Catholic Hospital Going to Hell

Well, to Hades, actually.

Caritas Christi Health Care, a non-profit Catholic hospital chain in Massachusetts dedicated to Catholic morality and social justice, is being acquired by a private equity firm. The name of the firm? Cerberus.

Caution! Saw May Be Sharp!

Word to the wise: sharp things can hurt you. If you buy something that is sharp--say, a precision machine designed to cut wood by spinning a 10-inch blade at nearly 4,000 RPM--then it's reasonable to suggest that you know what you're getting into. Namely, that you know it could cut you if you happened to touch that spinning wheel of death.

If simple common sense isn't enough, the liability-shy manufacturers make sure to plaster DANGER: WILL ROBINSON!!! warnings all over their tools. So much so that the warnings take up more of the manual than the "how to operate this tool" section.

I'll admit that my table saw is an imposing piece of machinery. It's intimidating, and I treat it with a healthy dose of respect. Much like I would get into full battle garb and carefully plan all my movements when dealing with HCl or infectious bodily agents in the lab, my table saw gets special consideration in my pantheon of tools. Now that I think about it, some of my hand-held tools are probably more dangerous with regular use, but there's something about the table saw when it's going full speed. It is serious.

So if I told you that a Boston-area man bought an entry-level table saw from Home Depot in the mid-2000's and when he mangled one of his hands in 2006, he sued and just won a $1.5M verdict, would you be surprised?

Sadly, you probably wouldn't, and neither would I. Still, the patent absurdity of a jury awarding some bozo a ton of cash because the extremely dangerous tool he bought turned out to be exactly as advertized. . . well, it's beyond the pale.

His side argued that some prohibitively expensive safety feature exists that can sense when the saw blade touches human skin and stop the blade, and the manufacturer was negligent because it hadn't included it. Sigh.

Just because a safety measure exists does not make a company liable for selling a product that is exactly what everyone knows it is. If the company said "no one can ever be injured with this table saw, ever, never, NEVER!" then sure, they'd be liable. But they went in the exact opposite direction, warning about SERIOUS INJURY AND DEATH on every open square inch of the product, its packaging, and its manuals. Thus, one might expect that extra care was warranted in using said product, and if one's hand gets mangled, it's probably because one was being a fucking idiot while using it.

I'm sure this is the same line of thinking that reasonable people were bandying about when that old crone spilled hot coffee on her lap, and--my oh my!--burned the crap out of her legs. Still, rampant stupidity and abdication of personal responsibility for one's own well-being and life must be called to the carpet when it rears its head. Even if it's lost on too many to be any good.

At least one commenter on the Boston Globe article got it right when he summed it up thusly:

The hammer manufacturers will be next, for not including thumb detecting radar.

It really is that sick and stupid.

Orren Boyle, Meet Bill Gates

"Google's algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google. These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up. Microsoft's well-received Bing search engine is addressing this challenge by offering innovations in areas that are less dependent on volume. But Bing needs to gain volume too, in order to increase the relevance of search results for less common search terms."

-Lead whiner for Microsoft, counsel Dave Heiner, pleading for help from the DOJ and EC

This is just disgusting. Back when the looters and rotters were attacking Microsoft for being too good, I was angry and defended the company against the injustice. Now they are doing the same damn thing, pleading to the State to knock their competition down a few pegs. "But it's too hard beat them! It's not fair! Bing needs to gain volume too! Who the hell are they to think they're so great?!"

Screw you, Microsoft. You deserve every bad thing that comes to you from now on.

Today, Yaron Brook and Don Watkins have a column in the Christian Science Monitor provocatively titled, "Apple vs. GM: Ayn Rand knew the difference. Do you?," with a subhead of "Apple acts like a producer. GM acts like a looter. It’s a key distinction that Ayn Rand laid out in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’"

Microsoft, though it admittedly has a very mixed history, has generally acted like a producer in the past. Now, it's playing the political pull game, and shows its new pragmatic, unprincipled colors: cowardly, yellow, Orren Boyle type colors. Sickening.

Brook and Watkins could just as easily be talking about Microsoft as they are GM:

The producers, such as Hank Rearden, inventor of a new metal stronger and cheaper than steel, work tirelessly to create products that improve human life. The looters are basically pseudobusinessmen, like the incompetent steel executive Orren Boyle, who get unearned riches by getting special favors from politicians. Their business isn’t business, but political pull.

It is the producers who make life possible: who keep grocery shelves stocked; who discover new lifesaving drugs; who make computers faster, buildings taller, and airplanes safer.

The looters, on the other hand, leech off the wealth created by producers.

The novel rejects the widespread notion that both the producer Reardens and the looter Boyles are fundamentally united by a desire for profit. Only the Reardens, she argues, deserve to be called profit-seekers, because they earn rewards through productive effort; the Boyles are antieffort parasites seeking unearned loot.

But it’s not only unearned wealth the looters want. In “Atlas Shrugged,” Boyle uses his influence to throttle Rearden with progressively harsher government controls and regulations, because he can’t survive except by hindering the competition.

Witness the birth of Microsoft's new tagline: "antieffort parasites seeking unearned loot."