Much As

The biggest annoyance to all of my Internet provider nonsense is the idea that I am paying for speeds of “up to” 800 MB/s. The problem is that I speedtest it, and have not gotten more than 75. When I called them on it, I got the “we promise as much as 800, but the time of day and conditions sometimes affect your speeds.”

Here is the thing: I only work 3 days a week. When I do work, I work a 12 hour day. I get home at midnight, one in the morning, sometimes (when I work the 15-03 shift) I don’t get home until 4 am. What all of that means is that I speed test all hours of the day or night, on many different days of the week.

This reminds me of the days when cell phone providers did the same thing. I was a customer of Sprint back when they were Nextel. My relationship with that company ended with me filing a lawsuit when I cancelled service after my phone service failed after 2004’s Hurricane Charley. I wanted to cancel my service because the number of missed and dropped calls was ridiculous. They claimed that they didn’t guarantee cell service in any particular location or at any particular time. As long as their phone service worked somewhere and sometimes, they were fulfilling their end of the deal. They told me that either I could stay with them or pay the $600 cancellation fee.

I paid the fee to avoid the hit to my credit and then sued them. I won the lawsuit, and was refunded my fees plus some additional my time and trouble. I remained on the Sprint shit list for over a decade.

By Divemedic, ago

Drugs

During the first few weeks of my new ED experience, I can tell you that the community of this new hospital has a larger drug problem than the last. At least a third of my patients have been on Meth or Tranq. Every patient that I have ordered a tox screen for has been positive for one or more of the following: opioids, Benzodiazepines, cannabis, or methamphetamines- in one case, even an 80 year old woman who came in unresponsive and wound up dying- she tested positive for benzodiazepines and cannabis.

In one day alone, I had four different patients come in that were combative because they were on Meth. One of them required 4 nurses, 2 paramedics, and 8 security guards to hold down. We wrestled with him for almost 45 minutes and had to give him 6mg of Ativan, 50 mg of Benadryl, and 10mg of Haldol before he took a nap.

By Divemedic, ago

Freedom of Association

When I have get togethers, there are rarely black people there. So? I only have a few black friends, but I also don’t have many friends that I hang out with on a regular basis. There is no law that specifies that I need to practice affirmative action when I decide with whom I will associate.

The vast majority of black people that I know are people that I work with. I don’t spend time with people from work. It’s just a bad idea to mix your social and professional life.

I hang out with people with whom I have common interests. It is very rare that I have anything in common with people who are not like me. Still, let’s address your claims:

I don’t like you. I would never hang out with someone like you, because we have literally nothing in common, and I despise all that you are. Not because you are black. No, I despise you because of who you are. Each of the following is a point against you, and in total makes you someone that is on the verge of being my enemy:
  • You are a lawyer.
  • You are a liberal communist
  • You are a West Coast Anti-gun California Liberal
  • Literally EVERY Tweet you send out calls out whites for being racist and keeping black people down, yet you are an attorney college professor with multiple graduate degrees who is making six figures while pontificating about how the white guy working at McDonald’s should be paying you reparations for something that happened long before either of you were born.
  • Which makes you a racist piece of shit who has already decided that I am a racist enemy of yours.
By Divemedic, ago

Cord Cutting

One of the things I am doing is changing the way that we handle Internet and Television. That system is a ripoff thanks to what they call “bundling.” My last bill was $230 for CATV and Internet. We don’t get any premium channels. I am trying to figure out what I am getting for all of this, but I have seen Greek instruction manuals that are less confusing than our cable bill:

  • They charge me $102 for Internet service that is nominally at 800MBps. When I check it, the best I get is around 50-70 MBps. My in-laws live 2 miles away and are getting 250 MBps, according to speedtest. So I decide that I am not paying for speed that I’m not getting and look to see what a lower speed would save me. Lowering my speed to 400 would actually RAISE my bill by $22 a month. Going to 200 would raise my bill by $34 a month. Yeah, I know that they have a disclaimer that says speed can vary, but only getting 10% of what they are advertising seems to be a stretch.
  • Now on to television. My wife watches far more of it than I do, but I do occasionally watch. Mostly movies, hockey, and old television shows. My wife loves watching shows like medical dramas. I can’t stand those, but we gotta keep the wife happy. They charge us $91 for 185 channels. Cutting it to the 125 channel option would save us a whopping 94 cents per month. If I go to only 10 channels, it would save me $40, but I can get those same 10 channels with an antenna for free.

They bundle them together, and the bill claims that with discounts, I am being charged $130 a month. Seems reasonable, so how do they arrive at my $230 biil?

  • Add-ons. They charge us $30 for three cable boxes, another $10 for DVR service, $6 for the remote controls so we can use their cable boxes, and $38 a month in service, sports, and local channel fees, Then add in the taxes, and the total bill is a quarter grand. $3k a year for cable and Internet. Believe it or not, this is the best of the providers in our area. We tried DSL. That service has even slower Internet. T-mobile has a home Internet that works over 5g cell towers, but there is a 200gb per month data limit. That isn’t going to work if we stream. They are raping us because there are really no other options.

