Uncategorized

This article about the redneck society states that you might be a redneck, if you think it is called “duck tape” instead of “duct tape.” The redneck society page says it as well.

Well, if you call it “duct tape,” you are wrong.  The trademarked name for the tape is actually “Duck Tape.” It was invented during world war two by Permacell, a division of the Johnson and Johnson Company and was used to seal American ammo cans against water. The resulting tape was nicknamed “Duck Tape” for its ability to repel water.

EMS in the United States is provided in one of five ways: fire service, private, third service, public-utility and hospital-based.

The fire service model is where EMS is run by the fire department. The personnel who staff the ambulances are usually cross trained as firefighters, and assume those duties at fire scenes. Since most fire departments in the country who follow this model are seeing 80% or more of their calls as EMS runs, having firefighters sitting around, waiting for a fire seems inefficient. So while there are no fires, they are put to work running EMS calls.

The advantage to this system is that it is more efficient to minimize the amount of down time that crews have and put them to work. The disadvantages to the system are that 1) most of the personnel would rather run into burning buildings than clean up grandma’s feces filled diapers. 2) If one of these people rises to the level of chief, you get an entire EMS agency that focuses more on the 20% or less of the organization’s responsibilities, and virtually ignores the primary mission of EMS, and 3) To adequately serve potential patients, EMS resources must be matched to meet demand. Fire departments have historically deployed ambulances using a fixed neighborhood station model, and many continue to use 24-hour shifts. This results in lower efficiency, with too many resources during non-peak times and non-peak neighborhoods, and not enough resources during non-peak times and in non-peak neighborhoods.

The next government run system is the ‘third service’ model, in which EMS is run as a branch of local government as a stand-alone service. Like its public-safety counterparts, it is completely owned, financed, and operated within the local government structure. The advantages here are that everyone in the EMS organization is charged with and working on the delivery of emergency ambulance service, and management is directly responsible to local officials.

The disadvantages here: As with all government run models, it is common for third-service and fire-based organizations to be evaluated by a level-of-effort approach instead of performance outcomes. This means no repercussions exist if the service underperforms. Poor performance is often addressed by simply adding resources. Another disadvantage is that control of expenditures is dependent on the local government’s budgetary and managerial processes. This makes it difficult to keep spending appropriate, as the people doing the budgeting are either invested in the process (the EMS chief) and spend too much, or they know nothing about EMS delivery (the city commission/mayor’s office), and spend too little.

There is private EMS, which is where a private company provides EMS service to the community, and is funded entirely by user fees, billed to those who use the service. Since the model also provides the more lucrative non-emergency transportation between hospitals, private homes, and nursing homes. In combination with lower wages, less opportunity for advancement, and higher expectations for productivity, the provider can usually make EMS profitable. The advantage here is that this service costs the taxpayer very little, but the disadvantages here are that significant oversight is required to prevent the company from cutting too many corners, and that employee turnover and burnout rates are generally high.

There is the “public utility model,” where the EMS agency acts like a public utility like the electric company. They are a for profit service that is contracted by the local government to provide service to the community, and they are paid a fee by the local government, and also bill the people who are transported to the hospital. The majority of the funding (if not all of it) is through these user fees.The advantage here is that the contractor is held to a standard, and if they do not live up to that standard, they can be replaced.The disadvantage is that this is a variation on the “for profit” system, and the disadvantages here are the same.

Similarly, hospital based systems see the same difficulties as the PUM and the for-profit models. In my area, there were two hospital based ambulance services, but they only did the more profitable interfacility non-emergency transports. A few years ago, one was replaced by a contract with Rural Metro. The other is still there, but is still relegated to interfacility transports.

Eric Sheptock has been homeless since 1994 when he last held a job, but he has a cellphone, 4500 friends on Facebook, and gets 1500 emails a day. He does it all by using free computers, begging for cash, and being paid to speak about how the government doesn’t do enough to help homeless bums.

