Divemedic

Sunday Morning Musings on Billionaires

Communism and communists get power from the jealousy of others. They convince poor people that the reason that they are poor is because others are rich. It’s a form of scapegoating that enables the would-be dictator to gain power by exploiting the jealousy of the poor by telling them that it isn’t their fault that they are poor- it’s that the rich guy has gamed the system and is somehow cheating. This results in stuff like this:

The reality is that investment entails risk- and this is true whether the investment is your labor, your money, or anything else of value. The riskier the investment, the higher that the reward must be, or else the juice simply isn’t worth the squeeze. If you remove the reward by telling a person that he will stop getting paid at a certain point, then that person will stop investing at that point.

If you set that limit at $999 million, then the person will stop investing beyond that point. After all, why risk losing your investment for no prospect of a reward? No more Tesla, Microsoft, or Apple. The person will shelter their wealth and simply retire.

The same goes for limiting income. Tell someone that they can only earn $200k a year, and your doctor simply stops seeing patients some time in October and takes the rest of the year off. Would you work for free?

The facts are simple-

  • there is not one single human endeavor that ensures that everyone has the same outcome. More talented people are more successful that less talented people
  • The more talent, the more the reward
  • people won’t work if they aren’t getting paid.

Much is made of the fact that “Elon didn’t found Tesla, he bought it.” That may be true, but Tesla wasn’t as successful until AFTER he bought it. It was Elon’s talent and skill that made the company what it is. That’s the reason why he is the richest man in the world. It’s no different than Michael Jordan. He played basketball like no one ever has- because of that, he was paid obscene amounts of money to play that game.

This jealousy of his wealth is what leads to communists using that wealth as a wedge issue to gain power, where the communists themselves then gain power and become wealthier than everyone else.

Which has the result of people becoming angry and killing CEOs. Was he doing things that many of us despise? I would argue that using a computer system to deny legitimate insurance claims wholesale, which resulted in needless death and illness is indeed evil. However, that isn’t an indictment of the entire economic system, and certainly doesn’t mean that citizens should begin executing CEOs. That ends in a place that is far, far worse than where we are now. The real fault here lies in government oversight that permits companies to get away with this.

Insurance companies argue that they can’t be held legally responsible for a person’s illness or death because they aren’t the ones who make medical decisions. After all, it’s the doctor who decides on your course of treatment, they argue. The courts and our laws have agreed. Of course, this completely ignores that a medical procedure that can’t be paid for is as good as prohibited. After all, if your doctor wants to order an MRI, but the insurance company won’t pay for the expensive test, it isn’t going to happen.

Now I am not arguing that the government needs to intervene. I am against the retarded intervention of power hungry bureaucrats into affairs of business. When legislatures have the power to dictate what is bought and sold, the first thing that is bought and sold will be the legislature itself.

No, the way to settle this is through the legal system with the use of lawsuits. That doesn’t mean that lawsuits where juries award someone a billion dollars because they called you a crisis actor is a perfect system, and there should be some limits on that sort of thing, but that is a different discussion. However, an insurance company that refuses to pay for someone’s surgery, despite the fact that they were supposed to insure that very person, is clearly involved in medical decisions and shouldn’t be permitted to claim that they aren’t.

It would be easy to blame healthcare and claim that we should have government run healthcare. This doesn’t solve the problem, it simply transfers the power from a CEO to a random government apparatchik that decides who gets medical care based upon his own whims: “Oh, only left handed transwoman lesbians with purple hair get MRIs this month.”

It’s a complicated situation, as most adult problems are. Looking for a simple solution to a complex problem is to believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. It’s a childish dream that just can’t work when we talk about hundreds of millions of people interacting and trying to gain advantage over one another.

By Divemedic, ago

Hating Government

However much you hate the evil government we have, you don’t hate them enough. The latest installment is that time the Broward County Sheriff’s office made a bunch of crack cocaine, then had undercover deputies sell it purposely within 1,000 feet of a school so they could get 3 year sentences on those who bought from them.

The State Supreme Court has since ruled the actions to be unconstitutional entrapment, but thousands of convictions remain on people’s records.

Like the FBI, cops follow Ayn Rand’s theory:

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them.

