Moving to Goodreads

Important Program Note

Effective with this post

I am moving all blogging to

GOODREADS

I feel Twitter is fully adequate

for most communication I was doing

here

and Kindle is

my main focus now

and in the future.

Goodreads is a perfect fit

at this point.

Hope to see you there.

•  

Price Gouging By Hospitals Needs More Airing

A physician visiting the sick in a hospital, German engraving from 1682 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Murky World of Hospital Prices – NYTimes.com.

 

“The price for a joint replacement with artificial hips or knees ranged from a low of $5,300 in a hospital in Ada, Okla., to a high of $223,000 at a hospital in Monterey Park, Calif., a 40-fold difference that cannot be explained by regional differences in wages, the sickness of the patients, or a hospital’s teaching responsibilities. The charge for treating heart failure patients in hospitals in Jackson, Miss., ranged from $9,000 to $51,000.”

 

Related articles

 

• Kansas hospitals’ prices vary significantly along with nation’s, information shows (kansas.com)
• EDITORIAL: Medical price discrepancies are sickening (courierpress.com)
• Nurses: Hospital Price Gouging Driving Up Healthcare Costs, Self-Rationing, Medical Bankruptcies (sys-con.com)
• Some hospital bills vastly higher for similar care (hosted.ap.org)
• Hospital Prices Vary Dramatically – ABC News (abcnews.go.com)
• OUR OPINION: Sickening disparity in hospital pricing (enterprisenews.com)
• High hospital bills go public, but will it help? (news.yahoo.com)

 

We will not solve our climate problem by adjusting the width of streets.

English: Collateral Damage Affinity Group (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

 

 

 

 

We will not solve our climate problem by adjusting the width of streets. Incremental changes will not save our cities. Cities will be saved by designing car free areas of areas up to a mile square.  Cars and trucks will be relegated the periphery of future communities. Transportation within future communities will be mainly be by foot and bike. Vacant and wasteland areas can become new car free communities. Car free communities need have no stairs. Most future residences will be one level. Graded ways can easily enable transit between levels. A max of four levels is adequate to support a car free community of 5-10K.  Thinking outside the box is the only way forward. Car free communities will be forced on us by climate change. Even if climate was not a problem, car free communities would make complete sense.

> So, is the structure of language a blueprint for the structure of the universe?

English: Juliette and husband Charles Sanders Peirce by the well at their home Arisbe in Milford, Pennsylvania, in their later years. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

> So, is the structure of language a blueprint for the structure of the universe?

 

Language seems to me a utility in itself. Language enables us to take signs that rise in reality and transform them into communication. The communications convey meanings. Language’s statement of what something means is a product of our will to think. (In that sense, we are prior to language. As is reality.) The structure of the universe has no blueprint save what we create as guesses. Insofar as we are aware of reality – the universe, the cosmos, everything, all – language helps us guess what its blueprint might be. Doesn’t Peirce say that most of our thought is abduction? (Odd the double meaning these days.) Anyway, it seems a good guess is that the universe creates continuously according to patterns science seeks to guess with ever greater accuracy. And that the greater part is unguessed and a mystery. Wherefore fallibility (humility, non-idolatry) should reign.

 

 

(Response to a question on the Peirce List.)

 

Baseball is continuous. Society is not. Cyber will change all metrics once it gets past the infantile gadget stage.

think stencil art & graffiti cat (Photo credit: urbanartcore.eu)

The text below is a comment on the following:

Identifying the “Sabermetrics” of Urbanism | PlaceMakers http://buff.ly/1938esZ

Well now er um. As an old Doxiadis auditor, I am familiar with this thinking in a younger iteration. As a born and raised New Yorker, I know what a block is. But as one who has thought for a lifetime about cities and particularly about metrics, come to think of it, I believe this suffers from a failure to see the self-evident. What is self-evident but missed? The answer is: The imperative to separate oil and the automobile from its central control of everything else. Once make these things peripheral, and the scales will fall from our eyes. We will not lose these anymore than we lost horses, But they will no longer influence all else we do and think. My metric is drawn from my reading of Christopher Alexander coupled with my own evolution of his thinking. It arrives at the concept of the cyber-community which is 10,000 persons of all sorts living by choice in a community that is car free, no more than four levels high, stairless, lego-like and so on and so forth. I see it all. It does not exist. Neither did the car once. I outline it in my largely-ignored book, Triadic Philosophy.

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