The current state of health care does not work for a good number of Americans. America’s current system doesn’t work for the working poor these are people who make ‘to much money’  to qualify for state assistance (Medicaid), yet their jobs don’t provide them with affordable or decent health insurance. When we look at it from a business perspective the so called working poor are the ones who do all the physical jobs that make life easier for the more affluent people who can afford private insurance so it’s stands to reason that healthier people mean more able bodied people to work.

Our current system of government provided health care (Medicare and Medicaid) systems are ginormous bureaucracies with volumes of rules and regulations that no one seems to really understand. The system is open to abuse and is abused daily by not only patients but the doctors and other people who provide services. We know it’s broken yet no one is bothering to fix it. If history is any indicator, the government will bungle health care for every American not just the relatively few who receive government assisted health care currently.

An example of abuse: My sister who has medicare/medicaid went for a dental checkup. It turns out she has 10 or so cavities. The office wants her to come back for each tooth separately. Now I personally have had 5 teeth pulled in one session, I know people who have had 2 or 3 root canals done in one day. Why would the office want her to come back separately for each tooth? Simple, every tooth is an office visit charge for Medicaid. Instead of one, two, or even three office visits and doing multiple fillings in one session the dentist wants to rake in the office fee 10 separate times. If this is flagrant abuse of the system, I don’t know what is. Who’s supposed to be auditing the billing? Why aren’t they catching straight forward fraud like this? Shoot a computer program should be able to pick up on situations like this. Why is X patient seeing the same dentist 10 times in one year? Does the patient have underlying conditions that require separate visits? If not, then sorry doctor you can longer take medicaid patients. Period that’s it. Scam the system once you’re out.

The problems are very complex though it’s not just an issue of the working poor not being able to afford private insurance. It’s also an issue of hospitals and other providers overcharging private insurance companies because they know they will pay. The common counter to the overcharging statement is that hospitals over charge to cover all the people who use their services and don’t pay the bill. There may be some truth to that but what about charging a fair price to everyone? This way perhaps some of the people who have to pay out of pocket can actually afford it. Instead of charging over $1000 to walk in to an emergency room to receive basic care. How about $200 for a dose of Tylenol and best yet they give you the generic. For $200 I can get a whole case of the brand name Tylenol.  How can you rationalize that price? There is no way possible, you just cannot. Please don’t feed me the line ‘well the hospital has to pay to maintain it’s facilities and stay on the cutting edge’. Charge the people who use advanced medical care to stay on the cutting edge. Don’t tell me well you’re using up an ER bed that could be used for someone who needs advanced care, I call bull chit. First of all that’s why pretty much every ER has trauma rooms and regular rooms, that’s why you have triage so the worst patients go first and if something catastrophic happened while I was sitting in a room getting a saline drip and the room was need for someone in worse condition than me, you would pull me right out and I wouldn’t have a problem with that.

The problem also extends to wastes of resources, this takes many forms.  Why do we need a phlebotomist to draw blood? Are you going to tell me the same nurse who just stuck an IV in my arm cannot draw a few viles of blood? Are you going to tell me that you cannot save sometime and have the triage nurse take a minute to draw blood if indicated?

Diagnostic tests are another issue a lot of these tests are wasted. Let’s face doctors pretty much guess what’s wrong with you. Wait a second, let me be fair here they hypothesize what’s wrong with you after years of  very expensive education.  They take your symptoms and run them against a list of probable diseases, infections, etcetera in their heads. Sometimes diagnostic tests just confirm the doctor’s hypothesis but other times a gauntlet of tests are run just to be sure they don’t miss something. More often then not the ‘not missing something’ tests aren’t for any other reason then covering their one arse from malpractice law suits which is sad.

Doctors charge outrageous hourly rates partially because they need malpractice insurance which is mega expensive because there’s no caps on pain and suffering amount. I sincerely believe most doctors are in the business to make people feel better and live a more comfortable life sure the money is an important aspect but I still believe doctors have one of the most noble professions out there. If a doctor makes an honest mistake and it isn’t because they were tired or under the influence of alcohol and drugs the damages should be capped. What the cap should be? I don’t know depending on how bad the mistake was if you can no longer work..The cap should be how much YOU were expected to make for the rest of your career adjusted for inflation and possible promotions. If a doctor’s mistake caused you to lose work or caused you to undergo additional treatments cap it at money lost + cost of additional treatment + nominal pain and suffering.