By Divemedic, ago

The Cold, Hard Truth

In our recent discussion, many of you say that this financial situation the nation finds itself in is fixable. All we have to do is eliminated this Federal department, that one, and then convince the recipients of all the Fed Bucks that it’s for everyone’s benefit that they stop getting government checks. Do you even hear what you are saying? Comments like this are simply not realistic:

  • Once DOGE is done and we quit using the Federal Reserve Note…
  • Flat Taxes have to come with spending cuts and entitlement program reform…
  • Did you know that snowballs last longer in hell if you put little hats on them?

Ok, that last one is me. Still, there is no way that millions of Federal employees, a hundred million welfare recipients, and 70 million Social Security recipients are going to sit idly by while DOGE and DJT tell them that the money faucet is being shut off. Even the medical field, my own profession, cannot survive without government money.

  • In 2022, 53% of Americans received at least a quarter of their income from government aid, up from 1% in 1970.
  • Government transfers account for 18% of all personal income in the United States
  • One in four Americans received Medicaid in 2022
  • One in five Americans received Medicare in 2022
  • One in five Americans receive Social Security
  • 12% of Americans are on Food Stamps, and 39% of children in school receive free lunches at school
  • In fact, Americans received $3.8 trillion in government transfers in 2022
  • Then there are employees. There are 28.5 million people directly employed by governments in the US.
  • Millions more are employees of businesses that owe their livelihoods to government largesse.

More than half of the residents of this nation are net receivers of government funds, and there is no recovering from that. To illustrate- what would you say if DJT and DOGE announced tomorrow that to save the nation, the entire Social Security and Medicare system was ending on January 21, but the taxes would remain in order to pay off the massive $40 trillion in debt? Would you be OK with that, or would you scream some variation of “That’s my money! You took it from me, and I want it back?” Or would you calmly walk into personal bankruptcy, secure in the knowledge that your personal sacrifice saved the nation?

Call it doomsaying, call it black pill, call it what you want- but saying that we can vote our way out of this is foolishly mistaken. There are no cuts, no magic wand waving, and no solution that the people of this nation will accept until they are forced to accept it. This only ends when the current system collapses.

Whatever your own personal theory on how to save this sinking fiscal ship, there isn’t one that enough people will accept that will be doable. It just isn’t going to happen. Instead of fixing it, we kept kicking the can down the road, and we will continue to do so until it all collapses.

This isn’t a new thing- I have been telling people this for 20 years.

By Divemedic, ago

Taxes

Peter asks for comments about the income tax, the EITC, and reparations over at his blog. A debate over income taxes ensues in the comments, and it perfectly illustrates our problems. Let me explain:

There are those who advocate for a 10-15% flat tax. This won’t work for one simple reason: that is nowhere near enough money. The US GDP is just over $27 trillion. The Federal government spends just under $7 trillion per year. In fact, it works out that the Federal government spends about 23% of GDP. This means that the flat tax would need to be about 24%.

Then came the people who wanted carve outs. The flat tax, they argue, should not be paid by anyone with large medical expenses, the poor, Social Security recipients, or half a dozen other special categories, which means that it wouldn’t be long before the new flat tax code would be just as byzantine as the current one.

There was a guy arguing that a flat or sales tax wouldn’t be fair because poor people would pay a higher proportion of their wages than rich people. Hogwash- flat tax means everyone pays the same flat percentage. Why do so many people want to punish success and reward failure, sloth, and laziness? Not only that, but many on the left say that the rich don’t pay enough taxes under the current system.

Then there are the types who say since the government always runs a deficit, why not eliminate all taxes and just run the government 100% on deficits.

Most people, even those who claim to be conservative, are wholly ignorant of the situation and only want the rules changed to benefit themselves.

Here is the problem:

The US government spends a total of $6.8 trillion a year. Of that amount, $3.7 trillion was mandatory spending, otherwise known as entitlements. In other words, money that has to be paid out by law: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Compensation, Refundable Tax Credits, Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), and other mandatory spending. Another $890 billion is interest on the debt that we already owe, bringing the total outlay for mandatory spending to $4.6 trillion. The government only collected $4.5 trillion in taxes. So without spending a dime on the rest of the things that the government must do: defense, courts, prisons, and all of the alphabet agencies, the government is already running a deficit of $100 billion. Add in all of those expenditures, and the deficit rises to $2.2 trillion. 

