Beatles Vs Stones.

I have a book called Beatles vs Stones, but this post is unrelated to that book.

The post also has nothing to do with Biscayne Park.

This post is about two, or possibly three, or perhaps four, songs.  One is the Stones' song "You Can't Always Get What You Want," (although I could equally well have gone with "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction") and the other is either the Beatles' cover of the Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford song ("Money, (That's What I Want)"), or the Pink Floyd song "Money."  But because the book exists, and I have a copy of it, I thought it would be cuter to call this post "Beatles vs Stones" than to call it Stones and Pink Floyd.  And it's all British Invasion, except for the original of the Beatles cover, which was written by the Motown originator.  Oh, well...

So this started when I got to the Ft Lauderdale airport too early today -- for a small collection of reasons -- and I suddenly, as the Brits would say, came over all peckish.  I needed something to eat, and I wanted decaf coffee to go with it.

I bypassed Jack Nicklaus' restaurant, because it looked too slick, and I went next door to a place which I think was called Heavenly Grounds.  I asked for their (overpriced, of course) "breakfast sandwich," and a large, black decaf.  How a place that has the name Grounds in the title, strongly suggesting that coffee is an important item they sell, doesn't sell decaf -- "not in the airport," for who can possibly imagine what reason -- was completely beyond me.  So I canceled the order, and decided to go to Nicklaus'.

The second piece of bad news -- the first having been that it looked too slick to begin with -- was that I couldn't see the menu by focusing my camera phone on the two-dimensional bar code.  It didn't work.  But a waitress, who may already have known this doesn't really work, came by very quickly with a physical menu, and there were two things I was willing to buy.  One was a shockingly overpriced "breakfast burrito," which cost $13.62, and the other was coffee.   Only one price was listed for the coffee, so I figured they just keep refilling your cup, as normal restaurants do.  So OK, I was hungry enough to eat a $13.62 breakfast burrito, however big that was going to turn out to be, and I ordered that and decaf.  At this point, I was seated at a table, which was more formal than I wanted.

What?!  Again they don't serve decaf?!  So does this mean you can't get decaf at Ft Lauderdale airport?  I need to talk to someone about this.  But by this time, I was about as hungry as I was frustrated, and I decided just to get my overpriced, and probably too large, breakfast burrito.  OK, fine, that and a glass of water.

If they had charged 1/3 the price they did, it might have been a fair price.  Since it was the airport, which is always rip-off city, food-wise, they might have charged 1/2 of what they did.  But that puny little thing, and most certainly not what anyone who's ever eaten one would call a particularly good breakfast burrito, for $13.62?  And up to $17.02, by the time they demand an 18% tip, and tax?

The Stones' song says that you sometimes get what you need.  Not this time.  And Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd sure were right about the focus on taking people's money.

The New Bosses Are Not the Same as the Old Bosses.

A friend and BP resident told me about his experience with leaving out yard waste.  It's not a happy story.

In the old days, with the old contractor, if you left out more than an estimated two cubic yards, someone would take a photograph of your estimated excessive leavings, the refuse would be picked up the next day or so, and you would be billed for the estimated overage.  That is apparently not the new deal.

Now, my friend said, he left out what was estimated to be more than two cubic yards, he received a notice of a $50 fine, and he had to move all the yard waste back behind the house.  No one picked it up, and no one was going to.  Pick up the yard waste, as is the contractor's job, estimate how much more than two cubic yards it was, and the homeowner can argue if he thinks someone overestimated?  Evidently not.  And this is for substantially more money than we were paying about two months ago.

Someone does not have much of a sense of courtesy, or even decency, when dealing with BP residents/homeowners/taxpayers.  We're now paying significantly more money for inferior and punitive, instead of helpful, or even accommodating, service.

"Great Waste," indeed.

PS: I don't know how to check this story without either simply believing that what my friend told me is true (which I do believe), or butting in to someone else's business, which I'm not going to do.  I was just told this story in passing, and I said I would blog about it.  My friend did not ask me to do that, nor did he request that I not do it.  We've fallen far from the WastePro days, and it's costing us a premium to take the bumpy and injurious ride.

