You Can Have My Dr. Pepper When.....

Well Philadelphia, the home of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, struck a blow against freedom yesterday by passing a 1.5¢ per ounce tax on soda pop. So that buck and a half 16 oz soda down at the 7-11 is now going to cost you an extra quarter. A 32 oz Big Gulp is gonna set you back an extra 50¢. The Philadelphia city council's eyes are glazing over at the thought of an extra 386 million dollars that they count on coming into their coffers. And they did it all to save you from catching the diabetes.

Of course part of the argument for the new tax was that it would REDUCE consumption of sodas by Philadelphians and protect the people's health - the people being too stupid to protect their own health. So if the tax actually does succeed in reducing consumption of Coca-Cola by the citizens of Philadelphia, then they ain't gonna get no 386 million in additional revenue. The trouble is they've probably already spent that money in next year's budget, which is why Democrat-run cities are always in debt. With hundreds of cities outside Philadelphia's city limits, Philadelphians will likely consume just as much soda only they'll buy it in nearby cities and suburbs, that don't have the tax. There will soon be a black market for soda pop in Phillie with pop junkies roaming the streets of quiet leafy neighborhoods. Your kids, instead of playing down at the park will be searching back alleys looking to score some Dr. Pepper or a nice A&W Root Beer.

The argument for such Byzantine laws is that it will help prevent diabetes which kills 70,000 people a year. This is considered horrific by many nutritionists and diet nazis who say that if we make sugar illegal or at least prohibitively expensive to obtain, those diabetes death rates will come right down. As one wag put it, they didn't have diabetes in Bible times, coz they didn't have soda pop.

It's a specious argument, of course. People did die of diabetes in Bible times. Just nobody knew what the heck it was. People's' body parts would rot off and they would die of infections. They often would just drop face first into the honey pot one morning with a diabetes related heart attack. Then, people would carry them out of the kitchen and into the yard where they buried them. Nobody kept statistics. Nobody knew it was a messed up pancreas behind it, especially since they didn't know what a pancreas even was in those day.

Besides, diabetes doesn't always come from sugar consumption. Of course you should be careful not to eat too much sugar. Fatitude is unhealthy. But trying to write laws to force people not to eat sugar is stupid - as stupid as trying to stop gun violence by taking guns from all the people who don't commit gun violence. 

Also, why is it always the people who say that marijuana laws don't work, who then want to turn around and ban cigarettes and sugar? Kind of hypocritical if you ask me. But that lot really do love their Big Friendly Government and those taxes on everybody else. 

I don't eat much processed sugar at all. I'm not a big dessert guy. Never have been. But I got type 2 diabetes. I was doing okay till a massively stressful job gave me high blood pressure. Turns out that certain blood pressure meds have type 2 diabetes listed as one of their side effects. Should have checked that sooner. I've switched to one that actually protects against diabetes, but reversing that stuff is really difficult. My numbers are coming down, though, but I have to watch my diet now - especially sugar intake. 

- Prostetnik Vogon Gelz, "The Benefits of Bureaucratic Inertia"
© HHGTTG Publishing, PDG 22321

But let's face it, laws against sugar aren't going to prevent obesity. Our world is too stressful. Reading the Facebook thread that got me started on this and arguing with everybody probably put a fat load of stress hormones on me; on all of the argument's participants really. These stress hormones are eating away at our health say the docs. So, are we going to ban Facebook next? Tax it? Somewhere some Senator is already salivating over that prospect you can bet. Are they going to charge us 1.5 cents to post a comment? Two cents if you include a photo?

We're grownups for crying out loud. We worked hard to become grownups. Just because a few of you are still smoking wacky baccy and living in your mothers' basements, doesn't mean you should treat the rest of us like infants. Grow up. Be a man for heaven's sake.

Why in heaven's name do we want to turn our entire nation's government into everyone's Mommy. You didn't like Mom being all up in your bizness when you were a teenager. What makes you think you'll like it anymore as an adult? Take some responsibility, people. You want to avoid diabetes? Easy. Stop stuffing Twinkies and Twizzlers into your pie-hole. Don't wait for the government to try and make you. Though if they do, I plan to become a black market Twinkie dealer and make a fortune.

I don't want the government going after my Dr. Pepper, even if I don't drink it. I actually drink Diet Dr. Thunder mostly (all praise to Walmart for that one by the way), but if I want a Dublin, Texas bottled real sugar Dr. Pepper, I want to know I can still get one. It makes me happy to know I have that option. That's freedom for me.

