Thanks to HIPPA (which stands for lawyers are watching if personal healthcare information is released) I can’t be specific with names in this report, but I’ll relate the pertinent medical facts and assure you that every aspect of what I am going to tell you is true.

The story begins last week when a woman, age 70, goes to take out the garbage at her suburban home.  She’s done this hundreds if not thousands of times since she’s lived in the house for about 40-years.

Well, this trip didn’t go as planned.  As she turned to wheel the garbage container out to the street, she slipped and fell on the driveway.

Unable to get up, she flagged down a passing car…which summoned the local EMS team and they suspected a broken hip.  So off to suburban Hospital A.

There, while her kids figured out what went on and came from work to see her, the Big Wheels of Healthcare began to roll.  Turns out Hospital A didn’t do the kind of surgery needed, so she was moved to big urban Hospital B.  Apparently, there is some kind of bidding/buying process for surgery time…but she goes to Hospital B.

Once there, she is MRI’ed and prepped for surgery.  The Doc is first rate and the surgery is done in 2-hours and all is well.

This was on Thursday or Friday and by Sunday the woman is back at home, one of her children with her for the first week since (with a new hip to get used to_) because she’s considered a secondary falling risk…and all this makes sense.  The woman is fit and I gotta say, down just 2-days for a hip replacement, is pretty damn good – at any age.

The one thing apparently “normal” from hip replacements is that there are quite a few meds involved.  Serious antibiotics, tissues this’s and pain killer that’s.

All of which leads (indelicately) to having to use the bathroom every couple of hours where thins are decidedly are “loose” to put it as delicately as I can.

So the daughter on shift decides to call the on-duty consulting nurse.  She wonders if this loose condition is normal?

“Oh, sure…not unusual at all…” she is reassured by the nurse.

“OK, thank you,  bye… “  says the on-duty daughter.

“Wait!  Before you go, I need to ask you some questions.”

“Oh…OK…what?”

“Has you mom been to Sierra Leone in the last 21 –days?”

“No.”

“Has she traveled to Liberia or Nigeria in the last 21-days?”

“No…she hasn’t left (city name) in several years.”

“OK.  Has she traveled to Mali in the last 21-days?”

“No.”

“Have any contact with anyone just back from West Africa”

“Not that we know of….”

This went on a bit longer, the consulting nurse explaining along the way that these were  new Health Department required questions as part of Ebola operations.

It takes over a month to get the administrative wheels going and even then, people are still coming in from West Africa, crews are rotating in from the oil patch back and forth, yet this woman aged 70 who hasn’t left a 25-mile circle in several years, who has understandable G.I. tract follow-up from a hip replacement…

I shake my head in wonder, sometimes, as how the world really works.

I talk to my consigliore about it.  Although he’s double-degreed in Accounting and Law, he has been fascinated with how bureaucracies work and almost went the Public Administration route.

Because of all his degrees, we’ve been following his projections on Ebola cases and seems pretty close to the mark so far.  Especially the part where he forecast lying would be the biggest problem because people do what?  (Go look at any political site, go on!):  They LIE!

But when we were chatting about Ebola this week, he also mentioned that big bureaucracies have a problem with flexibility.  Yes, yes, I’m beginning to see that. 

As the showdown over the Maine nurse’s quarantine showed, sometimes we get treated to the real-life version of the old physics problem:  “What happens when two irresistible forces collide?”

One State figures IT is the irresistible force.  You can damn-sure bet the Obama Administration believes IT is irresistible, too.

The facts of the case  ultimately yield the definitive  answer the physics problem thusly:

If irresistible Force A is the stationary driveway and irresistible Force B is gravity, the result in Today’s World is a Recent Travel Quiz.  The broken hip is ancillary to the discussion, though we wish the recipient a speedy recovery.

The broken hip has added tremendously to our understanding of modern healthcare. Rack ‘em & stack ‘em, bid ‘em, and fix ‘em, and push ‘em out the door.  And then quiz them on stuff that was in the patient H&I (history and information) from the get-go.

Take this new-found knowledge, along with two aspirin,  a law degree, plus three box-tops from political connections and you too might qualify to be the next Ebola Czar.

Just don’t spend too much time in the bathroom, even if you’ve had your hip replaced.

A Word from the Wiz

A reader of ours (The Wizard) is not surprised that my wife scored higher on an IQ test than I did.  Come to think of it – and this is disconcerting – seems no one was surprised by the outcome except, uh, ME…hmmm…

Well, anyway, the Wiz has a sure-fire method to turn things around:

Saw your paragraphs on the IQ test today (Elaine’s is the same as my MBA daughter’s by the way).

