tumbledry

Tumbledry Teaser

The following image is a teaser for the new tumbledry. It was cropped from the top right of the new design.

tease

The actual new tumbledry is decidedly less bovine than this image might indicate.

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Warren Buffet Quote

“In short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly capricious.”
Warren Buffet

God and Taxes

Report: Majority Of Money Donated At Church Doesn’t Make It To God — The Onion:

A shocking report released Monday by the Internal Revenue Service revealed that more than 65 percent of the money donated at churches across the world never reaches God. “Unfortunately, almost half of all collections go toward administrative expenses such as management, utilities, and clerical costs,” said Virginia Raeburn, a spokesperson for the Lord Almighty…

Thank you, Mykala, for finding that one.

Band Names

I don’t know if this is a series here at tumbledry, but more band names:

Ineffective Trombone
Urban Fox

Global Elite

Our current plutocracy makes the 20s look positively egalitarian. Take a look at The Rise of the New Global Elite in The Atlantic.

The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.

Emphasis mine.

Moving Cubicles

By the end of today, I was so annoyed with things in general that the sound of someone walking up the stairs at the Rec Center was enough to drive me bonkers. Clomp clomp clomp. ARRRRGGGHHHH! It all started this afternoon.

Things started going poorly when I called Dr. Klein over. Well wait, I guess it all started last month, when I was in admissions clinic with a schizophrenic patient. She was well-controlled (said she didn’t hear voices anymore, which was more blunt than I had expected), but the side effect of well-controlled schizophrenia tends to be… reduced faculties. Like, the person is there, but they aren’t there. It’s difficult for patients to think through the drugs.

So. Dr. Meyer loves to ask patients about their med history… A1C if they have diabetes, INR if they’re on blood thinners, their blood sugar that morning, etc. I tend to not ask for these specifics because (a) patients just make up what they think you want to hear and (b) they get things wrong. So, anyhow, it’s a few months ago and Dr. Meyer asks my schizophrenic patient about her medication.

“How are you antipsychotic drugs working?”
“Oh, fine. They worked and I stopped taking them.”

The patient was clearly STILL ON her medication. This was verified by the patient’s chaperone from her managed care facility. I tried to communicate to Dr. Meyer with a significant look that let’s not ask her more questions and WHY DO WE ALWAYS DO THIS.

Fast forward to today. Patient is back, and I’ve just spent a half hour in the chair checking and re-checking findings in the patient’s mouth. Dr Klein comes over:

“What are you doing today?”
“Treatment planning appointment; there’s just a few…”
“Where’s your group?”
“In IFC.”
“You should go work with them.”
“But I was scheduled here in this cubicle—”
“You should go work with them.”
“So I should… move this appointment?”
“Move everything to IFC.”
“I… ok.”

The appointment had already started late. Now, I had just been told, in the middle of it, to pick up everything, all the sterilized instruments, radiographs, the whole set up and move to ANOTHER FLOOR?! For absolutely no good reason. For no. Good. Reason.

Down in IFC there weren’t any chairs free, so I had to grab an old cubicle with one of the original dental school chairs in it. From the 1970s. Yay. I rushed, got everything set up, and grabbed an extra chair, because my patient was with her adult chaperone from her managed care facility. By the time I got them back to the cubicle, the chair I had grabbed was gone. I went over and got another chair, sat everyone down, and left to let Dr. Larson know I was ready to see him. By the time I got back, my chair was gone. AIIEIIIEEEE.

Dr. Larson saved my afternoon. He walked me through managing dry mouth in medicated patients and generally was awesome.

But somebody better explain the floor moving in the middle of an appointment thing.

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The Green Hornet

The Green Hornet looks AWESOME. I hope I’m not proven wrong, but boy that looks like a fun movie. Who wants to see it? Well, let’s wait for the results from Metacritic (or Rotten Tomatoes). Then you can let me know.

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Designing

For about the past twelve months, I’ve been convinced that I could design a better tumbledry than the one you see in front of you. With help from Mykala, Hoefler & Frere Jones, and Dive Into HTML5, that idea of improvement is becoming reality. I’m excited.

Gladwell on Economics

If you want to understand corporate America and/or nationalized healthcare it is critical that you read this four year-old-piece. Three years before GM went bankrupt, Malcolm Gladwell clearly articulated their problem in his New Yorker article “The Risk Pool”:

If the retiree obligations of Bethlehem Steel had been pooled with those of the much younger industries that supplanted steel—aluminum, say, or plastic—Bethlehem Steel might have made it. If you combined the obligations of G.M., with its four hundred and fifty-three thousand retirees, and the American manufacturing operations of Toyota, with a mere two hundred and fifty-eight retirees, Toyota could help G.M. shoulder its burden, and thirty or forty years from now—when those G.M. retirees are dead and Toyota’s now youthful workforce has turned gray—G.M. could return the favor. For that matter, if you pooled the obligations of every employer in the country, no company would go bankrupt just because it happened to employ older people, or it happened to have been around for a while, or it happened to have made the transformation from open-hearth furnaces and ingot-making to basic oxygen furnaces and continuous casting. This is what Walter Reuther and the other union heads understood more than fifty years ago: that in the free-market system it makes little sense for the burdens of insurance to be borne by one company.

The fundamental issue is the number of pensioners for each active worker. What’s particularly fascinating to me is that, during the strong times for unions in the 1950s, they (the unions) were overwhelmingly in favor of a government plan that managed their pensions and healthcare. They got it: a pension funded by diverse sources due to a generalized pool always has far far less risk than a pension dependent exclusively on the long term stability of a single company.

Mick Jagger on Creativity

Mick Without Moss - The New York Times:

“You can delegate things to other people,” Jagger observes, “and you have to, to a certain extent, but if you’re not behind it and getting your knowledge and input into it, it’s not going to turn out as interestingly and probably it won’t be what you would like. It’ll be disappointing.”

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