Life, The Universe, and Everything

[Doug Coulter]

I appear to be a living example of "too soon old, too late smart" on that one, at least. At least, a living example, could be worse!

[Rex Allers]

Doug,
Thanks for the reply to my query about your health. I think you pretty much gave us the story.

Sorry I'm so late to reply. I started to write some of what follows, but got distracted and just got back to it tonight.

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Smoking:
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Yeah, pretty amazing that consumption of a plant can have that kind of power on even very smart people.

I started smoking in my teens. Probably at max I was around 1 pack a day. After 10 yrs or so I empirically figured out it was bad. For me, it wasn't too hard to quit. I could usually do it without too much upset. I did it several times. Longest was about a year and a half. But hanging out in bars with friends, I would eventually start again.

The last time, my mid thirties, early 1980's, I finally grasped that quitting means never smoking again. Oh, Duh! Once I decided that, then -- me having just a puff, or one cig -- didn't happen anymore, so I really was done.

You mentioned vaping as a crutch for quitting. I can see it. That didn't exist when I quit.

My gimmick when I was quitting was... I would put one cig in my pocket. If I got a big craving, rather than bum a smoke or buy a pack, I would light up the one in my pocket and just take a drag or two to take the edge off. Then I would scrape off the fire and put the cig back in my pocket. Each time I got a craving, the old, used, stale butt was less appealing than the last time but available if I couldn't tame the urge. This fall-back cig helped a lot to get through the critical first day or two.

I think my ability to quit was greater than friends of mine. Once I decided, I could always quit, even when I would later weaken and eventually fall back. Other people I knew seemed weaker. They knew it was bad and wanted to quit in principle, but couldn't seem to quit for more than a day or two.

Another reflection is that back in the 70s-80s it was much harder to stay quit because it was ok to smoke in bars or even workplaces and most of my friends were smokers. Thus temptation was always there, especially when I was weakened by alcohol and people around me were smoking.

Now-a-days with public smoking banned in most places, I think it should be much easier to quit or stay quitted. Also it seems to be viciously expensive these days.

But I did it almost 40 yrs ago. I hope that should mean I'm almost like I never smoked at all.

Doug, I hope you keep improving.

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Health Care
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What we have, -- insurance based --, is a horror show. Insurance is not = health care. Compared to pretty much all the world's major countries our US system is terrible. Theoretically we have excellent medical resources available, but for most people, insurance makes getting access a steep battle. Any serious illness for most people can lead to life destroying financial burdens.

Every person must directly or indirectly pay the system for the potential privilege of using some kind of care. A minimum policy provides next to nothing of benefit for the usual general care and even worse if one actually gets sick.

Obama was in a position of political power and could have driven changes. He began from a position of weak tea signalling and compromise and then negotiated down. I believe the horror show of "Obama Care" was pretty much written by insurance company lobbyists.

I've been wondering if the Covid ongoing mess might have any effect on popular demand for a system more like Canada (or most any other country). I can see many people having financial stress from economy shutdowns then getting piled on from Covid bills for trying to stay alive. Could this cause enough of an uprising?

Oh well, this isn't the place to rant more about this typical "USA, USA!!!" we're the best, then living in the actual crap implementation.

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Boom vid
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I'm wondering what was the instigator for the bang on top of the barrel? Was it a wired electrical trigger, or ... ?

[Doug Coulter]

We could do a thread on health care and what I've found (with considerable help from disgruntled people in the biz) to avoid most of the problems.
You'll almost always pay more with insurance than without!!! And that's not counting the premiums.
Yes, Ocare was all insurance lobbyists work. Not sure what all I've linked here in the past, but I have a collection of eye opening links if anyone cares.
"You have to pass (even read?) it to find out what's in it" says it all - congress just took the brown envelopes and didn't bother.

