Incomplete
Posts that need fleshing out and completion.
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When to Burn the Bridges
Confession. I’m a burn the bridges kinda guy. It’s how I’m wired. However, after a few years here on earth, I’ve learned to temper my burning desires in some situations.
When to Burn Away
Burning sometimes needs to happen when you are dealing with people. Friends, oftentimes family, sometimes spouses need to be burnt outta your life for you to move ahead. Typically these are interpersonal relationships. If they are:
- Needy
- Negative
- Untrustworthy
- Progressive
- Judgmental/Critical of everything
- Drunkard
- Busybody
- Users
Oh, this list can go on forever … basically, if they are dragging you down instead of building you up = burn ’em. Get those people out of your life. If you can’t trust them in battle to have your back, eventually they will hurt you; could be physically, but most certainly mentally. You already know who they are …
Don’t Burn – Leave the Way Intact
I have discovered that there are certain situations where you might need to distance yourself, but you don’t want to eliminate a way back.
This is primarily in the business setting.
We often burn bridges to companies as if the people working there are the company themselves. In the past I’ve burnt companies because I didn’t like the person I was dealing with. Then later found that many people had not liked dealing with that person and he/she had been eliminated by the company … except now I’m on the outside because I had treated the company as if they were just that person.
Same can happen in a work setting. Your boss or coworker might be a total life suck. You definitely have to decide just how much you will take, but understand that if they are truly a sh!tty person, they will eventually be eliminated anyway. You might have to bide your time rather than burning it all down.
Caveat. Some companies are built from the ground up as ‘progressive’ … these should be burnt out of your life. They can’t change because their identity is built on the premise of hate as a founding ideology. This is different than the case of a crappy human working in a decent company. If the mission statement is written in a way that you are a target instead of a client = burn baby burn.
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How Social Media Tries to Influence You
Being on Twitter or Facebook, or using Google search for anything is dangerous.
You need to understand that they are not there to serve you. They are serving their own people and their own ideology. You must be constantly on alert if you are hoping to avoid the subtle way they try to influence you.
Here are is Rule #1 for social media giants: If it is good, or beautiful, traditional or contains Godly morality – they will try to undermine it. Look for those things and you’ll find social media presenting the ‘alternative’ point of view as if it were normal and mainstream.
For instance.
This is the day after the #marchforlife which is a celebration of life and demonstration of solidarity with those who oppose the killing of children.
Yet my ‘For You’ Twitter feed was 95% full of ‘pro-choice’ posts this morning. Totally manipulated. I don’t follow many ‘pro-killers’ in my Twitter feed … in fact, about 90% of the people I follow are pro-life people. So why is Twitter feeding me ‘pro-choice’ tweets?
It’s manipulated. They are doing this to try to move the conversation away from the #marchforlife and toward the evil of child murder. Remember, if it is good, or moral … it must be attacked.
How to deal with this?
The best option is probably to leave Twitter and Facebook … Google, etc. However, in doing so, you lose your voice. Even if it just a single voice ‘crying in the wilderness’, it has value. We must oppose evil where we find it. Running from it does not oppose it.
So we stay.
I find that if I keep in mind the above Rule in mind (they will attack all things good,) that it becomes easier to see the manipulation and understand it for what it is. Use that feeling in the back of your mind that you get when you see something not quite right … tune into it because it is usually correct. Your mind is trying to tell you that something is just not right. Don’t be mindless on these sites. They are trying to influence you.
And speak up. Oppose the evil where it is.
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Making Money from Diabetes
This morning I read an article that described how Frederick Banting (the man who discovoured Insulin and how to produce it safely) sold his patents for insulin to the University of Toronto for $1 back in 1923. The U of T then gave drug companies permission to produce the product royalty free. Apparently this was to prevent drug companies from rushing an inferiour product to market in an effort to gain the patents. Banting said, ‘When the details of the method of preparation are published, anyone would be free to prepare the extract, but no one could secure a profitable monopoly.’
Yet a mere 18 years later, on April 1st, 1941, the 3 main producers of Insulin in the US pleaded no contest to charges of price-fixing to ‘bring about arbitrary, uniform, and non-competitive prices for insulin and to prevent normal competition in the sale of the drug.’ See newspaper articles here. (A curious side note, is that this charge was brought against the drug companies a mere month after the death of Sir Frederick Banting. There maybe no connection, but it is certainly an interesting fact.)It is reported that those companies were eventually fined $5000.00 each and corporate officers were charge $1500.00 each for their part in the corruption.
Suspicion continued to surround the companies producing Insulin, especially Eli Lilly and Company which was accused of attempting to control the international supply of pig and cow pancreases which were the source of insulin before the advent of artificial insulin.
Flash forward to 2016 and the accusations of massive price fixing continue with calls for an investigation into the exorbitant price of Insulin. Reports show that even though the patents on Insulin have long expired, the price of the drug have continued to rise artificially by what appears to be collusion among the drug companies.
Electronics manufacturers have jumped on the ‘lets make a pile of money from this disease’ bandwagon with their production of small portable blood glucose measuring devices. While these devices are a true lifesaver for those who take control of their diabetes, the price of the essential ‘strips’ are prohibitive for many. The electronics and plastics bits of these meters cannot cost more than a dollar or two to mass produce in China (which is why manufacturers often give the devices away for free,) yet the price of the ‘strips’ that accept the blood sample have stayed what appears to be artificially high. While the strips are marvels of ingenuity, they are still mass produced from inexpensive materials – so why do they cost so much? ‘Generic’ and ‘store brand’ strip prices have come down providing evidence that the prices being charged by the leading medical device manufacturers is inflated. I’m a capitalist at heart, but if there was true competition between the device manufacturers, the price would naturally come down … not consistently rise. This all has the stench of collusion and corruption.