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Wastefulness that you have encountered ( tax write offs etc )

Perfectly good things get thrown away all the time at my job. My grandfather used to work for ALCOA, and in the 60s' and early 70s' the company would take good running vehicles complete with fuel and oil and either bury them or dump them in the bay.
At my job they threw away a $1,600 dollar stainless steel tool chest because it had a bent radio antenna ( there is a built in radio and refrigerator in the tool chest )
Apparently it would cost to much to ship back, so the guys spray painted it and took a sledge hammer to it so no one could use it. The company policy is that if something is in good working order and credit is given on the product, it has to be destroyed and thrown away.

Was I the only one that asked why not just have the manufacturer ship a new antenna ?? :confused:

Anyone else have examples of corporate greed / wastefulness ?

I saw a job where at the end of the project, Rigid 600 threaders ($1400 ish) were thrown in a dumpster along with other tools.
It was cheaper to dumpster them and list as a project cost than catalog, box up, store and ship to the next project.
Back in the 80s residential boom, for every 5 houses built, enough "overage" was dumped to build a 6th one. You should've seen the house I was living in. Most of that scrap got picked up :)

When my dad worked for Bell, they use rope once to pull underground feeders in. Maybe twice if it is clean and looks good. Then it gets thrown out. The rope is cheaper than the labor if it breaks mid-pull.

Shall I continue ?

We are forbid from reusing wire nuts. Sometimes the spring part gets damaged or falls out. Again, its cheaper to toss them than track down an open circuit.

If I went through all the items on construction projects that get tossed due to it being cheaper than the labor for cleaning, sorting, storing, transporting, etc it would only waste more electrons.

Shall I go on about how in food service, once it leaves the counter, even if wrapped, it must be tossed.

The waste in the county (corporate AND home) could support the rest of the world. :rolleyes: :mad:

These

http://images.mirror.co.uk/upl/daily...-774431823.jpg

4 years and counting of total chaos and mismanagement, escalating costs, leaky contracts allowing suppliers to demand more cash and at the end of it possibly a system which won't go far enough to actually make any money and will be living off my taxes and probably those of A-junior.

The proponents of this idea should be hung, drawn quatered and then shot and then the bits jumped up and down on and then shot again and... :mad:

Or at the very least they should be banned from holding a public office.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arragonis (Post 259060)

If England runs like the US, they will be promoted and get a raise.

Here we also have what are reffered to as "trains to nowhere".

Quote:

Originally Posted by JasonG (Post 259064)

Here we also have what are reffered to as "trains to nowhere".

Oh, we've got plenty of roads to nowhere ; stretches of road that don't connect to anything ; bridges over nothing or nothing going over a bridge ; a huge waste-water pumping line that sat unused for decades (it's now transporting potable water); a military airfield that was never used ;a huge tidal harbour dock that's hardly used, yet will be expanded with another similar dock; AFVs with 90mm guns that no-one else in NATO uses; MirSIP , unlicenced Dassault Mirage upgrades where cancellation would have been more expensive that seeing the upgrades through (later sold to Chile at a silly price); upgrading frigates, only to sell them to Bulgaria ; a metro system in Charleroi that was never used; ...

The list is far longer than that.

We're a rich country, with only 350 billion euro of debt.
Guess how we racked up that debt ...

I spent a year in the desert. Everything about that war is a waste, so I'm not going to bother citing individual examples.

How about this one: Defense Secretary's commute home raises eyebrows

Quote:

WASHINGTON - Shortly after Defense Secretary Leon Panetta took office July 1, he boarded an Air Force jet and flew home to California for a three-day weekend. He has flown home five weekends since then and has spent part of a two-week vacation there.

Aides say that unless he is required to stay in Washington or travel elsewhere, Panetta will spend most weekends and days off at his 12-acre walnut farm in Carmel Valley, where he and his wife, Sylvia, make their home.

It is common for members of Congress to fly back to their districts every weekend or so. But his absences at the Pentagon have raised eyebrows in workaholic Washington. Even some of Panetta's friends wonder how he can get away so regularly while his department, by far the largest in the U.S. government, faces multiple wars and daily crises.

