hey, a map of the new US oil exploration areas! courtesy NYTimes…

offshore petroleum exploration is one place where american technology shines these days. It’s where the next fifty years of military dominance will come from- or, rather, it’s a prerequisite for maintaining the empire, nothing like a guarantee.

finally.

you cannot imagine the twisted shit that i’ve seen perpetrated on people under fee-for-service. why think about the patient’s problems when we can shove instrumentation in them? thinking doesn’t pay.

a small but visible minority of doctors plainly don’t spend any time reading charts or thinking about their patient’s problems. a person becomes a patient becomes an excuse to perform a procedure and get paid three thousand dollars for 30 minutes of work. they’ll take a minor problem and make it worse without batting an eye. even a cursory chart review reveals how full of shit they are. these people are not chastised or disciplined publicly or privately for this behavior.

why doesn’t anyone seem to care? simple: interventionalist services keep the hospital from going bankrupt.

the worst part is that after damaging a person’s health doing some pointless but profitable shit, you can do even worse and everyone still gets paid.

there are a lot of stories i could put here but it doesn’t get much worse than taking someone who isn’t sick and either killing them, killing pieces of their brain with strokes out of sheer incompetence, killing an organ important enough to land them on a transplant list, or otherwise taking someone who could hold a job and turning them into a dependent perpetual patient who, if they’re still breathing independently, might just need constant care in addition to getting a bill equal to the cost of a small home.

these exact things, without exaggeration, are happening to real people with families. i’ve seen it happen so many times that it’s hard for me to continue being surprised by it.

so, what do i do? blow the whistle, charge to the rescue, the heroic student fighting corruption and taking a stand against overwhelmingly powerful superiors and whole industries? that’s what someone whose principles were their first priority would do.

no, i do something else with my frustration. you just finished reading it.

life as a hippocrite.

i again found this tool that lets me watch the pictures people upload on twitter, which i will now share with you.

this might become a regular series. it’s already a reflection of how my mind works.

now if you’ll excuse me, i’m going to go waste another half hour watching pictures go by… that or join the edukatorz at a strip club.

still alive. a month away might have fixed blob software. testing now with zany picture!

have i posted these before? i hope not.

this is with IR film (hence the glowy)

i made a custom ‘persona’ also known as a firefox browser skin.

it’s available for your use here – you’ll need a recent version of firefox, which you should have upgraded to anyway because it stopped that nasty crashing habit.

give the people what they want!

(more bloggings.)

we apologize for the interruption- bugs in wordpress apps and swamp gas have disabled any ability to score blog points on the move. i’ll be better, i promise.