Author: bmagnus@bridgetmagnus.com

The Fixer

Five years ago we were in the midst of a pandemic. And panic was a real thing. Many supplies were scarce, either because they were suddenly desperately needed, hoarding over potential need, or broken supply chains. The panic buying that occurs before a hurricane or blizzard happened everywhere at the same time. Some of the items in short supply were surprising, just like some of the workers determined to be essential were surprising. In addition to shortages, this caused higher prices for available products.

And maybe you remember that your workplace had a “fixer.” You know: the guy who managed to find workarounds. The guy who managed to get hand sanitizer made at a random booze distillery. The guy who found an oddball vendor or contractor to Get Stuff Done expediently.

Here’s the thing. Some of those workarounds became semi-permanent. A few because it turned out they were better than the way things had been done previously, breaking the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality. But a few are simply not. They remain because of a new “we’ve always done it this way” mentality. Your workplace is particularly susceptible to this if you had staff changes during COVID and the new staff legitimately don’t remember the way things were done in The Before Times. And hey, if it’s not broken don’t fix it, right?

It’s never wrong to evaluate business practices to make sure you are still doing things the best way possible — balancing safety, efficiency, and cost. This is a great time to look for things The Fixer fixed. Some of those fixes are no longer needed, are no longer appropriate, and should be discontinued.

“We’ve always done it this way” is not and never has been a valid reason to do something. Always look for why it came to be done that way and whether that’s still true.

Richard Nixon: Notorious Liberal

Now I do know what you’re thinking: Liberal? Wasn’t Nixon a conservative Republican? And, ya know, kind of disgraced in the Watergate scandal? Are we talking about the same Richard Nixon? Dear reader, that illustrates just how far the standards have moved in the last 50 years.

Nixon wanted to be a uniting force in the United States. Hmm, sounds like a big tent Democrat kind of idea.

Sure, he expanded the Vietnam War. He also got us out of Vietnam and made attempts to bring POWs home. And when he was done with that he ended the draft. Hmm, sounds like a weak Democrat kind of idea. Oh yeah, and then he opened relations with China.

During his entire presidency he issued 364 executive orders. Heck, the current president is on track to do that before Memorial Day. Slacker.

He signed the EPA into law. Hmm, a liberal tree-hugger.

And get a load of this list of liberal policies Nixon either enacted or tried to enact:

Despite expectations from some observers that Nixon would be a “do-nothing” president, his administration undertook a number of important reforms in welfare policy, civil rights, law enforcement, the environment, and other areas. Nixon’s proposed Family Assistance Program (FAP), intended to replace the service-oriented Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), would have provided working and nonworking poor families with a guaranteed annual income—though Nixon preferred to call it a “negative income tax.” Although the measure was defeated in the Senate, its failure helped to generate support for incremental legislation incorporating similar ideas—such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which provided a guaranteed income to the elderly, the blind, and the disabled; and automatic cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for Social Security recipients—and it also prompted the expansion and improvement of existing programs, such as food stamps and health insurance for low-income families. In the area of civil rights, Nixon’s administration instituted so-called “set aside” policies to reserve a certain percentage of jobs for minorities on federally funded construction projects—the first “affirmative action” program. Although Nixon opposed school busing and delayed taking action on desegregation until federal court orders forced his hand, his administration drastically reduced the percentage of African American students attending all-black schools. In addition, funding for many federal civil rights agencies, in particular the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), was substantially increased while Nixon was in office. In response to pressure from consumer and environmental groups, Nixon proposed legislation that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). His revenue-sharing program, called “New Federalism,” provided state and local governments with billions of federal tax dollars.

Expanding Social Security and Welfare?? Worker safety initiatives?? Desegretation and gasp Affirmative Action??? This little list does omit various healthcare initiatives such as the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, an attempt at true universal health care, creating HMOs, and Medicare coverage for dialysis as well as kidney transplant. Typical “tax and spend liberal” ideals!

And to top it all off, he had the temerity to only have one wife — and be faithful to her!

So yes. We have moved so far to the right that conservative Richard Nixon is — by modern standards — more liberal than Barack Obama.

Music Monday: Allentown

When I was young, I knew that The Nylon Curtain by Billy Joel was some great music. It would be many years later that I understood that the concept and lyrics were also brilliant. But why am I talking about 40 year old music?

Billy Joel sings in this song about how they’re shutting the factories down. That did happen. But it was over 40 years ago. The workers are gone: retired, deceased, moved on to other jobs. Their kids — and their grandkids — don’t have the same skillset even if they wanted to work in those factories. The equipment in those factories? Sold for scrap decades ago. The land? Redeveloped.

