Divemedic

An editorial at Bloomberg is talking about raising wages for places like McDonald’s to a ridiculous $15 an hour, and how the company can afford to do it with minimum impact. I say bull crap. Here is why:

I wrote here that paramedics made $14 an hour in 2002, and Florida’s minimum wage (pdf alert) was $5.15.
The Florida minimum wage is now $7.79 an hour, or 151% of what it was ten years ago. A paramedic now makes $13.23 an hour, or 94% of what it was ten years ago.

You reach a point where a person with no skills, no education, and no experience is making the same amount as a person who took the time to get an education or learn a skill, and you have just removed all incentive for anyone to go to school or work in a risky profession.

Many claim that a raise in minimum wage causes a “trickle up” effect by forcing everyone else higher, but that just doesn’t happen unless the employers can raise revenue by raising prices. Since the federal government has price controls in place through Medicare billing laws, there is no way for an employer to come up with the money to give his paramedics a raise.

You eventually hit a wage point where a job that requires no education, no risk of injury, and no responsibility becomes attractive. I think we have already crossed that point.

I just saw the trailer for the movie based on the book Lone Survivor. It looks to be a good one.

The Federal government studies everything. One of the things that are studied is enrollment rates of colleges by various demographics. The demographic that this post will focus on is part of my continuing discussion on race that various people say that they want to have: college enrollment rates of 18-24 year olds by race.

According to the government, 41 percent of all people aged 18-24 were enrolled in college in 2010, with enrollment in 4 year colleges being about double of 2 year colleges. This is to be expected, since it takes twice as long to complete, there should be double the enrollment.

38 percent of black Americans age 18-24 are enrolled, compared to 43 percent of whites. Pretty close, especially when you understand that Asians, with an 82% enrollment rate, are counted as white for statistical purposes in this report.

Which brings us to the next fact. The gap between white and black college enrollment disappears when you eliminate high school dropouts: 46% of black versus 48% of white high school graduates are enrolled in college.

What we see as the problem here is that large numbers of blacks are dropping out of high school. In fact, 124,000 blacks dropped out of high school during the 2011-2012 school year.

graduates per dropout by race:
White: 12.29

Asian:  9.15
Hispanic: 5.20
Black 3.79

There is a problem here. For every black that enters college, there is one that dropped out of high school. I hear many people complain that blacks have lower credit ratings, incomes, and higher rates of incarceration than other races. Perhaps the best way to fix this is to fix what appears to be a broken culture of fatherless children, high school dropouts, the gang lifestyle, all of which contributes to multiple generations of government dependency. This will likely be more difficult than blaming racism, but will undoubtedly be more successful.

There was a time when I viewed the Smithsonian Institute of being one of the finest museums in the world. With this article, I believe that its reputation has been permanently stained, as our President again uses his position to unite America…

The museum’s director, Lonnie Bunch, said Mr. Martin’s
hoodie, the one he was wearing the night of his death on Feb. 26,
2012, represents a unique opportunity to further the discussion about
race in America,

 So the thug Trayvon Martin is being used as the poster boy for black history? Why not pick someone who did something other than attack a man because the thought he was a soft target.

I was offered a job today. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they are a nationwide provider of EMS services. The job is a paramedic position, and would require me to commute about 40 miles each way, paying $5 in tolls round trip.

Before I go further, let me explain my credentials:
I have been practicing in EMS for over 24 years. I have been an instructor for ten of those years. I not only have my paramedic school done, I also have three Associate’s and two Bachelor’s degrees.

The job market is very tight, and this illustrates why: They offered me a rate of $12.53 an hour. That rate is two dollars an hour less than what my last job was hiring new paramedics for ten years ago. I already collect a pension that pays me more than that, and I don’t NEED the money, and I am not sure that I want to drive 80 miles round trip to work a 12 hour shift that will net me about $7 an hour.

I could get a job working at a hamburger joint and take home the same amount of money.

A Daytona Beach Police Sergeant resigned after the department discovered that she had hundreds of pornographic images on her two department issued computers, including 23 nudes of herself that she had sent to her boyfriend while on duty. Additionally, she deactivated the GPS tracking on her patrol car, so dispatchers would not know where she was.

That isn’t the worst part to me. The worst part is how she was caught: she was caught when the department was investigating a sexual harassment complaint that the Sergeant had made against another officer. Sexual harassment is no longer about dishonorable men that use their position to elicit sex from female employees, or about men trying to run women out of the workplace. Instead, it has become a powerful weapon that women use against men that they happen to not like, or to pull attention away from their own misdeeds. We see this all over, not just with sexual harassment, but also with claims of racial bias and domestic violence.

So Google reader went away. Now the reader I replaced it with, Old Reader, is too. So now I need to find another reader, and do it quickly. If I cannot find another reader, then blogging for me will probably come to an end.