Steve and Judy's Travels!

The road out front of our house got ragged.  This week, and last, we have a new road going in.

This will be more sophisticated than all the other roads in the park.  It’s going to have cement gutters!

And no potholes.  They’re taking the old asphalt all the way out, re-contouring the dirt below, and repaving.

Today, we even got a road grader!

We appear to be about halfway through the project.

Here is my take on what the health insurance industry does.  They allocate the cost of a person’s healthcare over the expected remaining life of the person.  If you project what your health care costs will be for the rest of your life, add in administrative costs and a profit motive for the insurance company, and divide it by your years remaining, that’s what your premium will be.  The insurance companies don’t provide any healthcare.  They don’t fix any broken bones.  They don’t cure anything.  They just provide a financing arrangement.

Isn’t that the kind of thing a government should be able to do; finance your healthcare?  That wouldn’t be government-run healthcare, that would just be the government performing an administrative task and taking a layer of private profit incentive out of the system!

Somebody help me!

I’m trapped insider this bird feeder and I can’t fit back out the hole I came in!

At the grocery, the store always provided paper bags.  Then they started offering paper or plastic.  Save a tree; use plastic.  Then we started thinking about petrochemicals (plastic) and keeping them out of the environment, so we started recycling.  Now we hear that a lot of plastic doesn’t get recycled and ends up in landfills, waterways, and the oceans as a major pollutant.  Paper is a renewable resource.  Cut down a bunch of trees, produce paper, then plant new trees to replace the ones you just cut down.  Then we figured out global warming.  It’s all about the carbon sequestered in oil and trees.  If we use oil, the carbon is released and contributes to greenhouse gasses.  If we cut down trees and use them, the carbon in them is also released back into the atmosphere.  Not only that, but trees take in carbon while they’re alive, so every time we cut one down, we remove another carbon-processing plant from the environment.  In an effort to combat global warming we need to stop cutting down trees and plant about a trillion new ones.

Paper or plastic, we’re screwed either way!  Carry cloth bags.