PPS: I urged my friend to go talk to Mario Diaz, who I hope will see to it at least that the $50 slap in the face goes away.  This is not $50 to take away the yard waste.  It's not $50 to take away more than the contracted amount of yard waste.  It's a $50 punishment, for nothing, and with no adaptive component.  And if matters could be made any worse, it appears to be our own Village that is punishing us.  Great Waste had no reason to punish anyone.  They just kept driving, and had less work to do.

I'm Reminded of the Old Days, When I Used to Watch Television.

It was way back when the little mobile phones -- maybe the flip phones, or maybe before that -- were becoming popular, and there was what was understood to be a holdout demographic: men, and especially manly men, and tough guys.  So, there was an advertisement that featured a middle-aged man driving a pickup truck, and wearing a cowboy hat, and speaking with what I vaguely recall was a southern accent, and using a mobile phone.  If this was good enough for him, and he approved and saw value in it, then it was good enough for anyone.

Now, there's this: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/telling-conservatives-its-a-shot-to-restore-our-freedoms-how-online-ads-are-promoting-coronavirus-vaccination/ar-AANGLpc?li=BBnb7Kz

It's very hard to understand the coronavirus vaccine holdouts.  They make their reasons clear -- there is no coronavirus, or it's all a government plot/hoax, or it's the fault of the Chinese, or the vaccine isn't proven enough, or the vaccine is dangerous -- but these reasons are entirely invented, and they don't make sense.

The whole matter, which is a medical problem, has bizarrely been politicized.  It's said to have economic consequences, which it does, but it's simply not political.  And the people who invent this interpretation -- that the government shouldn't tell people what to do -- do not advocate for the removal of speed limits and STOP signs and red lights and seat belt laws, which also represent the government telling people what to do.  For their, you know, safety.

So, it's all pretty insane.

The fact is that everyone should get vaccinated.  Everyone should.  Did you get DPT and polio vaccines when you were a kid?  They were required for you to go to school.  Do you think your parents were communists or idiots for doing this to you, or alternatively, are you glad you didn't get diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, or polio?

Just get vaccinated.  Don't be foolish.  This problem has been going on for the past year and a half, and it's now getting worse, with the surge almost entirely in unvaccinated people.  Some of them wind up sick, in the hospital, in the ICU, on a ventilator, and now, they want to get vaccinated.  They can't get vaccinated when they're that sick, and it's too late to request it.

Please do yourself, and everyone else, a favor, and get vaccinated.

A Waste?

In 2013, we had garbage and/or recycling trucks on the road five days a week.  I don't remember what we were paying, but despite paying our Village PW sanitation employees less than poverty-level wages, we were paying somewhere, I think, in the $500s per residential unit per year.  It was never explained why Village PW employees who were being underpaid weren't complaining, but we had to do something.  We had three garbage trucks, one of which was inoperable and not salvageable, and another of which was intermittent, and held together with spit and scotch tape, and employees who were not reliable to come to work, pulling other PW employees off other Village responsibilities, and whatever we could do to keep this "system" working was going to cost a good deal of money.  We were going to have to buy new trucks (even the most consistently reliable one was old and leaking), and hire more employees, and, if we cared about our own employees, we were going to have to pay them more.  The loose estimate at the time was that we would wind up paying in the $700s or more per residential unit.

So in 2014, we outsourced.  We were careful to find what we thought was the best outsource contractor, and one of our requirements was that they agree to offer full time jobs to all of our current employees.  Which they did.  And which would have been for higher wages.  And which, inexplicably, none of our PW sanitation employees accepted.  But we wound up with trucks on our roads three days a week, instead of five, and we were paying in the low $400s per residential unit.  And we restabilized our PW department.

Except some Village residents were bereft, and complained, and once we hit 2017, and the then Commission didn't care about anything, including trying to improve service, it deteriorated.  And once the contract with that contractor ended, and the then Commission still didn't care about anything, we just started with contract extensions, each for more money than the last.

We reached about $485 per residential unit, with deteriorating service, and no one to work with/on our contractor, so the newest Commission and manager decided to find someone else.  That someone else is Great Waste and Recycling Service.  They started at the beginning of last month.