Capping pain and suffering payouts would allow malpractice insurers to low their rates and in theory therefore allow doctors to lower their fees. As to how this pans out in the real world, we all know how greed people can be.

Here’s what I think we need to do: Utilize more licensed nurse practitioners and Physician’s assistants.  In just about every state LPN’s and PA’s have most of the powers of a doctor such as ordering tests, diagnosing and treating you, writing prescriptions, etcetera. Often times these folks have more real world experience then just out of medical school ER docs. Have a 1 or 2 doctors staff an ER with several PA’s and LPNs. The PAs and LPNs can ‘treat and street’ all the non-serious cases. Let the doctors worry about the serious cases and be there to advise the LPNs and PAs IF they need it. I’d even go so far as to say the easiest cases such as idiots who go to the ER for a common cold, or simple upper respiratory infections and stuff like that should be treated right in the waiting room. Heck if the triage nurse were an LPN or PA, they could diagnose, write a script, and get the patient out of the ER without even taking up a bed in little more than the time it takes to do the triage vitals.

Open 24 hour clinics all over the place. By all over the place, I mean clinics should be just as easily reachable as hospitals.  They don’t need much more than a few exam rooms, a waiting room and basic medical supplies. Staff those clinics with LPNs and PAs as mentioned above. Allow ambulance to take non-life threatening cases to the clinic. Take some of the load of the hospitals while providing cheaper but competent health care.

Face it, so long as hospitals have a duty to provide care and people don’t have insurance there are going to be people who go to the ER for stupid things that a regular doctor should be treating. Clinics will alleviate the pressure on hospitals freeing them up to care for those who really need a full staff of doctors, nurses, and on demand diagnostic testing.

Now you ask who’s going to pay for this. That’s the 100 billion dollar question. I really don’t think it’s fair that someone who went to college, got a degree, and makes a good living to provide for his or her family should have to subsidize health care for someone like me via taxes. It’s just plain unfair. What about people, even the working poor, who make a conscious effort to live a healthy life style..Why should they have to pay additional taxes to pay for the health care someone like me, a fat guy who smokes? That doesn’t seem very fair or even wise.

My suggestion is this:  Instead of lumping everyone into socialized medicine. Let the people who are happy with their current coverage keep it, and not have to pay a dime extra in taxes to subsidize a national health program. Revamp and expand the Medicaid and Medicare systems, set strict standard, weed out the scamming doctors and patients. Now, let average Joe the plumbers buy into the the system instead of saying ‘you make to much money you’re ineligible’. People should be able to buy in on a sliding scale with discounts for maintaining a healthy lifestyle and up charges for living an unhealthy lifestyle. The more you make, the more you pay. Now what happens is commercial insurance can compete with nationalized health care. Affluent people can choose between private and socialized insurance as in theory the prices will be similar for affluent folks.

As for the clinics the need to be built. I’m sure we can slip something in a stimulus package to build them.. Think of all the jobs it will create; perhaps even the government can stop propping up the auto industry under the guise of saving jobs if those clinic building jobs were earmarked specifically already unemployed people.

The whole thing is that the government doesn’t have to make a profit as hospitals owned by corporations do or even doctors with their own practices have to. The government only has to break even with a very small margin of profit for system upgrades. This is how a network of  clinics could work, even if you don’t buy into the medicare/medicate program above cost per visit out of pocket would still be nominal. If people don’t pay their bill you take it directly out of their next federal tax return no questions asked this way the system can support and sustain itself.

What are your thoughts? Do you think my plan pans out or make things worse?

The current state of health care does not work for a good number of Americans. America’s current system doesn’t work for the working poor these are people who make ‘to much money’  to qualify for state assistance (Medicaid), yet their jobs don’t provide them with affordable or decent health insurance. When we look at it from a business perspective the so called working poor are the ones who do all the physical jobs that make life easier for the more affluent people who can afford private insurance so it’s stands to reason that healthier people mean more able bodied people to work.

