FRIDAY FAST ONES

1.)  I suspect that it has become National news that a patient died during a nurses strike here in California.  What the media has a difficult time relating are the complete facts of the story (why is that?)  The nurses at a number of Bay Area hospitals were bogged down in negotiations about issues related to staffing, scheduling and benefits.  My sister works for one of the hospitals involved so she has the full, inside information.

Getting into the issues at hand is long and both sides have their points.  The problem that happened was when the nurses announced a 1 day strike, the hospitals locked them out for 5 days.  The patient didn't die on the one day - the patient died during the lock out.  The patient died because the temporary worker had no experience working on an oncology ward and there were not enough supervising nurses who had worked on an oncology ward to recognise the problem she related with trying to hook up an additional medication was a serious one.  She was told to use a different method to administer the medication which bypassed the safety measure in place to avoid that very possibility.

The patient died, the nurses' career is ruined, the hospital will be sued and rather than using this as an illustration of exactly what the nursing staff is trying to avoid in their negotiation with the hospital (the overuse of untrained  floating staff which burdens the trained staff with having to do their own work and try to supervise those that don't know what they are doing in that specific area of patient care) the media is focused on the strike as the cause of the patient death.  We need to demand better from our journalists.

2.)  I really like this explaination of the Occupation of Wall Street going on.

3.)   On the death of Steve Jobs:   The reason Jobs comes out ahead of the Wall Street types, Mitchell explained, is because “the Occupy people aren’t calling for an overthrow of the capitalist system; they’re calling for the greedheads, the famewhores and the powermongers to be stripped of their outsized influence over our culture, our government and our economy. They’re calling on us to reshape our values. To have values. To care.” —BF on Truthdig.


Many of my Facebook friends who expressed profound grief over Jobs’ death also have been expressing support for the Occupy demonstrations. It’s really something to witness—the depth of emotion all these left-wingers feel for the head of a giant American corporation. Jobs was one of the most successful capitalists of our time, and yet he’s hailed as a hero by left and right alike. This is because his goal was simply to create products that were Insanely Great. In a world where few people—particularly in business—truly care about what they do, he truly cared. By thinking that way, he became Insanely Rich, and when he died, his company had an Insanely Large cash balance in the tens of billions of dollars. But few begrudged either Jobs or Apple for their wealth, because their priority wasn’t to get rich—it was to achieve Insane Greatness. Getting rich was a byproduct. That’s how capitalism should work. - Dan Mitchell in SF Weekly:


4.)  And I thought this comment by GE CEO and chairman of President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness Jeff Immelt was very truthful.

Congress doing just one bipartisan thing would help build confidence by showing that the political process is not completely broken.  Congress' inaction is restraining growth.

5.) This is our 27th anniversary! Once the anniversaries get up this high, there are no traditions except for every fifth year - so the contemporary gift for 27 years is "Sculpture." Don't think that's gong to happen here...though if I had run into a Beyonce, I may have been tempted.

Have a great weekend!