I remember that last week (?) at some point you said that, while Elaine was trim & eats more healthfully and gets regular exercise, you could stand to lose 30 pounds and get off your butt now & then.  That sounds a lot like The Lovely Mrs Wizard and me.

Coming back to the IQ thing, I have found a way to prove to my wife that I am smarter than her – and she can’t argue with it!! And you can use it too.

It’s quite simple – First you tell her that you can prove it – she will say something like ‘How do you figure?’, and you say “Well, I married you <big grin> and look what I got!!  You married me <disgusted face> and look what you got.”

First time I did it, The Lovely Mrs Wizard’s jaw flapped open & closed silently a couple times, then it was just “DAMN!!!!”

Enjoy!

Wizard

Dear Wiz: 

You may wish to get some pictures and maybe a video of the silently moving mouth.  This will change over time.  Trust me on this.

Read More

It has been a good while since we’ve had anything big to report from the World of Woo-Woo – that place past Rod Serling’s “sign post up ahead.” 

It may be that WoWW is a consequence of natural forces we don’t understand.  Like right now, for example.  We’re in a “Michael K. Lee window” awaiting major earthquakes from the recent eclipse.  As we noted last week, the Hawaiian Kahunas were reportedly credited by Lee with noticing that quakes seemed to follow the Moon’s passage between Earth and Sun. 

The other item I’d propose is something I’d call the thermopoint.  No, I don’t think it is in any science books (yet) as it’s an idea which has only recently evolved.  Like in the last three  minutes, to be exact.

The idea is that Earth has semi-regular expansions and contractions.  the Northern Hemisphere ought to shrink its land masses ever so slightly when the Sun is providing the Southern Hemisphere with its Summer.   Down below the equator, the land would expand slightly. 

When the Sun is at it’s northern-most spot over the northern hemisphere, conditions would reverse.

In between would lay this thermopoint where the semi-polar expansion and contraction rates would be highest.

We would therefore expect (based on this whacky thought) that there would be less volcanism around the equator and more in the middle latitudes because these would be where maximal ground movement might occur due to having real summers and real winters, the result of which would be land mass expansion and contraction.

See how easy it is to come up with “nutter theories” like this one?

But there’s more to it than that.  It is entirely possible that other, larger, and perhaps unseen events drive Life as we know it.

One philosophical outlook, for example, holds that there are multiple Universes and that consciousness travels between them in ways not quite documented. 

Experientially, the Death process seems like dying, but it is simply a transit (through a door) and off to another reality which will be as complete as this one, yet dimensioned differently.  As some turn-of-the-last-century fellows called this:  another Universe orthogonal to this one.

There’s a fair bit to support the hypothesis…but it’s not our track this morning.

It’s the “coming and goings” of the breadcrumbs.  The little events of the “My, ain’t that strange?” variety.  The kind of thing which, after reading, you find yourself saying “Well, I’ll be damned…”

Sometimes they are small…other times big.  Sometimes explainable, sometimes not.

Reader Tom has a small one…small but interesting…

George,

I don’t know if this has relevance, but was wondering if you had received any other messages like this.

Last night, about 11:45 P.m. I had just gone to bed. The lights were off for about five minutes.  All of a sudden there was an instantaneous flash that couldn’t have lasted more than 1/1000 of a second I thought, out of the corner of my left eye. It was so brief I thought I was imagining it. The only thing is that my partner saw it also. She asked me “did I see that flash?” I told her I did, and had never seen anything like it.

I got up, looked around the house, looked outside to see if any of my security lights were on, they weren’t and went back to bed.

Has any of your other clients reported something like this.

Read More

Want a part-time job that can earn you $20-$25 per hour?  This morning not only do we deliver the goods on one, but we also show you the method to research many more potential money-making ideas that will be worth their weight when times turn down.,

Before we go “back to the future” however, we’ll first have some notes on major news stories and update our Trading Model. And many cups of coffee to warm up a fall morning…

[ May take longer than usual to load due to large number of graphics.

Read More

[Reader Note: We have decided to put the whole daily report on a single page in our efforts to more effectively recycle electrons.  Details in the “Coping” section.  Comments on this reorganized presentation are welcome…We now continue on to Bowling with Reality…]

No, this is not a joke.

The WaPo has an interesting story about how satellite data issues are causing some problems with forecast quality for the NOAA Weather folks.

