Foggy morning

LOL right on time

Alzheimer’s drug cited as Medicare premium jumps by $21.60

The increase guarantees that health care will gobble up a big chunk of the recently announced Social Security cost-of-living allowance, a boost that had worked out to $92 a month for the average retired worker, intended to help cover rising prices for gas and food that are pinching seniors.

 This is something nobody says much about when they rave about Medicare for all but Medicare is not free. Yes, it's substantially subsidized by tax money and so it's cheaper than the commercial product but it still costs something, and that something is deducted from the Social Security payments we old codgers get. 

And every year, right on schedule, the government announces a cost-of-living increase to Social Security payments (that's indexed to inflation) and then, about a month later, a corresponding increase to the Medicare premium (that is inflation).

This year the hit is a little less than most years, proportionally, and yes, this Alzheimer's drug is undoubtedly a very good thing. So not bitching, just pointing out.

This year's Medicare increase is, just like the bump in Social Security COLA, "one of the largest increases ever."

A rainy, windy day

I keep thinking this is some kind of joke…

Covid vaccine holdouts are caving to mandates — then scrambling to 'undo' their shots

…but what if it isn't?

No. Wait.

Skyline

The great Daylight Saving Time freak out…

Sunday, people living in states that follow this practice will set their clocks back, gaining the hour of sleep they lost in the spring.…

…that happens twice every year has always puzzled me. For one thing, one doesn't "lose" an hour in the spring and "gain" it in the fall; there are the same number of hours in every day. They're just numbered differently. 

For another, the hour supposedly "gained" always happens on a Sunday morning, a time when most people can sleep an hour later if they want to. And Sunday happens 52 times a year.

Plus, you can "lose" an hour five times a week by watching Jimmy Fallon.

I once heard a woman claim, in a TV interview, that Daylight Saving Time was "messing with God's time," God's time apparently being Eastern Standard. And I once met a guy from New York camping in the northern Minnesota woods who was frustrated because it got dark by 9:00 every night but he couldn't go to sleep that early—he re-set his watch so the sun didn't set until 1:00 AM and everything was fine after that.

I guess it all depends.

Down the line

Main Street

If we don't all go extinct from climate change…

 …or die in a global thermonuclear war…or get hit by an asteroid…or wiped out by a new, even more virulent virus…we might lose our democracy. 

How to lose America: The death of democracy looks nearer than ever

Grim, right? Except of course, just last week, thousands of people of all sizes, shapes, colors, genders, and Halloween candy preferences were elected to public offices all around the country, and it was an off year. 

There's that.

Morning on the Common