Divemedic

Six sigma is a system that seeks to reduce errors to less than 3.4 errors per million operations. What if I told you that it was possible to greatly exceed this standard? Can you imagine a company that delivers 2 million packages every day using 5,000 employees, and make less than one mistake every 16 million deliveries?

Can you believe that such a company has existed for over 125 years with no work stoppages? The dabbawallas of Mumbai pickup lunches from people’s homes and deliver them- still hot- to the breadwinner’s workplace 2 million times a day, and they make less than one mistake per week. They do all of it without a single piece of modern technology.

About 90% of American households own a phone. There are over 200 million of them. The average cell phone owner talks for 12 minutes a day. Americans use 1.1 Extabytes of data on their cell phones each year, and send over 2 trillion text messages.
To store the phone calls and data from one year alone would require over 1 yotabyte of storage space.
The facility in Utah that is being run by the NSA is capable of handling data at these scales, if reports are to be believed.
So to the government employee that is undoubtedly reading this:
Doesn’t it bother you that you are supporting a police state? We know the information being gathered is being used wrongly for political gain. Why are you supporting this?

To everyone else: begin encrypting everything. There are so many cheap ways to encrypt your stuff. Even if the government has the computing power to break the encryption, it takes time and computer power. Lots of it. If everyone, or even a significant percentage of people, began using encryption, there would not be enough computer power to handle the data.

Free hard disk encryption
Zfone telephone encryption
Hushmail for email

Symantec now owns the PGP technology. I don’t know, and have no way of checking, if the government has inserted back doors into the software.

Here is a great article on this.

Fire Captain Smart will get no discipline for the screaming rant that I posted on a few months ago. The fire chief says that since the Captain never told the man to stop filming, he did not violate policy. I have to say that this is obviously a public official that is covering his employee’s ass.
As a retired firefighter with over 25 years on the job, I can tell you that this is an embarrassment. As the title says, dickheads are everywhere. This is what happens when you give authority to a dickhead.

So a girl is graduating from a private High School, and decides to put an eagle feather on her tassel for the graduation ceremony, even though she was told not to. The school’s answer? A $1,000 fine, and withholding her transcripts and diploma until it is paid.
Another student was told that he could not get his diploma without performing 20 hours of community service, because his family cheered too loudly during the ceremony.
The valedictorian of an Oklahoma school used the word “hell” in her speech, and had her diploma withheld.

Each of these students performed all of the acts and lessons required of them to complete school and receive a diploma and are entitled to them. The things that happened to cause the school to deny their diploma were things that would result in detention, at most. To deny them the rest of their lives, and to deny them that which they have earned is a travesty. These are each cases of petty tyrants using the power of their positions to dictate the behavior of others.

More and more, I am beginning to oppose formal education at all levels.

This has to be the dumbest application of “zero tolerance” weapons policies that I have ever heard.

A three year old deaf child signs his name, and the school district says that his hands look too much like a gun, so THEY ARE MAKING HIM CHANGE HIS NAME.

The educational bubble: It is being driven by the government. As I said in my post the other day, Abraham Lincoln passed the bar with less than a third grade education. It could be argued that the government requiring a competency exam is in place to protect the public, but to me the argument that the only place to gain competency is in a government approved college educational program is hogwash. Of course, by passing the bar exam on his third try, Frank Abagnale showed that competency examinations are no guarantee of competency, either.

In order to attend medical school as either a Physician Assistant (Master’s Degree) or as a Doctor (MD or DO), one is required to have a Bachelor’s Degree. It doesn’t matter what you major in for the initial 4 year degree: I know Doctors with a BA in film, and I attended a PA program with a degree in EMS administration.

The problem here is that requirements for education are increasing costs.Let me explain: In the United States, to be a Doctor requires a 4 year degree to attend Medical School, followed by three years of medical school, followed by a three to seven year (depending on specialty) residency program. In all, the new Doctor now has a student loan debt of  $250-500 thousand. Our new Doctor has had no (or virtually no) income for a decade, and has incurred a quarter million in debt.

Considering that the young doctor could have earned anywhere from $160-400 thousand in that same time period, our young doctor is $300-900 thousand and 10- 14 years in the hole before he has made any money. If we assume that a person has an average working life of 47 years (between the ages of 18 and 65), he is going to have to make a hefty salary to pay back his student debt, and still make up for the years that he wasn’t working, and his non-educated contemporaries were.

For example:  a person gets a job in a fast food joint making a starting wage of $5 at age 18, and tops out at $50,000 a year before retiring at age 65. Over the course of his career flipping burgers, he makes an average wage of $22,000 a year. Over his lifetime as a burger flipper, he makes about a million bucks.

Now consider the doctor: he only has a working life of about 35 years, and over that time must make that same million, plus the cost of the quarter to half million in loans to break even with burger flipping. This means that the doctor must earn more than double what the fast food worker does, JUST TO BREAK EVEN. If we cut out the requirement for the 4 year degree, and instead made medical school a 4 year program, the meat of the doctor’s education is still there, but we have reduced the costs of becoming a doctor by four years and $150K. This means that the doctor can make less and still earn what he needs to earn, meaning that medical care just became cheaper, and also more accessible for the poor.

A man plays a carnival game trying to win an X box. He keeps losing, so he keeps going double or nothing, and spends his life savings- $2,600 trying to win the $300 game. All he won was a stuffed banana with dreadlocks. He calls the police and attempts to use them to get a refund.

– Why would you keep playing, when you keep losing?
– Why would you keep your life savings on you?
– Suing? Because you lost a game of chance? Vegas is gonna be in trouble.
– The police shut the game down? Under what authority?

PT Barnum was right…