There is no amount of cutting that is going to fix this. The math is eventually going to sink this fiscal ship. Those who think it will might as well buy a violin and learn how to play Nearer My God to Thee, for all of the good it will do.

By Divemedic, ago

Gangs with Badges

Read this story about cops selling NFA weapons to criminal gangs and then tell me again how only the government can be trusted with guns.

ICE lost $100 million worth of firearms and no one cares. BATFE says that police departments are let off off with warnings. They claim that prosecutors are reluctant to charge these cases, and the bureau stated that “it is our goal to educate, not investigate.”

“We’re not looking to prosecute fellow law enforcement officers,” said Eric Harden, former special agent in charge of the ATF’s Los Angeles field division.

What would BATFE do to a citizen or FFL who did this?

It’s time for Federal law enforcement to be disbanded. All they are is a tool of government tyranny.

By Divemedic, ago

Guns and Tasers

One of the questions we hear all of the time is “Why don’t you just carry a Taser? You don’t need a gun unless you want to kill someone.”

Today’s video is from Blount County, Tennessee. This happened in February of this year, and it is a video of a guy who was pulled over for DUI. You can see from the video that he was swerving all over the road, so a deputy initiated a traffic stop. He refused to get out of the car, claiming that the stop was only because he is black.

Once backup arrived, he continued to refuse to the point that a Taser was deployed several times. In the course of this, the primary deputy was shocked with the Taser. She stepped back, and with her out of the way, the suspect shot and killed the Deputy holding the Taser before getting away.

You can watch the video here, where it is cued up to the last Taser deployment. Because it contains a shooting with a fatality, Youtube will not allow it to be embedded.

Note that the Taser was being actively used and the critter managed to reach a firearm, shoot one deputy in the head and the other in the leg. This is the prime reason why Tasers are useless as self defense weapons. Carry a gun. Don’t bet your life on less lethal tools.

The fine young aspiring rapper who killed the cop was eventually caught after a massive manhunt and is now facing the death penalty. When he was arrested, he told the cop who was taking him to jail, “You black. You allowin’ this?” He is a convicted felon with a long history of committing violent crimes. As a result, he can’t legally possess a firearm or ammunition, but he does anyhow. Why? It’s his culture.

For too many blacks, it isn’t about right and wrong. It’s about race. If you are black, you can do no wrong. If you are white, you are evil. For them, it is a race war.

Look at the Change.org petition for him.

The charge is 1st Degree Murder, premeditated. There is an entire community of citizens that believe this charge is fueled by racism and hate…

It is unclear why Officers Eggers refuses this request of K9 and acts upon the excessive force of multiple taser deployments. Leading up to a firearm being discharged. He acted in self-defense, maybe even a state of shock and cannot be tried for first-degree murder/premeditated murder.

He is on video shooting two cops and killing one of them. It isn’t self defense. He was illegally carrying a firearm because he is a violent criminal.

He isn’t, as the petition claims, an upstanding member of the community. At 42 years old, he had already been in prison multiple times for aggravated assault, domestic violence, and a multitude of other violent crimes.

By Divemedic, ago

Today’s Lesson

Today’s video is of a police involved shooting in Salmon Creek, Washington that occurred in April of this year. I can’t embed the video because it shows someone getting shot, and Youtube won’t allow it. Watch it here.

The guy is a suspect in at least two armed carjackings from the previous 24 hours. He and a female had robbed one man of his vehicle at gunpoint, and were also suspected of having done the same thing a couple of hours before.

I don’t think that they shot him soon enough. When they initially confronted him in the parking lot, they saw that he was armed with a handgun. After that, he ran into a crowded building. I believe that they should have shot him as soon as he brandished his handgun. The chances of a bystander getting hit in that crowded building were unacceptably high, in my opinion.

My second issue with this video is they were chasing a man that they knew to be armed, yet no one showed up with a long gun until the US Marshalls appear at the end of the video, more than 3 minutes after shots were fired.

The dead critter’s accomplice was arrested and is awaiting trial. She was caught after a homeowner found her in his garage. This is why I never investigate odd noises in my house unless I am armed.

By Divemedic, ago

Solar Update

I haven’t done a solar update since September. Our system for November generated 1378 kWh. We used 817 kWh and sent a total of 516 kWh back to the grid. Total for the system since August: we have sent 849 kWh more power back to the grid than we have used, with most of that being in November because of a combination of two things:

  • We are making an average of 46 kWh per day because it’s been pretty sunny. There were only a couple of days where it was cloudy for the month, and we don’t get thunderstorms every afternoon like we do in the summer
  • we just aren’t using much power now that the weather is cool enough for the air conditioning to not be running.