So now, we're up to four days a week of trucks on the roads, and $659.49 per residential unit.  That's $178 per unit more than we were paying before July 1 of this year.  A residential unit is your single family house, or each side of a duplex, or each apartment in an apartment building.

We appear to have undone more or less all the good we did in 2014, and increased prices very considerably.

F***ing Human Nature

Chuck Ross called me this morning.  Early.  Too early.  My mother had just died, I couldn't sleep, and I was distracting myself, including by writing an e-mail to Chuck and Rox to tell them that my mother's death finally, mercifully, happened.  But when Chuck called, I needed at least to pretend to try to get some more rest, because I have patients today.  So, I told him I would get back to him later.

When I called back, Chuck and Rox and I talked about a number of things related and unrelated to my mother's death, and one of them was what I was going to do with myself professionally and geographically, now that one of my employers was drastically cutting compensation, and I had no further reason to live in south Florida (my mother lived in Surfside, and it was necessary that I be available to her on a regular basis).

Chuck has a recurring piece of advice, of which Rox reminded me (as if I needed to be reminded), which was to charge higher fees.  I had resisted this for decades, in spite of Chuck's droning urging, until I was dating a psychiatrist in 2015, and she suggested something that hadn't occurred to me: that if my fee is unusually low (which it is), people might be reluctant to seek treatment from me, concluding, perhaps, that they would get what they paid for.  So I reluctantly and somewhat grudgingly agreed to raise my fee, starting in the first half of 2015.  But last year, for a number of reasons, the higher fee (still very low by general standards) was starting to bother me, even though I discount the fee to anyone who can't easily pay it, and I lowered it back to where it was.  I told that to Chuck today.

This, of course, got Chuck going again, and he urged that I re-increase my fee, and don't work for the employer that was preparing to make a drastic (40%!) cut in compensation.

Chuck is a genius, he's deeply devoted, he's generous to a fault, and he's also very highly opinionated.  He is, as I put it to him and Rox, a pain in the ass.  But I also pointed out that this combination of traits of his is why people like Rox and me and others love him.

I have a version of the same conversation with couples when I do marriage counseling, which I do a lot.  People choose each other, from among many choices, for a reason.  And that reason is in more or less 100% of the cases, neurotic.  We all have conflicts, and those conflicts play a major role in determining whom we choose as a partner.  What we love about our partner also makes us crazy about them.  What drives us nuts about them, and makes us want to scream, hit them, or get a divorce, is part of why we chose them to begin with.  It's easy, and convenient, to forget one part of the conflict, so we can focus on the other, but it's all there, all the time.

So, thanks, Chuck.  Yes, I agree that if the employer in question reduces compensation by 40%, I'm going to quit.  But no, I'm not going to re-increase my fees.  And I'm going to continue to discount them if it's not easy enough for the patient to pay my preferred fee.  Sorry.  I still love you, though.

No.

Last Friday, July 9, one of our neighbors wrote to me privately.  The title of the e-mail was "Were You at Tuesday's Meeting?"

The content was "I think Dan Samaria is becoming increasingly addle-brained.   It's just painful to watch and listen to.  Not that he ever had much in the way of cognitive skills, but it's getting worse.  As long as the majority of voters in this city(sic*) stay uninformed and/or treat electing someone to the commission as the equivalent of a participation trophy in little league, we are so screwed."

*Municipalities in Florida can be either cities, towns, or villages.  Biscayne Park has chosen to call itself a Village.  We are either a village or a municipality.  We are not a city.

I responded as follows: "You answered your own question.  Did I listen to Tuesday's meeting?  'It's just [too] painful to watch and listen to.'  And it's not just Dan.  It's also Ginny and Judi, and I'm disappointed in Art's minimal participation.  Mac is great, but he can in no way contain himself."

To which our neighbor replied: "Agree on all counts."

We've had good Commissions and not as good ones.  But we crashed badly at the end of 2016, and we have not recovered.  If some of us thought Ginny O'Halpin would help us get back on an adaptive path, we were wrong.  And if we thought Dan Samaria would somehow find a way to stay on the adaptive path onto which he had stumbled, and was being propped up, we were wrong about that, too.

