Replaced my aging HTC Touch HD with a Nexus One three weeks ago. It's amazing that this phone, released close to 10 months ago, is still pretty competitive both against the iPhone 4 or recently released Android handsets. Korean version btw, came with an SLCD instead of AMOLED - which is cool. I didn't like the somewhat blurry letters on my friend's desire, and the extra brightness (albeit small) comes in handy in daylight. Don't watch movies on the thing (where AMOLED is better), I have a 37" LCD TV for that, or my netbook. Everything is cool about this phone, the only missing feature was Skype, but that problem went away a week ago.
Syncronizing files through dropbox between phone and PC, Netbook. Backups through WIFI using SyncToy on Windows 7 (Home Network is a very cool feature). I have all my important data in three places - Documents, Pictures, Books, etc. are synced between the netbook and my PC, and I have an external HDD (shock resistant, hardened) for offline storage.
The 1201n still runs strong, can't find a better netbook at a similar price, even almost a year after its release. Yeah, it has a somewhat shorter battery life than the newer iterations, but it has a dual core desktop CPU, and battery is still good for 4-5 hours.
And finally, I sold my TZ7 and bought the new TZ10 - we are talking compact, ultrazoom cameras. Panasonic, Leica lens, pocketable with a 12x optical zoom and really powerful optical image stabilizer. For a long time (3 years!) Panasonic had no competition in this nieche. Well, Canon tried, as well as Nikon and the rest of the big guys, but failed miserable until this year. Well, this year too actually, the TZ10 still bests all of them in every review I've read, but at least now Canon is somewhat competitive.
Can't think of any toy I need in the foreseeable future. I'm a gadget addict, and for the first time, I have everything I need. COOL!
I was watching a few episodes of MST3k recently, one of which was Hercules Against the Moon Men. This is the episode which introduced the concept of DEEP HURTING . I have had that soundbite stuck in my head since then.
Enter the farcical massive patent dump by Mr. Allen. It is but the newest example of stupid patent litigation over concepts of information systems and algorithms. News of these patent suits is becoming more burdensome on (at the very least) my sanity. And these patent problems are relentless. So when I was attempting to think of some phrase which best embodied my perception of this endless stream of patent stupidity, DEEP HURTING is what came to mind.
More extensively, following patents on concepts used with computers and information systems is enough like the "plot" of MST3k that I'm starting to think that the only way to survive this with our sanity will be to laugh and mock our way through them. Oh, sure, we'll need to take them seriously at times to work around them or invalidate them, yet that alone will not be sufficient to preserve sanity. Only, I'm not even sure how something like this could be done.
Or maybe I'm already going mad, and this is the stupidest thing you've heard in the past 24 hours.
DEEP HURTING. DEEP HURTING
derp
Every Sunday, and often on a weekday or two, millions of Americans eat Jewish flesh and drink Jewish blood. As a Jew, this scares the shit out of me.
The people doing this claim theyâ(TM)re faking it; that itâ(TM)s not real Jewish flesh and blood. Yeah, right. Thatâ(TM)s like Rush Limbaugh saying he really isnâ(TM)t a hateful bigot, heâ(TM)s just kidding, hah hah hah.
But let me tell you something: before the Army sends you off to shoot at real people and kill them, they have you practice on human-shaped targets.
CPR and first aid are the same way. You practice on a dummy before you are turned loose to do it on real people.
And kids who torture or kill pets often grow up to be serial murderers.
Do these âoeChristiansâ expect us to believe that after practicing for years, even for decades, on âoetransubstantiatedâ fake Jews, they donâ(TM)t want to sink their fangs into the real thing?
I am not a big fan of Islam, but given a choice between people who blow up a few Jews now and then and people who openly practice ritual cannibalism on Jews all the time, Iâ(TM)ll choose the Muslims any day of the week â" especially Sunday.
I just received mail notification that a fellow user has bought me a gift subscription to slashdot. I'm already friends/fans with the person but his email address isn't visible so I can't thank the person off-/. (wimp, change your privacy settings and deal with the spam!
