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  1. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Has Bernie seen this yet? Horrible.

    • #1
  2. Doug Watt Member
    Doug Watt
    @DougWatt

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Has Bernie seen this yet? Horrible.

    Bernie, and the rest of the squad. I’m not sure why anyone would take advice from AOC. Watching a video of a jumped-up bartender pondering the mysteries of a garbage disposal should be more than enough to disregard anything she says. 

     

    • #2
  3. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Has Bernie seen this yet? Horrible.

    No, no, no. Health lines are a good thing. Or perhaps Bernie doesn’t think the benefits of bread lines translates to health care. Who knows? Consistency doesn’t seem to be a Commie value. 

    • #3
  4. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Has Bernie seen this yet? Horrible.

    But … but … the subway stations! Have you seen the subway stations?

    They are splendid!

    • #4
  5. 9thDistrictNeighbor Member
    9thDistrictNeighbor
    @9thDistrictNeighbor

    The patients waiting to get in must not have had enough US $20 bills to bribe the hospital staff. 

    • #5
  6. Full Size Tabby Member
    Full Size Tabby
    @FullSizeTabby

    I understand that ambulances waiting outside hospitals has been a feature of the British NHS for several years. One of the reasons I have been told is that the “wait time” that is part of the hospital’s performance metrics doesn’t start until the patient comes through the door of the hospital. Time spent waiting in the ambulance outside the hospital doesn’t count.

    Same logic drove the U.S. Veterans Administration medical system to drop patients off appointment wait lists and reschedule their appointments. At least some VA medical centers needed to manage their wait list statistics. 

    I’m sure the current Wuhan virus is stressing medical systems, including the Moscow hospitals. But wait lines are a normal feature of “free” medical (or other service) systems. The system resources are by definition more valuable than the time of the patients or customers because system resources and their utilization are measured for performance metrics. Patient or customer time is irrelevant to the system, and therefore of no value.  

    In a socialized system the bread store gets penalized if it has to discard leftover bread at the end of the day. But the customers’ time costs the bread store nothing. And in a socialized system, there is no other bread store to which the customer can go, so the customers will wait. Hence, it is in the store’s interest to have the customers waiting as the store makes bread, rather than make the bread ahead of time and risk having more bread than customers. 

    • #6
  7. KirkianWanderer Inactive
    KirkianWanderer
    @KirkianWanderer

    Russian hospitals are an unmitigated nightmare. Some of the ones in Moscow and Petersburg are okay, and the private clinics are often quite good, but the system as a whole is rife with so, so many problems. Health and the healthcare system was one of the topics covered in my Russian course this term, and because we had to write a 250 word (in Russian) essay about it, I read up more on it than I ever wanted to (the Rand analysis is particularly well done). One foreign patient in a regional hospital only a few years ago described sinks filled with blood, patients lying on the floor in hallways, and criminally unqualified healthcare workers. In other words, if this hits Russia the way it did Italy, it will shake the Putin regime in a way that I don’t think it has ever seen.

    • #7
  8. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    It is not a coincidence that the weather is the same right now in New York City, Boston, and Moscow–40 to 52 degrees, rainy but not humid. The great cities in the world grew up where the weather was fairly temperate. And those are the temperatures in which this particular virus thrives. 

    I’m praying for temperatures in the 60s, but for Cape Cod, where we are colder and rainier in April, we won’t see that until the second week of May most likely. But I hope the rest of the world–New York, London, Boston, Moscow, will warm up to the 60s next week as they do most years. That will kill off a lot of the virus. 

    • #8
  9. KirkianWanderer Inactive
    KirkianWanderer
    @KirkianWanderer

    Percival (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Has Bernie seen this yet? Horrible.

    But … but … the subway stations! Have you seen the subway stations?

    They are splendid!

    The tram and metro system in Petersburg is simultaneously one of the funniest and scariest things I have ever been on in my life (I’ve used the Tube and public transport all over Southeast England, the Midlands, and Scotland well after midnight, including once taking a bus ride with a singing, drunk Scottish transvestite, and it is so, so much worse). When you board the trams there, there’s no touch card or automatic ticket collector by the conductor, just little old babushkas and sweaty middle aged men who wait for you to tell them your destination and hand them your change in exchange for a ticket. But seeing the way Russian taxi drivers operate their vehicles does make the public transport (which, I should mention, is operating with trams, buses, and train cars taken straight out of Chernenko’s day) seem splendid.