Our current system of government provided health care (Medicare and Medicaid) systems are ginormous bureaucracies with volumes of rules and regulations that no one seems to really understand. The system is open to abuse and is abused daily by not only patients but the doctors and other people who provide services. We know it’s broken yet no one is bothering to fix it. If history is any indicator, the government will bungle health care for every American not just the relatively few who receive government assisted health care currently.

An example of abuse: My sister who has medicare/medicaid went for a dental checkup. It turns out she has 10 or so cavities. The office wants her to come back for each tooth separately. Now I personally have had 5 teeth pulled in one session, I know people who have had 2 or 3 root canals done in one day. Why would the office want her to come back separately for each tooth? Simple, every tooth is an office visit charge for Medicaid. Instead of one, two, or even three office visits and doing multiple fillings in one session the dentist wants to rake in the office fee 10 separate times. If this is flagrant abuse of the system, I don’t know what is. Who’s supposed to be auditing the billing? Why aren’t they catching straight forward fraud like this? Shoot a computer program should be able to pick up on situations like this. Why is X patient seeing the same dentist 10 times in one year? Does the patient have underlying conditions that require separate visits? If not, then sorry doctor you can longer take medicaid patients. Period that’s it. Scam the system once you’re out.

The problems are very complex though it’s not just an issue of the working poor not being able to afford private insurance. It’s also an issue of hospitals and other providers overcharging private insurance companies because they know they will pay. The common counter to the overcharging statement is that hospitals over charge to cover all the people who use their services and don’t pay the bill. There may be some truth to that but what about charging a fair price to everyone? This way perhaps some of the people who have to pay out of pocket can actually afford it. Instead of charging over $1000 to walk in to an emergency room to receive basic care. How about $200 for a dose of Tylenol and best yet they give you the generic. For $200 I can get a whole case of the brand name Tylenol.  How can you rationalize that price? There is no way possible, you just cannot. Please don’t feed me the line ‘well the hospital has to pay to maintain it’s facilities and stay on the cutting edge’. Charge the people who use advanced medical care to stay on the cutting edge. Don’t tell me well you’re using up an ER bed that could be used for someone who needs advanced care, I call bull chit. First of all that’s why pretty much every ER has trauma rooms and regular rooms, that’s why you have triage so the worst patients go first and if something catastrophic happened while I was sitting in a room getting a saline drip and the room was need for someone in worse condition than me, you would pull me right out and I wouldn’t have a problem with that.

The problem also extends to wastes of resources, this takes many forms.  Why do we need a phlebotomist to draw blood? Are you going to tell me the same nurse who just stuck an IV in my arm cannot draw a few viles of blood? Are you going to tell me that you cannot save sometime and have the triage nurse take a minute to draw blood if indicated?

Diagnostic tests are another issue a lot of these tests are wasted. Let’s face doctors pretty much guess what’s wrong with you. Wait a second, let me be fair here they hypothesize what’s wrong with you after years of  very expensive education.  They take your symptoms and run them against a list of probable diseases, infections, etcetera in their heads. Sometimes diagnostic tests just confirm the doctor’s hypothesis but other times a gauntlet of tests are run just to be sure they don’t miss something. More often then not the ‘not missing something’ tests aren’t for any other reason then covering their one arse from malpractice law suits which is sad.

Doctors charge outrageous hourly rates partially because they need malpractice insurance which is mega expensive because there’s no caps on pain and suffering amount. I sincerely believe most doctors are in the business to make people feel better and live a more comfortable life sure the money is an important aspect but I still believe doctors have one of the most noble professions out there. If a doctor makes an honest mistake and it isn’t because they were tired or under the influence of alcohol and drugs the damages should be capped. What the cap should be? I don’t know depending on how bad the mistake was if you can no longer work..The cap should be how much YOU were expected to make for the rest of your career adjusted for inflation and possible promotions. If a doctor’s mistake caused you to lose work or caused you to undergo additional treatments cap it at money lost + cost of additional treatment + nominal pain and suffering.

Capping pain and suffering payouts would allow malpractice insurers to low their rates and in theory therefore allow doctors to lower their fees. As to how this pans out in the real world, we all know how greed people can be.