Just this AM I happened on another one of Belk's, this about pharma... and with what I know, he's actually being kind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpQRIItnl8A


The problem of big bucks buying legislation that favors them and locks out any competition or other price pressure isn't just around health care, but they're the poster child.
Now that near-monoplies run by MBAs have bought up most private practices and nearly all hospitals, the quality of care has nosedived, and in fact they are becoming
like the chain hardware stores vs the old lumberyard - they only want to do the high profit work, skip anything odd.

No one would pay for a scan if they paid what shows on those bills (including the insurance companies!). Insurance is the big enabler for the scams.

The initiator on the big boom was my Cooper .223 bolt with a fairly hot (3300fps - 53 gr fb) load. That rifle holds some records in hunter benchrest (a possible, and the only one in the history of that game). It might as well be a laser, it's so good out to a couple hundred. At this range, it feels like cheating. Yes, you can actually pick which letter on the label to hit.

[Donovan Ready]

My recent skin cancer surgeries were charged outside my insurance, so I owe $8,300. There's a (new) thing called concierge medicine that lets patients and doctors negotiate a monthly fee without the "help" of the government. I'm in favor.

My medications cost me $3.64 for three months, thank God.

[Doug Coulter]

I have a similar situation here. Small towns are nice - we all live here and it makes a difference. When I've been truly broke, there's a barter clinic with a good doc in town. A couple of us traded them computer support and upgrades for care.
I'm now using a different outfit that is mainly doctors doing other doctors - but I somehow got into the good ol boys club on that. Their business office is approachable and small, so the techniques descrived in the link above work - they'll work for almost zero plus medicare, do their own tests and charge that at cost - so a couple pages of tests is < $100. My meds are also cheap...under $5/mo (lisinopril and cyclobenzaprine). I just pray they don't sell out to one of the two major duopolies around here.

I had skin cancer cut off two times, $700 a pop. Believe it or not, the notoriety I have from this site, that Vice vid and others, and my work helps, all my docs have gone "oh, I know you, I've seen that video or been to the site" - or one of the nurses had and clued them in, so I'm not sure if the deal I get would apply to just anyone or some jerk - I do my best not to appear a jerk to them. But I'm not complaining anymore, now that I've got the system working. Well, other than dental, haven't managed a deal there yet and I'm going to need to do something.

It's funny, though - I've never had insurance and needed it at the same time. But doing the numbers, everyone I know who has insurance pays more in premiums than I have in my most expensive year, and I have some years at no cost. Lots of them, I got lucky in the gene lottery I suppose. When most of the rest of my family was alive, we kind of created a health slush fund and helped each other out, backed up by some high deductible insurance my Dad had via iEEE. But that deal isn't around anymore, and as either Belk or Hedgeless will point out - is just cover to pretend an bill so inflated that the part you actually pay covers the service and a fat profit, so it's actually useless - it's pure profit for insurance who often actually pay almost nothing. If they give you a quarter mill bill and you're broke, you can just tell them to fsck off - seen it done, they don't need the publicity of trying to get blood off a turnip. It can be an advantage to have little or nothing to lose (at least that they know of and can garnish).

[Bob Reite]

They shouldn't even call it "medical insurance" It is not in the proper sense of the word. If you buy fire insurance you pay a modest premium just in case the worst happens and the house burns to the ground. But if you do have to make a claim, the premiums stop! At least until you build a new house that you want protection on. But "medical insurance" you keep paying even if you are sick in the hospital It really should be called a "maintenance contract" on your body. Trouble is you are forced into it. As I mentioned before, if your body starts "wearing out", you can't overnight a new one from Mouser or Digikey,you are stuck with repairing the one that you have.

The US would be much better off if most medical care was "cash and carry". You "carry" yourself to the doctors office and pay cash. Cut the insurance companies out of it as "nobody works for free". Another example of how making medical care a cash business would improve things is the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, founded by a group of doctors that were tired of the insurance company hassles. Not only is the cost less, if you pick up an infection while in their hospital, they stand the cost of dealing with it! That is how it should be! If I drop an antenna through the roof of someones transmitter building, not only do I have to provide a replacement antenna for free, I also have to pay for the repair of the building roof! Needless to say the infection rate at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma is quite low, as they have a financial incentive to make sure that patients don't develop any other problems while under their care.