Not sure what I did to deserve it, but I thank you!
Yes, there are "terror babies" among us. But most of them were planted here many years ago by Russian Communist spymasters, not recently by demented Muslims.
One notorious Soviet-planted goon is Sarah Palinsky. Her parents and her husband's parents were secretly transported across the Bering Strait from The Motherland in the 1950s.
Note that Todd Palinsky has agitated for Alaska to secede from the United States, no doubt so that it can rejoin Russia, and Sarah Palinsky has noted, wistfully, that she can see The Motherland from her home in Alaska.
This song -- http://tinyurl.com/Sweet-Ala -- could easily be rewritten as "Sweet Home Mother Russia" and used to help Americans realize that Red states are going to become Red for real.
You see, the nefarious commie plot is subtle. Right now, in Phase One, the main objective is to impoverish the American working class while further enriching the richies. Phase Two, of course, will be the violent workers' uprising. In Phase Three, a resurgent Soviet Union will send troops "to restore order."
Newt Gingrovich, Ron Paulowsky, Rush Limbauvich, and Glenn Beckovits are also leading members of this evil conspiracy.
So, too, is GOP Chairman Michael Stalin (Stalin is "Steele" in Russian).
Please, fellow Americans. Go to the rifle range and hone your shooting skills. Make note of the tea party people, Republicans, and other traitors who live near you, and be ready to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights on them when the day comes, which won't be long now.
And remember, no matter how evil the Richies and their Republican stooges become, We are the country, we will survive!
Face it: we're going to have at least two or three more years of economic decline, and Obama is a DINO who worries more about his image on Fox News than about doing anything that might actually help working Americans, so we might as well have a Congress that agrees with him.
Here's what we'll get if we vote in a Republican Congressional Majority:
Yeah. Let the Republicons do their worst for the next two years. We're Americans. We're resilient. We will survive. And once we totally discredit them, we can get on with the business of moving America into the 21st Century.
Short Flash vid...
http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1273610622233RA56
Canadian pre-orders started today.
64 GB WiFi version ordered, should be here by May 28. No need for the 3G version, I can tether with MyWi on the iPhone.
My dad picked up the similar model on a trip to the US last week. Was playing with it on the weekend, awesome device. Perhaps not magical but still most impressive.
I would just like to take a little time to vent about recruiting in the IT industry. Once upon a time, you used to actually be able to find "recruiters" that you could work with. These guys or gals would call you periodically, take you out to lunch every now and then and just keep in touch. They were honest, hard working, and if they said they had a job for you to consider - they were usually serious.
Today in 2010 I'm finding that:
1. Recruiters don't know anything about the technology they are recruiting for.
2. Bug you for resumes and even cover letters and then don't return you phone calls or respond to emails.
3. Want you to doctor your resume to fit the job.
4. Don't read or pay attention to the skills on your resume and then try to pitch a job to you that has nothing to do with your skill set.
5. Lie about the going rate or salary for a position - either tell you its going to be much higher and then lowering it about 4-5 times or trying to low-ball you.
And the recruiters wonder why they can't find good people. Maybe its because they have ticked all the decent people off and we don't want to deal with them anymore.
Unions not only destroyed many once-proud American businesses, but also promulgated such evils as a 40 hour workweek (remember that?), health and safety regulations on the job that have saved many workersâ(TM) lives, paid vacations, and the now-discredited idea of defined-benefit pensions, plus a particular horror this country used to value called âoejob security.â
And letâ(TM)s not forget that pesky minimum wage.
We need to finish rolling back all the damage unions have done to the U.S. so we can compete with China and India. American workers have been spoiled by having things like indoor plumbing, electricity, telephones, and cable TV. Once we get them to roll back their living standards to the dirt-floor hut level common in the countries that are now eating our economic lunch, we will return America to its former state of greatness, where millionaires had hordes of servants (which we need because of the stress our fortunes cause) and children started working at age 8 instead of lollygagging around in schools all day.