'Toughest job in Washington'

"I think he's got the toughest job in Washington, and I think it's amazing" that he plans to go home so often, said Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., who represents the area and calls his own weekly coast-to-coast commute "the toughest part of the job."

Panetta usually flies home late Friday and returns to Washington late Sunday, getting to work on Monday morning, his aides say. Before agreeing to run the Pentagon, he told the White House that he planned to go home frequently. His aides maintain he stays in touch while out of town.

When Hurricane Irene threatened the East Coast last weekend, Pentagon spokesman George Little said Panetta had taken "an average of 5-7 minutes to approve" requests from governors to mobilize National Guard units.

He stays in regular email and phone contact on his ranch, aides said. A secure telephone has been installed so he can discuss classified material, and he can participate in secure video teleconferences at a facility a short drive away.

When a CH-47 helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan on Aug. 6, killing 30 Americans, Panetta's senior military assistant, Lt. Gen. John Kelly, called him in Carmel Valley with the reports. The next morning, after he spoke to commanders in Afghanistan, Panetta joined a conference call convened by national security adviser Tom Donilon to discuss the incident, Pentagon officials said.

Always accessible

"He is on duty 24-7, as any senior official is, and just like the president when he goes on vacation, the secretary is accessible 24-7," said Doug Wilson, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.

Robert Gates, the previous defense secretary, kept a home in Washington state. He visited several times a year but did not go home each weekend.

His predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, made occasional visits to a home in Taos, N.M., but he mostly stayed in Washington or at his house on the nearby Chesapeake Bay.

Panetta is required to fly on U.S. government aircraft to ensure constant communication with the Pentagon and the White House in case of a national security crisis. On personal trips, like the weekend flights, Panetta is required to reimburse the Treasury for the cost of an equivalent coach fare. The actual cost is far higher -- about $3,200 per flight hour, the Defense Department said.

When he goes home, he flies on the Air Force version of a Gulfstream executive jet, which also carries communications gear. When he was the CIA director, Panetta once was out of contact for 45 minutes aboard a chartered aircraft, aides said.

The CIA director's usual plane had mechanical problems, and aides discovered they did not have the phone number of the replacement aircraft. It became a mini-crisis when an urgent request came for Panetta to approve an operation against a suspected terrorist, a senior Pentagon aide said. Communications were eventually restored, and the delay had no impact on the operation.

Defense Secretary's commute home raises eyebrows | StarTribune.com Huh. Forget the link; the Strib changed this very link to something unrelated and deleted the comment section too. :confused:

If I never started another engine for the rest of my life it still wouldn't make up for the fuel this ***hole is burning. That's kind of like thinking about Fat Charlie's comment, my entire life's tax contributions probably paid for one tailfin on one missile (no I don't want to do the math to really know). :mad:

Military spending here is a mess.

1. Chinooks
RAF ordered Chinooks for Afghanistan a few years ago. MOD decided it new best and reduced the spec to one so low that they can't fly in fog, cloads or at night. Last time I checked Afghanistan has quite a few mountainous areas with clouds and is subject to periods of night at least once per day.

Boeing suggest the spec was too low, MOD said it new best. Chinooks delivered and couldn't be used. Sat in a Hanger for 5 years and even started to be canibalised for parts for other aircraft.

MOD finally decided to upgrade them expect to do this now means that they have to more or less take the things to pieces again to install the missing bits.

2. Transport Aircraft
RAF buying Airbus A400Ms - an aircraft too heavy to lift it's specified weight, too thirsty to have a long range and about 2 years behind schedule. Meanwhile of course there is the C-17 which is cheaper, goes further, faster, uses less fuel, carried more and is about 80% of the projected price of an A400M - oh and the US Army and Air Force have more or less worked the bugs out of it so it can be used from day 1.

And this is before we think about the fact that the Typhoon is a decade late, and under spec and we have to continue flying circa early 1970s Tornados, just when the Russians have started sending Bears over again.