If you wanted to build factories to build things here in the United States and avoid tariffs as the President has suggested, you’d face some obstacles. Like the NIMBY crowd that doesn’t want a factory in their town. Like EPA regulations that still mean it’s more expensive to build a factory here — and that’s not actually a bad thing. Training new workers. And realistically most of the work that they would have done by hand in Billy Joel’s Allentown would now in a new modern factory be done by robots. At least there’s jobs for robot maintenance technicians!

It would take at least 5-10 years to get it running. That’s a minimum of one President from now, possibly two or even three. Will the same rules still apply? Your guess is as good as mine.

Tariffs aren’t bringing jobs to the United States. They’re only bringing economic…. Pressure.

Music Monday: Born in East L.A.

Hey! It’s been a while since we did a Music Monday!

They made a whole movie of this plotline. Far more recently, this and this happened.

Remember: a drivers license is evidence that you can legally drive a vehicle, and evidence of your identity. It is not and never has been evidence of citizenship. Most of us cannot prove our citizenship with documents we carry daily.

Measles and Tuberculosis

The old Oak Forest Hospital is slated for demolition and site redevelopment now. At one time it was a tuberculosis sanitarium. That’s when my grandmother was a patient there. She was one of the first patients who was actually cured of tuberculosis, or TB. The drugs which killed the bacteria left her deaf.

Tuberculosis and measles are both diseases that can travel quite a long way. That’s why patients with those diseases are placed on airborne precautions. You probably know there’s currently a measles outbreak impacting 13 states as I write — probably more by morning. That’s serious, make no mistake. But Tuberculosis is also a serious and much more common problem.

Every year near the end of March is World Tuberculosis Day. Normally the CDC has a massive release of data on that day. At this time I do not know whether the CDC will release that data. My local health district has already quietly released their data, which they normally hold until World Tuberculosis Day. My state has not. It is worth noting that locally, cases are up over where they were 2 years ago (but down from last year). This data is vital to me in a professional capacity to determine how much risk my patients and staff face from TB in the community.

Believe it or not there is a vaccine for TB! It was developed a couple of decades before we had a cure. We don’t generally use it here in the United States because it’s not as effective as would be desirable, we have a relatively low prevalence, and it interferes with the cheap “skin test” you may remember having done at some point in your life. But many of our nurses from places like South Korea or the Philippines have had this vaccine.

Now about curing TB. It’s not fun. Remember from the beginning of my post that the first treatments we had often had horrible life changing side effects. However, it was better than the alternative: dying. Unfortunately TB has developed resistance to many drugs over the years. It is important to treat TB even if it’s latent — meaning it’s not causing you to be very sick right now. Treatment can often involve multiple, very strong antibiotics, every day for months. In some cases, the local health department might call every day to make sure you took it.

And this brings me to another important point. People without insurance — or with lousy insurance — might not be able to afford those antibiotics. When that happens, they are not only a walking petri dish for incubating drug resistant strains of the disease, they are sharing their germs with everyone around them.

Also, tuberculosis does not care about your immigration status.

Places where people are crowded together — like jails and immigration detention centers — are a perfect place for one TB case to turn into dozens. Are you wondering how many undocumented immigrants are going to seek medical care for their TB or measles symptoms?

150 years old receiving Social Security

So the weekend “news” included the claim that 150 year olds are fraudulently receiving Social Security checks. Now, I could bore you with a half dozen sources debunking that claim. Or we can look at it logically. After all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Someone 150 today would have been born in 1874 or 1875. Social security was passed into law in 1935 and regular monthly benefits began in 1940, when our hypothetical super-centenarian was already 65 years old! Today their kids would be well over 100 themselves, their grandchildren octogenarians or older, and their great grandchildren old enough to legitimately receive Social Security checks of their own. So we’re talking about a three to five generation grift, if true. That’s a lot of work.

Without thinking very hard I can think of three simpler and more likely explanations. First, someone got a digit of the birth year wrong. Someone born in 1974 or 1975 is just 50 years old, and might well be receiving Social Security as survivor benefits or disability benefits.

Second, it’s possible — less likely but possible — that a funeral home got a digit of a social security number wrong when reporting some decades ago and therefore mistakenly didn’t report someone as dead. Checks continue to go out, uncashed.

Oh, and a third and final explanation? Mr. Musk may have made the whole thing up to get you mad. After all, Republicans have been aching for excuses to slash or eliminate Social Security for a long time.