Divemedic

Brutal, but Accurate

Having interviewed and rejected for a management role with every hospital chain in Florida, I was conversing with Chat GPT to formulate a plan forward. This is what I was told:

  • White male → no DEI tailwind
  • Nearly 60 → systems prefer “long runway”
  • Nonlinear career → HR hates translation
  • MBA → irrelevant unless paired with the “right” titles

None of these are moral judgments.
They’re selection biases in modern healthcare.

And they stack.

Then the model went on to say:

In hospital nursing:

  • Degrees don’t open doors
  • Titles do
  • Timing does
  • Internal sponsorship does

The MBA was necessary but not sufficient — and at this stage, not decisive.

ADN nurses are getting leadership roles because they:

  • Are internal
  • Are younger
  • Have the “right” nurse-coded stepping stones

So, with that analysis, here was the recommendation:

Travel gives you:

  • Novelty
  • Distance from bullshit
  • Clear boundaries
  • Financial upside
  • Half the year off if you want it

If you want to be brutally rational:

  • Hospital management track → low probability, high emotional cost
  • Travel nursing → medium probability of satisfaction, high autonomy, reversible
  • Staying put → worst outcome

That makes travel the dominant strategy, even if it’s not perfect.

What’s odd is that the machine chose to say “distance from bullshit” even though I have not once used any sort of profanity in the chat. It also recognizes DEI and age as being probable disqualifiers.

Honestly, I want to start ramping down from working full time. The only misgiving I have is winding up in shitty hospitals. Then again, I am in one now. This week was brutal. Not in the patients that I had- I love taking care of seriously ill people, as the challenge of difficult cases is the draw for me. No, it’s working for people who are rank amateurs that got their position through favoritism and DEI instead of talent.

At least on a 13 week contract, I won’t have to put up with that shit for more than a couple of months at a time.

By Divemedic, ago

Genius

What Trump just did is a master class on how to get what you want. Let me explain. Take a look at the location of Russia’s strategic forces:

If you draw a great circle route from Russia’s missile fields to the US, two things become apparent:

  • The route for missiles launched from Russia’s Asian missile fields headed to the US west coast fly over Alaska.
  • The route for missiles launched from Russia’s European missile fields headed to the US east coast fly over southern Greenland and Iceland.

Since we already have missile interceptors in Alaska, the western routes have some protection (although there aren’t nearly enough of those interceptors to handle a massive attack). What we need is a place to put interceptors that cover those eastern routes. Iceland only covers a few of those approaches, but Greenland is ideal for a US missile defense base. Defending the US from a European based missile threat vitally requires interceptors (missile or energy weapon) in Greenland.

That’s why Trump wants Greenland. Everyone thinks that it is about mineral rights. I don’t believe that. If it were minerals, there were easier ways to do that. We don’t need the entire island, just a small part of it. It can’t be something another nation can take from us by simply demanding that we leave.

Sure, we have a base there now, but it isn’t a permanent one. Under the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement, the United States was allowed to operate the base under a NATO framework, as long as both Denmark and the United States remain NATO members. Under the agreement, the Danish national flag must be flown at the base to recognize that the base is on Danish territory. In other words, when we leave NATO, we lose the base.

No, the land where those interceptors will be must be US territory. Of course, Denmark wasn’t just going to GIVE it to us, so Trump had to do some creative acquisition.

That’s what he did- he got NATO to believe the US was going to invade. Europe, being the pussies that they are, decided to cave in to his demands without a shot being fired. The US has now secured a deal for some of Greenland to be ceded to the US. The NYT notes that according to officials who attended the meeting, the deal is similar to the United Kingdom’s bases in Cyprus, which are regarded as British territory. No matter what, this was a masterful demonstration of how to get what you want.

Once that is secured, I am wondering if the NATO accords are going to be pushed aside. After all, Trump has long declared the treaty to be a huge cost to the US with little benefit in these post-Soviet years.

By Divemedic, ago

Pull Them Out

Yet again, we have a case where the American public is told that cops don’t have to protect you. The school resource officer from the Uvalde school shooting was just found not guilty of all charges for standing outside of the school and hiding while the shooter massacred the students that the cop had a duty to protect.

It turns out, the cops don’t have a duty to do a damned thing except collect a pension. This echoes the case where the coward of Broward, Scot Peterson, was allowed to retire with his pension intact, even though he hid during the Parkland School Massacre and as the School’s Resource Officer, it was his job to protect the school’s students.