1960s
http://www.lightningpilots.com/LightningBear740.jpg

Now
http://files.air-attack.com/MIL/euro...2_20070822.jpg

3. Aircraft Carriers
MOD decides to retire the Harrier earlier this year. We only have aircraft carriers which can operate Harriers. So we don't have any. Oh but we are building two new ones, except they have no aircraft because the new Tempest is delayed. Oh and one aircraft carrier is to be mothballed straight away - why build it then ?

But even building the things is complicated - its done in two parts - on opposite coasts of Scotland. So they have to sail the centre section around the whole coast to attach it to the rest. Why ?

Oh, and to pay for all of this we just made 2000 soldiers, including some on active service, redundant.

We need another peasants (middle class) revolt...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frank Lee (Post 259202)

I could never start another engine for the rest of my life and still not make up for the fuel this ***hole is burning.

Can't see why you're blaming him, when it's policies he didn't make that force him to travel that way*. Seems to me as though he could pretty much do his job by telecommuting, if he was allowed, and save everybody money.

(*Also, Air Force pilots need to log a certain number of flight hours to stay current. If they ferry people around while doing this, there's no extra cost.)

It's the same with the criticism of Obama (and Bush before him, so I'm not being political) for taking "vacations" outside of Washington. AFAIK, there's very little a President does that can't be done just as well remotely, and one so inclined could skive off just as well in the White House as anywhere.

Not related to either politics or military discussions...

A few days ago we received a box from one of our regular suppliers with new product in it which we did not order.
The new product is the same product we already had but with new packaging and the instructions were to dispose of the existing stock rather than return it to the suppliers for repackaging.

The boss decided to give it to the Salvation Army depot so someone got for virtually free hair car products (shampoo , conditioner , volumiser etc) which normally retail at around $40.00 tube.
There were about fifteen or so tubes and that was just for our small retail section.

Hair car products are not our main line but it does prompt the question:
How much would it cost the manufacturer to do this for every stockist in the country?

No wonder their stuff retails at $40.00 each!

Peter.

I'm blaming him for flying crosscountry for a whole 1 1/2 day weekend, every weekend. I could see it for getting away for at least a week. Is it worth it??? He should get a place there; it would cost FAR less (not to him though).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frank Lee (Post 259347)

You may have noticed this incident from a couple of years ago ? The 650 s***s are still costing me a fortune in taxes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frank Lee (Post 259347)

I'm blaming him for flying crosscountry for a whole 1 1/2 day weekend, every weekend.

I'd place more blame on a system that doesn't let him (or a lot of other people) stay in California and do his job by telecommuting. How much "business travel" could be done just as well by telecommuting? I think about 90% - the rest is just waste.

Cucumber, lettuce, and bottled water. It's basically just the same thing, only thousands of times more wasteful than tap water.

Waste?

No tax deductions, or other rights, privileges, etc, should be allowed any corporation not also available to an American at the 30th percentile from the bottom of national income statistics (and also used by 50% of them). None, zero, zip. They don't like it, they can dis-incorporate. And no more capital gains tax: all income subject to income tax (at the 1960 rate of 5% of GDP for corporations/rich).

The waste, corruption and incompetence of the private sector outweighs that of government any day.

Secretary Panetta -- and the rest of them -- deserve no more than a government Ford and a driver. Whatever was good enough for FDR is good enough for these jackals.

.

.

My brother-in-law's company bought a printer/scanner/copier/fax/whatever. When it arrived it turned out that it doesn't work - there's something wrong with the carriage. So they called up the manufacturer and asked whether they should return it, or will someone come around and repair. They found out that a second one will be shipped and the first one can be thrown out. So my bro-in-law gave it to his brother, who was in need of a printer. It turned out later that the carriage was jammed because someone at the factory forgot to remove a piece of styrofoam. Now both of them have printers in perfect working order.

Towards the end of communism here, in the 1980's, nation-owned companies had regulations which stated that "each vehicle in the fleet uses X liters of fuel per week", no matter how much of it is actually used. If the fuel consumption was lower than the "official" numbers, then this would mean that the driver didn't work as hard as he should have, etc. This kind of mentality promoted doing all sorts of stupid things - idling the truck all night, for example. Even worse, many drivers would suck the remaining fuel from their tanks at the end of the week to show that they indeed needed all of it. Usually, the 'surplus' fuel would end up in the tank of someone's private car, but sometimes it would just get poured into the sewer.

