Sunday, March 12, 2017
Another sign that spring is springing...
Another sign that spring is springing... The past week's production from our solar panels. We had many weeks of zero production recently, because of snow (see 6 March, below). They've been completely free of snow for four days now; the less-than-perfect production is because of intermittent cloud cover. Soon we'll start seeing those perfect curves again, when we have our first clear days...
USPS fail...
USPS fail and medical care... No surprise in a USPS fail, right?
For years now we've routinely tracked the progress of packages shipping from Amazon to us. The vast majority of these packages ship via Fedex or UPS, and the tracking for them is easy, fast, and accurate.
But every once in a while, an Amazon seller will ship to us via USPS, no doubt to keep the cost down. Usually this is via one of the “priority mail” boxes that don't charge by weight, and the item is something heavy.
That just happened to me: a couple of woodworking clamps are headed my way, and the seller sent them by USPS last week. Four working days later, the USPS tracking number still shows “No information available”. I cannot recall even one instance in which the USPS tracking system actually worked. The items I ordered shipped on March 8th, and the USPS estimates delivery on April 24th. The first time I saw such a ridiculous estimated delivery time, I was quite alarmed – but the package actually arrived in quite the timely fashion, as have most of the others. I can only guess that the USPS sets the estimate so long so that no matter how badly the screw things up, they can still claim an “on-time” delivery.
The USPS likes to claim that they are not a government agency, and technically they are correct. However ... for any practical purpose, they really are a government agency: their subsidies, rate regulation, employment regulation, Congressional oversight, the franking privilege, etc. make them effectively one even if technically they are not.
My point is that the kind of awful service delivered by the USPS is always what we get when we let the government run something. As a veteran of the U.S. Navy, I can attest to the almost unbelievable amount of economic waste in the military. All of us know how wonderful the DMVs are, especially in the blue states (where government bureaucracies have run the furthest off the rails).
So how is this related to medical care? Like this: the progressives in this country deeply, desperately desire our healthcare to be a so-called “single payer” system, meaning that the Federal government pays for it all. The UK's NHS is their model. This is the connection, and the part I least understand: what they want is for the same “quality” of the USPS, or DMVs, to be applied to our healthcare, too! At least the damned post office won't kill me! Talk with any UK residents about their three month waits for an MRI, or their relatives who died of cancer while waiting for diagnostic tests, and you'll see our future should a single payer system ever be put in place here. What I simply cannot understand is why anyone wants this!
Who wouldn't want some effective corporate organization (Amazon, anyone?) to take over the USPS? I'd be willing to wager that the quality would go up and the price down – so long as there was competition...
For years now we've routinely tracked the progress of packages shipping from Amazon to us. The vast majority of these packages ship via Fedex or UPS, and the tracking for them is easy, fast, and accurate.
But every once in a while, an Amazon seller will ship to us via USPS, no doubt to keep the cost down. Usually this is via one of the “priority mail” boxes that don't charge by weight, and the item is something heavy.
That just happened to me: a couple of woodworking clamps are headed my way, and the seller sent them by USPS last week. Four working days later, the USPS tracking number still shows “No information available”. I cannot recall even one instance in which the USPS tracking system actually worked. The items I ordered shipped on March 8th, and the USPS estimates delivery on April 24th. The first time I saw such a ridiculous estimated delivery time, I was quite alarmed – but the package actually arrived in quite the timely fashion, as have most of the others. I can only guess that the USPS sets the estimate so long so that no matter how badly the screw things up, they can still claim an “on-time” delivery.
The USPS likes to claim that they are not a government agency, and technically they are correct. However ... for any practical purpose, they really are a government agency: their subsidies, rate regulation, employment regulation, Congressional oversight, the franking privilege, etc. make them effectively one even if technically they are not.
My point is that the kind of awful service delivered by the USPS is always what we get when we let the government run something. As a veteran of the U.S. Navy, I can attest to the almost unbelievable amount of economic waste in the military. All of us know how wonderful the DMVs are, especially in the blue states (where government bureaucracies have run the furthest off the rails).
So how is this related to medical care? Like this: the progressives in this country deeply, desperately desire our healthcare to be a so-called “single payer” system, meaning that the Federal government pays for it all. The UK's NHS is their model. This is the connection, and the part I least understand: what they want is for the same “quality” of the USPS, or DMVs, to be applied to our healthcare, too! At least the damned post office won't kill me! Talk with any UK residents about their three month waits for an MRI, or their relatives who died of cancer while waiting for diagnostic tests, and you'll see our future should a single payer system ever be put in place here. What I simply cannot understand is why anyone wants this!
Who wouldn't want some effective corporate organization (Amazon, anyone?) to take over the USPS? I'd be willing to wager that the quality would go up and the price down – so long as there was competition...
Paradise ponders, superstar mutts edition...
