Keith, Steve, Arthur, Mike S, E Pluribus Unum?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2013/09/08/left-with-nothing/ You are all naive and when challenged, mean. This is the world I knew from birth on the Indian Reservation but now your economic theories have brought it into the regular world. I don't give a flying f**k for your deficits. That is a shell game practiced by the powerful expedient. The culture is a swamp. The only oasis is Beethoven or Brahms, otherwise it's a sewer. Why not fess up? You were wrong and people have suffered and died for it. What about yourself? Have you ever found yourself in such a situation as above? I had to give up land on two occasions because of the private sector and their government lackeys. Because it was so ordinary, I just walked away but now the economic virus has gotten to the "ordinary" people they depend on. These people will eventually eat their babies. We had a community member with a house in Queens that would have lost it had she not been politically connected to the oldest families in Harlem. When Texas "entrepreneurs" put her house on the block after a payment scam, it was only her connection to the Chuck Schumer that saved her home and family. Meanwhile the Texas "fly by night" creditors just moved on to someone else with the same scam. If you want I will tell you privately but I won't put it on the list. As for me, my most recent brush with the private medical sector is typical of the trash that runs this society: In our wonderful private medical system there are two sides: Local and Corporate. Medical Practice and Private clinics are local. Saint Luke's Roosevelt Hospital is a corporation. Here are two examples of the same process from the Private Sector of the "Greatest Medical System in the world." One is local and the other is corporate. Both groups explain why I'm helpless and both blame the government eschewing any responsibility for a confidence game being run. 1. Had a severe sore throat and needed confirmation about whether it was strep throat, because of my age. (In the 1960s, when I was in the US Army Chorus at the White House, my otolaryngologist at Georgetown Hospital, Dr. Papadopoulos [who was then my current age], died from strep because he made an assumption about a mere sore throat that was incorrect and didn't take a strep test to check. He was head of the Laryngology section at Georgetown University Hospital and got a big article in the Washington Post about how distinguished he was when he died from not taking a strep test. Since that time I have had an agreement with various MDs to purchase the simple test whenever that possibility exists. My former Doctor had an office on 71st street but she closed it and I went looking for another. I came upon a new clinic two blocks away from my studio, when I had a sore throat. ) Like Dr. Papadopoulos, I'm am incapable of telling the difference without a test. Hence my visit to the new private Doctor's office for a test. Although I'm a veteran and use the VA for my health care, as noted, this office was across the street from my studio and I had used other doctor's for this test at earlier times. I hoped to expand that service to my students as well since strep is a common problem. The new office required my Medicare number and assured me that my co-pay would take care of the bill. It didn't and I was served with an additional bill amounting to about three times the cost of the test. I've been fighting with them about this ever since. I would guess that it's no accident that I never see patients waiting in their waiting room if that is their business procedure. I observed them blame the government but I've not had that problem in my experience with the Veteran's government hospitals. Example 2. I had a severe flu last year with four days of misery and high fever. This was post Hurricane Sandy which flooded my VA hospital, and so the VA told me, when my symptoms advanced to the "being unable to breathe" stage, to go to the nearest emergency room and that it would be covered by my VA since my hospital wasn't available. So I did. I spent an overnight in the Saint Luke-Roosevelt Hospital down the street from where I live. My wife and daughter advocated for me with hospital management. We all thought I was there for the flu but it seems that the complexity of my VA medications simply stunned St. Luke-Roosevelt and so they didn't test me for the flu but took me in for observation and ran up a $15,000 bill for medical tests to confirm the pharmaceutical regimen the VA had me on. They were going to keep me longer but my wife (happily for me) required my being home since she is also a senior and was incapable of monitoring me at the hospital and still working. We both continue our work as my half-cousin Dr. Senator Tom Coburn says seniors are supposed to do since "75 is the modern 65." Needless to say I'm a Democrat. Meanwhile that bill just kept running for an overnight stay in a lousy bed, a coughing roommate traveler from Japan who didn't know who or where he was (and the hospital didn't know what he had either). Meanwhile for the flu I was being fitted and was given a heart stress test by a doctor that I was assured was their best and that I should leave the VA and become his patient when he got back from vacation next month. (If a voice teacher interferes in another teachers students the New York Singing Teachers Association considers them unethical at least and pond scum at worst. Voice also requires belief in the learning of the complexities of singing. A