Another institution we may want to consider bringing back is slavery â" except that weâ(TM)re more racially enlightened now that we were in the 18th and 19th centuries, so we wonâ(TM)t deny this opportunity for lifetime employment to non-black people but will extend it to all.
Never forget: America is a Christian nation, and slavery is mentioned in the Bible but unions are not.
God bless America!
by Lazlo Toth, American
(at least, I *think* that's what the scrawled signature said.)
We seem to have collectively decided that at least 15% of our working-age population is no longer necessary to keep our country's businesses running, and every year we have a larger number of surplus people as we shift more jobs overseas or automate them out of existence. We basically have two choices: we can either remove some of the connection between work and income or we can build tariff barriers that eliminate at least some competition for American workers from people in other, lower-cost countries. Or we can come up with some combination of these two solutions.
Let's assume we don't want citizens' armies of former workers who have nothing to lose roaming our countryside, looking for food and shelter and killing anyone who gets in their way. If you are a prosperous or rich American, this would not be good for you, because you and your family would become possible kidnap, carjacking or home invasion victims. You can hide behind the walls of gated communities, but then you will need to worry about your hired guards, especially if you pay them the same low wages most security personnel receive today. And what if some of the redress-righters who want to kidnap you or steal from you are relatives of your guards? When this situation arises, your guards are more likely to help loot your house than protect it from looters.
It is, therefore, a good idea for America's more prosperous citizens to help those who have little. Forget morality for a moment and think of enlightened self-interest. Almost every communist revolution and pre-communist revolt against an imperial or dictatorial government was preceded by period during which the rich got richer at the expense of everyone else. In other words, maybe pre-communist Cuba was a paradise for the wealthy families whose offspring fled to Florida to get away from Castro's revolutionaries, but before the revolution life was miserable for most Cubans; no decent medical care, barely enough food to eat, high illiteracy rate due to a lack of public schools, low pay at best, no work at worst. In other words, a dog-eat-dog state, with no protection of the poor from the depredations of the rich, and no social safety net.
Class warfare? You bet! And it typically ends with bodies of the formerly rich or prosperous hanging from lamp posts or their heads piling up next to guillotines while rampaging mobs loot the stores and ransack mansions. Smart American rich people (think Warren Buffett) realize that too much greed by too many people will inevitably cause society to break down, so the rich and prosperous need to allow a certain amount of wealth-sharing through taxation, and must support at least some level of "entitlements" in order to save their own skins. Dumb American rich people (think of the Olin, Walton, and Hilton heirs) seem to believe they can get away with living on the backs of working people because they chose the right parentage and have no obligation to share any of their unearned wealth with anyone else.
If we want more employment, let's hire a lot of people
The two biggest federal depression-era employment programs were the WPA and the CCC. I know the current anti-government people love to say no government handout program ever ends, but both the WPA and the CCC went away as soon as they were no longer needed. It took WWII -- and a level of government spending that eclipsed the WPA, CCC, and all other government entitlement programs before or since, to end the need for these two agencies. Hopefully we won't need a similar war to pull our country out of our current depression, but to make sure of that we need to start figuring out how to help our surplus people before the unemployment problem becomes as acute as it was in 1934 or 1935.
Remember that the WPA and CCC were both "workfare," not "welfare" programs. They included construction projects and public art projects, folklore research (John and Alan Lomax were partially funded by the WPA), and many other useful projects both blue-collar and white-collar.
Were the WPA and CCC "successful?" Not from the standpoint of the 30s far right wing, but a large majority of Americans both rich and poor supported these programs because they staved off misery for an awful lot of Americans, and removed much of the very real threat of a socialist or communist revolt supported by the Soviet Union, which at the time openly talked about spreading communism to the whole world.
There was plenty of right-wing squawking in the 1930s about the government getting too large and not following the Constitution, but that noise was tempered by knowledge that millions of angry workers out of work permanently or even for more than a few years represented a far greater danger to the Republic than a liberal interpretation of the Constitution's Commerce Clause.