Here’s what I think we need to do: Utilize more licensed nurse practitioners and Physician’s assistants.  In just about every state LPN’s and PA’s have most of the powers of a doctor such as ordering tests, diagnosing and treating you, writing prescriptions, etcetera. Often times these folks have more real world experience then just out of medical school ER docs. Have a 1 or 2 doctors staff an ER with several PA’s and LPNs. The PAs and LPNs can ‘treat and street’ all the non-serious cases. Let the doctors worry about the serious cases and be there to advise the LPNs and PAs IF they need it. I’d even go so far as to say the easiest cases such as idiots who go to the ER for a common cold, or simple upper respiratory infections and stuff like that should be treated right in the waiting room. Heck if the triage nurse were an LPN or PA, they could diagnose, write a script, and get the patient out of the ER without even taking up a bed in little more than the time it takes to do the triage vitals.

Open 24 hour clinics all over the place. By all over the place, I mean clinics should be just as easily reachable as hospitals.  They don’t need much more than a few exam rooms, a waiting room and basic medical supplies. Staff those clinics with LPNs and PAs as mentioned above. Allow ambulance to take non-life threatening cases to the clinic. Take some of the load of the hospitals while providing cheaper but competent health care.

Face it, so long as hospitals have a duty to provide care and people don’t have insurance there are going to be people who go to the ER for stupid things that a regular doctor should be treating. Clinics will alleviate the pressure on hospitals freeing them up to care for those who really need a full staff of doctors, nurses, and on demand diagnostic testing.

Now you ask who’s going to pay for this. That’s the 100 billion dollar question. I really don’t think it’s fair that someone who went to college, got a degree, and makes a good living to provide for his or her family should have to subsidize health care for someone like me via taxes. It’s just plain unfair. What about people, even the working poor, who make a conscious effort to live a healthy life style..Why should they have to pay additional taxes to pay for the health care someone like me, a fat guy who smokes? That doesn’t seem very fair or even wise.

My suggestion is this:  Instead of lumping everyone into socialized medicine. Let the people who are happy with their current coverage keep it, and not have to pay a dime extra in taxes to subsidize a national health program. Revamp and expand the Medicaid and Medicare systems, set strict standard, weed out the scamming doctors and patients. Now, let average Joe the plumbers buy into the the system instead of saying ‘you make to much money you’re ineligible’. People should be able to buy in on a sliding scale with discounts for maintaining a healthy lifestyle and up charges for living an unhealthy lifestyle. The more you make, the more you pay. Now what happens is commercial insurance can compete with nationalized health care. Affluent people can choose between private and socialized insurance as in theory the prices will be similar for affluent folks.

As for the clinics the need to be built. I’m sure we can slip something in a stimulus package to build them.. Think of all the jobs it will create; perhaps even the government can stop propping up the auto industry under the guise of saving jobs if those clinic building jobs were earmarked specifically already unemployed people.

The whole thing is that the government doesn’t have to make a profit as hospitals owned by corporations do or even doctors with their own practices have to. The government only has to break even with a very small margin of profit for system upgrades. This is how a network of  clinics could work, even if you don’t buy into the medicare/medicate program above cost per visit out of pocket would still be nominal. If people don’t pay their bill you take it directly out of their next federal tax return no questions asked this way the system can support and sustain itself.

What are your thoughts? Do you think my plan pans out or make things worse?

I’ve been a long time fan of Roboform in fact I often recommended it to just about anyone I could tell about it. For those of you who don’t know both Roboform and Keepass are form fillers and password savers; they both save your user name and passwords in addition to your name, address, etc. Just one click with Roboform and it fills in your user name and password to log on to sites and another click fills in your name and address information when placing orders. For anyone who spends any amount of time online a form filler is a major time saver not to mention great for security as you can set random passwords and have the program remember them for you.

Now a little back story, I’d been becoming more and more frustrated with Roboform as I’ve bought more than a few licenses over the years but just last year when I bought a new laptop and desktop within a month of each other I bought two more licenses and started using them. Which is all fine and dandy until you reinstall Windows a few times and Roboform won’t activate which means with over 200 passcards stored I couldn’t use any of them. I’d have to email support and beg them for more activations, which they always obliged but it was still an unnecessary headache in my opinion.

For this reason when Foxmarks (now xMarks) started offering secure password sync along with it’s awesome bookmark sync’ing capabilities I started letting Firefox save all my IDs and passwords little by little.