Maybe have insurance for something catastrophic, such as cancer. A cancer diagnosis really doesn't happen all that often. Maybe as often as severe auto wrecks, so it would stand to reason that a cancer protection policy would be about the same cost as an auto policy. Yes it would be fair to charge a higher rate if you smoke, just as you are charged a higher rate if you have a high performance sports car vs a sedate sedan.

Which is a good segue into quitting smoking. For some the cost was a deciding factor. Usually when the cost of a pack of cigs broke into the next even dollar amount. I remember one "two pack" a day guy that said "Fuck this shit" when the price hit three dollars a pack. When the last one from his inventory was smoked, he quit cold turkey. He also noticed how much more spending money he had when he quit blowing $180.00 a month on smokes which gave him even more incentive not to resume smoking.

[Doug Coulter]

I think your points are dead-nuts on, Bob.

My parents pointed out the fact that insurance companies, like all others, have to run at a profit.

When they are actually beneficial (well, on some level) all they do is substitute their billing system for your responsibility, or lack thereof. In my family, we paid into a joint fund - our own insurance company, in effect.
This worked before things became utterly financialized and obfuscated. Not sure exactly when it became kind of mandatory to have insurance, a couple decades ago?

And it's hard to analyze. I did my father's estate and he was the kind of guy who saved everything, especially financial. I was astonished how he was able to have a house, a stay at home wife (initially) and 3 kids on his income at the time,
inflation is tricky to figure, but he was basically an ET at NRL. And then orthodontia for the kids, a thing everyone complained was super expensive, but you'd see office vists in the ten dollar range. It's hard to put together a good picture because
of how the value of money has changed so much - gasoline at a few bucks a gallon is now actually cheaper than it was at .25 in terms of hours to earn a tankful. (that's a special case due to externalizing the cost of a military to make it so)
At least then I understood why he could never give us the minibike we craved...
But net - no one on ET pay has a house, 3 kids, two cars, and the ability to put the wife through a prestigious college once the kids are in school, anymore. The medical biz isn't the only one that's been ripping us off! Or at least mismanaging the economy and money supply.

Belk points out, as does Hedgeless, that it's this lack of information that enables this scam, in large part. And it's all round. Doctors don't know how the money works - that's done elsewhere by MBAs, who only know
that if they charge some super high number and accept what insurance actually pays, it works and they keep their jobs. Insurance leverages these fake bills, and by getting a co-pay often recoups the entire amount
the docs will be compensated via the co pay...leaving the premiums as profit. They mostly don't even know how to handle a cash customer - or cynically, hope that the huge score they get if one pays those insane numbers
no one in on the system will, they get a bonus. Then other guys, bill collectors, "just doing their job" - as are ALL the players...it's something best observed from 30,000 feet, not in your own face.
It's how that became "just doing their job" that is the poison - and extremely difficult to tease out and deal with. The guys who poured concrete for the concentration camps were "just doing their jobs" too.

As time has gone on, and medical miracles kind of become a lot less daily fare, the business has been a lot less magical and more like a plain old repair shop. It's not so much an art as sometimes portrayed on TV (Which I haven't watched for a few decades - but you can't escape others talking about it). No magically insightful doctor saves lives on what are always obscure maladies, daily. It's more like, hey the fuses are blown, I bet the output transistors are fried, and it's probably the bias network opened up, or the output got shorted, the fix is expensive but obvious - just like the last 9 units with the same complaint. The screen is dark, is there high voltage? Or, it won't start, hmm, check the usual compression, ignition, fuel. And whatever fixes are available are not mysterious combinations of incantations and secret formulas, they're well known and have changed little over the last n years. It's just a repair shop, and to the extent there's anything much undefined, it's how to get the patient thinking right (or if you're the patient, get the docs on board!). And like a repair shop, you do run into things that can't be fixed, or aren't worth it. We, and the medical business need to be reminded of that a bit more. I had an injury that ruined half my face and skull, it's nasty in the mirror, and it also wiped out my teeth on that side. OK, I could spend all my income for the rest of my life (borrowing ahead of course) to have endless reconstructive surgeries and get some "fake front end" slapped on - or just grow the beard and hide it while learning to chew on one side. Bingo.