And we've had the same problem with managers.  We stumbled at first with Frank Spence, but it was an honest mistake, and we had to figure ourselves out, in terms of turning over functioning and a good deal of decision-making to a manager.  But then, we had three excellent managers in Ana Garcia, Heidi Siegel, and Sharon Ragoonan.  And we gave it all up for meaninglessness and mediocrity.  If we thought Mario Diaz would get us back on track, we guessed wrong again.

I always regretted, or complained, that Village residents who had been Commissioners stopped attending Commission meetings once the meetings were no longer about themselves.  And at this point, I myself have stopped bothering.  I was faithful through the Truppman et al years, and at the beginning of the next phase, but the whole thing has become too frustrating, too infuriating, and too tragic, and I've just quit tuning in.  Would I go if I could go in person?  I don't know.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  The stalwart of all stalwarts was Dan Keys, and he's quit going, too.  Although I think he quit because he was no longer a member, and Don, of the P&P Board.  Bob (and Janey) Anderson also used to come after Bob retired from wanting to continue to be a Commissioner.  As far as I know, they still watch virtually.  So maybe Bob will take the torch from Keys.  But whoever is there to observe is doing no more than watching a train wreck happen.

The person who wrote to me said it seemed as if voting for someone to be on the Commission was like giving them the empty prize that otherwise represents a "participation trophy in little league."  Yeah, that's one way to put it.  And in its way, it's not wrong.  But I think it misses the point.  The point is that some kids really like little league, and either they're good at it, or they're not.  Other kids are bored, or they want to do what their friends are doing, or their parents urge them to play.  Others maybe just want that participation trophy.   And that's our problem.  That last thing.  We've had way too many Commissioners, especially lately, and now, who don't want anything.  At least they don't want anything that has anything to do with the Village.  What they want is that participation trophy.  So they can pat themselves on the back.

I've seen it elsewhere around here, too.  There are some people who join boards like high school students who want to go to good colleges join clubs: it pads their resumes, and makes them appear more than they are.  Do you want to know what they do once they get appointed to a board?  Nothing.  That was never the intent.  I know of one new board member who, after one meeting, which was attended "virtually," decided that s/he should be the vice president of that board.

We do have some neighbors who talk as if they wanted something (for the Village).  Some of them join boards.  And they criticize the successions of Commissions and Commissioners.  But the ones I have in mind steadfastly refuse to run for Commission.  Claiming to know the right answer to everything, and wallowing in criticism of everyone else, is easy.  Being at the place where the buck stops?  Um, apparently not.  I know people who bitterly criticized the Commissioners who preceded me, and they supported me in my first campaign.  Then, once I became a Commissioner, they criticized me exactly as they had criticized my predecessors, and they advocated for the Truppman wrecking crew.  Then, they criticized the Truppman squad, just as they had criticized me, and just as they had criticized my predecessors.  But never, not once, will these people themselves show us all how it's done correctly.

So, no, I did not tune into last week's Commission meeting.  If you did, I hope your life is empty enough that it didn't seem to you to be a waste of your valuable time.

Many More Than Two Can Tango. (Especially If There's No Dancing.)

This coming Friday night -- July 9 -- Orchestra Miami is putting on an extremely interesting tango concert.  It's a tribute to Astor Piazzolla, who was the undisputed king of modern tango music.

Piazzolla was an Argentinian musician whose instrument was the bandoneon.  This is a small instrument that is closely related to the accordion, except the accordion has keys, as does a piano, as well as buttons, and the bandoneon only has buttons.  The bandoneon is considered an extremely difficult instrument to master.

Piazzolla was classically trained, and he went to France to learn composition.  His main teacher told him not to try to learn to compose European-style classical music, but to stick to his tango roots.  So Piazzolla took his teacher's advice and became the master of modernized tango.

A collection of exceptional musicians, and a conductor, will be performing Piazzolla's music on Friday.  The venue is the Scottish Rite Temple at 471 NW 3 St in downtown Miami.  Ticket prices -- Orchestra Miami does not charge enough for what they do -- are $15 regular adult admission, $12 for seniors, $5 for children, and $36 for a "family pack," which is intended to include two adults and two children.  There is also a "live-streaming" opportunity, and the minimum requested price is $5.  If you want live-streaming, you can sign yourself up through orchestramiami.org.*

The ensemble will be 24 strings, a bandoneon, a guitar, and a singer.  That's aside from the conductor.