The Player Piano Alternative
Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel, Player Piano, takes place in a future where most American workers have been displaced by machines, live on scant welfare payments, and want to be useful rather than live on the dole -- except that there is hardly any demand for physical workers in an automated world. Replace automation with "Chinese workers" and include many white-collar workers whose jobs have moved to India, and you still have Vonnegut's Player Piano, along with its original automation component. You not only have massive and growing unemployment, but structural unemployment that is unlikely to abate even if the economy "recovers" from its current malaise.
What do we do about this problem? Warehouse our surplus workers and feed them just enough dole money and free TV to keep most of them sitting on their couches drinking beer instead of plotting home invasions? Do we decide to put strong tariffs in place that make imports artificially more expensive than American-produced goods and services -- and deal with the inevitable smuggling and other problems this solution would create as by-products?
I'll admit that I am personally attracted to the idea of protectionist-level tariffs for a large "basket" of items that we should make here in the U.S. instead of obtaining overseas if only because we are so dependent on them. Food? Yup. Energy? Why not? Support American oil, nuclear power, solar and wind generation, etc., by levying a large per-Joule tax on all imported energy sources. Computers and electronic components? If, as so many companies in this industry claim, "intellectual property" is what matters, producing the physical products here would not lead to huge price increases. Ditto with pharmaceuticals. One day I bought a popular over-the-counter cold remedy and noticed that it was manufactured and packaged in Costa Rica. This is a product where the actual production cost is only a small fraction of the retail price. Making it here in the U.S. would not drive its maker into bankruptcy, especially if all that company's competitors also manufactured here because of tariffs or because of laws prohibiting the manufacture of FDA-controlled products outside our borders.
An aside: we pay the world's highest prices for pharmaceuticals, and have many laws prohibiting individual citizens from buying pharmaceuticals in other countries and bringing them home for their own use. And yet, a growing percentage of the price-supported drugs we buy are made elsewhere. This makes no sense whatsoever. If "safety" is the reason not to allow individual Americans to import drugs on their own, why should pharmaceutical manufacturers or wholesalers be allowed to do it? This is a ripoff. And I'm scared that we won't get rid of it anytime soon because the pharmaceutical industry has always been a prolific source of political donations and the Supreme Court recently decided to make it even easier for pharma companies and their trade associations to influence elections. Grrr....
Where Will We Put the Welfare Trailer Parks and Tent Cities?
Another way to make American workers competitive is to house them in circumstances similar to those "enjoyed" by Indian and Chinese workers. In other words, get away from the idea that Americans inherently deserve luxuries such as separate bedrooms for children, indoor plumbing, and broadband Internet service, let alone government-paid education or decent medical care. Under this scenario, we dump the concept of a minimum wage and let the market determine the value of each human's contribution to our increasingly corporate-dominated society. If supply and demand in a world of free trade dictates that the value of an American blue-collar worker is $5/day and that a knowledge worker is worth $10/day, so be it. Of course, this means most American workers won't be able to afford any market-rate housing we currently have, let alone allow their children to attend school instead of working for their daily bread (or possibly nutritious soy mush). TV? We'd better make sure they still have that, along with low-cost beer (and possibly pot) to keep them happy in their new ghettos, where they will live out their lives in the equivalent of FEMA trailers. Or tents. Or yurts. Or shanty towns and slums like the ones common in third-world cities.
Provide a Minimum -- but Low -- Income to All
I am starting to believe we need to provide a minimum income "floor" for all Americans, along with basic education and health care services. This is not an ideological belief. It is purely practical. Perhaps you want to live somewhere people are falling off the edge of civilization and you need to carry a gun whenever you go out because many of your fellow citizens have no way besides crime to eat, clothe, and shelter themselves. I do not want to live in that kind of country. At the same time, I don't want to live in one where the government dictates my every move, including where I live and how I earn a living.
