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Make it free and people will take it

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Hmm..., I'm from the government, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  7 Responses »
Mar 242016
 

From merry old Englandistan:

Cambridgeshire A&E ‘not for hiccups and broken nails’, clinicians warn

In short: English hospitals Emergency Room getting swamped with nonsense like broken fake fingernails, taking up time, funds, space, resources, time.

Well… duh.

Exciting personal anecdote: a few months ago I found myself in possession of a minor physical malady. The pain it produced was remarkable. Sadly, my regular doctor was fully booked and couldn’t see me that day. They suggested I walk a few hundred feet down the hallway to the ER. So… I waited in the waiting room for about two hours, then another hour in the ER proper. And then I walked out, without being treated. Why? Well, I asked: “So, what is this likely to cost me?”

“$600.”

“Byeeeeee…”

And I got a doctors appointment for the next day and the problem was resolved. One night of buggo-drivin’ pain was not worth $600.

Even before I found out what the cost was going to be, I was on the edge of bolting. The whole time I was there in pain, I knew that it was not medically serious; certainly not life threatening. But the patient on the other side of the curtain? Slow, ragged machine-assisted breaths that I’m pretty sure were about that persons last, coupled with weeping family members. *That* is a dandy way to make you realize “I can live with this for another 18 hours, no sweat.”

And so Britainland has universal (I gather essentially “free”) health care, which means people aren’t charged an arm and a leg for visiting the ER. So if it is actually free…. why *not* take advantage of it?

There’s no such thing as free health care. *Somebody* has to bear the burden of the cost of labor for the doctors and nurses if nothing else. Is there some good reason why the person actually consuming that service shouldn’t have to bear at least some of the cost? How much would an ER visit have to cost to dissuade morons from coming in complaining of hiccups and the like? If it was fifty bucks, I would imagine most people with stupid complaints would think twice… but it’s a cheap price for a broken leg or a stab wound.

 Posted by at 12:29 am

“Trump” is a dangerous word

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  6 Responses »
Mar 222016
 

Ah, university kids…

Emory Students Express Discontent With Administrative Response to Trump Chalkings

In short, someone at Emory University did something dastardly… wrote pro-Trump slogans (such as “Trump 2016”) on the sidewalk with chalk. So rather than doing something radical like writing “Somebody Other Than Trump 2016” on the sidewalk, or doing something truly revolutionary like ignoring the messages, the whiny Junior Fascists on campus have gone crying to the university, demanding that political opinions they don’t agree with be banned.

Nothing especially new here; same ridiculous gibberish was going on when I was in college, a quarter century ago. But it never ceases to amaze me just how fragile some people openly claim to be… and how loud they are in demanding that the world be made into Nerf for them… and how willing so many people who should know better are to accommodate these nattering nincompoops.

If there are any students with a full set of nards on that campus, they’d be liberally plastering the joint with pro-Trump slogans. And I say this as someone who thinks Trump is reprehensible.

 Posted by at 8:32 pm

Now that’s comedy

 Crazy, dumbassery, news, religion, ಠ_ಠ  3 Responses »
Mar 222016
 

So I was flipping between news channels a few moments ago. Everyone seemed to be headlining some variation on “Terror In Belgium” or some such. But then I landed on Al Jazeera, which was going on about “Islamophobia in America.”Because, sure, some people being unfriendly is certainly more newsworthy than nail bombs.

Anchor Joie Chen ramped up the hilarity by pointing out that Islam is a faith practiced by more people than any other.

 Posted by at 7:08 pm

A thousand tons of ridiculousness, now in kit form.

 awesomeness, Crazy, Gah., history, models, projects, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  12 Responses »
Mar 222016
 

The Third Reich was jam-packed full of ridiculous notions. Genocide. Invading Russia. Declaring war on the US. Superstitious claptrap. Dreams of world domination. Government programs that favor one ethnic group over another. Collective economics. But perhaps the *goofiest* idea was one of Hitler’s favorites: the P1000 “Ratte,” a 1000-ton *tank* packing the turret from a battleship, with two 280mm cannon and diesel engines from U-boats. There is zero chance that it would have worked worth a damn,and had one popped up on a battlefield every tactical bomber in a 500 mile radius would have competed to bob it into oblivion.

I’ve often thought that what the world needed was a good scale model of the Ratte, but I’ve never gotten around to it. But it seems someone else has; TAKom Models has recently released a 1/144 kit of the P1000. It includes two “Maus” tanks for scale. I would have preferred 1/72 scale, but I imagine that would have been a bit spendy.

The box art is fairly epic. Not only does it showcase the ridiculous scale of the Ratte… it also includes Nazi flying saucers because, hey, why not.

The Ratte kit is available on Amazon.

 

 Posted by at 6:44 pm

X-13 Ad

 aircraft, art, history  No Responses »
Mar 222016
 

A Ryan Aeronautical Company ad from a 1957 issue of Aviation Week, touting the wonders of the VTOL aircraft. An aircraft that turned out to be a technological dead-end. Shrug. Still, it’s some pretty art.

1957-06-03-58 x-13

 Posted by at 4:45 pm

Bombing in Brussels

 AARRRGH, Crazy, news, religion  7 Responses »
Mar 222016
 

A pair of suicide bombers have killed at least thirty in the Zaventem airport and the Maelbeek metro station in Brussels, Belgium.  The bombs were packed with nails. Reports also of “chemicals,” but that doesn’t mean a whole lot yet.

Brussels attacks: Zaventem and Maelbeek bombs kill many

Go ahead and guess what’s behind the bombing. Was it the Amish? Donald Trump supporters? Is it too late to blame Sarah Palin???

 Posted by at 12:43 pm

Yay! The Age of Airships II may be upon us…

 aircraft, awesomeness, blather, history, news  11 Responses »
Mar 222016
 

The airship is a paradox: an obsolete piece of technology for a century ago that has nevertheless been the face of the future for the last fifty or so years. And it looks like it’s on the cusp of a comeback:

Massive new aircraft the Airlander 10 is unveiled

The multi-lobed British craft is helium-filled and 300 feet long. It will be able to carry 48 people, and the company is hoping to make a dozen a year by 2018. The cost and upcoming end of availability of helium might be  tad problematic

A decade ago DARPA and the US Army were looking at a similar, but larger, heavy-lift airship under the “Walrus” program. Sometime around 2005-2006, ATK and NASA were looking down the road towards the post-Shuttle future for the Shuttle booster rockets, including five-segment rockets for the Ares I and Ares V. Some of the redesigns for the booster segments would have weighed a bit more than standard Shuttle booster segments. The problem there was that the existing road transport system – needed to haul the segments from the Promontory facility down I-15 to a the railhead forty or so miles south – was already at the limit theDepartment of Transportation would allow on the highway. So… NASA wanted alternate ideas. I proposed the obvious: use a Walrus heavy-lifter to carry segments straight from Promontory to Cape Canaveral. It would have had more than enough lift capacity and would have been faster than the truck & train. Plus: I just wanted to see a thousand-foot-long airship floating over my house. Who wouldn’t? Obviously that didn’t happen; ATK management looked at me like I was insane. Something about “you want to fly millions of pounds of solid rocket fuel through the sky over populated areas potentially though storms” or some such whiny nonsense. I understand the final solution for dealing with the highway overloading issue was something along the lines of “la-la-la I can’t hear you.”

Shrug.

 Posted by at 12:33 pm
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