If police don’t have a duty to do anything, then why do we even have SROs in school in the first place? In shooting after shooting, we know that the police are cowardly pussies who will take cover while our children are slaughtered. That’s how we know that they aren’t about to go door to door to take shit.

Pull the cops out of the schools and cut police and school budgets by an appropriate amount. School resource officers are a horrendous waste of money.

By Divemedic, ago

More Dishonesty

Now the anti-gun idiots are saying that the 2A is irrelevant because gun owners won’t rise up and fight the very policies they voted for.

Let me clue you in:

  • You said cops and the military should be the only ones armed
  • You are STILL opposed to citizens owning guns
  • Therefore, you are a disingenuous ass who doesn’t really think guns are needed UNLESS they are used for your purposes
  • I wouldn’t fight for you. Hell, I wouldn’t piss down your throat if your tonsils were on fire

We aren’t fighting it because this is what we voted for. You keep bragging about what you are going to do to us and to ICE Agents once you reclaim power. That’s when the real games will begin. Deporting a few illegals is nothing, a prelude.

By Divemedic, ago

Hey You, Get on to my Cloud

My Dad was an engineer for Hewlett Packard. When I was a kid, I grew up in a world where computers took up an entire room, and when my dad had to work on the weekends, he would bring us with him. To entertain me, he would allow me to use mainframes to play games. Back then, games weren’t nearly as polished as now. I played games like the text based Star Trek or Lunar Lander. I remember that there was a text based drag racing simulator. Later, after cartridge-based video games like the Atari came out, my Dad and his coworkers showed me how to use a machine that would burn ROM chips with software called “Bruno,” that would read a cartridge then create a ROM that was an exact copy while a message on the computer monitor would say: “Bruno is crunching data. Nom. Nom. Nom.” I owned hundreds of Atari and Intellivision games as a result.

I am willing to bet that I played games on millions of dollars of mainframes. The point to this story, was my dad once predicted that computers were too expensive and large for the average American to have in their homes, but he said that one day, it would be common for Americans to have a terminal at their home, and they could rent computer time. He didn’t foresee the revolution that would make computers as powerful as those mainframes fit in the palm of your hand. However, it turns out that he was quite astute when it came to the business side of things.

Jeff Bezos has declared that people will soon have nothing but terminals in their homes, which they will use to rent cloud computing time as a subscription model. Cloud computer is, of course, a term meaning someone else’s computer. Namely, Jeff Bezos’ computer. It’s because companies are busy buying up every computer chip they can lay their hands on. 64gb of RAM that cost me $230 in October are now costing over $600 now. A 4tb SSD that cost $215 in October costs $430 now.

It seems that these companies buying up all of the production have driven costs through the roof. Those same people are saying that they will let you rent the computers they just built, at a handsome markup, of course.

And they are wrong. When prices climb like they have, the market response is predictable. Other companies will enter the market, causing prices to stabilize. Eventually, prices will come down. The first home computers were expensive.

The IBM PC (1981) started at $1,565 (over $4,000 today) for a basic model, with only a 5.25 inch floppy drive for storage. I remember that my Commodore 64 had one of those drives (external, of course) and that drive cost $350. Why was it called the ’64’? Because it had only 64 kilobytes (KB) of RAM, which is where it gets its name, plus about 20 KB of ROM for its operating system and BASIC interpreter, and the Commodore 64 was popular because it had more memory than its competitors. 64kb of ram is literally one millionth of the capacity of the computer I am typing this one.

Those 5.25 inch floppy drives? Yeah, they held 512 kb of data, and you could double that if you had a hole puncher. Those of you who know how that works, well, you know. The NAS that I use for storing files in the house? It has 12 TB of storage space, meaning it can store the same amount of information as more than 12 million of those drives, hole puncher or not.

The point is this: the market will respond, and it will be as difficult to force Americans to rent computer time online as it will be to tell Americans that they have to buy shares in a community automobile. The real purpose of this is control. If they control your car, your computer, and what you do with them, they control you.

Then there is nothing that they can’t make you do. The title of this piece, most of you will recognize, is a paraphrase of a Rolling Stones song, meant as a protest of how restrictive the Stones thought American society was in the 1960s. It’s odd to me that the counter culture of the 60s is now wanting to give birth to a society that is far more restrictive than 1960s America ever was.