Fast forward a little bit and I’m reading on Lifehacker about using Keepass and Dropbox as the ultimate password sync tool. As some of you know I use several computers and with those computers I often dual boot, so keeping all my passwords in sync is a great idea not to mention Roboform only works on Windows and with my new Mac plus me dual booting Linux on my other machines Roboform isn’t much help in that area.

Long story short, I decided to dive in the only problem is that there isn’t a direct Roboform to Keepass conversion path. I found one how to on lifehacker but it didn’t convert half my user IDs which was troubling a little Googling found this more involved python script that went off with out a hitch: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7023471 .

Now that I’ve been using Keepass for a month or so now I really don’t miss anything about Roboform. Probably my biggest ‘loss’ in switching is that there’s no toolbar in Firefox or IE to fill and submit as there is with Roboform. However the gains are much more, I now have my passwords stored safely but available from any operating system and in conjunction with Dropbox my passwords are constantly synced and updated whenever I turn on my computer. You just cannot beat that.

The only thing I noticed that wasn’t immediately apparent is when you’re using Keepass on Linux and Mac in addition to Windows you’re going to want to download the ‘classic’ (1.x branch) of Keepass for Windows so the database is saved in the same format across machines.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do like Obama I really think he has admirable goals, whether or not he will be able to achieve them is another story. However foolish I think it is for Americans to think that one man can solve all our problems like some sort of super hero, I still like the message Obama brings to the table. Although I’m not too sure about the whole change media blitz. Change for the sake of change is pointless it has to be change for the better. I do really think Obama has our best interests at heart and is going to give it his best again whether or not it will work remains to be seen.

We have here our first rock star president. He has an awesome stage presence and gives great speeches but I hope there is substance here not just media polish. He  is probably one the most active and full of life looking presidents we’ve had in a long time. Being 24 the only presidents I really remember are Bush senior, Clinton, and Bush junior so I guess that isn’t much experience.

No matter how much I like Obama, I cannot help but be annoyed at the media fascination with him. I understand the first black president is a very big deal; perhaps because I’m not black I don’t understand the full significance of that but I know it’s a big deal.

I wholeheartedly believe the media fascination with Obama from the get-go helped him win from the beginning it’s been one puff piece after another. What if McCain or even Hillary had received the same amount of attention? I guess we will never know.

It would be nice if just for a wee bit the media would stop yammering about this guy. I’m hoping within the next month the frequency of Obama propaganda will trickle down to the normal frequency of presidental news.

What makes this news? What the hell makes a parking lot being full news?  Later this evening when I awoke there’s a story in that same newspaper about how a Wal-Mart worker was tampled to death by people breaking down doors to get in for sale (Note: This is not the same wal-mart mentioned above). How sad is that people are so hungry for a few dollars off 3rd world made, electronic junk that they kill someone in the process.

Personally I think black Friday is one of the biggest media perpetuated farces going. Anyone who’s ever watched TV or picked up a Sunday newspaper in America knows that retailers will use any excuse for a sale. We’ve got President’s day sales, Memorial Day Sales, Labor Day Sales, back to school sales, hey it’s sunny outside today sales well maybe not that latter but you get the point any excuse to move more products by feigning a sale. Black Friday is just another sale except that you hear about it on the news, the sale all of a sudden comes news worthy. The week of Thanksgiving no doubt the every single night the evening news will have something about Black Friday sometimes the “reports” could easily be mistaken for a commercials. “News” programs start plugging products around the beginning of November under the guise of gift guides. Wal-Mart and other retailers send cease and desist letters to webmasters who list it’s black Friday sales on their websites. No doubt knowing full well that you cannot claim copyright on prices but hey it drums up more publicity. It’s ridiculous.

Black Friday the epitomizes of the commercialization of Christmas. I’ll write on the commercialization of Christmas at another time, it sad but not the focus of this post. Retailers advertise lower than usual sale prices for black Friday yet never seem to have enough stock to keep up with the demand. As Black Friday happens every year I have a had time believing that retailers cannot source and plan for it. I wouldn’t doubt if they only stock 5 or 10 of those drastically reduced price flat screen, made-in-Korea TVs just to get you in the store to buy other stuff. If you woke up at 5AM in order to trek all the way to the mall and then they don’t have what they advertised why not get something else any way right? Why waste a trip? We already know that big chain stores have products called loss leaders. Those are popular products that they deliberately sell at a loss just to get you in the store to buy it where more than likely you’ll buy something else too; chances are at a considerable profite for the retailer. It’s the old razor sales model. Sell the razor handle cheaper then cheap then charge an arm and a leg for blades. Consumer printers do the same thing with ink.