For 15 days in November, we generated more than 50 kWh, despite the fact that hours of daylight are getting shorter.

We only used power than we consumed for 5 days in November. The worst of these was a 48 hour period (November 6-7) where we used 18 kWh more than we generated. During those two days, we generated 20 and 25 kWh, but used 32 and 31 kWh.

So far, it appears as though the solar power system that we installed is working as well as I had hoped. Things do get a bit tight in the heat of the summer, as air conditioning uses so much power that, if the grid were to go down for an extended time, we might not have enough power to run everything without making some conservation moves when it’s a bit cloudy or if it’s unusually hot. Perhaps by turning off the water heater or by not doing laundry on days when it is cloudy or unusually hot.

The problem isn’t generation capacity- it appears to be storage. If I add even one more Powerwall to the system, this will correct the issue.

So for us, twenty four PV panels of 420 watts each gives us more than enough generation capacity. We currently have 27 kWh of Powerwall storage capacity, and could really use about 8 or 10 more, which would mean true independence and the capability of being off grin indefinitely.

By Divemedic, ago

Assembly Line Medicine

Or alternatively titled: Why I Don’t Watch TV.

Nearly every medical show irritates the piss out of me. That’s why I can’t watch those shows.

Chicago Med doesn’t appear to have any nurses- the doctors do everything.
I saw one show where there was a car accident near the hospital and the doctors ran down the street to the scene, snatched the extrication tools from the firefighters’ hands, and extricated the patient from the car.

This is how it works-

  • the patient comes in and is triaged by the nursing triage team.
  • The patient is taken to an ED bed. The nurse assigned to that bed conducts the initial assessment and orders some basic tests, and maybe even a few medications.
  • The doctor reviews the patient’s chart and orders some additional tests and more medicine.
  • Then we wait for the results if testing and imaging
  • More medications are ordered and the patient is either admitted or discharged

The doctor may appear to see the patient at any point in this process, or may not. There are times when the patient may not even see the doctor until hours after they arrived. It doesn’t mean that the provider isn’t evaluating you- it means that some maladies don’t require him to physically be in the room for most of it.

Not so on TV. On television, the doctors are waiting outside for the ambulance, then they run into the ED with the patient, frantically shouting orders. People see this, and when they come into the hospital are shocked and angered that it doesn’t work like that.

I get at least one patient each day who asks: “So when is the doctor going to come see me? I’ve been waiting for an hour.” In reality, the doctor and I have been in constant contact, you have an IV, blood has been drawn, a CT scan was ordered and done, you have received three or four medications, and we are awaiting the results of all of that testing. It’s remarkably efficient, fast, and maximizes the wise use of everyone’s time.

Even shows about EMS and firefighters is nothing close to reality. I once watched a show where a paramedic needed to deliver a shock to a patient in cardiac arrest, but the patient was lying in a puddle of water. He then placed the paddles on the patient’s chest (paddles are largely a relic of the past) did a handstand on those paddles to get out of the water, and shocked the patient.

I can’t tell you how many times someone has said to me: “Why aren’t you doing X? It always works on Greys Anatomy/Chicago Fire/Rescue 911.” People watch this stuff and think that it’s a documentary.

The few times that my wife tried to get me to watch shows that cover topics in which I have some knowledge, I spent the entire time rolling my eyes and making comments. She doesn’t watch them while I am around any more.

The only thing that all of those shows get right is that there are tons of people who work together that are having romantic affairs. Every hospital seems to have a doctor or two who enjoys diddling the nursing staff, and there are plenty of young nurses fresh out of school who think that they are going to bag themselves a doctor husband, not realizing that they are the fourth or fifth nurse he has bedded this year.

At this point, I just assume that every show on TV is BS. Then there are the people who Google their symptoms or malady and want to know why we aren’t doing what Google recommends, but that is another topic entirely.