    • #9
  10. KirkianWanderer Inactive
    KirkianWanderer
    @KirkianWanderer

    MarciN (View Comment):

    It is not a coincidence that the weather is the same right now in New York City, Boston, and Moscow–40 to 52 degrees, rainy but not humid. The great cities in the world grew up where the weather was fairly temperate. And those are the temperatures in which this particular virus thrives.

    I’m praying for temperatures in the 60s, but for Cape Cod, where we are colder and rainier in April, we won’t see that until the second week of May most likely. But I hope the rest of the world–New York, London, Boston, Moscow, will warm up to the 60s next week as they do most years. That will kill off a lot of the virus.

    I joke with a friend that I bring some kind of special curse on all of the places I visit. The first time I went to France began the worst weekend of gilets jaunes protests that had yet been seen, transport workers went on strike the same day I touched down in London for the first time, when we went to Petersburg the second day there they began rolling out tanks in front of the Hermitage when we were visiting, and when I went to Italy in December it was crawling with police (and then rife with covid-19 only a few months later). And London, Boston, and Moscow are cities I either grew up near or have visited (some frequently). Maybe I should just stop traveling. 

    • #10
  11. Phil Turmel Inactive
    Phil Turmel
    @PhilTurmel

    KirkianWanderer (View Comment):
    Maybe I should just stop traveling. 

    Awww!  But your stories are so entertaining!  If you do stop traveling, could you make some up?

    • #11
  12. KirkianWanderer Inactive
    KirkianWanderer
    @KirkianWanderer

    Phil Turmel (View Comment):

    KirkianWanderer (View Comment):
    Maybe I should just stop traveling.

    Awww! But your stories are so entertaining! If you do stop traveling, could you make some up?

    I do hope I will be able to travel again when this is all over (at least to reach home at some point), and after having a Russian visa permanently affixed to my passport, a stamp for Italy only a few months before the virus broke out there, and having been pulled over “randomly” at least twice in different countries because I keep forgetting to pull an Arabic language children’s book out of my travel duffel, I don’t think my luck could get much worse. This did remind me that I forgot to write about two of my more recent journeys abroad, so I’ll try to have at least one up this week, before I start having full blown conversations with the baby succulent. There is still considerable disagreement among my friends about what to call it (I have a 6 year running joke with one friend about Robert Byrd, so it may end up being really strange).

    • #12
  13. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    Percival (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Has Bernie seen this yet? Horrible.

    But … but … the subway stations! Have you seen the subway stations?

    They are splendid!

    They certainly are.  My wife and I rode on the Moscow subway back in 1996.  We were surprised there were no monitors with CNN blaring away . . .

    • #13
  14. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    KirkianWanderer (View Comment):

    MarciN (View Comment):

    It is not a coincidence that the weather is the same right now in New York City, Boston, and Moscow–40 to 52 degrees, rainy but not humid. The great cities in the world grew up where the weather was fairly temperate. And those are the temperatures in which this particular virus thrives.

    I’m praying for temperatures in the 60s, but for Cape Cod, where we are colder and rainier in April, we won’t see that until the second week of May most likely. But I hope the rest of the world–New York, London, Boston, Moscow, will warm up to the 60s next week as they do most years. That will kill off a lot of the virus.

    I joke with a friend that I bring some kind of special curse on all of the places I visit. The first time I went to France began the worst weekend of gilets jaunes protests that had yet been seen, transport workers went on strike the same day I touched down in London for the first time, when we went to Petersburg the second day there they began rolling out tanks in front of the Hermitage when we were visiting, and when I went to Italy in December it was crawling with police (and then rife with covid-19 only a few months later). And London, Boston, and Moscow are cities I either grew up near or have visited (some frequently). Maybe I should just stop traveling.

    You must have recently visited Lansing . . .

    • #14
  15. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Amazing.

    • #15
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