This is why, when I say "minimum income floor," I mean truly minimal, not in suburban houses people work hard to afford. And I don't believe everyone has a right to the most expensive medical treatment available, either. And education? I have nothing against you (or anyone else) sending your children to a private school at your own expense, any more than I have a problem with you wanting (and paying for) medical care from a private physician and private hospital rooms while people with less money deal with clinic-style medicine and open hospital wards.
Housing? This is what I wrote about housing the homeless in 2007. I haven't changed my mind since then.
As far as food, I am not in favor of the current program that lets poor people spend government food subsidies on things like soft drinks and cheese doodles. Sorry, but if you're going to eat on the taxpayers' tab, you had better get used to cooking from scratch or at least from low-cost mixes. Want more than four to six ounces of meat per person per day? You are going to have to find a way to make some money. Ditto if you want white meat chicken instead of thighs and legs or butter instead of (generic) margarine.
Opportunity is Important
What keeps people from going wild when things aren't going well is hope. For many, religion furnishes it, in the sense that there will be pie in the sky bye and bye. But for even more it is important to have a belief, even a false one, in our ability to make our lives better through our own efforts. This is the oft-cited "American Dream.
If you're broke and facing bankruptcy or you've already lost a home you sweated hard to buy, that dream seems more like a nightmare. We have millions of citizens who are living that nightmare, and even when we read "hopeful" employment numbers, they are "hopeful" only because fewer people lost jobs this month than in previous months, not because more people are suddenly getting hired than are getting fired.
So what are we going to do?
I'm afraid that lowering taxes, especially on our richest and greediest citizens, isn't going to help put a lot of unemployed Americans back to work. An awful lot of people seem to have forgotten that some of the years when this country experienced its greatest economic growth, and saw the greatest rise in the percentage of citizens who owned their own houses, and the greatest rise in standard of living for working people, and some of our greatest scientific advances, along with major strides in civil rights and other social aspects of our lives, happened in the 1950 - 1970 period when we had some of the most progressive income tax schedules ever. Banks and other financial institutions were highly regulated. Unions were far stronger than they are today. And in most married households, one income paid all the bills.
Sure, our houses were smaller then, and we didn't have Medicare for old people. But, in general, every year was a little better than the year before. Every day, in every way, we really were getting better and better.
Can we say the same thing today? I don't think so. If anything, life is getting worse for a majority of Americans.
Are we really willing to see our fellow citizens living in tents, especially in winter? Are we willing to risk that kind of life, ourselves, if we lose our jobs and health insurance and face medical bills we can't pay? Are we so determined to hold on to the illusion of liberty it's easy to enjoy when we have substantial incomes, but not so easy to hold onto when we run out of money before the end of the month, that we want to keep saying, "The free market will save us," in the face of evidence that it will not? And increasing evidence that our most vocal "free market" proponents aren't even interested in trying?
At the same time, we can't run government deficits forever. I'm okay with the Keynesian ideas that led to the Golden Age of Capitalism after WWII, but sooner or later we need to pay back the money we have borrowed -- and that means true government austerity, not the little bits of savings (starting next year) Obama has proposed, plus it would mean tax increases larger than any American politician at the national level has enough guts to propose.
No matter what, the current "rich get richer while the poor get poorer" economic reality will not go on forever.
The only question is whether we'll end it by purely political means (more transfer payments), by government stepping in and helping capitalism work (creating jobs during bad economic times; increasing import tariffs; tax incentives to help persuade businesses to hire more Americans) or by civil breakdown and insurrection.
So which alternative do you prefer?
I prefer the third alternative, myself. But I don't hold an elective office and don't plan to run for one (and don't have the level of corporate support it's going to take win future elections, anyway), so you might as well disregard my opinion since it can't possibly translate into action in today's sad political climate.
This post sponsored by Millers Art & Video -- the company that makes professional video for people on tight budgets.