What really irks me about black Friday is that people are so stupid. They don’t seem to see it coming. Do people not realize that there are sales all year round? Do people not realize that retailers just want to lure them into the store? Do they realize that you can sit at your computer in your underwear and find sales any day of the year? Do people really enjoy waking up at 5 AM, going out in the cold, battling crowds, and traffic just to save a few dollars? Even if you save $20 on an item is it really worth all that aggravation?

Keep in mind, this is coming from a guy who goes shopping as late as possible in the evening or sometimes in the middle of the night to avoid crowds. I love kids but cannot stand them running around and screaming like Indians in stores unchecked by their parents. I don’t like being bumping into by carts, nor do I like feeling rushed and not being able to just browse people everyone’s in a rush to go wait on a checkout line and fight their way out of the parking lot. Heck I wear my headphones when shopping so I don’t have to hear the rude people yelling into their cellphones, broken English over the loud speaker, and kids throwing temper tantrums. Chances are if I have to wait more than 5 minutes on a checkout line, I’m gonna be pissed and not very pleasant to the cashier even though admittedly it’s normally not their fault; more than 10 minutes and the cart is getting left there with everything in it while I head to the nearest exit.

Yet I participated in Black Friday once before I became so hardened to, sham sales, crowds, traffic jams, and shopping in general. I think it was 2001 or 2002. I really forget the reason but I agree to go with my friend’s mother to help her I’m not sure if I was supposed to help her pick out the electronic gifts, drive, lift furniture, or a combination of all 3. I remember getting up at 4:30AM leaving the house by 5 to get to a store with an already packed parking lot, fighting for a shopping cart. 4 hours in the store and 3 full shopping carts later but the time we got to the checkout counter I felt like I’d been through a battle. The battle of crazy mom’s vs. sales clerks. Only everything before the checkout line was the ‘calm before the storm’ every freakin’ customer in front of us (of where there had to be about 20) had questions about prices 1/2 ‘needed’ a manager to fix some perceived error. Literally after an hour and a half on line, 20 minutes to check out. We headed out to the parking lot which was utter chaos. A half hour of packing the car later we were on the road only it took 20 minutes to get out of the parking lot. People straggling all over the place, no doubt just as frustrated as me made backing out of the parking space daunting and getting out of the parking lot was just as fierce with three or four separate fender benders being tended to by the police whom I felt really sorry for was way to much for this guy.

A half hour after getting out of the parking lot we were home and unloading the car. Get this my friends mother wanted to go for another round. I think I could’ve killed her just for asking. I declined and spent the rest of the afternoon helping to wrap and hide gifts. Ever since that one black Friday I’ve swore off Black Friday and generally try and stay out the stores between now and January 2nd.

I cannot be the only person in the world who thinks that if a business cannot survive on it’s own it should fold. We bailed out that banks, the bail out failed a month later we got the secretary of the treasury saying we need to go a different direction so obviously those hundreds of billions you handed out like candy on Halloween did squat. Now you want us, the American people, to believe you’re going to rescue the auto industry, a dinosaur that is no longer relevant?

Now don’t get me wrong I understand there is a whole ecosystem surrounding the auto industry; Hundreds of suppliers that have thousands of worker and factories. Perhaps for that reason we should rescue them but here is what I say we do: Let them go bankrupt and restructure to get the blood sucking united auto workers union under control and manageable.

I think the biggest part of the problem is the union. These guys are getting paid way too much when you add in benefits the manufactures are utterly screwed. When you have some guy getting $40/hr plus benefits and retirement to put tires on a car you’ve got problems. Wal-Mart has guys changing tires for less than $10 an hour and it’s more work than just putting on a set of tires.

