Sadness I Will Remember Forever

The words still ring in my ears and make me want to cry. “My pony!” [deleted] I’m getting all misty just thinking about this.

When our first child was maybe 3 or 4 years old, she was all about her My Little Pony stuff. She must have had a dozen or so little horses, play sets for them, accessories, clothes, the whole works. When she got a little pink pony with purple hair from McDonalds in a happy meal, she was happy about it. She was super happy about it; she loved that pony.

We stopped at the grocery store on the way home and when her door opened, the pony fell out and tumbled aaaaallll the way down into a storm drain next to where we had parked. The grates weigh like 300lbs and there was no way I could have got down there. I tried to play it off but it hurt me, to hear her plaintive cry of

“My pony!”

Sadness I Will Remember Forever

Oh man this is so [deleted] sad it still hurts me. You may think it is stupid.

When I was maybe 8 years old, M.U.S.C.L.E. figurines were the bomb. I had some and I wanted more. I would play with those things by myself and with my friends at school and I love love loved them. Had a little wrestling arena for them and everything.

One day my mom took us to a store on Highway 6 in Houston and I got a bucket of these figures and it had some of the coolest high level ones. My collection was really stepped up by having these. I was stoked.  I dropped the bucket and it spilled out all over the highway as we were crossing the road on foot. Mom had to hold me back from running across the ditch when I realized what had happened, because cars were driving through where we had just been, and running over my precious figurines.

Government: Worse at Everything

I made a note to myself when it was fresh news, to mention this as an example – but here we go since I remembered it again:

Travis Central Health had a nice program: if you need a ride to the hospital, we’ll give you one. It was initially given $19,000 but because of increased demand they put in another $9,000. By the time this made the radio news, it had given rides to 140 residents.

No, I didn’t drop a zero there. 140 people got rides, for $28,000. For the math-impaired, that is $200 per ride. You could literally hire a taxi for every drive and do this cheaper. But not if you want to layer a government bureaucracy on top of it.

And no, this is not ambulance transportation. This is *literally* hiring a cab, or giving people a voucher to get on the city bus which costs single-digits of dollars per ride.  The additional cost to get up to $200/ride is the bureaucracy.

Remember that, the next time someone says they want to put government in charge of another aspect of life.

https://www.centralhealth.net/connecting-patients-to-care-central-health-communitycare-providing-door-to-door-rides-to-medical-appointments/ fx

https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/Austin