So I called them. We are getting rid of cable TV and cutting the Internet speed to 400mB/s. Why pay for 800 when we never get speeds that high, anyway? If it continues, I may even cut it further. We already have Amazon Prime and Netflix, because they were free with other things that we already have and pay for. So here is the plan:

  • Internet: $87
  • Netflix: Free
  • Amazon Prime: paid for through other means
  • Paramount+ $12/mo
  • Hulu (with ads): $8/month
  • Peacock (with ads): $5/month

So it will cost us $25 for TV and $87 for Internet. Once we see if there will be any hidden charges, especially from the not-so-transparent Internet provider, we can consider upgrading to the “no ads” version of the above services, which will cost us an additional $19 per month. However, we just cut our cable/internet bill from $230 to $112 per month.

By Divemedic, ago

Court: 80 Percent Receivers are NOT Firearms

The Firearms Policy Coalition recently had a major victory in Federal court. On June 30, a Federal Judge in the Northern District of Texas struck down the ATF ruling that an 80 percent receiver is a firearm, and the order applies nationwide: the case is VanDerStok v. Garland. The judgement was final on July 5.

Last year, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) issued a new rule that improperly defined a range of inert objects as “firearms.” This new definition of “firearm” contradicted the text of the federal Gun Control Act. With this effort to rewrite federal regulations, the Biden administration tried to redefine tens of thousands of individuals into criminals. The FPC sued, arguing that the rule was illegal. The winning argument was that the ATF exceeded its authority.

On June 30th, Judge Reed O’Connor of the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued an order granting summary judgment in favor of the FPC and gun owners. This is a huge step forward. There will be an appeal from the ATF.

During the case, briefs were filed in support of the ATF by California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Washington. So there is your complete list of the 18 anti-freedom states.

On the freedom side of things, the FPC was joined by Defense Distributed, the Second Amendment Foundation, and Blackhawk Manufacturing (doing business as 80 percent arms). For now, it’s time to celebrate a major victory on behalf of the Constitution and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Read some of Judge O’Connor’s concluding words in his opinion (note: “defendants” refers to the ATF):

In sum, there is a legal distinction between a weapon parts kit, which may be an aggregation of partially manufactured parts not subject to the agency’s regulatory authority, and a “weapon” which “may readily be completed [or] assembled . . . to expel a projectile.” Defendants contend that drawing such a distinction will produce the absurd result whereby a person lawfully prohibited from possessing a firearm can obtain the necessary components and, given advances in technology, self-manufacture a firearm with relative ease and efficiency. Even if it is true that such an interpretation creates loopholes that as a policy matter should be avoided, it not the role of the judiciary to correct them. That is up to Congress. And until Congress enacts a different statute, the Court is bound to enforce the law as written.

I agree. It is time to stop these bureaucrats from becoming a de facto legislative body.

By Divemedic, ago

Price Tag

Bloomberg claims that it will cost $200 trillion to save the planet from climate change by 2050. So let’s do some math- $200 trillion in 27 years equals $7.4 trillion per year. The GDP of the entire planet- the sum of all goods and services produced worldwide- is $45 trillion. This would mean that 16% of the entire world’s production would have to be diverted to combating climate change. At only 3% inflation, that cost would balloon to $16.5 trillion per year by 2045.

Medicine, food production, transportation, manufacturing, energy, sanitation, one sixth of everything that everyone on the planet does, would need to be diverted to this goal of avoiding climate change.

It is physically and fiscally impossible.

By Divemedic, ago

Virtue Signaling

Do blind people watch sports? Even if they did, are they going to be able to read these uniforms? What about the people who DO watch sports? Can they read this?

Companies are just trying to pander to any and every special interest group that they can in a lame attempt to garner favor. In an effort to pander to the visually impaired, I am going to come up with a Braille condom.

By Divemedic, ago

Personal Annoyances

There are some things that commenters say, not just on this board, but on the Internet in general that really make you come off as being less intelligent. As the owner of this site, I am not going to prohibit them, but I do want people to be aware that saying these things makes people want to ignore anything that you have to say. Call them my pet peeves. I will still post comments like this, but I can’t promise that I won’t roll my eyes while clicking the “allow publication” button, nor can I promise that I won’t make fun of you for it:

  • Using “HONK!” in a comment. I get that you are trying to sound smart by calling things “clown world” but it really makes you look like a moron. When I see this, it is a sure indicator that the rest of the post will not make a coherent point and is guaranteed to be annoying. Make your point without it.
  • Writing a comment that so poorly uses the common rules of English grammar that your post is indecipherable. Honestly, I just skip your comment without reading it when I see things with tons of deliberate misspellings and poor grammar. Life is too short to spend several minutes rereading your comment and trying to decipher what you meant to say.
  • Don’t purposely misspell names to sound clever. Obozo, Teabaggers, Trumpf, Bushitler, Magats, all of those are juvenile put-downs that do nothing to forward a real exchange of ideas. It usually is a huge distraction from whatever point you are trying to make.

It reminds me of how people used “word” for everything back in the late 80s. You would say, “I love chocolate ice cream,” and someone would reply with: “Word.” Feel free to roast me for being a grumpy old man in the comments to this post.

By Divemedic, ago

Church of England Calls God Misogynist

The archbishop of York says that the language in the Lord’s Prayer might be “problematic” for some people because the words “Our Father,” which open the prayer that Jesus taught when his disciples asked him how they should pray is too patriarchal.

Yep, the fact that the Bible itself teaches that man was made in the image of God is wrong, according to a major Christian church. Now we are at the point where churches themselves are protesting against the very God that they worship and the book that they claim was written by him.

By Divemedic, ago