My Quiet Life

I've already written about how stuffwhitepeoplelike is stupid and irritating at best, harmful and offensive at worst, so I won't rehash the how and why. I just wanted to point out that 2 years later, it's even dumber, less funny, and more pointlessly vitriolic. Witness their recent post on roller derby:

Once a league forms, schedules are made, websites are put up, venues are booked, and tickets are sold. In all, it’s a testament to the incredible work ethic that white people have when it comes to a whimsical activity.

...

If you know someone who plays on a Roller Derby team, you should treat them like a white person who does improv. Encourage them in their efforts, but make it clear that you will not pay money to watch their hobby.

It's funny, see, because as we all know, only white people organize sporting events. GET IT?! Hilarious. Wait, what?

The most irritating thing about this website is that you can almost smell the authors' smug sense of immunity -- that they're above reproach. That is, if you brought any criticism to them or fans of this site, you would immediately be accused of not having a sense of humor. But no, I hate it because I have a sense of humor.

A sad/interesting anecdote of an insurance officer not-so-gently questioning a doctor's care of an elderly (and likely dying) woman:

So the medical officer called me and started asking pointed questions. "Why did you do that test? You know that she's not been compliant. Are you sure you want to do that? I don't think that's a good idea." In other words, this was not just a review of the case. This was an opportunity for the insurance company to intervene in the actual care of the patient.

Then the kicker: "Have you considered not doing anything and . . . just letting nature take its course?"

At first, I was stunned. "You mean let the patient die?"

Expressed in such blatant terms, while he was trying to be diplomatic, made him back down. "Well, uh, no, but she is a high-risk patient."

Anyway, this was the first instance I've encountered in which the insurance company is not just in the business of reviewing a case, but actually trying to intervene during the hospital stay, to the point of making the ultimate healthcare cost savings: Letting the patient die.

I'm certainly in agreement that insurance bureaucrats have no place sticking their nose in the business of patient care, but just a quick note here: you know, it's easy for the author (the doctor) here to get all high-and-mighty about her continued care while it's the insurance companies (really, the payees) that are paying for it, but I don't think his position entitles him to that much moral superiority. The problem here is merely yet another side-effect of the wrong economic model (insurance markets) being applied to what is not unexpected. Insurance works best for the unexpected: car accidents, fires, tornadoes, et al. It doesn't make any sense for things you know are going to happen: the flu, doctor checkups, and, unfortunately.. dying. Dying currently happens to everyone, and the cost of preventing it is directly correlated to the time you want to buy.

No one likes to talk about the longevity of human life in terms of dollars, but that's essentially what it boils down to. If we were employing a commodity market (pay for what you get), this elderly woman's care would not be paid for by her insurance company. It would have to come out of her pocket. Would the doctor still be so gallantly altruistic in advocating for continued, rigorous (and expensive) tests and care if she couldn't pay the bill (read: if he had to foot the bill)?

"Dying", or the process of getting older -- and requiring more expensive healthcare -- is probably better served by social security-like models, where the current generation subsidizes a smaller subset of the surviving elderly, to guarantee a reasonable standard of health/survival through retirement, disability and death. I'm not saying it's easy to dictate who gets what and for how long, but it makes more sense to me than an insurance model, where ongoing care (and cost) is left unchecked, save for the needling bean-counters of the insurance companies. Hard questions.

Someone sent me this collection of pictures from the pacific theatre of WWII.

On a morning when I'm in the midst of several days back-log of work while being inundated with clients calling about hacked servers, it's a good reminder that I really have no good excuse to be that stressed out.

I also think it's funny that while I'm thoroughly vexed trying to take pictures with a Argus C3, lamenting how hard it is at lunch on a weekday while eating a burrito, these guys were doing it in the middle of the jungle while being shot at. Remember that next time you think you're hot shit because you got a new DSLR.

A quick question for everyone out there trying (or wanting) to quit smoking: why would you not at least just switch to nicotine patches full-time? From a pure health perspective, smoking is a weird habit, because the actual chemically addictive agent (nicotine) is actually ... not all that bad for you by itself. So I'm assuming it's either a matter of cost or some external factors (habit, socialization, oral fixation, etc).

From a pure cost basis, one 21 mg 24 hour nicotine patch is around $2. Cigarettes, by comparison, are around $5/pack (highly localized and ever-increasing, but let's use this for now). A pack has 20 cigarettes, and each cigarette has around 0.7mg of nicotine. So, you'd have to smoke around 30 cigarettes to get the nicotine of one 21 mg 24hr patch -- around a pack and a half, so $7.50 -- let's say $8. So, cigarettes are 4 times more expensive? Did I do the math right?

Regardless, it seems clear that the patch delivery mechanism is waaaaay cheaper. So, smokers: even if you didn't intend to stop being addicted to nicotine, why wouldn't you switch to the patch? Is it the oral fixation? Is it the time-to-bloodstream factor? Obviously inhalation hits your brain way faster than a patch would. If that's the case, I wonder what the price point comparison to the nicotine vaporizers is. Anyone know how much those are?

What am I missing here?

For once a blog post referring to the MSM that isn't about the mainstream media! So, there's this meme about mechanically separated meat that's going around. Chicken, specifically. As a quick visit to snopes will tell you, the original text with the meme is riddled with errors and exaggerations -- e.g. the meat is never "soaked" in ammonia, nor do they grind up everything in the carcass. But even aside from that, I find the whole thing fairly irritating. Can someone please tell me what the actual problem is, here? Yes, it's a "gross" picture. Lots of our food is gross before we eat it. A fresh butchered chicken by itself isn't the most pleasant thing even before it's ground up. How is this pink paste any more revolting than tofu?

Tofu is made by taking soybeans and blending them up and pressing them into a homogenous juice, and then adding a coagulant (usually Calcium sulfate, Magnesium chloride, calcium chloride, or Glucono delta-lactone), which causes it to curdle. They then press the resulting curd slop until it's solid and cut it into uniform squares of this hideous white substance. Oh man, can you believe people actually eat that revolting, processed food?!

Seriously, though: let's talk about mechanically separated meat. Here we have, possibly, the one actual benefit of widescale industrialized meat production -- an efficiency of scale. I could just as easily see, if this process did NOT exist, an impassioned, cutting expose about how wasteful the evil food industry is by not even using 50% of the carcasses they process. Jamie Oliver had a clever little experiment he liked to pull on kids, and he was shocked to learn it didn't work on American kids (see the video here). In the clip, he butchers a chicken and takes the remaining carcass and blends it up and presses out the meat from the bones and uses it to make chicken nuggets. The American kids are not daunted and want to chow down, leaving Mr. Oliver shocked, SHOCKED that they'd eat something so bad. While this may be an example that Americans are less aware and critical of what's in their food, I fail to see (in this case) what's so gross or unhealthy about the food he made. It's fresh chicken. People have been making the most out of animal carcasses (out of necessity) for millenia.

I'm not one to defend food inc., here, but come on, people.. get a grip. Mechanically separated chicken is not the biggest problem we're facing. If you want to get serious, let's talk a little about corn. Now THAT'S gross.