If you're not familiar with Piazzolla, or not terribly familiar with tango music, this concert is not to be missed.  If you are familiar with tango, modern tango, and Piazzolla, this concert is not to be missed.  I would say probably to bring tissue.

* Please note comment.  Ticket prices are not correct.  The actual prices are higher than the e-blast showed, but they're still low for a concert like this.  If this is disappointing, you can bring less tissue.

"When You Hear Hoofbeats, Think Horses, Not Zebras."

There are several sustaining medical maxims, and the title of this post is one of them.  It means that when there are indicators of a condition, think first of the most common cause of the complaint.  Don't first think of the rarest possible causes.

For years now, we've had increasing collections of flood water in the streets after even normal rains.  The drains don't work as they did.  We have increasing erosion of the streets, including cracking.

Very recently, one ocean front building in Surfside collapsed, and last night, another was evacuated for what was considered imminent danger.  And Miami Beach has more, and more sustained, street flooding after rains than we do.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist," as they say, to conclude that with climate change, and rising seas and water tables, there is less opportunity for water collections to dissipate, and increasing damage is done by this increased water, from above and below the streets and buildings.

But still, there are people who can think of all kinds of possible reasons for the increased water, or they deny that there is increased water, and attribute the water damage to something other than water.  

Either they say they don't hear the hoofbeats, or they're pretty sure those hoofbeats are caused by, you know, the zebra population.

It's nice living in south Florida, near the ocean.  It has advantages.  It also has disadvantages.  We need to be grown up enough and responsible enough to recognize those disadvantages, and confront or accommodate them.  

This isn't the zoo, where we get to amuse ourselves observing the zebras in their pens.  It's the open plain, where we're going to get stampeded by wild horses, if we don't do something about it.  It's inconvenient, and it costs money?  Yeah, and your point is...?

"The Long and Winding Road"

The fact is, I'm not generally a fan of Paul McCartney songs, at least not the later ones.  But the title works, so it was the way to go.

My mother lives in Surfside.  She's 94 1/2, and she's been rendered totally nonfunctional, because of strokes.  We have aides for her, because there's nothing she can do for herself, and I see her once or twice a week.  The most regular of those times is Sunday mornings.  I get food, I bring it over, I make coffee, and we have breakfast, for at least a little while until she wants to go back to bed/sleep.  We try to do video visits with my daughter, son-in-law, and my grandchildren (my mother's only great grandchildren), but she can't pay much attention, and she can't hear what people say to her.  But it's part of my ritual.  She knows who I am, and every indicator I have is that these visits are important to her.

Normally, I go down to the 79th St causeway to go to Miami Beach (because I resent that Bay Harbor Islands didn't take away the toll as they said decades ago they would -- they increased it), and then, I come north on Collins to Surfside.  But last Sunday, I already knew that wasn't going to work.  I (rightly) assumed the streets would be closed because of the building that collapsed on Collins at 87th St.  So I had to work my way around some other way.  I was trying to get to 88th St and Abbott Avenue.  It wasn't easy.

Many streets have long been closed or capped, and egresses from them, like the southern end of Abbott Avenue, are one way at the end (not the one way I needed for half a block), and you have to turn.  I had to go a different way, and many blocks out of my way, to work my way north of 89th St, and then south on Abbott.  There were several avenues I couldn't take north, because there were no turns into those avenues.

The Town of Surfside did this years ago, because they didn't want people driving -- or "cutting" -- through Surfside streets, on their way north from Miami Beach, or south from BHI or Bal Harbour.  It's made a mess of trying simply to get from one place to another.  And it's no easier for residents of Surfside.  If you want to go south, you can really only do this by going to Harding.  If you want to go north, you need to get to Collins.

In the past, there have been partial and temporary movements to do a similar thing, for the same reason, in BP.  Fortunately for us, and everyone else, these little crusades generally peter out without any action taken.  About a year ago, we had another version, and this one proposed changing the character, capacity, and rhythm of 6th Avenue.

