In the Dark Season - Netflix Series

In the Dark Season 1 Trailer | Rotten Tomatoes TV
Rotten Tomatoes TV

Fairly lightweight, semi-comedic drama, might be a murder mystery, but we're two episodes in and the body is missing, so maybe not. We've got a very pretty, young, blind woman who's a little bit lost. Smoking, drinking, screwing just about anyone she can get her hands on. But then this kid she used to hang out with goes missing, so now maybe she has some purpose.

Famous Billy Squier tune of the same name.

Disability-Adjusted Life Year

Age-standardised disability-adjusted life year (DALY) rates from All Causes by country (per 100,000 inhabitants). Color indicates rate. It ranges from 9,250 for light yellow to over 80,000 for dark red.

Detroit Steve sent me a link to a complicated DALY chart. There are a bunch of diseases listed, but what the heck is a DALY? Wikipedia knows:

    The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a measure of overall disease burden, expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death. It was developed in the 1990s as a way of comparing the overall health and life expectancy of different countries.
    The DALY is becoming increasingly common in the field of public health and health impact assessment (HIA). It "extends the concept of potential years of life lost due to premature death...to include equivalent years of 'healthy' life lost by virtue of being in states of poor health or disability."^[2] In so doing, mortality and morbidity are combined into a single, common metric.
    Looking at the burden of disease via DALYs can reveal surprising things about a population's health. For example, the 1990 WHO report^{[citation needed]} indicated that 5 of the 10 leading causes of disability were psychiatric conditions. Psychiatric and neurologic conditions account for 28% of all years lived with disability, but only 1.4% of all deaths and 1.1% of years of life lost. Thus, psychiatric disorders, while traditionally not regarded as a major epidemiological problem, are shown by consideration of disability years to have a huge impact on populations.

Clerk shortage, food shortage

by Marcel

Regularly at Walmart, I'll want to buy onions, but the onion bin is empty. Or a pouch (Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!) of salmon. There's a space on the shelf, maybe an empty cardboard box where the salmon used to be, but there's no salmon. Or gherkins, or oyster crackers, or hot dog buns. The stuff is in the store, but it's on the pallet back in the back. The shelves look like the Moscow Central Grocery Collective might have looked in 1982. In Soviet Russia you could slip some money to the clerk, and she'd sell you some of the salmon hidden under the counter. In Walmart, there are no clerks.

In Communist Russia, the central planners set the price of salmon below its market price, so alternate mechanisms developed for distributing salmon. Maybe fish was rationed by hassle -- the salmon cost twenty kopecks plus two hours in line, or twenty kopecks plus a bribe for the clerk. Or maybe you bought your salmon from a guy who stole it from the cannery.

In America today, it's completely different. To keep costs down (Thanks, Obamacare!),Walmart has thinned out their supply chain until they have too few people working too few hours to keep the shelves stocked, and there are long lines to check out. They have, in effect, set the price of salmon below what it costs. But this is America! Here, we don't wait for hours or bribe the clerks (there are no clerks; that's the point!) Here in America, we buy something else, or we make a scene. We stand in the aisle and holler "Where's the salmon!" or "Customer need assistance!" I mean, one would rather politely ask a clerk for help, but like I said there are no clerks.

People could shop somewhere else, but circumstances are the same there. Mom and Pop's closed because they couldn't compete with Walmart prices. Ritzy Organic's prices are too high for someone on disability or working part time at, wait for it, Walmart! where their hours just got cut. Before the current food price inflation (which of course is not really happening), I thought the retail business model of the future might be membership. Customers would pay a flat monthly fee for whatever they wanted to carry out of the warehouse. Now, I don't know. Maybe we need federal food insurance.

Stolen entire from Monday Evening. I really enjoyed reading this. Could it be that the Walmartians, in their effort to cut costs and prices, are going to drive themselves out of business? Or is it really true that Capitalist slave drivers are no different than Communist slave drivers? Two legs are better than four, no wait, four legs are better than two. I hope this is a temporary, or maybe a localized anomaly and not a portent of things to com.

I enjoyed this story, although being a good anti-Republican I had to overlook the crack about Obamacare, because you know all our troubles are because of adventures in the Middle East. No! It's because of the banks! No it's not! It's the old people! Bash! Bop! Pow! etc., etc., etc.

Hire The Handicapped -or- Ten Thousand Maniacs

I am of two minds about the handicapped. On one hand I think ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) is a good idea. If you are building a new building, it doesn't take a whole lot to make it easier for people in wheelchairs to get through the doors. On the other hand, if we are going to devote acres of prime parking space to the disabled, the least they could do is get out there and use it!

And who rates a break for being disabled? Certainly military veterans who were crippled in the line of duty, and people who are disabled through no fault of their own, as in an physical accident or an accident of birth. But what about those people who have eaten their way into a wheelchair? Or those who smoked themselves into one? And how about the idiots who did something stupid and suffered the consequences? And how do you tell the difference?

I suppose I should count my blessings as I am still walking around and have all my faculties. Crazy like I am isn't generally considered a disability.

Roughly 20% of the US population has a disability of some sort, and about half of them (10% of the population) have a severe problem.

Chart from Chartbook on Disability in the United States.

I've been thinking that we could really use a consistant basis for all our statistics. I mean what does a hundred million people, or a trillion dollars really mean? It doesn't mean anything. It may as well be infinite. I'm never going to see that many people or that much money all in one place. So I was thinking we should give all our financial and population statistics in relation to a more manageable number or people, say like ten thousand. You probably know a hundred people, you may even deal with a hundred people every day. And each of those 100 people will know a hundred other people. So crossing two degrees of seperation, which isn't very far, you have a 10,000 people. 10,000 people is like a small town, or half a dozen villages, or a neighborhood in a big city. It's number you can relate to, sort of.

So for this example, out of your average town of 10,000 people, a thousand have a real problem. That's a pretty large number.

In terms of disabilities, this line from Wikipedia put a different spin on the situation:

"Several chronic disorders, such as diabetes, asthma or epilepsy, would be counted as nonvisible disabilities . . ."

Most of the time a person with one of these disorders could be perfectly fine, but occasionally they could cause real problems.

Update November 2022 replaced missing chart.