By Divemedic, ago

Propaganda

As I read this article, a supposed interview of the Minneapolis police chief, a couple of thoughts came to mind:

1 This is not an interview, it’s a propaganda piece

At one point in the interview, a supposed person driving by recognized the police chief and yelled out: “How dare you let this happen here? You should be fucking ashamed. You should be fucking sick. Fucking pig.” Yeah. That moment, some random passer-by, just happened to pass by when the chief was being interviewed on camera. I believe that. This entire piece is propaganda worthy of the old Soviet Union.

2 What we are seeing in real time, is an insurrection. There is nothing else to call it. This is a state, multiple states, in fact, that are openly defying Federal authority. The governor has said he is calling out the national guard to support local law enforcement. Support them in doing what? Defying or even attempting to arrest ICE agents, in my opinion. This is a thinly veiled threat.

The left is going to take over the government. Not by force. The useful idiots are going to help them. At the next election or two, the left will gain enough power to begin the purge. It’s coming. I’ve been saying it since the Floyd riots in 2020. Shit is going to get ugly. It’s taking longer than I thought, but this is perhaps being moderated a bit by the average American’s attention span.

By Divemedic, ago

Gun Control Fails Again

Four men, two pairs of brothers, came to Florida to enjoy the state. One returned home, and the other three were standing in the yard of their rental home, preparing to head to the airport, when the man who lived next door shot and killed all three of them. Witnesses and police say that this was a random attack, and there had been no altercation before the shots were fired.

The man who did the killings was known to police. Ahmad Bojeh was arrested in 2021 for randomly firing a gun at people and traffic. He was acquitted due to insanity and released. He was charged with felony drug charges in 2015, and resisting an officer with violence in 2020, but again, charges were dropped. The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office was asked whether there were any requirements or safeguards in place, given that he remained in the community and is now accused in a triple homicide. The sheriff’s office referred questions to the State Attorney’s Office, which released a statement saying it cannot comment beyond what has already been made public but will release information when it becomes pertinent.

In other words, the cops and courts didn’t do shit. Again. Our so-called justice system isn’t. It has become a jobs program for useless bureaucrats, and a green light for criminals.

The state claimed we needed red flag laws to stop people from having guns after they fell through the cracks. In other words, people just like this murderer are still killing people, even though the state now has the power to strip everyone else of their rights. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

By Divemedic, ago

My Plan

Sorry for all of the personal stuff. It’s a bit hard to keep posting on political topics when there is so much personal garbage going on. This one is on my plans for the future. If you want to move on, I get it. There will be other posts coming soon.

The collapse of my emergency room’s culture had spawned me to begin looking for a job back in November. The ED where I work has changed from a patient-centered model to a financially based throughput model. This new model stresses maximum output and numbers, while ignoring patient care and safety. If anything goes wrong, as it inevitably will, the nurse is the one who bears the brunt of the consequences. I just can’t do that. Time to go. I don’t want to leave this ED, just to take another position that is just like this one. That gets me nowhere. Besides, I have a master’s degree now. Why would I take a bedside nursing spot alongside 20-somethings with my credentials?

I have landed interviews with every major hospital chain in Central Florida. Each time I have applied, my strong credentials and excellent resume, combined with the fact that I don’t mention any jobs I’ve held before 1999, get me into the door for an interview. I’ve had more than a dozen job interviews in the past three months. That’s where the story ends. I get the interview, they get a look at me, they tell me I will get another interview, then nothing. Silence. My emails go unanswered. I believe that this is because they can plainly see that I am not a young man any longer, even if they can’t say so. This plan isn’t working.

So I need to find another path forward. I got to thinking:

  • what was the best thing about being a teacher? The copious time off.
  • What is the worst thing about being a teacher? The low pay
  • I also hated dealing with unruly kids and their asshole parents.
  • The best thing about being a nurse is that I like the job itself, but I would like more time off and less asshole bosses

I really do miss the days when my wife and I could travel all summer. Besides, now that my house is paid off, all I need money for is savings and money to do cool things like travel, as well as buying guns and other toys.

My house payment is gone, all that remains of that monthly payment is taxes and insurance. The $3400 a month that was principal and interest are gone. Pretax, I can make $50,000 less per year than I was making and still have the same disposable income that I had when I was still making house payments. Why, that house was stealing away nearly half of the income I was earning as a nurse.

