Friday, March 22, 2013

I guess I am not a very prolific blogger as it has been a while but I have some things to get off my chest and it really does not relate to the JnR Hotel as posts here probably should. The hotel is fine. Guests keep coming and the rooms keep getting cleaned for the next guests. It is a lot of work to keep everthing as nice or nicer than the chains even if it costs a few extra bucks. The hotel is for sale. I am almost 73 and it is time to go visit the things the guests keep telling me about. Since I need to be here to serve the guests, I can't go very far or for very long. So if you are thinking of a neat business come take a look. You can control the revenue easily with the open/no vacancy sign. Stay open and folks come. Close up and they don't. Stay closed too long and it takes a while to get going again. Back to what I really wanted to write about.

The government has not only a spending problem but a management problem. If the management could be brought under control the spending could be reined in. There are so many places to cut without hurting the general public. It is only a matter of citizen involvement to overcome the lobby effort of several big business groups. A few examples:

Homeland Security: They have bought enough ammunition for their target practice too keep up their efficiency to last 100 years. They have bought an great number of armored vechicles and caskets. I guess in case their tarket practice gets out of hand. They have several detention centers ready to open. There use seems to be a secret but it could house us because it seems they have much more space than necessary to house real terrorists. They bought xray machines for the airports that are not good for those subjected to them. They are now replacing them a second time. We will see what they have picked out. Radiation exposure does cause cancer. Frequent travelers do not need so much exposure. Are the airports the only place the terrorists might attack? How much do we have to give up to think we are safe. I say think because you really are not safe.

Federal Drug Administration: Their goal is to protect us from bad drugs, medicine and food. So far they are not doing as good a job as other countries are doing. Our health care costs are higher than other countries that have healthier residents. We have a slew of drugs that have beaucoup of warnings about causing death and they often do. We have drug companies with big lobbys constantly bombarding decision makers with demands of drug approvals with misleading clinical trials. They drug companies already know how much to set aside for lawsuits. Remember the compounding pharmacy that was selling their stuff across the country illegially and was a dirty place. It took several years to get them shut down until after folks started dying from their contaminated mixtures. We raid vitamin companies that make bonifide health claims and attack doctors that use methods that show excellent results because their treatments do not use drugs that can be patented. An example is cherries. The manufactures of cherry extract were told it would be classified as a drug and they would have to go through drug trials to get approval to sell the fruit because of the health claims, even though the claims were true. A division of the FDA is the USDA whose job it is to keep the food safe. If you pay attention to the recalls, the product is always on the store shelf before action has begun and people have already gotten sick. Animals are given injections to keep them well in the squalled conditions they are kept in under the guise of we have to make a profit. Free range chickens only have to be able to get outside once a day for a minute or two. I don't think the people think that is really free range. While they make a profit, we suffer. Food has a direct relationship to health. High fructose corn syrup was in use for some time before people woke up and found out that that was one of the reasons they were getting belly fat and diabeties. They even tried to rename it to sugar so the public wouldn't know what they were eating. Regulations are not well enforced. More often than not just a warning letter is sent out and any action is a long way off.

The Federal Communication Commision has a war with industry that never seems to cease. Newspapers, Radio and TV are constantly attempted to be bought out by single corporations decreasing the validity of the news we get to read and hear because they do not want to tell anyone about things that do not compliment their holdings. At every hearing attempts to create new rules are shot down because the communicators are not going to be able to continue with business as usual. Things have really changed over the last decade. A monopoly of the media was not allowed. Now it seems ok. So far no one has yet taken over the internet, but I bet it will happen.

Well enough laundry to air for one day. I have to get back to work and do the book keeping, checking in guests, supervising the contractors to see if the job they did is what I hired them for. I can't tell them how to do the task but I sure can make certin they get what I want them to do done well.