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.

 

Vitriol is not a cure for anything

 

Each succeeding election cycle, as I recall them, has been less collegial and more adversarial than the one before.  In days gone by, men as different as Nixon and Kennedy could meet for a debate, treat each other honorably, and shake hands when it was over.  Such days are now but a fading memory.

It happened gradually, if what I recall is actually true.  Little by little, the respect paid by one side to the other had eroded, almost imperceptibly at first, increasing in small increments.  Until 2016.

The election of 2016 was 'special'.  The electorate was given a choice between Donald Trump, a boorish, egotistical huckster with a flexible definition of 'truth' and Hillary Clinton, former attorney, former First lady, former Secretary of State who — one would be forgiven for assuming — had to know the law regarding topics like 'conflict of interest' and 'national security' and who — one might be forgiven for assuming, given her many years in government — took her obligations seriously, and Gary Johnson, a retread Republican who couldn't be taken seriously by the GOP establishment.  Only Johnson ran a gentlemanly campaign.  As between the other two, the 'major party candidates', the only surprise by election day was that neither had punched the other.

Of course, the chance that boorish Trump might triumph over a seasoned professional politician was too ridiculous to seriously contemplate, so few seriously contemplated it.

The American voter, however, largely considered Clinton to be a probable threat to national security and gave the bulk of electoral districts (and electoral votes) to Trump.

How dare they!  How effing dare they!!  The Democrats collectively lost their minds.  That Trump might have won the Presidency on his own merits was a sheer impossibility.  There had to be another reason.  The excuse their leadership settled upon was 'Russian collusion', and the rank and file got foursquare behind the idea that the dastardly Russkies had meddled in our election.

For 4 years and despite a series of unprecedented successes by Trump, successes that earlier Presidents had diligently worked toward without ever reaching (or, in most cases, approaching) those goals: a booming economy, historically-low minority unemployment, peace in the Middle East, and a radical skinnying of welfare rolls; Democrats and quasi-Democrats have repeatedly tried to undermine Trump's policies.  The Mueller investigation found nothing it could prosecute beyond a few low-level operatives who were snagged on charges unrelated to the 2016 campaign.  The subsequent Horowitz investigation determined that the Department of Justice had been subverted to the cause of neutralizing Trump.  The mainstream media covers only stories that are damaging to the Republicans; stories that cast aspersions on Democrats are pooh-poohed as 'Russian disinformation' and buried along with UFO sightings.

One might be forgiven for thinking that things couldn't get any worse, but things have gotten much worse.  Unable to depose their bête noir, the Left now seethes with anger.  Cities burn, Antifa and BLM activists riot in the streets, bystanders are beaten and killed for no reason but that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Anarchy reigns, and it's time for another election cycle, this one more vitriolic than the last.

Despite the Democrats proffering a man who, in 47 years in the Senate and White House, has virtually nothing on his resume and who is a proven plagiarist to boot, coupled with a Vice-Presidential candidate who was so unpopular — among Democrats — that she had to drop out of the race for the nomination early — despite all that, Democrat voters have lined up behind the only chance they have to depose the man who killed all their dreams in 2016.  It's vitriol that's fueling this election, and nothing else.

Vitriol is not a cure for anything, and if Joe Biden loses to President Trump in 2020, the level of vitriol is only going to increase and the situation in this country will get worse.  How long before we seriously consider that 'secession' might be a good thing, all things considered?

 

Rioter, rioter, go away

 

News from the trenches of the New York Times:

Voters are beginning to become alarmed by the wide-scale rioting in several cities and have begun to notice that the cities with the worst problems are run by Democrats.  Poll numbers are thus swinging to the Republicans and away from Democrats.  Even Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon have started to notice, and they, too, have become alarmed and are suggesting that it's time for the riots to stop lest they damage Joe Biden's chances of unseating Donald Trump.

This presents an intriguing problem for Biden who has already promised to get the domestic situation under control if elected in November.  The problem is this: if Biden (or the Democrats generally) issue a call for the rioters to behave themselves, one of two things will happen.  Either the riots will stop, or the riots will continue.

If the riots continue, it makes Biden's promise to calm the troubled waters seem hollow.  If the riots stop, it labels the rioters as Democratic partisans and the Democratic party as the likely source of the unrest that has caused billons (with a 'B') of dollars worth of damage to probable Democratic strongholds.  One path confirms Trump's charge that the Democrats are America-haters, while the other marks them as ineffective braggarts.

I wouldn't want to be in either one of those shoes.

 

Out Of Our Shackles

 

If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it!) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other,...  the bands of political associations will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies;  and far better will it be for the people of the disunited states to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint. -- John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams was not alone in voicing such secessionist sentiments, either.  Alexis deTocqueville also thought it a good idea along with Sec'y of State Timothy Pickering (F-MA) and President James Buchanan (F-PA).

Some will protest that the issue of 'secession' was settled long ago.  That's not true.  What was settled in 1865 was the question of whether an agricultural economy without an industrial economy in partnership can hold its own against such a partnership.  The answer was that it could not.  The Confederacy decided to 'go it alone' and the Union objected to being left without a ready source of cotton, rice, and okra.  The Union got its way, thanks to their industrialized economy.  Might makes right.

Big government supporters then and now were and are very much against the idea of government growing smaller as by the departure of states, but lately the worm appears to be turning.  Upset over the election of a President they wouldn't have chosen (and, in fact, didn't), California has been making secessionist noises recently.  It's a fact that California's economy absolutely dwarfs the economy of the Confederacy, so they certainly could survive (at least in the short run) without being a part of the current union, and it is very unlikely that this President would react as negatively to their departure as did Abraham Lincoln.  In fact, it's probably true that a large portion of the electorate left behind would actually cheer the new nation onward.

Should we object to a CalExit?  I think it is becoming more apparent with each passing day that, as Mike Vanderboegh once observed, the United States is now one country occupied by two distinct people.  That wouldn't be a problem if both of those two distinct peoples were tolerant of each other, but that's not the case.  In fact, it's blindingly obvious that one faction considers the other to be sub-human and unworthy of any consideration.  This group, the intolerant, accost members of the other group at restaurants and disturb their peaceful enjoyment of a meal they haven't prepared themselves.  They do not simply boycott the 'others', they actively thwart the others' enjoyment of rights they themselves insist upon.  Rights for me but not for thee.  When those 'others' are invited by their supporters to speak on college campuses, for instance, they often find themselves blockaded and unable to even enter the venue.  When they do actually gain entrance and try to speak, they are often hooted and heckled by the 'intolerants' in the audience who — it must be said — are not present to hear the speaker but rather to prevent the speaker from being heard — by anyone.  Surprisingly, the intolerants are not receiving the same treatment from those 'others' who, by and large, tolerate the intolerants.

In case it isn't obvious, the intolerants are without notable exception so-called 'progressive leftists', and their targets are, also without notable exception, so-called conservatives.  The left isn't prepared to extend even the basics of common courtesy to a group they see as 'the enemy'.  In other words, we are at war.  We just haven't started shooting each other yet.  If and when the shooting starts, progressive leftists are going to be unpleasantly surprised to discover that conservatives are better armed and are all too willing to shoot back.

One would have to be an absolute moron to think that a peaceful secession would not be better than that.  Maybe it's time for us to seriously consider secession as a solution to the unrest we see every night on the 6:00 o'clock news.