Then it hit me- I could work half of a year and still be doing pretty well. I looked into PRN (as needed) nursing. Nope. They require that you come to work every week, just for fewer hours. That was when I looked into travel/contract nursing. Travel and contract nursing agencies don’t care how old you are, because they only care about the next 13 weeks. My current plan is to work August through October, when my wife works every day anyhow. Then I can work some other period in the January through May period.

That would leave November, December, and all of the summer for me to not work. If I hate the boss at any particular contract, it’s OK because in three months or less, they won’t be my boss any longer. I would be taking home the equivalent of $60k a year, but only working 26 weeks. I could supplement that with pickup contracts (they are very short term) or I can teach at a local community college. Either way, I can be semi-retired. Our bills are fine. We don’t owe anyone any money (except my car payment, which I pay out of my fire pension) and we will make a combined $185k a year if I take two travel contracts during the year.

Now that I had the outline of a plan, I talked about it with my wife. She is on board, with a few conditions:

  • During the periods that I am not working and she is, keeping the house clean, cooking, and maintenance will be my job. She says it isn’t fair for her to work and still expect her to keep house. That’s cool. I would get bored with nothing to do all day, so cleaning is cool. It’s not like the two of us make a huge mess, anyhow.
  • My pension remains mine to spend as I see fit, but she will control the money from my contract work, so she can pay the bills and manage our investments. Meh. My pension is more than $3500 a month. I don’t need to spend more than that. She does a good job of picking investments, better than I do. I’m OK with that.
  • She will continue to do her laundry, and I will do mine. I suck at laundry, especially women’s things.
  • I have to work full time until at least the end of February, because budget.

So having come to an agreement, I have a plan. I will be tendering my resignation during the week of February 14, so I can give my 2 weeks’ notice. Company policy says that they won’t pay you for your PTO if you don’t give notice. I have 100 hours of PTO, so trying to get paid for that is the goal there.

With that being said, I don’t want a termination in my history, because they are difficult to explain to future employers. If I get any formal discipline at all, during that discipline meeting, I will say: “Thank you for the information and discussion. This makes things quite clear for me. Our goals and outlook are clearly no longer in alignment. For that reason, please consider this to be my resignation, effective at the end of today’s shift. I wish you luck.”

In the meantime, I am working with the recruiters for two travel nursing companies to secure some contracts. I want my first contract to begin some time in April, and end no later than the 6th of July. I will begin my second contract during the first half of August.

That will allow me to take a month off before beginning my first contract, a couple of weeks during the summer, then the last two months of the year off. So that’s the plan. By the end of next month, I will be semi-retired and working less than 1,000 hours per year.

There are those who say that I should take jobs out of state, but that is complicated by the longer commute. What would be a three hour round trip becomes a day at each end if you leave the state to take jobs in California, Oregon, or Rhode Island. Now instead of three days a week, I am away from home 4 or 5 days a week. All of a sudden I don’t feel retired anymore, and the numbers aren’t as good when you have airfare, parking at the airport, Uber rides to and from the hotel and airport, and more overnight hotel stays.

Others suggest a motor home. I don’t think those numbers make sense. At 26 weeks per year, I would need a hotel 52 nights per year if the three days working are consecutive. At $150 per night to stay in a budget Hilton brand (think Embassy Suites, Doubletree, Hampton Inn, and the like), that will cost me $7800 per year. Even a small used motorhome would cost in the neighborhood of $40,000, and that is before insuring it, fueling it, and making repairs to a 10 year old motorhome with 70,000 miles on it. It just isn’t worth the cost. It would take me a decade or more to recoup that expense.

What could make sense would be a camping trailer like this one. At $15,000, it would cost just over 2 years to recoup the cost. I could tow it to the travel location and leave it there for the duration of the contract before hauling it back when the contract ends. That’s something to consider.

By Divemedic, ago

Replaced

So an apology when I am wrong. I posted a couple of months ago my estimate for the illegal immigrant population. I said that I believed it was 16 million. There were those in comments who claimed it was as many 30 million. All of us may have been low.

News came out this week, many of the non-domiciled (in other words out of state residents) CDLs are issued illegally to illegal immigrants. North Carolina has 53%, New York 52%, and California claiming 29%, but not allowing the Feds to check. In all, there are 100,000 KNOWN illegal immigrants with CDLs in the US.

One in five construction workers are illegals. As many as 4 million. Of course, the pro-illegal lobby says those illegals built 400,000 houses (non-hosted PDF alert). Unless they are all living 10 to a house, that’s a net loss.