Placebo effect is very real. My mother, a research psychologist, wrote one of the seminal books on the subject that caused quite a stir before finally being accepted. she stepped on the toes of western medicine and shamans alike. Faith healing works, but it's not the faith of the preacher or shaman, it's yours - he's just a clown to keep the circus going and hopefully enhance the faith of the patient. This idea of course offended all the clowns...

Belk points out that it's not a free market as it lacks all freedom. Back in the days of cash and carry (actually, I'm old enough to remember the odd house call) - there was price competition, and things were better, even though the tools weren't as good. I would point out that some of the expensive tests, nice as they are would never fly when people actually knew they'd pay those numbers. Well, the number would be reduced to what the market would bear, if history is a guide. Those machines, and the ones they wanted to charge me $70k to be irradiated by just in case for my skin cancer, are expensive, but a majority of the expense is other than how hard they are to make and to run - it's insurance (legal in this case) and other junk loaded up on the price.

We let all this happen to us. People with an agenda (cementing their own income) always have a great story - "think of the children", "don't you want to be safe" and sell this line - but also sold thalidomide and a long list of other crap.
This leads to a realization that a huge amount of modern life and commerce is make-work. It's easy to be really angry about how things are now - we see a lot of inchoate anger that's been manipulated and misdirected by people with sick agendas these days, it's in our faces. The anger is real, and at least partially justified, but as usual, it's been harnessed to point at anything but the real causes and problems, but instead to benefit those doing the manipulating.

[a few paragraphs omitted here - it's too easy to "go there", and even though my rather unconventional analysis of how people are duped - and self-duping(!) might make some happy - believe me it isn't the fake political red-blue dichotomy, the whole topic leads to angry arguing that goes nowhere. There's a reason that most all religions start out by pointing out how man goes wrong without some help. It's too easy to become a cynic, and too difficult to recover without quite a lot of rare understanding and the ability to back off and watch the show a little dispassionately. "I'm glad I'm not a beta"! Sometimes better to pretend one isn't even human, like the rest. Always easier to see the faults of "the other".]

Your point on expenses, wow, yup. At 2-3 packs a day - 14-21 a week, and $3ish a pack (in cartons!)...and a liter of wine a day - it adds up to crazy numbers, not even counting the cost of the damage. And I had to drive to get this stuff - 26 miles round trip to the nearest supply of such things. Somehow I was coming up with the money - it's almost as though the hunger caused the food to appear. $300 a month or more! There was a time when my first apt - a 2 bedroom one that somehow had room for my lab - in the DC area - cost $125/mo. With utilities.

I'm really glad on that count, and yes I've noticed having a much larger toy budget, even as my income has gone down - I quit stock trading quite awhile back when it became more difficult to make money at it, and the stress...glad I quit.
This medical stuff would be less an issue with that income, but most of the paths I've had to money-flow caused enough stress to create more issues, it's probably a wash. Running a product design/software house with 60-80 hour weeks - even with
the very best people (who deserve eternal thanks and blessings), a good income stream and so on - just continuous problem solving on a time-budget as time-to-market AND lots of 9's were the demands of the customers - also hard on ya.
It was fun to be able to truthfully say "the difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer" - and make it stick, it was quite the adventure - but I wouldn't go back.

At any rate, the money wasn't the motivator here - it was knowing I had a leg, an arm and half a torso through death's door, and damn it, it just wasn't time yet. I can (finally) conceive there there will be a right time, but it's NOT TODAY.
I'm just not done yet. And while it may look to outsiders that I've been slacking of late, I don't feel that I have been. All those good things I accomplished required a base infrastructure to get happening - and it had crumbled, from "stuff that provides daily bread and shelter" to my own ability to get out of bed. Fixing that to be able to pull off the next leg is imperative, and I'm well along on that now. Whew! A few more weeks of this and I should be a lot closer to "there".