Paradise ponders, superstar mutts edition... So I took a few quick photos of Mako and Cabo to assuage the demon readers who are pestering me about them. Here are the superstars:
I took these before the sun rose, which is why they aren't as crisp as you'd expect. The first one is Cabo, the little girl. She has those eyes all the time, perpetually looking startled. Sometimes the lighter hair on her head stands straight up, like a little mohawk cut. The second is Mako, the big boy. At the moment I took that, he thought I had some food. The last photo shows both of them, and gives you an idea about their relative size. Despite being much smaller than Mako, Cabo holds her own in any play battle. That's mainly due to her completely ruthless nature. When they're “fighting”, she will chomp down on any part of Mako that happens to be handy – yes, including those parts. Ouch! She's also much quicker and more agile than Mako, so she'll make fast runs at him and bowl him over. Mako, on the other hand, appears to be much more polite about their battles. Sometimes he even looks offended when she does something outrageous to him, and often he looks befuddled by the sheer speed with which she does it. Despite all the mock fighting, though, these two are best buddies. They spend all day in each other's company, even when they don't have to (our yard is big).
Yesterday afternoon, our neighbors across the street (Gary and Elayne S.) called us and invited us to go to dinner with them. That was completely unexpected, but we hadn't seen them for a while, so we eagerly accepted. We ended up going to a place we'd never been before: the Logan Steakhouse, which recently began the process of turning themselves into the Copper Mill. Their web site apparently isn't operational yet. We'd read bad reviews of the steakhouse, which when combined with high prices kept us away. The reviews for the new Copper Mill were very good, though, so we'd been planning to try it out. Our outing with Gary and Elayne was the perfect time to do that. Debbie and I shared a fish & chips plate, and it was delicious – cod done perfectly, great fries, dinner rolls right out of the oven (or they sure tasted that way!), and a nice salad for Debbie. Price was modest, too. We approve!
Our conversations over dinner were mainly catching up on the past few months. Somewhere in the conversation the subject turned to our solar panels, which Gary wanted to know why we had installed. That led to a discussion about our Tesla (because the panels largely were justified by the need to charge it), which Gary and Elayne didn't know we had. It turns out that their son has been urging them to get one, and they really couldn't figure out why. That led to Gary and Elayne wanting a ride in our Tesla. Gary wanted it to be to “someplace important” :) So we're going to out with them to Maddox sometime next week. And who knows? Maybe we'll end up with our neighbor having a Tesla, too!
We bought a couple nice chunks of fresh ahi tuna from Macey's, and that's our dinner today. Yum! It's hard to beat ahi for fresh fish...
I have a new question to use in order to rule political candidates in or out. “Do you support getting rid of Daylight Saving time?” If they say “no”, they're not getting my vote...
I took these before the sun rose, which is why they aren't as crisp as you'd expect. The first one is Cabo, the little girl. She has those eyes all the time, perpetually looking startled. Sometimes the lighter hair on her head stands straight up, like a little mohawk cut. The second is Mako, the big boy. At the moment I took that, he thought I had some food. The last photo shows both of them, and gives you an idea about their relative size. Despite being much smaller than Mako, Cabo holds her own in any play battle. That's mainly due to her completely ruthless nature. When they're “fighting”, she will chomp down on any part of Mako that happens to be handy – yes, including those parts. Ouch! She's also much quicker and more agile than Mako, so she'll make fast runs at him and bowl him over. Mako, on the other hand, appears to be much more polite about their battles. Sometimes he even looks offended when she does something outrageous to him, and often he looks befuddled by the sheer speed with which she does it. Despite all the mock fighting, though, these two are best buddies. They spend all day in each other's company, even when they don't have to (our yard is big).
Yesterday afternoon, our neighbors across the street (Gary and Elayne S.) called us and invited us to go to dinner with them. That was completely unexpected, but we hadn't seen them for a while, so we eagerly accepted. We ended up going to a place we'd never been before: the Logan Steakhouse, which recently began the process of turning themselves into the Copper Mill. Their web site apparently isn't operational yet. We'd read bad reviews of the steakhouse, which when combined with high prices kept us away. The reviews for the new Copper Mill were very good, though, so we'd been planning to try it out. Our outing with Gary and Elayne was the perfect time to do that. Debbie and I shared a fish & chips plate, and it was delicious – cod done perfectly, great fries, dinner rolls right out of the oven (or they sure tasted that way!), and a nice salad for Debbie. Price was modest, too. We approve!
Our conversations over dinner were mainly catching up on the past few months. Somewhere in the conversation the subject turned to our solar panels, which Gary wanted to know why we had installed. That led to a discussion about our Tesla (because the panels largely were justified by the need to charge it), which Gary and Elayne didn't know we had. It turns out that their son has been urging them to get one, and they really couldn't figure out why. That led to Gary and Elayne wanting a ride in our Tesla. Gary wanted it to be to “someplace important” :) So we're going to out with them to Maddox sometime next week. And who knows? Maybe we'll end up with our neighbor having a Tesla, too!
We bought a couple nice chunks of fresh ahi tuna from Macey's, and that's our dinner today. Yum! It's hard to beat ahi for fresh fish...
I have a new question to use in order to rule political candidates in or out. “Do you support getting rid of Daylight Saving time?” If they say “no”, they're not getting my vote...