eljinca

There's no getting around this issue. My wife is a pediatric sub-specialist. I have to constantly assure her that our toddler does not have exceedingly rare disorders that I have never heard of that she only learned about in medical school. Wife: "Tell me [kid] doesn't have agranulocytosis." Me: "I have no idea what that is. Is it common?" Wife: "No, very, very rare blood disorder." Me: "[Kid] does not have it." Wife: "Thank you." This happens twice a month.

Snoogins

They drove from the airport to a state dept office that processes passports and sat for 6 hours. Got new passports and flew out the following day. It was fun to hear the three argue as to who was at fault for none of them checking.

My wife, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law all showed up to the airport to fly to Italy with expired passports. Not single one checked in the months leading up to the trip.

Lunar is a great G&T gin. Haven't see it mentioned, but Barr Hill is my go to for martini's:

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

He should be fired, but won’t be.

Good one yesterday morning. Every week my wife asks me to buy a gallon of oat milk for her coffee. I don't like it, so I buy a pint of whole milk for my coffee. I was on the phone in the morning and accidentally grabbed the oat milk out of the fridge and poured it into my coffee. Which precipitated the following exchange: Me: "Do you want to take my coffee. I used oat milk by accident. I'll make another cup for myself." Wife: "No, I like the whole milk in my coffee." Me: "Then why do we buy the oat milk for your coffee?" Wife: "Well, I like to have the oat milk because we always run out of the whole milk." Me: "So how about I just buy more whole milk and no oat milk?" Wife: "Then what will I use when we run out of whole milk?" At this point I just walked out of the kitchen with my coffee. Oh, my wife is a doctor.

Still have a few bottles of Laphraiog Cairdeas 2013. The best scotch I've had in the past decade.

Last night I was in another room walking into our living room when I had this exchange: Me: Can you flip the channel over to ESPN? Wife: What channel is that? Me: 560. Wife: Is that up or down? Me: What? Wife: Is that up or down from what I'm watching. Me: I can't see what you are watching and have no idea what channel you are watching. Go to 560. Wife: I'm going through the guide, I'm almost there. Me: ------ Wife: Found it! For next time, ESPN was down. Me: Sure thing. My wife is a doctor.

Sadly, no. They were some Whole Foods brand. When I put them away I opened the cabinet to find 3 unopened bags of the same brand.

We have a new infant and are staying in as much as possible. I asked my wife to send me a list of groceries she wanted me to order from Whole Foods for delivery to tide us over for the weekend. She said she couldn't do that. I asked why. She said she needed to browse and couldn't come up with groceries off the top of her head. I gave her my laptop to "browse" and add groceries to the cart and I would supplement after she was finished. An hour later it was returned with the following essentials: one box of Fig Newman cookies, one box of fudge strip cookies, one box of chocolate covered graham crackers, one bag of salt and vinegar chips and two mangoes. That's it. That's her list of groceries for the week.

This was really good. Saw it Saturday afternoon. The "single-shot" focus was a little forced at times, but overall was a really good, harrowing movie.

Spondi in Athens was a great meal. http://www.spondi.gr/spondi/

The fact that there's no Canadian bacon option causes this threat to lose all credibility.

Sadly, the answer to healthcare in the U.S. is not at the federal level. All hospitals would be out of business within a few years if they were reliant on federal reimbursement. I know the pediatric space well, and as it is all children's hospitals are only profitable due to charitable giving as CHIP and Medicaid payments account for roughly 70% of their reimbursement revenue. You can say that "doctors need to make less" but that's just not a realistic short-term plan, nor is it the main driver of cost at a hospital. Long-term, AI can replace many (most?) physician decision making which will drive down physician compensation and demand.This is already happening in radiology. Single-payer or Medicare/Medicaid for all can work, but in my opinion, only on a much more local level that the US federally. The country is just too large, both from a population standpoint and a pure geography standpoint. We are also substantively more diverse than any other country we can use as a model. The UK is roughly the size of Minnesota and ~90% white. If you want to centrally plan that health system, you can; Minnesota could come up with a pretty good plan for its healthcare system, I betcha. To continue the comparison, there's only one truly world-class pediatric hospital in the UK - Great Ormond Street in London. The NHS can centralize all truly high-acuity care and specialists in one location as they only need patients to travel a maximum of a few hours to arrive at the point of care. That model just can't work in the US, where you have many times greater travel times to get to location. There are probably 10 Great Ormond Street equivalents in the US. Patients require local care. If you are born in Colorado Springs with a congenital heart defect, we can't fly you to Boston Children's for a surgery as a system. Just another example of the diversity of care we have to deal with here - my wife is a Pediatric Hematologist/Oncologist. There's another physician she works with who specializes in Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) in children, which only presents in individuals of sub-Sahara African descent (very rarely in middle eastern). This physician is trained/from the UK, but left London as SCD is classified as an "exotic disease" by the NHS as there are so few people in the UK with SCD (<500 new diagnosis per year in the entire country). She sees exponentially more patients with SCD in a large east coast pediatric hospital and can run studies that would take years in the UK. What's the point? Every country is different and unique and models are hard to replicate. That is true in regions of the US too. If we want to actually create better healthcare in the US, we have to push decisions about healthcare down to the lowest levels feasible. To me, the state level is where most of the decisions should be made, and the federal government would be better off pushing as much money down the system closer to patients. People don't actually travel outside of their counties for healthcare - especially patients who are either on Medicare or Medicaid. If certain states - I believe Oregon did this - want to offer Medicaid for all, they should be able to with larger pools of federal funding than current levels.Other states that have large levels of economic disparity, like California, might want to think about substantially higher reimbursement rates for govt funded payers, but means test those benefits and force those with means to obtain their own insurance. States just have very divergent health issues, and there wont be a federal system smart enough or flexible enough to address needs adequately. Voters and local government should be both in charge of and accountable for what are, at the end of the day their tax dollars and their health(care).

It's gonna be lit when the Democrats don't take the Senate in November and RBG kicks the bucket.

The Federalist Society.

Corker and Manchin already saying they will vote to confirm. https://twitter.com/elainaplott/status/1045478279220797440

Right or wrong, he'll be confirmed next week with something like 52-48. It's going to be incredibly hard for swing Rs and Ds in red states to vote against him. Dr. Ford was totally credible, but given the lack of corroboration, I just can't see enough of Manchin, Murkowski, Collins, Donnelly, Corker and Flake voting against. Lindsey Graham's tirade and McConnell's speech from the floor yesterday are clear signals the R base is firmly behind the "confirm" position.

Two good ones: Many years ago, the head of design at my company came in to show me and a (female) colleague a new mock-up of a website. Opens his laptop up to a browser that immediately starts playing a hardcore porn video of a guy fucking an enormously fat chick. He slams his laptop and says, "Yes, that was porn. Yes, I like bigger women. Let's move on." He left to close out that window, came back in and proceeded as if nothing happened. Second, I was interviewing a candidate for a role and asked why he was relocating. He said, "My significant other switched jobs." Without thinking, I said, "What does she do?" He was, of course, gay and said, "Well he does...." Worked out in the end as I hired him, but very embarrassing in the moment. Kudos to him for brushing it off.

Ballon Blue de Cartier 42MM Steel.

Cocaine Mitch and the Chinamen

Gotta love Ward 8 in DC. Same ward that elected Marion Barry to the City Council with 95% of the vote after stepped down from being mayor for the fourth time (a position to which he was elected after serving time in federal prison). He was reelected every cycle until he died. Every year there was a ballot initiative to ban convicted felons from serving on the city council. Every cycle, it failed.