Japan, China and all the other nations that are leading the sales numbers for cars don’t have the UAW to deal with and on top of it have much cheaper labor to boot. Detroit just cannot compete with that. Don’t get me wrong unions had their place back when (legal) immigrants were getting taken advantage of because they didn’t know the system and in some industries labor unions still service their people well however UAW union has Detroit over a barrel. The UAW has serviced it’s members well but screwed over the auto industry and is now we’re risking the UAW screwing over all Americans by bailing out Detroit.

Secondly Detroit is putting out utter crap in the last 3 years I can only think of maybe 4 models that appealed to me. I can think of a lot more foreign models that hit my eye. Why?

I say let ‘em fold, get their labor situation under control, and then hire some overseas talent for design.

I cannot be the only person in the world who thinks that if a business cannot survive on it’s own it should fold. We bailed out that banks, the bail out failed a month later we got the secretary of the treasury saying we need to go a different direction so obviously those hundreds of billions you handed out like candy on Halloween did squat. Now you want us, the American people, to believe you’re going to rescue the auto industry, a dinosaur that is no longer relevant?

Now don’t get me wrong I understand there is a whole ecosystem surrounding the auto industry; Hundreds of suppliers that have thousands of worker and factories. Perhaps for that reason we should rescue them but here is what I say we do: Let them go bankrupt and restructure to get the blood sucking united auto workers union under control and manageable.

I think the biggest part of the problem is the union. These guys are getting paid way too much when you add in benefits the manufactures are utterly screwed. When you have some guy getting $40/hr plus benefits and retirement to put tires on a car you’ve got problems. Wal-Mart has guys changing tires for less than $10 an hour and it’s more work than just putting on a set of tires.

Japan, China and all the other nations that are leading the sales numbers for cars don’t have the UAW to deal with and on top of it have much cheaper labor to boot. Detroit just cannot compete with that. Don’t get me wrong unions had their place back when (legal) immigrants were getting taken advantage of because they didn’t know the system and in some industries labor unions still service their people well however UAW union has Detroit over a barrel. The UAW has serviced it’s members well but screwed over the auto industry and is now we’re risking the UAW screwing over all Americans by bailing out Detroit.

Secondly Detroit is putting out utter crap in the last 3 years I can only think of maybe 4 models that appealed to me. I can think of a lot more foreign models that hit my eye. Why?

I say let ‘em fold, get their labor situation under control, and then hire some overseas talent for design.

Out of the whole election one thing that pisses me though is how the news is going on and out about a record number of young and black people voting. It bothers me that most of the people who haven’t voted before and voted this election weren’t voting the issues they were voting for a man that has black skin because he has black skin. I think that’s just as bad as not voting for someone because they have black skin.

Maybe we haven’t come as far as I thought we did?

An aside note: I did wake up last night in time to see McCain’s concession speech and Obama’s acceptance speech. I couldn’t help but think how hard it must of been for McCain to just find out he lost the election then go before a national audience and congratulate the who defeated him. That takes some character. Obama’s acceptance speech was great, he’s an excellent public speaker although I didn’t get anything out of it besides grandstanding let see what he does in January and the years ahead.

One thing that kind of irks me is all three major networks pulled regular programming off the air in favor of election coverage. What’s the point? We’re not going to know anything solid until at least 10 PM since the last polls close @ 9. So, we’ve got a bunch of talking heads predicting this and that which none of which matters until the votes are tallied. All I can say is thank God for my DVR.

Kind of like how all the networks have to show the state of union address. Why not just one? I never quite understood that. Meanwhile I’ve never seen PBS the governement funded Public Broadcasting System show a state of the union address that doesn’t make much sense to me.

Anyhow I’ve had a long day, I’ve got a headache, I’m heading to bed shortly.. I guess I’ll just have to wait until the morning to see who the next president is going to be. :p

Call me un-American, unpatriotic, or what else you can think of but no I don’t bother voting. After the whole Florida debacle and with the accuarcy of electronic voting machines in question I have to wonder if every vote really does count. Even if every vote does count, chances are whoever gets into office will go back on all their promises as usual. Not that it’s entirely the candidates fault the public expects each and every president to practically be superman and fix all their problems. If candidates don’t promise do so they simply won’t be elected.

Whether McCain or Obama are elected chances are the new president will spend the first couple of months in office doing favors for their biggest campaign contributors. Nothing new here whether it be “America First” or “Change we can believe in”.