Oh, and then there are the "small" things, like whole office building where all computers and lights are left on 24/7.

Quote:

Originally Posted by slowmover (Post 259560)

Whatever was good enough for FDR is good enough for these jackals.

I have to disagree with that: no WAY am I, as a taxpayer, going to be happy about buying yachts for these guys: POTOMAC - F.D.R.'s "Floating White House" FDR also had his own Presidential airplanes, one reportedly customized with a built-in elevator for his wheelchair.

We get quite a few components which are solid-state - no moving parts and no parts which can be replaced or serviced, at least not economically by us. If they are DOA or fail within the warranty period it is cheaper for the reseller to just replace them for us FOC and ask us to dispose of the old one. That passes the cost and responsibility of that disposal to us of course.

When we asked for the cost of shipping the parts back one time the supplier concerned immediately suggested that there would be an additional price for all deliveries and pickups in Scotland, and as they were a monopoly supplier for that component at the time we had to accept it.

Insurance often means we can't recycle parts even PCs, although we have enough parts to make hundreds of reasonable spec machines if we put them together. I'm trying to see if we can donate them somewhere but they usually only take complete, working equipment.

Plus of course we have to destroy HDD contents for data protection which takes time.

What happens to the bread that a bakery doesn't sell? Often, it is given away to homeless/poor people.

That used to be the case here, until a few years ago when new tax laws prohibited giving away stuff which should have been sold, or even selling it for less than its cost of production (anti-dumping law?). The media showed a baker who got a huge fine for giving away a few day-old rolls (he was a local hero for a short time). So perfectly edible bread was being thrown out:mad:

Only after a lot of protests did our Enlightened MPs pass a law allowing stale bread to be sold off for 1 grosz (~1/4 eurocent).

Who's watched Jeremy Seifert's Dive!?

Airplane cups and napkins are a huge waste.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Piwoslaw (Post 259643)

They used to do the same here, Churches,Shelters, non-profits........ Then somebody got sick, blamed it on the day old/ left over food and sued. Won tons of money and ever since the stores throw it out to protect themselves from the lawyers.

Throwing "slice" pizzas out at the end of the night when I worked delivering pizzas. My manager usually let me take the leftovers home if I called dibs on the leftovers when clocking in for my shift. I did that every once in a while, not all the time since I was sick of pizza. The undeliverable or "stiffed" food was set on a counter and was fair game for staff to eat while on shift.

In my job, it makes far more financial sense for me to throw out broken items and buy new for the tax writeoff instead of mend them. I try not to, but given the financial incentives it's hard not to sometimes.

I was passed today by one of those crew-cab pickup things popular over here with the bald midget shouty type of bloke.

On the side it said "Edinburgh - Your council, your future". Oh so its run by the people who want to build trams...

It had one person in it.

i worked for the department of defense rebuilding humvees for for years before going to iraq, we would take apart completely perfect running equipment to install new usually inferior stuff. exp for a while we where finding red top optimas in the battery boxes for these arent spec so where scrap . i went to iraq your a year to help field the new mrap vehicles. i was paid $23 per hour plus 35% hazard plus 35% prodiem(being away from home ) for the first 40 hours everything after that is time and a half. i probably worked 10 hours a week but got paid for 16 hours a day 7 days a week.

...yah, but the irate natives (usually) don't shoot AK-47's or RPG's at you if they don't like your work back here in the 'States!

(ex-USN, gov't contractor, here).

Here's a representative of democracy that democracy could live without.

Quote:

A veteran politician branded yesterday 'Britain's laziest MP' because he hasn't held a a surgery for constituents for 14 years says this is because he feared attack. Sir Stuart Bell claims he was threatened by a member of the public so decided only to see people by appointment since 1997.

Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts considers the case and concludes the MP for Middlesbrough 'has been taking the mick'.

