Category: Random Thoughts

Play Ball

The other night I had the pleasure of attending a Las Vegas Aviators game at the Las Vegas Ballpark. They played (and lost to) the Sacramento River Cats. That picture is me with the Aviators mascot, Spruce the Goose.

The facility is in an area of town known as Summerlin. For those who don’t know Vegas, it’s a “suburban” Master Planned Community on the West edge of town. The Ballpark itself is within walking distance of a newer outdoor shopping complex (the kind of place that does a farmer’s market on the weekend) and a high end locals casino resort. It’s easy to get there from two different exits on the highway that loops around town or two major east/west roads. There’s ample parking, a real effort to appeal to foodies while still having access to classic ballgame fare, and comfortable seating for 8196 with a total capacity over 10,000. The night I attended there were about 7300 present.

There has been a lot of talk about the Oakland A’s coming to town, adding Major League Baseball to Vegas’s stable of professional sports teams. We currently have the reigning world champion WNBA Aces and NHL Golden Knights, as well as other teams. The latest legislative session passed a law to make it possible, land deals are in talks, and MLB is considering whether to let it come to pass. But nothing is set in concrete.

Here’s the thing: a typical A’s game is currently bringing in barely enough fans to fill the locals oriented Ballpark way on the West edge of town. Some games end up with fewer fans in the stands than the minor league game I saw the other night! Somehow they plan to fill a brand new 30,000 seat stadium close to the Strip and all the Strip traffic with limited parking available on a regular basis. Oh, and it’s the same freeway exit as people are using to get to Allegiant Stadium T-Mobile Arena, and the “back way” to Harry Reid Airport.

I’m not sure who’s coming out ahead on this deal, but it certainly isn’t the people of Las Vegas. I’m not even going to bet on whether this will actually come to pass, or whether it’s just a gambit to make Oakland beg to keep their team.

If they do make it here I’ll have the same policy I do for the Raiders: I’ll buy one team T-shirt and one hat for the Las Vegas A’s; and the day they announce they are leaving town they are dead to me.

Musings for Labor Day Weekend

One legacy of the COVID pandemic is people re-evaluating work: what kind of work we want to do; what risks we are willing to take at the workplace; where we want to work; even how we want to be treated at work.

This is as good a time to point out as any that President Biden — neither the best nor the worst president we’ve had in my living memory — said in the State of the Union address that he both wants to reduce gas prices and get people back to working from their doggone offices. Seems to me that gas prices could be reduced by reducing demand and letting people work from home. But I digress.

This weekend we celebrate changes in our workplace made in the 19th and early 20th Century, giving us such things as a 40 hour workweek, overtime pay, the end of children working in factories, safe workplaces, and even a minimum wage that was originally intended to provide a living wage. It is an admission that we would not have the things this nation has without labor.

The status of regular workers has been declining for decades. Wages simply haven’t kept up with inflation, even the undercalculated inflation that currently is reported.

And so the Great Resignation happened. According to many, is still happening. Workers collectively said “Nah, we’re good. I’ll find something else.” You can measure the churn with the JOLTS report. And many who didn’t actually quit started dialing back what they actually did at work, or Quiet Quitting.

The name makes it sound like they stop coming to work. But no, they do come to work. They do their job and nothing more: no picking up slack, no adding additional duties, no overtime, no calls or emails after business hours. And sometimes they proudly proclaim it on social media. Another name for it is “acting your wage.” In short, it’s taking “they aren’t paying me enough for this” into practice!

Of note, there’s also such a thing as Quiet Firing.

Good news, there’s lots of articles out there about trying to combat Quiet Quitting: why people do it, what managers can do about it. Bad news is that the problem might be bad managers, who are unlikely to implement any of those strategies.

Wishing you a happy Labor Day. Furthermore, wishing you a safe job that pays more than enough to cover your bills, and leaves you glad you actually do it.

Recurring Plot of CW/DC Hero Shows

Villain: Bwahahaha! I am going to do evil thing!

Hero: No! Don’t do evil thing!

Villain: Oh, I’m totally going to do evil thing!

Hero team: If we can’t stop Villain, people will get hurt or die!

Villain: I don’t care! I have reasons for doing evil thing!

[Hero team comes up with way to save the day. Hooray!]

Villain: Oh wow, I guess I didn’t need to do evil thing after all, thanks for stopping me.

Hero: Hey no prob, everybody makes mistakes. Wanna be friends and allies?

Villain: Ok!

Candida auris

This nasty little thing is getting a lot of press lately thanks to an outbreak in Nevada, so I’d like to say a few words. I’ll start with a quote from the CDC:

“Candida auris is an emerging fungus that presents a serious global health threat. CDC is concerned about C. auris for three main reasons:

  1. It is often multidrug-resistant, meaning that it is resistant to multiple antifungal drugs commonly used to treat Candida infections. Some strains are resistant to all three available classes of antifungals.
  2. It is difficult to identify with standard laboratory methods, and it can be misidentified in labs without specific technology. Misidentification may lead to inappropriate management.
  3. It has caused outbreaks in healthcare settings. For this reason, it is important to quickly identify C. auris in a hospitalized patient so that healthcare facilities can take special precautions to stop its spread.”

It has been on my radar for a while now, but thankfully I have not had any first hand experience. Currently, I can’t even run a test for it easily. The people most likely to get a C. auris infection are already very sick for other reasons. Normal healthy people with normal healthy immune systems are unlikely to be infected with it. Colonization, however, is another matter. You can learn more about that from Medline.

