Monday, December 19, 2011

Quick hits

71-year-old man drives 225 miles with dead wife in passenger seat beside him. He didn't know what to do without his wife to tell him what to do.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? Apparently you just order him to go out on patrol, and he follows orders. So now John Kerry knows the answer to his question.

Over the past four years, the monetary base has been tripled. According to Austrian economists, this means we should be going Weimar, and should have been going Weimar for at least a couple of years. According to Keynesian economists, tripling the monetary base when you're in a liquidity trap will have no (zero) effect. So, uhm... who's right? (Hint: Krugman is right. Of course.)

Soldiers are having trouble feeding their families, and can't find jobs after they're mustered out of service, having a harder time than non-veterans even. America supports our troops, woot!

Yet more evidence of the shrinking middle class. Soon there will be only the filthy rich and the abjectly poor. Serfin' USA, dude!

- Badtux the Hits Penguin

5 comments:

  1. Dead wife in car: It's probable that they were hightailin' it back to Canada because even when we Canucks buy loadsandloads of medical insurance in case we need treatment in the USA, much of the time claims are not approved, and we're still on the hook for hundreds of thousands of $$$.

    The old guy had probably read this story of just last month where a vacationing elderly (insured) couple were billed $10,000 a day for a hospital stay: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/11/11/bc-travelclaim.html

    We like your country, but most of us don't want anything to do with your health care or legal systems.

    Heck, Oliver is no more than an hour from the border - he was almost home. I guess he figured he couldn't get her body across the border without questions.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'll just note that the insurance you mentioned was sold by a *CANADIAN* insurance company, not by an *AMERICAN* insurance company. Pot, kettle, black, much? If you have a problem with your insurers not paying claims, complain to your government, it's got nothing to do with us here in the USA. (Though we have the same problem with *our* insurers, go figure).

    My guess is that the woman told him to take her back to Canada because she wasn't feeling well, and then when she quietly expired beside him, he kept doing what she told him to do because, well, that's what he'd been doing for the past 50 years of marriage, whatever she told him to do ;). Until, as you mentioned, he suddenly realized that taking a dead body across the boder might cause... questions :).

    - Badtux the Morbid Penguin

    ReplyDelete
  3. Poor guy probably suffered some sort of senile dementia... 71 is certainly old enough to suffer Alzheimer's, for example. I do hope whoever told him treated him kindly. If his dementia is new, he is having a hard road already, dead wife as companion or not.

    [CAPTCHA text: "thrila" ... Michael Jackson, right?]

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm damn good at being poor, yup, damn good.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I don't expect that the old guy knew or cared that it was a Canadian company that sold those other folks their medical insurance. It's academic anyway; of course the guy would have bought his insurance from a Canadian company - that's who we have to deal with, Up Our Way.

    You know as well as I do that the insurance companies in general stay in business, and turn a tidy profit, by making it as difficult as possible to actually pay any money out. That goes on either side of the border.

    ReplyDelete

Ground rules: Comments that consist solely of insults, fact-free talking points, are off-topic, or simply spam the same argument over and over will be deleted. The penguin is the only one allowed to be an ass here. All viewpoints, however, are welcomed, even if I disagree vehemently with you.

WARNING: You are entitled to create your own arguments, but you are NOT entitled to create your own facts. If you spew scientific denialism, or insist that the sky is purple, or otherwise insist that your made-up universe of pink unicorns and cotton candy trees is "real", well -- expect the banhammer.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.