teacher who interferes with another teacher is sewing discord. It's not only unethical for someone to break a window in order to be hired to fix it but its criminal as well. What if I had died from that rise in blood pressure when they took me off the VA medication? My blood pressure was 200 over 120. The highest of my entire lifetime. I was too sick to know until they told me. Yes it was all confusing with my being unable to breathe and feeling terrible and wondering if I was going to get some version of SARS from my Japanese roommate who had been brought straight from the airplane to my room. So I checked myself out before they gave me more tests to confirm the VA's diagnoses from twenty years and insisted that they could do it better. They changed my blood pressure medication to Amlodipine which it turned out I couldn't tolerate but my VA Dr. found that out and changed it to one that I could. So I have more medications than before. I still don't know what that Flu was all about and my co-pay for that $15,000 is $1200. So much for private medicine, medical practice as a business, and me as a consumer. It seems the complexity of all of this is beyond the capability of the education of the modern medical management. That's why am I considering voting for a sexual addict for mayor because he's the only one that has acknowledged this. REH PS: There are those who talk and those who share. In the scheme of things I was taught that there are four methods of what you believe. 1. The Method of tradition and authority. (Your Heritage and your "betters.") 2. The Method of Tenacity. (Experience, Practice, Discipline and Virtuosity) 3. The method of Metaphysics (Knowledge of your personal psycho-physical instrument) and 4. The Method of Science (Scientific Method in the pursuit of reliable environmental answers). Economics is grounded in the first but aspires to the latter and is very poor at two and three preferring to speculate, legislate and skim the profits while skipping mastery and self knowledge by narrowing the parameters to exclude most of the rest of the world around them. Not unlike the Bush/Obama idea of selective bombing in Iraq and Syria. That being the case I would make argument that current private/public market practices are actually war models with a vertical heirarchy. There are no possibilities or even theories about what peace would be like. Harmony is as denuded as those poor statues of Madam Justice in the courthouses. Note to Steve, you are the only one on this list that has ever accused me of writing too little. Some things can't be said simply in English. Nonetheless, in my profession the only valid basis for theory is personal experience and correct records. Our performances are judged by the public in public performance. No performer can afford to hide their success because transparency of success creates the agreement of audiences to desire tickets to what you do for a living. There is no expediency built into my Art, my religion, my pedagogy or my science. Professions built upon expediency have no right to complain about the lack of long term planning. It's an oxymoron. Expedient structure are war structures and the province of those who love and desire them for their needs. Artistic long term structures (and traditional Native spirituality) do the work until it's done and that may take seven generations. To the Artist and the Indian, Eternal Life is an assumption rather than a desire. That makes the only question a question of the value and quality of product and journey to accomplish it. The question is always one of the values inherent in the project. I see almost zero value in most of the projects that the market exploits the environment to complete. To make war on the planet is an assumption. That being said Steve, you know I love you, and am glad to read whatever you have to write even when I think you are fighting a losing war. As for the others I also have an affection for them but I do not mistake who are my brothers and sisters on the list, in this terminal battle that I did not choose and will lose, and those who are just theorizing about what they think is happening and want to have some kind of safe relational experience as they walk through life comfortably. REH -----Original Message----- From: futurework-boun...@lists.uwaterloo.ca [mailto:futurework-boun...@lists.uwaterloo.ca] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2013 1:10 AM To: futurework@lists.uwaterloo.ca Subject: Re: [Futurework] more hot air from Krugman Pete wrote: > I believe they're saying it appears economists don't like to use > simulations because it limits them to speaking about actual results, > rather than making stuff up. Ha! Yeah. Assume there's an analytic function that correctly describes and predicts some aspect of the economy. If I have enough money to be a "player" and I know that function, I can outsmart it. As soon as I do that (and, perhaps, my fellow players do so), the analytic function no longer describes what it purports to describe. Ergo, if there were such an animule, it would cease to exist on the next tick of the clock. I do have to read the Brian Arthur paper Steve posted. I think that's the kind of thing his non-equilibrium (or multiple equilibria) approach addresses. - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ mspen...@tallships.ca /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@lists.uwaterloo.ca https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@lists.uwaterloo.ca https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