In a fantasy libertarian paradise, each citizen works hard out of enlightened self-interest. No one uses force on anyone else, since my rights stop where your nose begins. If you accumulate a whole bunch of property, bully for you! If I fail in business or some other endeavor and suddenly have no money for food, clothing or medical care, too bad for me. Maybe some of my enlightened neighbors, out of self-interest, will help me out with voluntary donations. And maybe they won't. Under communism, the opposite is true. Each citizen works to his or her maximum capacity in order to benefit society as a whole, and society as a whole owns the major means of production, including farms, factories, and mines. No one goes without the basics of life, and the idea of any one person owning a yacht disappears, because no citizen needs a private yacht when he or she can freely use state-owned boats for anything from fishing to partying. Under either system, everyone is happy and fair and treats other members of society with respect.
But both philosophies suffer from a problem. That problem is human nature. I'm sorry, but there are hardly any instances in human history (or pre-history) where applying an essentially utopian political or economic philosophy has resulted in a utopia. In the modern world, we have Somalia as an example of extreme libertarianism in practice, and North Korea as an example of extreme communism in practice.
"But...but...but," the libertarians stammer, "we don't want anarchy like Somalia. We believe in having enough government to serve as referee in disputes, and we don't believe violence is a valid basis of society." I hear you, folks. Unfortunately, plenty of people do not hear you, and in a situation where government is weak, will inevitably exert their will through force. It doesn't take a high percentage of the population to believe that power comes from the barrel of a gun to destroy even the rosiest libertarian paradise. And, as we have witnessed in the U.S. over the past few decades, many of the people who talk loudest about deregulation and freeing themselves from burdensome laws essentially want to be able to steal from their fellow citizens without risking prison sentences when they do.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the street, the communists are apoplectic with rage at the very idea that any sane person could conflate their inevitable workers' paradise with North Korea's brutocracy. Or Cuba's repressive regime. Why, those countries don't represent communism any more than Somalia represents libertarianism! True. But in real life, communist revolutions have almost always led to dictatorships of one sort or another. And, as a little-noted side effect, endless, mind-numbing speeches by the dictators. Even mild communists like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez (who calls himself a Bolivarian and denies being a doctrinaire communist) can go on TV and spout drivel for hours on end, and has enough control over the airwaves that you can't necessarily change the channel and catch a soccer game or telenovela instead.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around.
Under a truly libertarian capitalist system, if some people become so wealthy that they can afford personal airliners while a few miles away, others live in
grinding poverty, that's fine. Under the Soviet Russian (communist) regime, party leaders have always had sumptuous dachas where they lived in luxury, far from the prying eyes of ordinary citizens who typically lived in crowded communal housing.
In other words, neither system serves most people very well, although adherents of both philosophies will spend as many hours as you let them (and then some) telling you why theirs is better for you than the other one.
As an American, what I really want is the best parts of both systems. I want the income security of communism, or at least of its milder cousin, socialism, while at the same time I want libertarian-style personal freedoms. I realize that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, so I am happy to have you pay taxes to support our government. (I also believe I should be exempt from most of them, just as I'm fine with laws that restrict any of your behavior I may not like, but none that restrict my behavior.)
Do I sound spoiled, hypocritical, cynical, or all three?
Or do I just sound like a normal American?
The reality is that no system will work perfectly as long as it is run by human beings. Private industry screws up all the time, and big companies often turn into impenetrable, inefficient bureaucracies -- as do government agencies that don't get constant oversight from concerned citizens. Even science-fictional computers running a large society are likely to screw up, since they would be built and programmed by fallible humans.
So what is the solution?
I' m a mild believer in what some call the Third Way. Neither leftists or rightists (in old-fashioned politics-speak) like or respect moderation. I do. Nobody goes away happy, but we manage to generally keep everyone's unhappiness level low enough that we transfer power after elections without blood in the streets, and tend to have excesses of socialist-leaning presidents and Congresses muted by the libertarian-leaning ones that almost inevitably follow them -- and vice versa.
This kind of compromise is the American way. Our founding fathers didn't agree on everything. They compromised, and our Constitution was the result of that compromise. Let's carry on that tradition!
