Last night I was listening to a discussion on NPR, which started out with how covid will end up increasing deaths of all types because people aren't going to the hospital until it's dire. Not only for covid but for everything like heart attacks and appendicitis. Then they talked about cancers, and narrowed in on pancreatic cancer, which has a 90% death rate in the USA. The tumor in the pancreas can be removed as long as it's not over a certain size, 1 cm I think. And in the US screening is very rare so people don't even know they've got it until they're at the end stage.
Meanwhile, they went on, in Japan screenings are done and the survival rate is about 90% because so many of the tumors are found when they're small. A mystery, a real mystery here...
Dinner last night had been shrimp curry with nasturtium leaves, which came out really well. I used the curry roux that comes in a block, which is problematical because it's hard to get it melted before the melted part has started to set up, resulting in an uneven mix. So I'd gotten a cheap vegetable shredder at 99 Ranch and shredded the stuff, and it worked out great.
I woke up around 9, and probably got out of bed in the 10-11 timeframe. I did the usual diddling around, looking at too much shakuhachi stuff online, finding Ebay items I need to ship, etc. After a bit of that I cooked probably the best-tasting batch of scrambled eggs I've ever had. I put in some shishito peppers that were starting to ripen, and a mix I've been using lately of shoyu, mirin, and some instant dashi grains.
I stayed in and mainly watched too much junk on YouTube, but managed to get 18 things packed and listed 10 on Ebay and cooked up some dinner.
I thought of a theory today that businesses tend to, like rivers, gradually become as inefficient as they can be and still exist. Dig out a river straight, and over time it will form loops and oxbows and things, essentially slowing it down as much as it can and still move the X amount of water it has to.
I think small mom'n'pop businesses tend to do this also. They'll happily get by using what become eventually decades out of date methods and materials, as long as the business does well enough to feed whatever people depend on it. Say the founding family has a few sons who want to stay in the business, then the business will grudgingly expand, maybe set up in a couple of nearby towns. But that's it.
Now enter the modern way of business where profit is all, and profit must increase. Now you don't get relatively happy people puttering around with paper index cards, because you've got people going around squeezing everyone to modernize and make more throughput. It's like having the Corps of Engineers periodically dredge that river straight again and about as good for the mental health of the business' employees as the dredging is for the wildlife along the river.
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