Young ears

Quicksilver and I were walking out of the orchard and past the garden this afternoon. We were looking for ripe raspberries. There were some weed stalks leaning across our path. Some of them were Setaria faberi, Giant Foxtail.

"Pokey! Pokey!" Quicksilver said in alarm as she looked at the seed-head's awls.

"No, it is soft" I assured her. "That is Fox Tail."

I do my best not to talk down to kids. They are sponges for knowledge and by not speaking down at them means they can painlessly absorb a LOT of information.

Quicksilver likes to parrot back words.

She returned two syllables. The first syllable started with the "F" sound but the second syllable absolutely did not start with the "T" sound.

I repeated "Fox Tail" and Quicksilver returned "F" not "T" words.

Hmmm! I need to do some soul searching. I am 96.7% sure she didn't hear it from me and 99.99% sure she didn't hear it from Mrs ERJ.

Sponges. Yes, absolute sponges.

Lifetime cost(s) of "gender affirming care"

Most stories about the costs of "gender affirming care" that pop-up using common search engines are circa 2015. Given the explosion in the number of procedures for "gender affirming care", it is curious that there has not been more recent data published.

One report from Johns-Hopkins that was published in December 2015 states:

In the first five years, the researchers found, providing health care for transgender people cost between $34,000 and $43,000 per year of quality of life; after 10 years, the cost dropped to between $7,000 and $10,000 per year of quality of life.   Emphasis mine

Let's assume a 20-year-old opts for "gender affirming care" and let's assume the lower prices through their entire life.

5 years * $34k/year = $170k

Years 5-through-10: 5 years times $20.5k (the midpoint)/year = $102k

Years 11-through-40: 30 * $7k/year = $210k

Total, assuming a 60 year life expectancy: $480k

For comparisons, death due to cardio-vascular disease has a typical end-of-life cost of about $25k. E-o-L is usually characterized as the last 365 days of medical costs incurred. Death due to cardio-vascular disease has the lowest end-of-life costs of all major causes-of-death. Approximately 25% of the patients who die of cardio-vascular events simply fall-over dead and the sum-total of their medical cost is the ambulance ride to be declared dead at the hospital.

Death due to cancer has a typical E-o-L cost of $100k. This is primarily due to the customized nature of chemo-therapy and the fact that many cancer drugs are "niche" products and the development costs must be amortized over relatively few patients.

Dementia also has an E-o-L cost of about $100k but they use the last several years due to the slow, progressive nature of the disease.

So if the costs today are similar to the costs nine years ago, one person who receives "gender affirming care" has an incremental cost similar to five, terminal cancer patients.

Oh, and the person who receive "gender affirming care" will eventually die and incur whatever costs that are associated with that event.

Is our current prosperity a mind-virus?

The Dutch Tulip Mania was one of the very first market manias (bubbles) based on speculation.

New forms of tulips were spontaneously popping up in fields and people with wealth were bidding the prices of these novel tulips to astronomical levels.

It was a time of great optimism and discovery. New species of plants were being found and identified as explorers opened up the Orient. Everything seemed possible, even tea plantations in Ireland!

For whatever reason, the Dutch (a great maritime nation at the time) seized upon tulips as a source of wealth. It was the bit-coin of the day. Tulips automatically reproduce but they do it at a slow, controlled, finite rate (maybe the crypto analogy wasn't that far off!). Demand for the newest types of tulips vastly exceeded the natural rate of reproduction.

The way to prove your status and coolness in Holland in 1635-1637 was to be a "player" in tulips. The "market cap" of tulips exceeded the market cap of all other forms of wealth in Holland at one time. The value of the buildings and farm land and cattle and gold...in sum, were less than the "extended" value of all the tulip bulbs in Holland in 1637. By "extended" I mean the daily selling price at auction extended over the entire crop.

People borrowed prodigiously to buy into a piece of the action.

The gravy-train crashed when it was realized that the fanciful colors and twisted petals and other novel presentations were due to a disease. It was due to virus although viruses were not understood at the time...but the idea of something being sick and contagious was.

Today's prosperity

Crypto is valuable because people think it is.

Healthcare is considered a source of wealth because people think being pregnant is a disease that needs to be corrected with surgery or a pill.

Additionally, Healthcare is profitable because people have been trained to think that angst-y teens' and pre-teens' fantasies must be acted on and it is profitable to cut off their body-parts, sort of like the beggar in Life of Brian.

Social media is valuable because people think that knowing what all 537 of their "friends" are doing on a second-by-second basis is more important than paying attention to the task in front of them. Young women passed young men as the least safe drivers in recent years suggesting that distracted-driving is a bigger problem than drunk-driving.

When you start scratching around, there are many more examples of activities that we were sold are "generators of wealth" might in fact be nothing more than mind-viruses.

Demo-ing a 16'-by-16' deck

I am getting to the fiddly parts.

I ripped off the rails and lattice.

I ripped up the decking.

There is a 16'-by-10' frame (gazebo?) over the deck and I want to save as much of the treated lumber as is practical. It has 6, 10' 2"-by-8"s and 10, 8' 2"-by-6" planks.

At the time of this writing, a new, treated 2-by-6 runs a buck-a-foot. I am leaning toward not trying to save them. Just chainsaw the 4-by-4s and yank it off the remnants of the gazebo with at tow-strap and the pickup truck.

The weather turned cool on us. It is good weather for working. No bugs.

Why so many modern workers exhibit symptoms of mental illness

"Safety is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Satisfying our customers is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Compliance with Federal Mandates is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Passing internal audits is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Ever increasing quarterly profits are our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Reducing scrap-rate is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Reducing absenteeism is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Work/Life balance is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Recruiting the very best talent is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Addressing historical injustices is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Getting the boss's boss promoted is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Reducing our carbon footprint is our organization's Number One Priority!"

"Reducing head-count is our organization's Number One Priority!"

....and all before 9:00 AM on Monday

Back in the day...

 

Things were harder back then. We are not the same.