I think I can adapt that sweep-tube amplifier to what I want for the ion trap stuff. I need a broadband (guessing ~ 1-20 mhz), high voltage (a few kv pk pk) source that doesn't have to be high current at the moment - I could take out 5 of the 6 tubes and be fine I guess, to make the measurements of impedance and resonance broadening I want to make. I think I can even do what amounts to ALC using negative feedback on those super fast opamps I use to drive the tubes, so I have a constant voltage output vs F - pentodes are nice as they don't need huge drive and the opamps do fine. Once that data is in hand, I can then predict with some confidence a good way forward, or it's time to give up. At least on some aspect. Because the other thing I've learned is that new understanding almost always leads to unexpected possibilities for value creation. You just keep your eyes open! No one else has made these measurements with the particular malice-aforethought I have here, there's no telling what might be revealed and implied when someone who can, follows the old nose.

I think I've decided to drop the upstairs small system, though I may bolt that tank onto the big setup (there are lots of ports around for that). The small system pump just isn't up to it, while the big one - and the whole system, are. I've left the big guy off for days, it barely comes up to a millibar, and it goes right back to e-8 mbar in minutes when I power it back up. That's going to give me a lot better data. A separate system would be nice, but...I don't have a spare 20k bucks to make it so, so...we work with what we have.

[Doug Coulter]

Just released from hospital. My first voluntary ambulance ride, post what we think was a heart attack. Lots of tests, change in meds, all that stuff. They found "a mass" in a lung, around 20mm they say, that they want to do further investigation on, but say that where it is, they can't do a catheter biopsy, and want to do the intubation thing via the throat. Oh boy (not). I put that off till the middle of next month, ugh.
Meanwhile, it's not in here - a couple hits of Tc99m to do a cardiac stress test of the new sort. .3 millicuries and two pops, the nurse said. When I got home, I wanted to do a gamma spec to see the Tc line...but couldn't as it was overloaded with me in the same room, and those spectra don't work well at a distance due to random Compton scattering. Maybe after a few more half-lives.

May have overloaded the standard counter too - that flat top.

Here I am on our standard counter, I walked out of the room for a bit to let it show the background count. For reference, a thorium type lamp mantle laying right on the tube gives us ~ 6000 counts. This is a bit more...

[Bob Reite]

Welcome back Doug. I remember a few years back at an annual physical where they were concerned about "T-segment depression" observed on my EKG. So they had me do a thallium stress test. That left me "one hot guy" for about a month. Made an ordinary Gieger counter go nuts and I would even budge the needle on one of those yellow CD ionization fallout meters. Oh, they finally concluded that the EKG measurement was 'off' because I'm so lean.

[Doug Coulter]

My stuff is still pretty much up in the air, but if I take it easy, it seems I get by. I just have to start off REAL SLOW in the AM, no waking up in the middle of a James Bond fistfight to the death (and winning) anymore.

That stress test - be glad if you don't need one of those. It's not the treadmill anymore. After the first bit of technetium and a picture, they repeat, but this time also inject you with "near-death panic attack", and it's gotta be as bad as it gets - you're just gonna die. It lasts a couple minutes and by golly, forces your metabolism to do everything in the arsenal to not-die-right-here-in-total-asphyxiation-and-fear. I didn't and don't think I'm particularly afraid of dying if it's clean. This is as dirty as it gets.
You're really glad it only lasts a minute or so (EG around 3 eternities), and are utterly shaken and glad to leave that room on wheels. You're not going to stand up for an hour or more. I didn't know you could gasp that hard - this completely shuts off lung function and then nature takes its course.

Yeah, a couple of nurses commented on how thin I am at 5'10" and 120 lbs...no one said it was related to my issues, other than one doc mentioning that at least I'm not obese or diabetic. For me, it's genetic, and this kind of body worked real well for my sister...not so much for a male wishing for more-normal, but it'll do.