Happy Birthday Steph!

Happy Birthday, Steph! If you have to work today, then jammies all day is a perfectly cromulent decision.

Shit I'm already sick of in this election.

• Obama is the worst President ever -- not even close.

• Hillary will be a disaster -- she's running on the status quo and the country isn't on fire.

• Obama isn't doing anything about terrorism -- total bullshit, hell the GOP candidates kept saying they would do what Obama is already doing.

• Refugees are unvetted -- total bullshit.

• Hillary can't be trusted -- why is she different from any other political player? what secret agenda do people think she has? she has a long history of pretty much doing what she says she'll do. God, just oppose her for policies instead of this vague crap.

• Obama/Hillary won't say radical Islamic terrorism and you can't fight terrorism without saying it -- so dumb. It's not like either of them are denying that ISIS has a connection with certain Islamic teachings. This is just phrasing. How the fuck is phrasing going to change anything when everybody knows what is going on.

• We need to bring back manufacturing jobs - and let's give everyone a pony too. Manufacturing output has going up and up in the U.S. as five million manufacturing jobs (or more) have disappeared. If manufacturers return, they aren't going to create lots and lots of good paying jobs. The reason they would return is because automation has decreased their need for labor, making labor expenses a much less significant portion of costs.

• We're going to eliminate waste and fraud to cut costs -- everybody says it, but it never adds up to much. Any big organization is going to have a certain level of waste and trying to eliminate fraud will likely increase waste because you're adding more hoops to jump through and more things to monitor.

That's just a start...

What I want to hear about:

• How do we adapt to globalization and automation?

• How do we lower the cost of health care? Not how do we provide insurance.

• How do we advance human rights in the world without creating instability?

• What do we do to mitigate and manage climate change?

How do we lower the cost of health care? Not how do we provide insurance.

The weird thing about this, and I am saying that as someone who works for a healthcare employer that is now the largest employer in the area after manufacturing jobs have left, is what happens when we cut healthcare costs and everyone loses their job? What job is left?

what happens when we cut healthcare costs and everyone loses their job? What job is left?

From what I've seen in my years working on healthcare IT projects is the cost inefficiencies have very little to do with too many people doing a job that would be done better with fewer people. If that makes sense? A LOT of high healthcare costs stem from bad or non-existent processes.

Ah, summer. The time when young ladies wear skirts and then yelp when they get up because they're glued to the pseudo-leather of their chair.

Yikes, that brings back unpleasant sense memories of the vinyl seats of my mom's Ford whatever-it-was in the 1970s.

I dread wearing shorts in my Jeep, both the sitting down on hot vinyl and the getting up.

ION, I have been doing my Cataract Surgery Loves Carrots spiel to a co-worker. He's getting bad halos around lights and wanted to know what other symptoms I had and how good my vision is how. We stared out the window at the local trees, and I told him I could see the individual trees and the leaves (for the first time in about thirty years). He can't and decided to move his eye appointment up.

Raising a glass in honor of Steph's birthday, and another for bonny supporting the supporters at the Capitol.