The Hon Sir Stuart Bell, MP, knight of the realm, freeman of the City of London, chevalier of France's coveted Legion d'Honneur, did not get where he is today by listening to his constituents. No, no.

Champagne socialist Sir Stuart, 73, who sits for Middlesbrough in the Labour party interest, may have been born to a mining family. He may have started working life as a colliery clerk in County Durham and may once have been a city councillor in Newcastle upon Tyne.

But yesterday we learned how far he has travelled, in all senses, since those youthful days. Sir Stuart, who is said to maintain a pied a terre in Paris, admitted that he had not held an advice ‘surgery' for his constituents since, ooh, 1997.

Nor did he maintain an office in his North-East England constituency. He was willing, he vouchsafed, to meet the electors of Middlesbrough. But before any such face-to-face encounter could be undertaken, they must obtain an appointment from Sir Stuart's well-staffed Westminster office.

Tug your forelocks, little people. Sir Stuart will see you now. Be grateful. But do be quick, won't you? You may be heading back to Teesside on the National Express coach but your lord and master is off in the other direction. He has the Eurostar to catch for another of his long weekends on the banks of the Seine.

Sir Stuart's absence from his constituency, where he has a majority of 8,000, has something of a Victorian feel to it. You can imagine him gracing the pages of an Anthony Trollope novel, a whiskered, waist-coated powerbroker who takes a room at a local inn during the fortnight of general election campaigns but otherwise spurns the company of the voters.

But this is the 21st century and, furthermore, the post-expenses era. Westminster has just been through one of the most torrid periods of self-examination in history. In recent months the Commons, or so we thought, had improved itself. Did Sir Stuart not notice?

Seemingly not. Middlesbrough's Evening Gazette newspaper has done fine work. As Sir Stuart's local newspaper, the Gazette and its reporters must have long had to put up with his airs and graces. Finally, perhaps, something snapped. Journalists from the paper conducted an experiment and, pretending to be hard-pressed constituents, tried to contact the MP.

Over the course of two months they placed 100 telephone calls to Sir Stuart's published contact numbers. Never was Sir Stuart's telephone answered by a person. Each time a message was left on his machine. Never was a call returned. Pretty plainly, Sir Stuart could not give a stuff.

He is not the first politician to take a snooty view of the electorate. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal Prime Minister at the start of the 20th century, once made a rare visit to his Commons seat of Stirling Burghs and afterwards drawled: ‘I had nothing to say to my constituents on Friday and I think I very effectively said it.'

When newly elected Labour MPs reached Westminster after the 1945 landslide, one of the remaining Conservatives is reputed to have murmured in horror: ‘Who the hell are these people? They look like a lot of damned constituents.'

Constituents should not be everything to an MP. A parliamentarian is more than simply a representative of his electors. Being an MP is a curious mix, part law-maker, part scrutineer, part philosopher, part counsellor. An honourable MP will even, on occasions, ignore local opinion and vote in the Commons according to his own conscience.The expression ‘a good constituency MP' can be a two-edged term. It can suggest a dullard who is destined to languish for ever on the backbenches. An MP who thinks only of his or her constituents is a shallow proposition.

But the extent to which Sir Stuart has neglected Middlesbrough is way off any reasonable scale. He has been taking the mick. His behaviour has been beyond satire.
Fear attacks: Front page of the local newspaper about Stuart Bell MP, who has claimed £83,000 of work costs despite not holding a surgery for 14 years

Fear attacks: Front page of the local newspaper about Stuart Bell MP, who has claimed £83,000 of work costs despite not holding a surgery for 14 years

Sir Stuart has long been one of Westminster's shop stewards. He has a keen sense of entitlement, not just for himself and his wife (whom he employs on a fat public wage) but also for his fellow parliamentary pooh-bahs.

On the surface, he is an unlikely politician. He is a poor public speaker. Although he is a barrister, he is an indifferent advocate of a cause. When faced with a TV camera, he squints at the lens. His voice is furry, his vocabulary unspectacular and his intellect not always much sharper than a butter knife.When the expenses scandal was starting, most sensible veterans of Westminister could see that the game was up. They could see that Michael ‘Gorbals Mick' Martin, then the Speaker of the Commons, was inadequate.

