Divemedic

I, robot

Fast food workers continue to protest, despite the fact that they received a twelve percent raise from $8 an hour to $9 an hour, paid time off, and educational benefits, with a promise of another twelve percent nest year to $10 an hour. Why? Because they claim that they want fifteen dollars an hour. They further claim that the money they get forces them to decide whether to pay the electric bill or the rent, but doesn’t allow them to pay both.

Looking at the pictures in the article, it seems like many of them have smart phones and designer clothes:

The money quote?

“If we want people to stop selling drugs, stop murdering, robbing, raping and killing … then we have to pay them something to keep them vitalized and civilized,” added Rev. Rideout III.

So this is essentially a threat, that unless we pay up, they will kill people.

There is another option: Employers can simply replace them with robots, like these. At some point, the cost of installing and maintaining a robot will be less than the cost of salary, training, paid time off, Obamacare, and loss from theft, botched orders, and waste. When employees price themselves out of the market and the robots take their jobs, there will be no going back.

By Divemedic, ago

Illegal immigrants being hired as cops

From the USA today, illegal immigrants are being hired as cops:

Law enforcement agencies struggling to fill their ranks or connect with their increasingly diverse populations are turning to immigrants to fill the gap. Most agencies in the country require officers or deputies to be U.S. citizens, but some are allowing immigrants who are legally in the country to wear the badge. From Hawaii to Vermont, agencies are allowing green-card holders and legal immigrants with work permits to join their ranks.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said he has no problems with green-card holders becoming police officers because they’ve made a long-term commitment to the country and have undergone extensive background checks. But he worries about the security risks associated with allowing any immigrant with a work permit to become an officer, especially considering that the Obama administration has given hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants work permits.
“We’re handing over a gun and a badge to somebody whose background we don’t really know a lot about,” Krikorian said.

Read the whole thing, and think about the ramifications of a heavily armed, militarized police force, who have no loyalty to our nation, our laws, or our Constitution.

By Divemedic, ago

Nursing homes are taking people

Paramedics refer to nursing homes as ‘God’s waiting room.’ In Florida, they are almost universally filled to the bursting point with patients who are largely catatonic, and are poorly cared for by an overworked and underpaid staff. What this means is that the staff that doesn’t quit for a better job are stuck there for one reason or another, and the usually begin viewing their patients as a burden.

During my 20 some odd years as a Paramedic, I would frequently walk into a nursing home and see patients who had been left there for hours, lying in adult diapers that were filled to capacity. I learned to associate the smell of unwashed bodies, human excrement, and disinfectants as the “smell of nursing homes.”
They hide these conditions from prospective clients and their families by putting the most healthy and most frequently visited patients in the front of the building, and hide the most neglected in the back. If you found a patient in the last room on the left as far from the nurses’ station as possible, in the back hallway of the building, you could bet money that the patent was the one that the nurses found to be the most bothersome, and the patient was most likely being ignored.
I once responded to a call for a patient because the staff claimed that they could not take his blood pressure. I asked when the last time his BP was taken, and they told me just 2 hours before, and that it was fine then. When I got there, it was obvious from the advanced state of rigor mortis that this particular patient had been dead for at least four hours.
Why does this happen? Because nursing home care for a patient who is on Medicare is a cash cow. The goal here is to keep the patient alive and under the care of the nursing home for as long as possible at the lowest cost possible, so that profits are maximized.
I know a physical therapist who was instructed to stop rehabilitating patients for walking unassisted once the patient could walk a certain distance. It seems that once a patient can walk a certain distance (IIRC it is 30 feet, but I may be wrong) they are no longer eligible for the higher amounts paid for nonambuilatory patients.

But one day last summer, after he disputed nursing home bills that had suddenly doubled Mrs. Palermo’s copays, and complained about inexperienced employees who dropped his wife on the floor, Mr. Palermo was shocked to find a six-page legal document waiting on her bed.&nbspIt was a guardianship petition filed by the nursing home, Mary Manning Walsh, asking the court to give a stranger full legal power over Mrs. Palermo, now 90, and complete control of her money.
Read the article, and it will open your eyes as to how the Medicare system is being played, and how this is causing people to be treated like cargo.

I once had a supervisor at an ambulance company tell me that it was our job to treat the customer well, but that the patient was not the customer, the nursing home and hospital was. “You see,” he explained, “the nursing homes and hospitals called for us, not the catatonic patients. The patients were just cargo, and no one cares about whether or not cargo is happy.”

I had a conversation with another supervisor where I was explaining that what we were doing was Medicare fraud. During this conversation, I was told: “We are making money, the nursing home is making money, and the patient doesn’t even remember his own name. We all win here, so don’t rock the boat. You want to keep your job, don’t you?”

By Divemedic, ago

You don’t need that

One of the most common things that you hear in Central Florida when you carry a concealed weapon is that you don’t need to carry a gun to the theme parks, because they are for kids, and no crime happens there.

The place is, of course, a target rich environment for all sorts of criminals. Child molesters, for example:

The report states when deputies searched Jiang’s phone, they found numerous inappropriate pictures of children between 4 years old and 7 years old taken inside of the park — including one in a bathroom stall.




By Divemedic, ago

Global Warming exaggerated

From the Times of India:

 Two of three scientists at a session on climate change and society at the Indian Science Congress on Tuesday felt fears of man-made global warming were greatly exaggerated…Singh said that if climate change was the cause of glaciers retreating, they should all be retreating at the same rate. “But in reality they are retreating at different rates, and some were advancing,” said Singh. “Despite the melting of glaciers, only at some places the sea level is rising, whereas at others it is constant, possibly due to the sinking of land,” he added.

By Divemedic, ago

Obama plays Robin Hood?

The Hill claimed on January 19 that Obama was playing ‘Robin Hood’ because he is offering free college to one group by taking money from another. That is NOT Robin Hood.

The common misconception of Robin Hood says that he was stealing from the rich to give to the poor. That is NOT what happened in the story. In the story of Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham was taxing the people of the kingdom into poverty, and using that money to the benefit of people who did not earn it. In other words, Robin Hood was stealing from the government’s tax coffers and returning the money to the people.

In essence, Obama is the Sheriff of Nottingham. He is taxing the people of the kingdom to enrich himself and the people that he is counting upon to make him the king.

By Divemedic, ago