WEEKEND RAMBLINGS

CHINA - Shanghai has been in a lockdown for 22-days and an American lawyer who is living there has documented what it’s like.  In a nutshell, nobody leaves.  Ever.  Each neighborhood has appointed one person who has permission to go for deliveries, but food and supplies are scarce.  The volunteers who are allowed to leave and pick up items for the neighborhood must wear a full protective suit.  It’s either peak level crazy or China knows something about what this virus does to people long term and they aren’t about to share it with the world.  Before you conspiracy theorists freak out, keep in mind that the Chinese government doesn’t give two shits about common, everyday people so I’m leaning toward this being on the side of peak level crazy with a side of experimentation to see just how much a billion-plus people will take before they start to resist.  It’s amazing that they haven’t figured out there are more of us (people) than there are of them (government) and the people would win quite easily if they just decided to take a stand.  But, the problem in China is the same problem every country in the world has had for the last two years…and that is that we don’t trust one another to be unified and we are scared of fighting the battle alone.  Jared T Nelson is the person on Twitter keeping an account of each day in Shanghai, if you want to go read it.

POLITICS - My level of disgust amongst all the political parties is at an all-time high.  MPs get raises, citizens get a carbon tax.  At what point do governments run out of things to tax?  That’s the solution for everything when money is ‘tight’.  Tax.  There will come a time when this method of operating cities, provinces, and countries simply doesn’t work anymore.  People only have so much to turn over to the tyrants.  Personally, I make a very good living and yet it’s not easy to make ends meet.  I don’t know how families on modest incomes do it.  I really don’t.  

INCENTIVES - My solution to most of this would be to base decisions around incentives.  We have an obesity problem.  How about providing cash rebates to people who lose weight?  Oh, but we can’t do that.  In fact, people who buy gym memberships now have to pay a ‘tax’ on staying healthy.  It wasn’t all that long ago families received rebates for enrolling their children in various physical activities.  Now, we’ve done a complete 180.  Why?  Because the government wants our money.  Plain and simple.  If you just stop for a minute to think about some of this stuff and then compare it to their Covid decisions, it shouldn’t be difficult to come to the understanding that these people do not care one bit about the health and safety of those who live here but rather are constantly making decisions based on the security of their power over us.

CONSUMPTION TAXES - I actually have no problem paying tax to go to a Rider game.  If you wanted to tax those ‘choices’ people make out of luxury, I would live with it but ONLY if governments removed taxes from groceries, school supplies, and anything else deemed necessary for people to have.  For example, maybe all clothing tagged under $30 is tax free.  If you buy no-name jeans from Walmart, no tax.  You buy a new pair of Mavis, pay tax.  If you wanted me to pay 20% on a new pair of AirPods, fine.  But, then no tax at all on my internet bill.  I’m over-simplifying things but we can’t keep doing what we are doing.  We need new methods and new systems to give people the ability to keep more of their money or else what’s the point?

COERCION/CHOICE - The other thing governments could do is make life even harder for those who could be working but aren’t.  That would help the labour shortage tremendously.  We’ve seen what politicians are, happily, prepared to do to those who wouldn’t obey and get vaccinated so why can’t we just treat the unemployed in much the same way?  Either work or be banned from participating in areas of society that are deemed unessential.  I mean how can an unemployed person afford to go to a restaurant anyway, right?  I mentioned this one time to a politician and he cringed, yet he saw no problem taking this exact stance with a person who refused to vaccinate against Covid.

GAS TAXES - The gas taxes are a total scam.  In Saskatchewan, the province takes 15-cents per litre regardless of what the cost of fuel is at the pump.  So, if it’s $1.19 per litre, the government gets 15-cents.  If it’s $1.68, the government gets 15-cents.  Why not just charge PST on the portion of fuel that is NOT taxed?  Well, you don’t have to be a math wizard to figure out they’d get a lot less from us if they did such a thing.  But, that’s the way it should be.  

ONE DR OPINION - I was stopped on the street by a doctor I’ve known ever since I’ve lived in Saskatchewan and it was a very enlightening conversation to say the least.  He told me that he’s paid through ‘fee for service’, which means the more patients he sees, the more money he makes.  During Covid, he saw fewer patients overall because the government and Sask Health Authority decided that if it wasn’t Covid, you don’t really need to see a doctor.  This physician says newer doctors are paid via ‘contract’ so whether they see 1 patient or 100 patients doesn’t matter.  They get the same wage.  I have no way to back up his claim, but he says the ‘contract’ is much more lucrative than ‘fee for service’ because of the contract structure so when doctors (and we know who they are in Saskatchewan) are screaming for lockdowns, it’s - in part - because they know that they are going to make the same amount of money for a lot less work.  One such Saskatoon doctor that I interacted with on social media shot down my suggestion that all physicians be capped at $250-thousand a year and the excess money be given to those who had their businesses shuttered by the government.  After all, becoming a doctor is very expensive and he didn’t think doctors would be able to make ends meet however he failed to understand what ordering businesses to close does to those who aren’t doctors.  Some of you may not be aware how much doctors make.  In a government release last year, Dr. Hassan Masri was approaching $700-thousand per year in salary.  His income is not affected by telling you to stay home.

BUREAUCRACY - I don’t like pointing out individual people, but I have gone through the SHA website and I do have questions.  For example, they have a department called ‘Quality, Safety & Strategy and Chief Medical Office’.  As I look at the leaders listed on the website, I keep in mind that each of these people all have staff.  At the top of the page is the person given the title of ‘Vice President Quality Safety & Strategy’.  From there, we go to the ‘Executive Director Quality & Safety’.  After that, the ‘Executive Director of Clinical Standards’.  Wouldn’t safety and strategy be part of establishing a clinical standard?  Yet we have 3 leaders, all with staff, doing what appears to be much the same thing. Then we have an ‘Executive Director Strategy and Innovation’.  How many managers in charge of ‘Strategy’ do we need and if you are any good at deciding what the ‘strategy’ is going to be, shouldn’t that in itself be ‘innovative’?  These are just questions and since the government continues to siphon more and more of my money, don’t I have the right to wonder what all this is and could some of it not be amalgamated into one department?  As a reminder, Canada ranks 2nd out of 28 OECD countries in healthcare spending per thousand people, so money isn’t the problem.  Yet, we are 26th in doctors per thousand, 25th in hospital beds per thousand, and of the 10 countries that track wait times, we are 10th.  When I see a bunch of ‘Strategy’ leaders/bureaucrats, I’m left wondering whether or not that’s an area we could be a bit more efficient.

VAX - I’m seeing more and more people tweeting and stating how thankful they are for their vaccine booster shot.  These people describe horrible sickness with Covid and they can’t imagine how sick they’d be without the vax.  What I don’t understand is how do you know the vaccine is working?  Is it a magic thing where the vaccine knows just how sick you can be before you need a hospital, so it allows you to get terribly ill but then kicks in just before that turning point of needing to call an ambulance?  From day one, Covid has feasted on those who are elderly and/or unhealthy.  That has not changed from March 2020 to April 2022.  Hospital numbers today are very high and the reasoning given is that those folks are already terribly sick.  But, that was also the situation two years ago and death statistics back this up when you look at the number of co-morbidities associated with those who passed away.  Even a Stats Canada release this week shows there have been no excess deaths in Canada in the year 2021.