During the third Obama term Biden administration, as many as 3 million people a year illegally entered the US, so there is another 12 million. In fact, 52 million people (1 in 6 of us) are not born in this nation, that we know of. Half of them have been here for over 10 years, a quarter of them more than 20.

Anecdotally, there are dozens of counties in this state where more than half of the residents do not speak English. Before anyone accuses me of having this opinion out of racism: I say the same shit when people move here from New York, so don’t go there. Your race card won’t work here.

The Center for Migrant Studies of New York, a liberal, pro-illegal immigration lobbying group, claims that there are 8.4 million illegal immigrant workers in the US. as of 2024. The data above suggests that the number is far, far higher. Looking at these numbers, 30 million illegals seems low. While there are no accurate counts, all evidence points to there being a much larger illegal immigrant population than anyone is estimating. There are perhaps as many as 45 million illegals at this point- one out of every 7 residents.

We have been overrun. There is no way the US can possibly get rid of the illegals at this point. They are entering at multiples of what can be deported, especially considering the resistance coming from the left.

By Divemedic, ago

Contract Work

Hospitals all over the country fill in gaps in their nurse staffing by bringing in nurses on contract. Pay varies widely from state to state. Here are a few samples of pay rates available for nurses on contract:

  • California $10,500 a week.
  • Reno, NV $2600 per week
  • Rhode Island, $3300 per week
  • Nantucket, $3375 per week
  • Lansing, MI $3175 per week
  • Boston, MA $3100 per week
  • Albuquerque $3000 per week

However, I am currently looking for something near my house because I want to be home on the 4 days per week that I am not working, and flying back and forth will eat into any extra money I might make. Here are some that are showing:

  • Lake Placid, FL $1900/week
  • Davenport $1800/week
  • Fort Meyers, $2200/week

So it looks like Florida is somewhere around $2000 per week. The costs would be gas and tolls to and from one day per week, plus the cost of a 2 night hotel stay, so call my costs about $300 per week, plus the fuel to get there. As a contracted nurse, I have a lot more control over my work conditions than I do when I am tied to an employer. My conditions for accepting any given contract are:

  • the 3 days each week must be consecutive. Some hospitals like to have you work Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday one week, then Saturday, Monday, and Thursday the next week. I won’t accept a contract like that, unless I get more money.
  • No mandatory meetings or training, unless it is during my contracted work days. Most hospitals actually like this condition, because they don’t want to invest money in a contract nurse who isn’t staying.
  • No mandatory overtime. If I do decide to take overtime, it must be mutually agreed upon, and my overtime rate is going to cost enough that I can compensate for the extra costs. Somewhere around $100 per hour.

My recruiter says all of this is doable, but some hospitals won’t agree to consecutive workdays. That’s fine, I told her, I don’t need to take those contracts. However, if they offer enough extra money, I might. Taking non-consecutive days increases my costs and my time commitment in driving time, so I pass them along to the hospital. If they don’t want to do that, that’s OK. They can hire someone else.

Let’s say that I take a job that is a 2 hour drive from here. I drive there, work my three shifts, and drive home. Total time working and driving is 40 hours. If you break those days into complete non-consecutive, I have to drive there and back three times. That adds 8 hours to my work week, so it’s going to cost you an extra $1200 a week. Don’t want to pay that? OK, no problem. Just find someone else. I would take a job that required me to fly up to Rhode Island every week before I will spend 12 hours a week in a car for no extra money.

Like Liam Neeson, I have a particular set of skills, honed over decades of learning my craft. Those skills are specialized and difficult. I can now dictate the terms under which I will work, and I don’t NEED to work full time. In fact, I don’t WANT to work full time. That puts me in charge of when and how I will work.

After all, how many nurses are there that are certified for critical care, emergency nursing, pediatrics, and trauma? The answer is not enough to cover demand.

Contract nursing has variable terms. Most contracts are for 13 weeks at a time, but there are agencies that have contracts that vary between 8 and 24 weeks. There are even agencies that offer one day contracts, but those don’t come with stipends, meaning that you can take those even if they are within 50 miles of your house. Say a hospital in the area has a need for a nurse two days from now, but only needs that position filled for two days. Your agency will offer you the contract for two days for $1800, but it would be 100% taxable.

I’m really liking the idea of being self employed.

By Divemedic, ago