Sheptock won’t take a job that would compromise his advocacy efforts or the long hours he spends tending to his digital empire, he says. In other words, the man is a professional parasite. He gets up every morning from the same bed in the same shelter, showers, gets a free breakfast, and spends the next 6 hours surfing free internet.

There are 6500 others just like him in DC. The only thing that makes him unique is the fact that he spends his days complaining that people and the government don’t do enough to give him better free stuff. At 50 years old, he hasn’t had a job since he was 25 years old and quit his job to be a crack addict. He first came to Washington DC to protest the Iraq war.

If you subsidize something, you get more of it. I say that it is time to stop feeding the strays with government cash. If a private charity wants to pay for these leaches to loaf all day while complaining that you aren’t giving them enough, that is the charity’s business. I for one, think that we have funded enough of this. If he can spend his days surfing the net and lobbying government officials for free cash, he can get a job.

There is still a lot of talk about how public employees in general, and firefighters in particular, are overpaid. I have touched on this in the past. This talk often mentions how firefighters make large amounts of money. While it is true that there are firefighters in Central Florida that make $48,000 a year to start, let’s look beyond the surface to see just how we arrive at that amount.

A firefighter who works a 24 on/48 off schedule works 2912 hours per year, which averages out to a 56 hour work week. According to Federal law (the FLSA) that firefighter gets overtime for all hours over 53 in a week. So, this overtime premium adds 156 hours to his pay, meaning that the firefighter is paid for 3,068 hours. If we divide the firefighter’s $48,000 annual salary by that number, we see that the hourly rate for this firefighter works out to $15.64.

Now let’s look and see what a firefighter working for a private company works out to. A private employee gets overtime at 40 hours. This means that a 24/48 schedule results in an overtime premium of 832 hours, which means the private firefighter receives 3,744 hours of pay per year. Paying that firefighter even $14.50 an hour would mean that he would make $54,288 a year.

A paramedic with no fire training starts at an average of $14 an hour in the Orlando area. Some jobs pay more (hospitals) and some pay less (theme parks). My department currently starts firefighters at about $40,000 a year ($13 an hour), but they must be Paramedics to get that rate of pay.

Every year for the last 10 years, we have had our pay and/or benefits cut. In my opinion, that is why we are seeing a serious decline in the quality of our people. This year, my department is talking about severe cuts to our pension plan, and is making deep cuts to our other benefits, including health.

I am considering leaving the EMS field to pursue other endeavors. Maybe I can get my master’s degree and go be a Physicians Assistant.

My Uncle John was just 16 years old on December 7, 1941. As we all know, the Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on that day. My Uncle John (really a great Uncle) decided that he was going to defend his Country. He went to town and waited in line at the closest military recruiter’s office. By the time he got into that line, he was so far back, it took him three days to get to the front of it.

Once in the recruiter’s office, he lied about his age to enlist in the United States Navy. He was then sent home and told that the military was not equipped to handle the sudden influx of new recruits, and he would have to wait his turn. A week later, he was on a train headed for boot camp. I am not sure where he went to boot camp, but I remember that he said that it was less than a month long.

Uncle John was put on a ship as a passenger, and arrived in Pearl Harbor Hawaii in the first week of February. He was amazed that there was still so much destruction from the attacks that had happened just three months earlier. He was there only a few days when he was assigned to his first ship, a destroyer. Three weeks later, it was sunk out from under him. He was rescued, and was sent to a second ship, and two years later, that ship was sunk out from under him as well. His actions won him a purple heart and a couple of other citations that I cannot recall.

He stayed in the Navy after the war, and eventually retired in 1967, after 25 years of service. He was 41 years old. He remained in Norfolk for the rest of his life, working at the Navy Shipyards until he retired a second time in 1982, at the age of 56. He was classified as disabled.

I went to visit him several times during the 5 years I myself was stationed in Norfolk. He was a personable guy with a lot of interesting stories. He is dead now, as the greatest generation slowly fades away. Today is a day of remembrance. December 7, 1941. The day our greatest generation rose to the call of their nation.