Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 19

Betrayal is bad advice

It makes sense that the beltway would want to depress voter turnout by working class voters. It’s a mistake for Trump supporters to do so.

Popcorn is a many-splendored thing

Ways to make popcorn besides merely butter and salt. Curried popcorn, popcorn granola, chocolate popcorn, creamy popcorn, and caramel popcorn.

Medically assisted deaths could save millions in health care spending: Report linked on Editorials

“New research suggests medically assisted dying could result in substantial savings across Canada's health-care system.

“Doctor-assisted death could reduce annual health-care spending across the country by between $34.7 million and $136.8 million, according to a report published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on Monday.” Government-run health care always seems to lead to euthanasia nowadays. It starts with neglecting the most vulnerable so that they die by default, and ends with explicitly killing them. Whether it’s the NHS or the VA or now in Canada.

Milton Friedman would not be surprised. Put the government in charge of health care, and in fifty years you’ll have hospital-sponsored killings.

"Hospital-based care costs the health care system more than a comprehensive palliative care system where we could help people achieve their goal of dying at home."

Chesterton wrote that it isn’t the big words that are hard, it is the little words. Translate the above to little words, and what you have is “healing the sick costs money. Letting them die at home is cheap.”

Simple game menu for the Color Computer 2 with CoCoSDC

This simple menu provides one screen for cartridges saved in the CoCoSDC’s flash ROM, and any number of screens for your favorite games for your friends to play.

End D.C. linked on Editorials

“With enormous technological changes in how business is conducted and how communication works, it may be that a capital city is a vestige of an earlier era. Perhaps rather than working to fix D.C., we should work to end it… today, we shop online. We work online. For two years, people went to school online. If all these essential life activities could be moved to the internet, why couldn’t government?” Adam Ellwanger adds a lot of detail to my {% crosslink "big-house" "2015 idea of dispersing the House of Representatives to their respective districts” %}. His proposal disperses everyone, the House, the Senate, and even the various bureaucracies.

Rather than send the various bureaucracies out of DC to the states, his idea is to do the same thing I suggested for the House: keep the individual employees at home so that each department is fully distributed. This vastly reduces both the potential for a monoculture to develop, and the severity of any monoculture that does develop.

“Dissolving the capital could reduce the corruption… [and] make it feel a good deal closer to the people it serves.”

It’s a great idea. Good luck getting the beltway to agree to it.

Three from the Baker’s Dozen

Three recipes from a Baker’s Coconut pamphlet once included in McCall’s magazine: coconut squares, chocolate cheesecake, and broiled coconut topping.

Creative Computing and BASIC Computer Games in public domain

David Ahl, editor of Creative Computing and of various BASIC Computer Games books, has released these works into the public domain.

Paprikás Burgonya (Potato Paprika Stew)

Friday is National Potato Day. Why not try this very easy potato-sausage stew from Hungary? You can make it in an hour on the stovetop, or start it up in the morning in a crockpot.

Spotlight on: The Saurian

Who are these enigmatic lizards of ancient jungles? The saurian is the most unique of all the player character species.

Simple .ics iCalendar file creator

A simple Perl script to create an ics file from a human-readable text of events.