(Now we will all rise and sing the national anthem together.)
More drivel at Roblimo.com
One of my wife's friends is a doctor's wife -- who is now on an austerity budget because, she says, her husband's pediatric practice now sees an average of seven patients per day, down from an average of thirty patients per day a year ago. He's laying off two more of his office staff people this week, and this is not his first layoff. The reason? My wife's friend says it's because many of her husband's patients' parents have lost their jobs and health insurance and can no longer afford to take their kids to a doctor for minor illnesses or regular checkups. And if something happens to their children that makes medical care necessary rather than optional, these newly-impoverished families seek out public health clinics or go to the local emergency rooms, and will only call their old pediatrician as a last resort.
This situation is not necessarily typical in the doctor business. We are speaking here about a Spanish-speaking (bi-lingual) pediatrician in Sarasota, Florida, one of the cities in the U.S. that is in a true depression, not a mere recession. We're also talking about a doctor who caters heavily to Spanish-speaking residents, a group whose members have historically depended more on the now-moribund construction industry for income than most others, and because of this is now experiencing an extraordinarily high rate of unemployment -- by some estimates as high as 40% or 50%.
And even Hispanic families here whose members still have jobs are feeling pinched. Many of them are facing reduced hours and, even if that's not a factor, feel obliged to help unemployed relatives. There has long been a local, truth-based stereotype of Mexican and Central American families packing four people into a one-bedroom apartment and six or eight into a two-bedroom place. Now families are doubling up, so that crowding is worse than ever.
An Anglo with a steady job or some kind of entitlement income (Social Security or an old-fashioned defined pension) may turn up his or her nose at the idea of so many people living in so little space, especially if the nose-turner is living alone in 1000 square feet or is part of a family of four that lives in a 2000 or 3000 square foot suburban house. The complacent love to sneer at those less well-off than themselves. I don't know why this is, but it is a habit among many in this part of the world.
But how many of the sneerers have taken in their laid-off relatives? Or send substantial part of their incomes to relatives in Mexico or Michigan or other places where the economy is even more depressed than it is here? Some, I'm sure, but not a huge percentage.
We can also sneer at families whose adults may be illegal immigrants, and point out that a Spanish-speaking pediatrician here probably has plenty of illegals -- or their "anchor baby" children -- among his patients. Still, when these children don't go to doctors as often as they should, the doctor's income drops, and employment in his office drops, and the risk of those children carrying commicable diseases goes up. And fine, yes, we can send all those families back to Mexico or Guatemala or which means the pediatrician will have even fewer patients and may eventually be forced to close his practice entirely, which means everyone who works for him becomes jobless and our already-high local commercial property vacancy rate will increase by one more unit.
I'm sure other doctors are also feeling pinched. From what I hear, mostly second-hand and third-hand, plastic surgeons and those who specialize in Lasik eye surgery and other optional procedures are also seeing their practices shrink, and more people are tryig to stick with their family doctors or internists instead of going to pricier specialists either because, now uninsured, they are paying for treatment out of their own pockets or because (my wife is in this second group) they can't afford the risk of their insurance company failing to pay all or part of a specialist's fee.
What's the point here? Nothing, really, except to point out that even businesses once considered recession-proof aren't. Gambling was once considered recession-proof but casino revenues are now way down from where they were a year or two ago. And the medical sector was once considered even more recession-proof than the gaming industry. But this no longer seems to be so. We don't have many doctors standing on street corners yet, holding their medical bags and signs that say, "Will Cure You for Food," but I have one relative and more than a few friends who have lost more humble jobs in the medical field (phlebotomy, lab techs, receptionists, etc.) and are now having a rough time feeding their families.
What should we do about all this? Unleash the now-discredited free market so it can work its so-called magic? Use more government subsidies or job-creation programs to put money in ordinary citizens' pockets? I have no idea. But I hope someone has one. Soon.
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Read more of my essays and see some of my videos at Roblimo.com
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
