Y2K For Nurses

 

Norene just read me a snippet of an article in a newspaper about COVID-19 causing a huge surge in demand for RNs who can drop everything and act as shock troops for hospitals experiencing a lack of trained staff.  Wages of $100/hour (and up) are attracting nurses from all over for 13-week contracts almost everywhere.

To a mainframe programmer, this looks like Y2K all over again.  $100/hour annualized for a 2000 hour work year comes to $200,000/year.  Overtime at time-and-a-half can easily double that, and $100/hour is the low end of the scale.  Hot diggity!

A bunch of nurses who have been working for — in many cases — short wages see an offer for an irresistibly high hourly rate, and they figure "In three months, I can pay off my mortgage.  If it all falls apart after that, pffft!".  With no mortgage and probably a nice cash cushion beyond that, a nurse can dish pancakes at IHOP until the dust settles, and good nurses are almost never out of work for very long — if they want to work.

For hospital administrators, it must look like a scene from a horror movie:  all my experienced nurses are gone and now I have to shell out triple to replace them with headcount I have to train to use our systems.  Maybe I should have put them in 'golden handcuffs' when I had the chance.  Yeah, you should have...

Ah, well, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.

 

Traffic Circles

 

As long as I'm on a safety jag, I might as well stump for my favorite traffic-easing device: traffic circles (TCs), AKA roundabouts.  Once upon a time, TCs were to be found everywhere.  They were economical because they didn't require the installation of traffic lights with the attendant wiring and opportunities to malfunction and maintenance issues, although they did take up more room.  The beauty of a TC is that the only thing that might slow a driver down is the presence of other traffic, and that's exactly the condition in which you ought to slow down.  With no traffic light to halt you because it's not yet time for it to turn green, you always have the ability — as long as traffic allows — to cruise right on through (including right turns, left turns, and U-turns).  That is, the only red light condition is "there's too much traffic".

In rural France, a driver almost never sees a traffic light, and even STOP signs are fairly unusual (and, yes, they say "STOP', not "ARRETEZ").  Nearly every intersection at grade is a TC, and after you've negotiated two or three, it seems the most natural thing in the world:  slow as you approach, find an opening in traffic, enter the rotation, and exit when you get to the road you want.  If you miss your exit, go around again.  When viewed from above, traffic seems never to stop through a well-functioning TC.

Studies show that TCs are orders-of-magnitude safer than light-controlled intersections:  38% fewer accidents and 90% fewer fatal accidents, not to mention a 28% smaller carbon footprint.  If safety were the overriding goal for traffic engineers, TCs would be ubiquitous.  So why aren't they?

With so many fewer accidents, vehicle stops, and savings on gasoline, there must be some reason they're not more common.  That reason is very probably 'ticket revenue'.  With no red lights to run, there are fewer tickets issued to offending drivers.  Yes, TCs may be economical, but the county doesn't see it that way.  No tickets means no fines.

Then, too, American drivers, having been weaned off the whole TC idea no longer view TCs as something beneficial.  "OMG, it's chaos!"  To be fair, there are some TCs that are truly horror stories.  Paris' "L'Etoille", the TC that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe, is one such.  Even Parisians shudder at the thought of getting caught in that maelstrom.  The scene in "European Vacation", although set in London, was likely inspired by "L'Etoille".

But...  if the thought of easier passage through intersections, fewer red lights to slow you down, 30% fewer fill-ups at Shell, and a greatly-reduced likelihood of getting a ticket from a red light camera appeals to you, maybe you should think about campaigning for more TCs.

 

Lights and Wipers

 

We were driving home from West Palm Beach yesterday after two wonderfully relaxing weeks at a condo owned by my cousin.  Just after we got on the Florida Turnpike, the skies opened up and the rain was coming down in buckets, so much so that I wondered whether I should pull over and wait it out.  Of course I had my wipers wiping furiously and my headlights beaming because, in Florida as in many other states, when your wipers are operating, you must have your headlights on.

You would be surprised — or maybe you wouldn't — by how many other cars on the road didn't have their headlights on even given the horribly reduced visibility.  It occurred to me that it would be a fairly simple engineering change (and in software it would be even simpler) to force the headlights on whenever the windshield wipers turn on.

Given the simplicity of such a change and the lives that might be saved by doing so, I'm stunned that the feature isn't a standard specification for every new car.

 

The Really-Awful Very Bad Election

 

For weeks, possibly months, Democrats have been predicting a Blue Wave that will hustle Donald Trump out of the White House where he never should have been in the first place.  Republicans, in contrast, have been pooh-poohing the notion under the assumption that GOP voters are reticent about openly supporting Trump for fear of blowback.  One of these was almost certainly true.

Imagine our surprise, then, to see neither a Blue Wave nor a Red Wave, but rather an ordinary neck-and-neck contest between an egotistical braggart and a senile farm-team second-rate politician!

In the run-up to the election, Trump has been packing stadiums with his followers while Biden is lucky to have 200 people — including staff — show up for any of his appearances.  Social media numbers, even given FaceBook's and Twitter's obvious suppression of conservative opinion, has been heavily skewed toward Trump.  One might be forgiven for suspecting that the Dems were about to get their asses handed to them on platters.

Election night proceeded more or less as expected save only for the mysterious appearance late in the process of hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots heavily favoring the Democrat slate.  One report — thus far unverified — claims 138,339 ballots in a single batch were all — ALL — for Biden, 100% of them, zero (0) for Trump.  Statistically, this is as likely as hitting the lottery twice in a row.

The closeness of the election and the slight lead enjoyed by the Democrats, not to mention the several stories of irregularities, combine to make more plausible accusations of vote fraud.

While I have never been an active supporter of Donald Trump, I recognize that he has managed to do things while in office (despite active obstruction by Democratic politicians and elements of his own Department of Justice) that deserve applause:  reducing regulation (which probably had significant impact on both the stock market and the minority unemployment numbers), brokering historic peace deals between Israel and several Middle-Eastern nations, and renegotiating NAFTA; along with several things that warrant raspberries and spitballs:  tariffs prime among them.

What I find hard to justify is the overwhelming waves of hatred — pure hatred — that his opponents fling his way.  The hatred is so unremitting that it results in what some call TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome:  the haters are unable to even give credit where it's due.  The only thing that matters is putting Trump down.  If that means giving up all the good things Trump has managed to do, that's the price we must pay, and if it means we must overlook the fact that our Presidential candidate is visibly failing, mentally, and is almost certainly NOT up to the rigors of the Office of the President, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.  Besides, there's always the 25th amendment by which Joe Biden can be put out to pasture and replaced by President Kamala Harris who, as a contender for the nomination, was so unpopular among Democrats that she had to drop out of the race early.

You can't make this stuff up.  Democrats have decided that things like 'truth' and 'justice' and 'fair play' are just getting in the way of what must be done.

When "Tipping Point" was being written, Oleg Volk read an early galley and remarked:  "Frank, I sure hope you haven't written a documentary," and I agreed.  That was then; this is now.

The larger the government, the more corrupt it will be.  This seems to be a law of nature.  There are no countervailing examples.  To reduce the corruption, there is but one path:  reduce the size of government.  If that needs to happen via secession, then so be it.  A nice little civil war seems right about now to be a step up from where we are.