The good news is that the data is starting to come back online:

NCEP IS NOW RECEIVING THE FOLLOWING NESDIS SATELLITE DATA FOR 00Z MODEL INGEST.. NPP – CRiS AND ATMS DATA GOES SATELLITE DERIVED WINDS GOES RADIANCES GOES SOUNDING PRODUCTS THE FOLLOWING DATA TYPES CONTINUE TO BE UNAVAILABLE FOR THE MODELS.. MODIS IR AND WV WINDS OMI OZONE DATA AIRS HYPERSPECTRAL SOUNDER DATA COSMIC GPS-RADIO OCCULTATION DATA NESDIS CONTINUES TO WORK ON RESTORING ALL THEIR SATELLITE DATA PRODUCTS..

Read More

A long-time reader of ours, Caroline, sent me a note  reminding us about the partial eclipse of the Sun coming this afternoon to a large portion of the South.

“begins in Nashville area 4:51 to sunset — don’t look directly into…”

An in depth look at the details of it can be found on the EarthSky.org site here.

Apparently, she’s not the only one who’s aware of it.  I noticed that Panama Bates, my brother-in-law, had wandered out from his apartment out into the woods Wednesday and was busily throwing knives at the dead “knife tree” we use for such things.  It’s also a pistol backstop when we’re too lazy to walk over to the 100-meter range.

He’d picked up a set of five throwing knives (stainless steel, at that) and was throwing them about 20-feet, or so.  I wandered over and gave it a try, sticking the very first one out of five.  Bates had been running three out of five or better.

As Jim Bowie, Jr. (moi) tried to throw, Panama mentioned that we should see about a 60% level, but I wasn’t too clear on whether that was 60% dark or 60% light,  Didn’t honestly pay it much mind; it was much more important at the time not to slice my hand off as I worked out the intricacies of a handle throw, versus the tip throw. 

After a while, I worked up to where absolutely none of my throws were sticking in the dead tree, and I made a note to tell my liberal friends that I’d come over to their side, at least on knives.

Panama, shook his head with a kind of hang-dog look, went back to throwing 3 or better out of 5 at 20-feet.  Then he revealed that his lady-friend was doing 2-for-2 with a pair of throwing knives she has.  Worse, she did it under-hand.  None of this “rear-back, see it coming” stuff, for her.

I’ll stick to writing, but it was some first-hand experience in being eclipsed.

One worry, though, if your meds haven’t kicked in yet:  I always thought (and you can check me on this) that there ought to be more of a relationship between eclipses and major earthquakes.  Just seems logical to me that when the gravity of Sun, Moon, and Earth all line up, there should be extreme tides and plenty of earthquakes.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who is drawn to this alignment problem.

Michael K. Lee is reportedly a teacher of religion and history out in Hawai’i and somewhere along the way of studying how the Kahunas work their stuff, he did some work and Presto!  Out popped some working earthquake predictions.

I’m not the first guy to notice his work.  Graham Hancock (great fan of his work) had a write-up on it a while back.  Apparently, the EQ risk is greatest after the eclipse has gone by.

So not to be eclipsed by events – and since everyone is a predictor of the future, anymore – I’m going to step out on a limb and predict a 7.0 earthquake somewhere in the eclipse area in the next three days.

Lee’s work, notes a Hawaiian earthquake site, has windows after an eclipse that can go for upwards of 16-days.

So if a quake comes along, is a biggie, and happens in the eclipse path, and happens in the next two weeks, or so, remember where you heard it first.

And, if it doesn’t happen?  Well, the odd thing about humans is they easily recall successful predictions.  But the number of bad ones sheds off them like water off a duck.  Which is why I’ve taken to writing down not only when people make predictions, but also religiously scoring them when they fail to appear.

The results are often a slightly better than chance success rate, but if you know enough “precursor” events, such as Lee’s observations about eclipses and quakes, you can oftentimes get better than chance future predictions…hence our quake prediction this morning.

While predictions and futuring are fun, they are only of value if you can really act on the information provided.  So, if you take something like the “Lee Window” here for the next couple of weeks, the problem is what?  Obviously, everyone can’t move out of the eclipse path and wait under the quake window closes.

But, you can at least think about it just in case.

Me?  yes, we live in the eclipse path – or off to the side of it.  But we won’t move.  Besides, I’m having lots of fun with much shorter term (and more profitable) predictions like this one from Peoplenomics yesterday morning before the market opened:

“Now, since the market closed the S&P 500 at 1941.28 yesterday, we have a pretty good chance of a good pullback beginning today”

Turns out that was a worthwhile prediction, huh?  But that was yesterday and today we should bounce.

Had Steve Allen Found God?

Earlier this week, we were having a discussion about whether Ruler of All/God/Master of the Universe, used planets as incubators to hatch out new ultra-beings.  And we naturally asked if the emergence of the mass consciousness of the Web might be the latest Ultra-Being learning to speak and express?