The reason our nation is at loggerheads over issues like this is that we all tend to get stuck in our own political ideologies. It's the old "If all I have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" conundrum. Essentially, we have two "hammers" in our political system - the "all government is bad" and the "all government is good" ideologies. One says we're all rotten sinners and can't be trusted with power. The other says man is basically good and if we find the right leaders to tell us all what to do we can create a man-made Utopia on Earth. I admit I'm drawn to the first position. Probably being a Christian predisposes me to that, what with the whole Original Sin doctrine. That doesn't mean I can't work with those who believe the opposite. The issues affect us all and need to be solved. The first thing we have to do, though, is everyone must lay down their hammers..

Given the state of our culture, I don't see that happening. We're probably going to end up beating on each other with our ideological hammers until we've killed enough people to get it out of our systems or have worn ourselves out beating on each other.

Just one man's opinion.

© 2016 Tom King

If you like your ISP you can keep your ISP..............yup!

With the seizing of regulatory power over the Internet by the FCC yesterday, America has received the promise that the white knights over there in the guv-ment are a gonna tame the evil corporate Cable Company beasts and save us all from massive unfairness.

They will do so by turning these wild savage corporate beasts into nice tame and friendly little "public utilities". How has that EVER worked out to the advantage of consumers. Right now, if my ISP jacks around with me and gives me crappy service, I just go buy my service elsewhere. Let the free market sort it out. Haven't we learned from hard experience that the more the feds try to run things, the less competition there will is, the worse the service and the slower they become at solving problems. And innovation just disappears. When phone service was regulated about the only innovation we had during the first 80 years or so was automatic dial-up and push button phones that imitated rotary phones so we wouldn't have to do that dialing thing. Mobile phones required a limo-sized vehicle to carry them around in, huge deposits and year-long waiting lists. Long distance calls could easily run five to six dollars a minute. When the giant government regulation supported phone company was deregulated, long distance rates dropped to 10 cents a minute in practically no time, you could carry a mobile phone in your pocket and customer service reps began to treat you with respect.

The one great thing central planners hate is too many different utility companies to regulate. When we deregulated the electricity delivery system and provided consumers with choices, the prices dropped quickly. All sorts of cool electricity plans were offered that saved us all money.

Why, by all the chocolate fondue fountains in Hollywood, do we want to regulate an industry that's already mostly deregulated. This cannot end well.

If the FCC wants to help, then investigate the ISPs that do all this evil stuff to consumers that you say they do on a case by case basis. The FCC needs no authority to do that. Any citizen could conduct such an investigation if they wanted to do the detective work. If they want to make these guys quit screwing customers, let the FCC give them a consumer rating index where they can mark their scores down for jerking customers around. For those that pinch off bandwidth, let everybody know it and give them a bad consumer service rating. When my bandwidth dropped during the evenings, I complained to Centurylink DSL. Next thing I know they boosted my badwidth by more than 50%. It still runs slower when all my neighbors are streaming NCIS at the same time as me, but I'm hearing from Centurylink that the company is investing in more fiber and if we're patient, we'll like the results. I'm willing to be patient in exchange for the promise of innovation.

This whole thing is a case of the feds offering to fix a temperary problem with a permanent regulatory solution that freezes the problem in place with a half-ass solution. The issue is that there is only so much bandwidth. If the ISPs don't have some freedom to juggle customers around a bit, the whole thing is going to lock up. You can't change the amount of existing bandwidth by merely passins a regulation that says give everybody the same bandwidth. To do that the ISPs would have to cut everyone back. There's only so much bandwidth. Unlike the president, real world Internet Service Providers can't crap bandwidth unicorns on command - at least not ones that will do anybody any good. 

If you don't let the ISP's juggle customer access speeds on the fly, you're just going to have to slow everyone down so that nobody is getting what they need. You can't tell an ISP provider, just to spend more money on fixing the problem without giving them a way to pay for it. All it means is that they cut other services and reduce everyone's bandwidth so that we're all equal, even if that means we're all stuck with inadequate bandwidth.

"So, just let them be satisfied with less of those nasty evil profits," say the manic-progressives on the picket lines. Just tell that to the stockholders and watch the Dow drop like a stone. And before you diss Verizon and Comcasts stockholders, you might want to check. You might just be one of those stockholders through your retirement plan, bank savings, money market accounts or savings accounts and not even know it.

Regulation is a sledgehammer tool and everything it touches is a spike to be smacked down. The providers are working hard to fix the problem you're talking about. Let's not tie the hands of the mechanic who is trying to fix our car. Do you want a temporary fix so you can drive while the right parts are coming or shall we all just sit in the garage and wait for the parts to arrive someday if the regulators don't decide that unless every car in the garage also gets the same part, the mechanic can't fix your individual car. After all, it wouldn't be fair.to the others if you had a newer carburetor than theirs.