These are public streets, with "public" meaning everyone.  If people don't want to live in Surfside, then they should live on Indian Creek Island.  If people don't want to live on open BP streets, or on the one with four lanes and a 30 MPH speed limit, then they should live in culs-de-sac.  I know Indian Creek Island is more expensive than Surfside, and a cul-de-sac is more expensive than 6th  Avenue.  But if that's what you want, then go live there.  Don't make your fiscal limitations everyone else's problem.

Is It Foolishness, or Stubbornness?

We (the whole world) have been struggling with the coronavirus for almost a year and a half now.  Setting aside the distractions of trying to figure out whom to blame, we can't seem to agree on mechanisms to protect ourselves.

Many of us have relied on doctors whose specialty is epidemiology: expertise regarding epidemics.  You wouldn't think it would take much brains to realize that these are precisely the people on whose insights and advice to rely.  As is true of many parts of medicine, the path is not always clear, and doctors have to recognize what they don't know, how to find it out, and how to make the most informed judgments they can.  It's not always easy.  (I do a lot of work for the Social Security Administration.  I'm what they call a "Medical Expert" for appeals hearings.  But Social Security judges are not required to use Medical Experts.  It's always a curiosity to me that some judges don't want expert medical advice about these cases.  The cases are not infrequently difficult for me to figure out, and I'm a doctor of the relevant specialty.  I always wonder how someone who is not a doctor of the relevant specialty, or not a doctor at all, imagines s/he can figure the cases out without someone like me.)  Similarly, it appears there is a proportion of the non-epidemiologist and non-doctor public who think they can make their own judgments about how to deal with an epidemic, and they can declare epidemiologists and other doctors simply wrong, or in some cases dishonest.  And this is on the basis of nothing.  (Although let's not forget the title of this post.)

So, we started out, based on epidemiological advice, taking the precaution of not exposing ourselves to people who might be infected, so we wouldn't get infected.  We stayed home, we kept a distance, and we wore masks.  Some of us did.

For a while, that was the best we could do.  That is until vaccines were quickly developed, and those were thought to confer immunity, so that even being exposed to someone infectious would not cause infection.  We weren't completely sure of that in the beginning, nor did we know at that early phase, and with vaccines quickly developed without long range monitoring, how long the immunity would last, but it became the even better thing we could do, beyond isolating ourselves.  Over time, we have learned that some or most or all of the vaccines turned out to be as effective, and long lasting, as we hoped, and a sizable proportion of people in the world have gotten themselves vaccinated.  But the size of that proportion is not 100%, even setting aside all the people to whom the vaccines have not been available, and who could not have gotten themselves vaccinated.  I have read varying calculations of what proportion of people who could have gotten themselves vaccinated did get themselves vaccinated, and the numbers seem to hover around 50-70%.  It's more than a little disturbing to wonder about the other 30-50%, and what leads them not to protect themselves from a very serious epidemic.

And now, we have the "Delta Variant."  The Delta Variant is not more damaging than the regular coronavirus.  It's more easily transmitted.  So it infects, and makes sick, and kills, more people, because it is more infectious.  But it's not infectious to, or can infect, sicken, or kill people who are immune to it, because they got vaccinated.  Those people are not going to get the Delta Variant any more than they were going to get the regular coronavirus.

So we're left to wonder what's with the people who won't get vaccinated in an epidemic/pandemic.  They think vaccination is a government plot, or they don't trust doctors, or they don't trust Tony Fauci, or they think this must be someone's fault, and they want to use their emotional energy resenting whosever fault they think it is.  Instead of getting vaccinated.

If someone comes into your house, and takes your stuff, they're selfish, terrible people, and they don't care about you, and it's wrong, and they shouldn't do that.  So do you refuse to get locks for your doors, because locks cost money, and now, the locksmith might be able to break into your house, and what if you lose the key, and why can't the police patrol every house all the time, so no one will enter your house when you're not there?  You'd have to be foolish, stubborn, and frankly childish to take an approach like that.  But that's what people who won't get vaccinated do.