For reasons that are never clear to me, I happened across a reference in my studies this week to the vox  populi..

And therein lies a fascinating tale that you can find on a dusty shelf of Wikipedia:

American television personality Steve Allen as the host of The Tonight Show further developed the “man on the street” interviews and audience-participation comedy breaks that have become commonplace on late-night TV. Usually the interviewees are shown in public places, and supposed to be giving spontaneous opinions in a chance encounter – unrehearsed persons, not selected in any way. As such, broadcast journalists almost always refer to them as the abbreviated vox pop.^{[citation needed]} In U.S. broadcast journalism it is often referred to as a man on the street interview or M.O.T.S.^[

Pretty cool, huh?  But is it vox pop from Allen or vox populi?

Often quoted as, Vox populi, vox Dei /?v?ks ?p?pju?l? ?v?ks ?d??/, “The voice of the people [is] the voice of God”, is an old proverb often erroneously attributed to William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century.^[3]

Another early reference to the expression is in a letter from Alcuin to Charlemagne in 798, although it is believed to have been in earlier use.^[4] The full quotation from Alcuin reads:

Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.^[5]

English translation:

And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.^[6]

The usage indicates that the phrase had long since become an aphorism of common political wisdom by Alcuin and Charlemagne’s time, since Alcuin advised Charlemagne to resist such an idea.^[7] Of those who promoted the phrase and the idea, Archbishop of Canterbury Walter Reynolds brought charges against King Edward II in 1327 in a sermon “Vox populi, vox Dei”^[8]

But wait!  I look around at the blind, the lame, the sick, the pained, and the suffering and I wonder aren’t the acts of God pretty close to madness, too?  Was Steve Allen right in bringing out the vox pop which is evermore present on the web?

We had a dandy pile of comments on the post “Reproduction of the Gods” and I’ll try to get some of the better comments distilled down into summary form for tomorrow’s breakfast.

In the meantime, I’m working on a hunk of software that will text-to-voice postings from the web.  At last!  We can get sports-talk radio off AM radio.  We can instead listen while driving to the latest posts off the HuffPo, Drudge, and GLP…all played to be beat of the Princeton EGGS…

Continuous Improvement Dept.

Here we go, again.

A number of readers have asked over the years that all of a day’s writings and scribbles be on one page so you won’t have to click so much. 

Amazingly, there is an attribution rate over time (slow, but persistent) because people just can’t be bothered to click a couple of times to go sniffing around for pieces of UrbanSurvival.  You and that other guy are the only readers left, but it has saved us a bundle on bandwidth charges.  Very Dilbert of us.

So effective this morning, the website displays the two most recent epistles on the very first page.  Elaine thought the index at the top would be useful, too.

Read More

We know the market is dropping just as soon as the little rally we’re in presently wears off.  It’s a lot like “hair of the dog that bit you” on the way to a monumental hangover; the underpinnings of the market are in trouble, everyone knows this, but we’re still in denial – and that’s a sure-fire formula for a rally.

In  the meantime, however, the problems of negative growth are still coming down the tracks at us; it’s just we don’t have the vision to see the train clearly, at least just yet.

As we covered in our last report, importing a new underclass from South America via the perishing once-upon a time border may seem like the easy way out.   Besides, it’s a lifetime meal ticket for political manipulators who promise the moon and then tax people to pay for it.  Not that the republicons are any better than democraps; they all helped surround Washington with the garrison of checkbook bandits from K Street who buy public policy the way you and I might hit Subway for lunch.

Read More

This is actually economics and management, and it’s something you maybe haven’t thought about.  But it’s bothering me this morning, so…..

Back when the length of U S Senate and House terms were being set, it look a long time to get a letter from, say, the West Coast back to the halls of power in Washington.

According to an Amazon forum, it took Pony Express:

Fastest, 7 days plus, average around 10 days summer, 12-16 winter

Now, let me apply some of our renown Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) skills and look at the problem in the time domain.

Let’s remember that 7-days was for just one way.  In order for there to be two-way communications, it would be 14-days plus a day for typing or writing because back then there were secretaries and such.  Some places were closer/faster, so let’s aggregate turn-around and travel time at 14-days.

A 2-year congressional term is 730 days.  So this means, the number of sequential back and forth communications that could be fired off would be (rounding off) 52.

Obviously, for a senate position (6-years) there would be three times as many, or 156 such exchanges. 

At the end of these exchanges, if a voter still hadn’t gotten something ironed out, there would be an election.  Throw the buggers out.

Fast forward to the present.

