Lots of little pieces

Tilapia and sweet-corn chowder for Ash Wednesday and Friday's dinner

Mrs ERJ is happy. I shampooed our 120 square-feet of carpet. She says it looks better. I cannot tell the difference.

Of course, I am the 8 crayons in a box guy as far as color goes.

Shooting range

I just happened to be on the firing line at a local shooting range. It was windy. The fellow next to me had a muzzle-brake on his drill-motor. It made me a little bit twitchy.

2" groups at 100 yards were more than acceptable considering the conditions. I try to keep in mind that granpaw filled the freezer using a gun with minute-of-paint-can accuracy at 100 yards. Pawpaw did that by not launching Hail-Mary shots at deer 200 yards away.

I am glad the guy next to me was shooting his .308 and not his 7PRC. That would have been enough to suck the snot out of my sinuses. A heavy .308 load might have 45 grains of powder while a heavy 7PRC load might have 80 grains. The gentleman was lamenting that the 7PRC is a boutique chambering and ammo is running about $80 a box, when he can find them.

Code Blue in Medical

I had lunch with somebody in the medical profession the other day. The picture he painted was not pretty.

"Travel" nurses, doctors, etc are making as much as three times as much as the permanent employees. The permanent employees are chained-to-the-oar if their replacements do not show up for their shift.

Some business plans are unraveling. One local business formed large groups of specialists and and planned to use economies-of-scale to underbid everybody else. High overhead pressured pay-rates. The specialists started jumping ship. Remaining specialists are being forced to work extra shifts and are burning out...and are leaving. 

It takes ten years between entering medical school and exiting residency as a specialist. There is no quick fix. Professions that used qualifications to narrow-the-gate and keep wages high are not responding quickly to the inversion of supply (which used to be too high) and demand (which used to be lower when we were younger and healthier).

Another trend my lunch date talked about is that the small-practice, stand-alone General Practitioner will likely become extinct. Payments do not cover costs. When GPs are integrated with a larger group that includes specialists, then they are feeders to the more profitable specialists and can operate at a loss. Stand-alones do not have that dynamic.

My source indicated that there is chatter within the industry about roving PAs, NPs visiting drugstore outlets and performing GP-Level once-a-week, drop-in medicine. Apparently, this was a "thing" during Covid and might become the norm.

Unless something dramatic happens, the traditional "hospital" in legacy cities will face extinction in a decade.

Lifting

Lifting was a mixed bag today.

I PRed again on the squats at 175 pounds. I started at 135 and did two sets of four reps. Then two more sets at 155. I finished with two sets of 175.

I went over to dead-lifts and did my warm-up, ten reps at 135 with no straps. I put on the straps and did two reps of 205 and said "I'm done".

I had nothing left after the squats.

There is pretty significant overlap in muscle groups between squats and deadlifts. In this case, it was my lower back telling me to back-off. I am old enough and wise enough to listen.

Sig's sermon

I did not want to comment too soon after posting that segment. It needed a little bit of time to sink in.

I intended for it to be an allegory for those ideologies that punished followers who questioned-the-dogma in good faith.

This is not a right-left thing.

On one side we have the WOKE movement which excommunicate any follower who dares to question any position in any detail.

On the other side we have Trump who is very black-white and appears to perceive independent thought as disloyalty.

Of the two, I find it easier to ignore Trump's ego than the WOKE movement's insatiable appetite for permeating every facet of life and controlling it.

Those who loath Trump call his following "a cult" and liken him to cancer.

Those who loath the Woke movement also call it "a cult" and liken it to HIV.

The difference between cancer and HIV is that cancer dies with the patient while HIV continues to spread.