Category Archives: Essays

This is a very boring name for me writing about the stuff that’s on my mind. I strive to make the essays more interesting than the word “essays” and this description.

Essays, Journal

Thoughts on Aughts

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There’s an old man who comes to the gym in the mornings. He has a walker with an oxygen bottle, and bears visible scars from open heart surgery and a pacemaker implant. Monday morning I loosened up in the hot tub, and the two of us talked.

I learned that he had his first surgery in early December of 1999. I was reminded of my bout with myocarditis that same month, and how, as I lay in the Intensive Care Unit at UVRMC, the rooms around me were full of what I have come to call “gray people.” Their skin was literally deathly pale, and I assumed that the majority of them were going to die there.

I asked where this man had gone for treatment back in ’99, and he told me he was at UVRMC, and spent most of December in the Intensive Care Unit.

One of those gray people not only survived, but did so for a full decade at current count.

The last decade has been huge for me. I started a new job, rose to prominence, and then quit to do the same thing again. I created Schlock Mercenary, and Sandra and I had two more kids.

All of this in a decade.

I don’t know what my elderly friend at the gym has done with the ten years the doctors, God, and/or the Fates gave back to him, but I’m sure they are precious.

Whine about the “aughts” if you must, but as we begin the second decade of the twenty-first century, know that at least two of us are really thankful for the last ten years.

Essays

$250,000 per Job? Only a little bit too expensive.

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If you’ve been following the news, there are lots of people screaming about how incredibly expensive the stimulus package was, and how it didn’t create enough jobs for the money spent.

I’m not a fan of stimulus, nor big government, but I do know how to do math like a capitalist. An employee costs a lot more than just salary, and I haven’t seen much reporting in this vein.

Let’s say you’ve been given stimulus money to hire somebody. GREAT! Do you start writing them paychecks immediately? No. You find work for them to do. Let’s go on to say that the employee is (as many of them are reported to have been) a construction worker. How much is it going to cost to put that person to work? Well… you have to have land on which they can put a building, materials to put up the building with, and tools for them to use. Some of this you might already have, but with stimulus money you’re going to go buy MORE of it so you can grow your business and (here’s another form of the word) STIMULATE the economy as a result.

Pulling numbers out of my butt: if twenty guys can build a subdivision of 40 homes in a year, and the homes cost $120,000 each to build, you’ve spent just short of five million dollars creating 20 jobs, at a cost of $240,000 per job.

You also created forty homes (in a depressed real-estate market that is saturated with defaults, foreclosures, and short sales, but I digress…)

Also, somebody out there sold you a whole mess of lumber, nails, concrete, PVC, etc.

Sure, if all we wanted to do was feed people tax money we could do it much more efficiently by just dumping the entire stimulus package into the existing welfare system. But that doesn’t stimulate the economy, and it provides incentives for the wrong sort of behavior.

Again, let me say that I’m not a fan of the stimulus package, not as implemented, and not in principle. But the math I use as a good capitalist who wants to be able to create jobs tells me that the critics of the stimulus package are being very loudly dishonest in their criticism.

(Note: If you gave me $240,000 and told me to create as many jobs as I could, I would hire a writer, two line-artists, and a colorist and create graphic novels out the wazoo. If the books sold well, I’d be able to keep my employees. If not, well… they worked for a year, and we all had a good time with taxpayer money. DO NOT SEND ME TAX DOLLARS IT WILL ONLY END IN TEARS.)

Essays

What Will Finally Fix Health Care

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You know what will finally fix health care?

Information.

For centuries good health care has not really been about seeing a doctor or a surgeon. It’s been about getting the right information to the right person at the right time. Okay, sure, often that person WAS a doctor or a surgeon, but often it was not. And the smarter we got as societies, the longer and better we started living. The pattern still holds.

These days we have ready, free (or as close as makes no difference) access to all the information our doctors do. (Except patient records — HIPAA says that would be a violation of privacy, and I agree…)

What we, the patient-class, the uninitiated do NOT have free and ready access to is trusted gatekeepers who will filter the good information from the not-so-good. You know, doctors who will tell us that although our Google search on these symptoms was flawed because we left out “night sweats,” or something like that.

Assuming we haven’t all succumbed to Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Nanocancer, or the Andromeda Strain in the next 200 years, I firmly believe that our descendants are going to look back at our primitive, 21st-century discussions and wonder why we wasted so much time and money when what finally fixed Health Care was information we’d been sitting on for decades.

We will probably always need a select few, skilled practitioners of the dark and arcane arts of medicine, but most of what we need to be healthy is a correct diagnosis, and the alignment of simple treatments with sets of symptoms.

That’s just information.

I’m not belittling what my doctor does. He’s worked hard to throw terabytes of information into his head so that his miraculously synaptic brain can quickly process my complaint and prescribe the treatments I need (and proscribe the things that are hurting me.)

But it’s still just information.

Okay, not when he whips out his scalpel and removes a mass from my forearm (had that done in January. Ouch.) — that’s skill acquired through years of practice. And we’ll always need somebody with that skill set to complete certain treatments. We’ll also always need other things that cost money, like new medications, fancy devices for irradiating tissue, and diagnostic tools. But those things don’t need to cost what they currently do. Not once we fix the flow of information.

I’m not proposing anything radical here. I’m not really proposing anything. I’m arm-chair quarterbacking, only instead of yelling at the television about the choice of plays, I’m yelling about how the game should really be taken into orbit and played in three dimensions by guys in armored EVA suits.

Essays

PAX, WSU, H1N1

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CNN is reporting that 2500 students at Washington State University have come down with the H1N1 virus. From the article:

…officials were surprised that the long Labor Day weekend, when most students left campus, did not do more to interrupt the virus’ spread.

Long Labor Day weekend, eh?

Maybe some of these students who left campus went across (EDIT: different towns!) the state to PAX. The Penny-Arcade Expo was also hit with H1N1. I mean, (EDIT!) Washington’s a big place, but it’s no stretch to imagine a few thousand local college students hitting a convention geared towards their demographic, right?

I’m not pointing fingers at anybody here. I’m just drawing connections that the CNN folks really should have already drawn — there was a big event (EDIT!) across the state, and both the University and a crowded convention center make for a fantastic confluence of vectors.

You know what? H1N1 notwithstanding, I still wish I could have made it to PAX this year. But I’m glad I’m not in college anymore.