And email (even on a slow day on the net) takes 2-minutes to send.  Even with a big-ass attachment. 

Once it arrives, composing a reply could take an hour…but since it might have come in during a lunch break, and there could be a weekend, let’s generously say 3-days for turn around.  And then another 2-seconds in transit.

Given that the transaction speed is what makes government responsive, not the calendar (lol) then the length of a modern Congressional seat should be 3-days times 52 transactions, or 156-days.

And, by inspection, we see that Senate seats should be held for 468 days (1.28 years) which we could round off to one year and three months and buy senators a copy of Dragon so they can work as hard and fast as the rest of us.

And this relates to economics how, exactly?

Well, it brings down the stupid election spending and – because of higher turnover – there just might be less incumbent suck power and lower corporate bidding, which could put us all back in the game when comes to decisions like global taxes, fracking…well, we all have a list, right?

Any other Economic angles?

Yes.

The whole world almost melted down completely  in 1974 when Bank Herstatt welched on a debt.

That led the financial world to adopt something called continuous settlement – and that’s a fine concept to be roll over into government.

Lookie here: When Elaine goes shopping in town, I know when she will be home and when I need to go out and schlep in the groceries.  I can tell by when her debit card is dinged by watching the bank in real-time.

If banks can instantly ding my account, why can’t we get government online, elected along this continuous settlement model and get responsive? 

Don’t mean to get off our usual path of honest reporting of crooked finance, the continuous printing of money, or the pending monetary collapse of Europe.  But this is actionable except for one thing:  The Old Paradigmers can not change it themselves.

If the Congressional Record allowed and reported constituent comments, Facebook would be in trouble.

Meantime, stories of government waste continue to pile up because of unresponsive government.  The Washington Post reports three-quarters of a billion dollars a year is being spent on government employees who are on paid leave.

Life’s getting too short for this old man to run for office against one of these $100-million marvels that pretend to “represent us” unless we can squish down term length to something more reasonable and in keeping with modern business practice.  (The only thing longer than a senate term, though, is still software support hold times….)

Instead of running for office, I may have to settle for a high-paying government job, that I could be immediately be laid off from on administrative leave.  I recommend you apply for one immediately, too.

More after this…

Verizon Earnings

Kicking it:

Wireless

• Added 1.5 million net retail connections; retail postpaid churn of 1.00 percent; 106.2 million total retail connections; 100.1 million total retail postpaid connections.
• 4.8 percent year-over-year increase in service revenues; 4.6 percent year-over-year increase in retail service revenues; 31.9 percent operating income margin; 49.5 percent segment EBITDA margin on service revenues (non-GAAP).

Dow futures are up 45 when  we looked and some additional gains in the metals.  Crude is still hanging about $83.

Meantime, the National Association of Realtors is out with existing home sales…down a bit…

They also report in part “…unsold inventory is 4.5 percent higher than a year ago, when there were 2.21 million existing homes available for sale.”

One of these days that REO held by the banks will come out…

Tales of Two Three Oscars

Odd how these news rhymes work out:

Oscar Pistorius gets five years in jail.

Oscar de la Renta checks out at age 82.

And rounding up the Oscar cluster is speculation about which films might be hot for the 2015 Oscars.

The Dirty West/Ukraine Oil Re$serve$

Was using cluster bombs in Donetsk says a human rights group. 

Not true says the who yah gonna believe.

Aw…hell….didn’t they get the memo about the Dneiper-Donets petroleum basin? Have a State Dept. cookie and read:

The Dnieper-Donets basin is almost entirely in Ukraine, and it is the principal producer of hydrocarbons in that country. A small southeastern part of the basin is in Russia. The basin is bounded by the Voronezh high of the Russian craton to the northeast and by the Ukrainian shield to the southwest. The basin is principally a Late Devonian rift that is overlain by a Carboniferous to Early Permian postrift sag. The Devonian rift structure extends northwestward into the Pripyat basin of Belarus; the two basins are separated by the Bragin-Loev uplift, which is a Devonian volcanic center. Southeastward, the Dnieper-Donets basin has a gradational boundary with the Donbas foldbelt, which is a structurally inverted and deformed part of the basin.

See map page 6 here.

“You mean Ukraine was / is all about oil and gas?”

D’oh.  Of course it ain’t over…it’s never over.  Just like the Leviathan gas find off Gaza…double d’oh dough…

Everything is a business model, remember?

Too Much Sizzle

And not enough steak when comes to news content says a new Harris Poll out this morning:

When provided with several types of news stories and asked which are under-, over-, or appropriately covered, three-fourths of U.S.

Read More