Saturday, December 10, 2022

Ready to set up the Christmas Village...

 


16 comments:

  1. {listener}

    Alan, you asked if the NP recommended salt water gargle.

    Nope. I was way ahead of that.

    Here’s what I told the Nurse Practitioner:

    Treated with:
    Fluids (no caffeine)
    Rest
    Salt water gargles
    Listerine gargles
    Advil
    Robitussin DM
    Zinc lozenges
    Sugar free Riccola cough drops
    Kept away from dairy
    Used Debrox to clear ears of any wax

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    1. {listener}
      She acknowledged that I’d done everything.
      (I did raise 5 children! 😆)

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  2. {listener}
    Thanks also, Alan, for the cautionary tale.
    I will start slow and simple and see how it goes. I already did just a few of the easy excercises, but stopped when my wrist began to complain.

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  3. Contracting for services, aka "privatization" was promoted in the name of efficiency and expertise. What it turned out to be in practice was a substitution of commercial profit for personnel and the substitution of equipment, whose production and maintenance personnel went uncounted, but cost much more for management and corporate profit than the public service personnel it replaced.
    My grandfather was a postal worker and a mechanic. When he refused to join the National Socialists, he was demoted and sent to a rural area. where he delivered mail on a rural route and kept his own vehicle in shape in a fully outfitted repair garage with a well, rather than a mechanical lift, so he could work on the undercarriage. One man with one vehicles delivered mail and packages to a dozen mountain villages and the farmsteads in between.
    Perhaps it is ironic that the German postal system started as a private enterprise and then went public whilemany in the U.S. want to do the reverse.

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    1. Deutsche Post was adversely affected by e-mail, just like USPS. They became an internet service provider, added other services (remember US postal savings?), transitioned to something akin to US contract post offices, and sold off much of their extensive and progressively underutilized real estate. Their management had much more freedom to act than does the USPS-- US congresscritters really don't know how to run a business, just like they don't know how to administer a city (DC). I think restoring postal savings would be a great idea--it ought to put many of the pay day loan sharks out of business. By way of contrast, the operation of the German railway system has deteriorated significantly in recent times. (To be fair, the Nazis didn't know how to run the German railways either.)
      ---Alan

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    2. In Oak Park, contracting for trash and recycling pickup has definitely saved money. Pickup services remain excellent. I don't personally know what happens after pickup but, this being Oak Park, I trust the village government to keep a close eye on it.

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  4. Replies
    1. Gee, consequences.
      Surely the deteriorating systems is what’s giving Putin fantasies of the nuclear option. He is a dangerous man who is weaker more desperate each day.

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    2. ^ {listener}

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    3. I think the only way for Putin to get out of his current situation alive is to flee into exile, but am reminded of how Leon Trotsky fled to Mexico and was assassinated by an NKVD agent. Could it be that Putin anticipates dying of natural causes before long, like Nicholas I, rather than by gunshot like Nicholas II? [Notes: Nicholas I brought ruin upon the Russian Empire by pursuing the Crimean War, and Nicholas II led it into defeat and extinction by entering into WW I. The parallels of both disasters with today's situation give me pause.
      ---Alan

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    4. WOW!, Alan. You called it!

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  5. How Homo Naledi is Changing [Our Understanding of] Human Origins [Click] An hour long seminar; I did not realize how amazing the Homo naledi excavation was. From Wisconsin PBS.

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