Many non-cable ISP's, especially the independent ones are working to make wireless so good that you'll no longer need cable. There's talk of setting a geo-syncronous satellite overhead and beaming the Internet to you that way. When I don't have to pay $3000 to have a stupid cable run 500 yards to my house, I'm going with that ISP and Comcast be damned.

The cable companies are trying to figure out how to survive in a rapidly changing market. Consumers like me are sticking up antennas and plugging them into a hub that lets me switch between on-air stations, my computer's Internet connection, Hulu, Netflix, The Classic Movies streaming site, Youtube, Amazon Prime, two DVD players, a VCR and a hard drive full of movies I downloaded from Amazon. I'm happier than a dead pig in the sunshine and the cable TV guys get nada. I dont' think Net Neutrality bothers them at all. The cable companies would rather be public utilities. Their business gets protected that way and they don't have to work as hard to keep up with technology.

The straw man argument about changing bandwidth, unfortunately, convinces people that we need to regulate. The problem is consumers think if you subscribe to 12mbs, the ISP should deliver 12mbps 24/7. The problem is that the company doesn't have enough bandwidth for that. At some times of day it drops to 4mbps for an hour or two simply because lots more people are using the Internet. I just shift my tasks that demand a lot of bandwidth to times when the net isn't so busy. I can live with that while Centurylink builds out its bandwidth in my neighborhood. We all share the Internet. You deal with some issues when you're building something that's never been done before.

I'm working on the AI voice for a device that acts as a computer companion and helps run your house. It has what they are calling an "emotion" chip. It will attempt to recognize your facial expressions and speech patterns and learn to respond to you appropriately. It's hugely complicated and it isn't happening fast enough for some of the company's investors who heard "emotion chip" and assumed we could find one in some scientist's abandoned laboratory, stick it in Data and have him weeping or telling jokes in a couple of minutes.

Our gains are made in fits and starts, just like the incredible gains we've made on the Internet. Regulating in the way the FCC wants to regulate merely stultifies development. The Internet has thrived because it is flexible. Plenty of attempts to add new capabilities or create new capacity have failed miserably and been abandoned. The current spate of heads-up display devices that pull stuff off the Internet and flash it in front of your face is a case in point. Some looks promising. Some is just intrusive and stupid. It will sort itself unless the FCC decides it needs to "fix" heads up display technology through regulation and then *poof* innovation ceases.

Let the industry sort itself out. In the meantime, at least yesterday, if we didn't like your ISP provider you could change your ISP provider.

© 2015 by Tom King

It's Not Greed - It's How Business Survives the Pressure to Centralize

(c) 2012 by Tom King

A friend sent me this link to an article about the practice of medical systems buying up doctors' private practices.  http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/12/23/4505491/as-hospitals-buy-practices-billed.html

He wrote above the article:  "Pure Unadulterated Greed". 

The article started like this:

By Fred Schulte
Center for Public Integrity

After Vermont hospitals started buying up local doctors’ practices, state Sen. Kevin Mullin of Rutland began hearing complaints that some patients were paying much more for routine care.

 

I disagree. I don't think it's so much greed as it is the added cost of centralizing any bureaucracy. Nobody seems to understand that any time you add layers on top of any organization, that those layers cost money.  I don't think the medical systems are necessarily greedy any more than are the doctors who sell their practices.  I think it's just the good old capitalist, free market system's response to outside pressures on independent physicians.  For years we've been hearing that independent physician's practices are disappearing.  Where did people think they were going anyway?

There are very good reasons for doctors to sell their practices and very good reasons for hospitals to buy them. Spiraling regulatory requirements layered on willy nilly by the government and mounting medical malpractice lawsuits, driven by TV lawyers (the real parasites in my opinion) promising to win the sue 'em till they squeal lottery for anybody whose doctor visit didn't turn out the way they had imagined.

Let's face it, doctors want to practice medicine, not accounting, law or tag-you're-it with government regulators.  To doctors, selling their practices to large medical systems with teams of accountants and lawyers and compliance officers just makes good sense.

And yes, it drives up your doctor bills.  How else are they going to pay for all those new federal employees Obama just hired and all those commercials by all those ambulance chasing lawyers and all those tax accountants it takes nowadays to keep a medical practice going.  It's much easier for doctors to sell out and have the gigantic health care system protect them from all those bureaucratic predators and buying practices is a way for health care systems to pay for all the accountants, lawyers and compliance officers they need to run their hospitals. 

THAT's why I find centralizing or worse yet, governmentalizing any business sector to be a very BAD idea.  I don't like paying for people who basically sit in offices generating paperwork for each other, making things ever more complex and hard to do and charging us poor schmuck consumers for services I never asked for and personally find worse than useless.

Just my opinion.

Tom

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