By Divemedic, ago

Your Truth

Joe brings up a great issue. The left refuses to admit that not everyone has the same opinion as they do. You didn’t vote for Kamala because you are a racist misogynist, not because leftist policies suck. I tried to explain to some people why I voted against Florida’s amendment that would have legalized marijuana. I told them that I voted against it because it only permitted people with licenses to sell, distribute, and grow marijuana, and because it would have meant smelling that nasty shit everywhere. Had they made it legal for anyone to grow it, and mandated that only edibles could be used in public places, I would have voted yes.

Instead of listening to me, they called me names, with ‘boomer’ being the least offensive. They don’t understand that the way to convince someone to give you their vote doesn’t include threats and name calling.

There is a truth in many things, and there are opinions. One needs to be able to tell the difference. Sometimes, “Agree to disagree” is not a viable option.

I refuse to “agree to disagree.” That is stupid. Suppose I came out and said that men should be able to freely rape women, or we should be able to own slaves. Would liberals still want to “agree to disagree?” When someone says that to me, it comes across as some smarmy, superior attitude that basically says “I am smarter than you, and I am your better, but since you, with your obviously inferior intellect cannot see reason and agree with me, I will simply smile at you, and tell you that you have a right to your opinion, you simpleton.”

I won’t “agree to disagree,” because “agree to disagree” is an incredibly lazy tactic. It ranks up there with “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” among dishonest and self-defeating statements made in lieu of actual argument.

The argument could be useful, I suppose, if it meant no more than what it says – mutual recognition of a disagreement on a matter of opinion. Some arguments are intractable – issues of personal taste or the subjective importance of certain values cannot be resolved empirically. In an argument like that, once both sides have expressed themselves as clearly as possible, if there is still no agreement then there is nothing left to do but acknowledge there is a disagreement, and leave it at that.

That is not, however, the sense in which I most often hear the phrase “agree to disagree” used. What is usually meant is “we’re both equally right, both equally wrong.” It is an arch-liberal dodge, invoking the most ludicrous type of relativistic equivocation. If I am holding a flamethrower and you are holding a lit match, it is true that we can both start fires, but pretending that we can just “agree to disagree” about which is better suited to the task of lighting a candle is nonsense.

Two positions, one demonstrably true and the other based on nothing more than feelings, do not share the same level of validity. If we can agree on some basic definitions like “true” and “evidence”, and if we can agree that it is important to have true beliefs rather than false ones, then we can and should examine different ideas. While it might be nice to pretend that this kind of dispute is simply a difference of opinion, it most certainly is not. I refuse to pretend that a poorly-argued position, based on straw men refutations of legitimate questions, holds sufficient validity to be granted any more respect than belief in aliens or the Loch Ness monster. Examples include:

  • Women don’t have, and never have had, penises.
  • If a man truly has a belief that he is a woman, or a woman believes that she is really a man, that person is delusional.
  • Adults shouldn’t be discussing sexual matters with children. Even adolescents are iffy in most cases.
  • Taking one person’s money to give to another isn’t charity- it’s theft.
  • One person’s rights end where another person’s rights begin.

When a person claims that they wish to “agree to disagree” is really saying is, “I want you to agree that my position has just as much merit as yours”, and I am certainly not interested in engaging in masquerading a clear true/false dichotomy as a simple difference of perspective. Truth is not established easily, and that’s a good thing. In a universe where an infinite number of explanations for a given phenomenon are conceivable, we must scrutinize and test to see which ideas are worth keeping and which can be discarded safely. “Agreeing to disagree” is simply asking to lump the good ideas in with the fanciful or debunked ones in some misguided sense of fairness.

Some things are simply so repugnant, and so against freedom and decency that I cannot agree to disagree. The point here is that we live in society that claims to value freedom. There are always those who would abuse those freedoms and hurt others. I won’t play that game, nor will I vote for someone who does.

To the left- that is why I voted the way that I did.

That is also why I don’t have a strong opinion on abortion. The matter of opinion in that debate, where I am concerned, is “when exactly does life begin?” There are good arguments to be made on both sides, and there is no real empirical way to settle that debate (at least not at this point). There is a point, however, when no one can argue that the fetus isn’t a living child. The child has a heartbeat, a functioning nervous and digestive system, and is a fully formed person capable of survival on its own. At that point, abortion is murder unless it is to prevent death or serious injury to the mother (in other words, it becomes a form of self defense).

I also think that this isn’t a Federal issue, not being one of the enumerated powers of the Federal government, so it is up to each state and its voters to determine.

By Divemedic, ago