Because it is a yeast — not bacteria — antibiotics will not kill it. In fact, antibiotics make someone more susceptible to it! Antifungal medications are needed. I’ve been asked what symptoms to watch out for. The fact is that depends on where it is: blood, urine, lungs, skin. Blood is most serious for reasons that should be obvious.

In my facility, we will focus on the basics that keep patients safe from pathogens. I do have contacts at the state and local health departments that I can reach out to as necessary, in addition to experts within my corporate structure. I will use guidance from both the CDC and the Association for Professionals in Infection Prevention. Until and unless I receive guidance otherwise, persons suspected of being infected or colonized with C. auris will have the same sorts of contact precautions as those with CRE.

As always, keeping your hands clean is your best defense against infection, in or out of the hospital.

Omicron Thoughts

And so we drag over the two year mark with COVID. More variants, more sickness, more cases. And things will “likely get worse” according to experts. I have seem greater numbers in my facility, and “surprise” cases (we test on admit, thankfully). Objectively, we have more cases now than when we tried to lock down! Notice I said tried, because obviously it didn’t work out as planned.

Nevertheless, the CDC has changed guidelines to make it easier for people to get back to work. Or if you’re more cynical, to make it easier for companies to force people to get back to work. Nurses — both union and not — came out against. Other unions, including flight attendants, came out against. Will that change anything? Not known.

For the record, my company has a policy saying don’t come to work of you have a fever, productive cough, vomiting, diarrhea, generalized rash, conjunctivitis, or have been instructed to quarantine. People who are sick should stay home, period. Don’t try to soldier through, because you’ll both do a halfway job and potentially make other sick. I encourage everyone to follow this sane advice even outside a pandemic.

There is good news, however. The influenza rate is sharply down over the pre-panda era. In my area, we’ve had less than two dozen hospitalizations and (so far, knock on wood) no deaths. In fact, one line of influenza may be extinct!

Keep your hands clean and your masks on, folks. The mask goes over the nose, by the way.

I am OK

When I woke up, my phone was darn near on fire with messages. It took me a while to figure out why so many people were suddenly asking about my health and safety in the middle of the night. I has since learned that there had been one hell of a mass shooting last night in Las Vegas. Here’s a minute by minute account.

I do not have time to process what the heck happened right now, and I certainly don’t have time to say anything insightful. I just wanted to reassure everybody that I’m OK. At the actual time this stuff happened, I was snug in bed roughly 3 miles away.

Something not quite right here

So Mattel is trying really hard to show us that Barbie is still relevant. I suppose they think cultural diversity is part of that plan. How many things can you find wrong with this picture?

Offhand, I see a black girl with ridiculously straightened hair, and an Asian girl with a T-shirt that looks like they ran an internal contest for “best stereotype.”

When somebody who thinks cultural appropriation is a woman shaming scam notices this stuff, you can be sure the target audience ain’t buyin’ it either.

The Childcare Problem.

 

Click image to read more from the original article
Click image to read more from the original article

Lately, politicians have been making a bunch of noise about affordable childcare. Here’s the part of the problem they are focusing on: “The average cost of full-time daycare for kids up to the age of 4 has reached $9,589 a year.” Just for reference, with the minimum wage at $7.50, a minimum wager lucky enough to actually get 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year makes $15,600 — and that almost never actually happens. Median income in the United States (remember, half of us earn more and half earn less) is

Median income in the United States (remember, half of us earn more and half earn less) is $53,657. That means that many families are spending a fifth of their monthly income or more on childcare. Even for somebody fortunate enough to make $100,000 is paying a tithe for an average daycare bill. Even though the problem is hitting low-income families hardest, the families of roughly 32,700,000 families feel this burn.

The other side of the problem is that child care workers are poorly paid: “These workers earned an average hourly wage of $9.40. This hourly pay rate translates to an average annual wage of $19,560. The median hourly pay rate was $8.94, which means that half of childcare workers in the daycare industry made more than $8.94 and half earned less.” This leads to high turnover, which isn’t good for the kids.

So let me summarize both halves of the coin: childcare workers are paid a pittance, yet child care is too expensive for workers who need it. That’s a big problem. It can’t be solved by paying childcare workers $15 an hour and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour: that still leaves workers paying too much of their salary for childcare (X still equals X)! It can’t be solved (completely) by office daycare centers: over 80% of us work for small employers where that’s just not possible. It is neither practical nor desirable to assume that there will be willing and able relatives to take care of our children.

How do we solve this problem? I don’t know. The one thing I do know is that market forces are not sufficient to make it happen.

Babushka: the Tar Pit of Cultural Appropriation

 

Follow the link to learn more about her culture. Seriously.

Some weeks back, I read this item on cultural appropriation. And I’ve been bothered by it ever since. I looked into the issue further. To briefly summarize, it’s cool for a woman from anywhere in the world to wear jeans and T-shirts, but I am not allowed to experiment with world fashion. If I am in a Kimono or a Cheongsam, it had better damn well be Halloween. Headgear? Sure, I can wear certain hats, but beyond that lies dangerous territory.

Men seem to be largely exempt from these rules. Utilikilts are acceptable in many places. L.L. Bean has been selling plaid shirts in traditional clan patterns for decades without checking the heritage of the purchaser. Nobody seems to be alarmed at western men with their hair done in a topknot, despite not being samurai.

Some people even want to be in an uproar about sushi being served in a university cafeteria. One must wonder if these people are similarly concerned over spaghetti or tacos.

And this brings me to an important question. Many of my forebears hail from Russia — somewhere near Anatevka, perhaps. I have forebears from other areas of Eastern Europe as well. So, am I Russian enough to wear a scarf in the Babushka style? Or am I about to be flamed for taking this picture in the privacy of my home?

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