A handful of old codgers, however, was prepared to defend the status quo. One of them was a Conservative (let us demonstrate party-political balance) whose name was David Maclean. Mr Maclean is now a member of the House of Lords. Don't tell me you are surprised.

The other defender of the old, rotten regime was the great socialist trougher, Sir Stuart Bell. That knighthood, since you ask, was bestowed by the Blair government in 2004. It was given ‘for services to Parliament' rather than for services to Middlesbrough.

Sir Stuart was part of the Labour party's ‘North East mafia' but Tony Blair was never completely sold on Bell. Rather than make him a minister in his first Government in 1997, he threw the jagged-toothed old boy a sinecure: Second Church Estates Commissioner. Thus did he become the voice of the Church of England in the Government. That good Anglicans should have been represented by a man so little interested in his own constituency, yet so gripped by expenses and allowances, was pretty grotty.

Sir Stuart was also active behind the scenes. He was, as the saying goes, ‘a good committee man'.

From 1997 onwards he immersed himself in Commons committees concerned with pay and pensions and estimates and budgets. As we later discovered, MPs, over that period, did pretty well for themselves. ‘Services to Parliament', indeed. Arise, Sir Stuart.

Now the wider world knows of his neglect. Now it is clear what we parliamentary sketchwriters long suggested: Sir Stuart Bell is a wrong 'un. The way he has ignored his constituency stinks. But it perhaps makes sense of his career.

After all, an MP who had really been in touch with the voters would surely never have gone out on such a limb to defend Speaker Martin or the old expenses arrangements. In the end, laziness was his undoing.

Read more: Snout in the trough and a flat in Paris | Mail Online

...does the phrase "...maintaining a professional 'distance'..." ring any bells?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arragonis (Post 260217)

A veteran politician branded yesterday 'Britain's laziest MP' because he hasn't held a surgery for constituents for 14 years...

Err... I know you guys are into the National Health thing, but don't you think asking your MPs to do surgery is taking things just a wee bit too far?

Well, getting this guy to do anything seems hard enough, and the waiting lists could do with some help, so maybe....

As for the NHS, it is super great IM(NV)HO...

Here's one

BBC News - Failed fire project wasted £469m, says committee of MPs

Quote:

A project to set up nine regional control centres for fire and rescue services in England was a "complete failure" and wasted £469m, MPs say.

There are 9 emergency phone centres which cost £4m a month in total every month, and all are EMPTY!

Someone on the radio this morning suggested setting fire to 8 of them. I find it hard to disagree...

Parliament pushes to slash food waste in Europe

Quote:

The European Parliament wants to cut food waste in half, warning that fresh and packaged foods tossed out every day pose a threat to Europe’s environment and efforts to reduce global poverty.

The European Commission estimates that up to 140 million tonnes of food and plant rubbish are produced each year in the EU, amounting to 300 kg per person – two thirds of which is edible.
...

MMMM... dining on recovered "thrown out" food right now- tastes even better when it's free!

Unless they have changed their policy lately; how about Japan's insistence on trashing out cars over 5 years old. True, we get some low mileage recycled motor/trans parts here (from Japan), but the idea staggers me!

I'm sure it's fun to have the latest thing, but what a waste!

Even here this worship of the new model motorcyle/or car that is 1 /10th of a second
in the quarter mile than last year's beater!??!

How jaded can one get.

I'm wired far too practical !

I'm thinking all men should wear gray socks, and medium brown briefs, but that's just me!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Piwoslaw (Post 280824)

Parliament pushes to slash food waste in Europe

What they don't say, is
- they are subsidizing the lot of it.
- they are often mandating this waste by requiring unnecessary short "use before" periods
- they've been stacking up milk-lakes and butter-mounts in the past
- when the EU exports more excess food to developing countries, it pushes local farmers out of the market, increasing dependence and poverty (same goes for US agricultural exports BTW)
- people get arrested and convicted for dumpster-diving, which is seen as theft

Quote:

Originally Posted by euromodder (Post 281053)

What they don't say, is
- we taxpayers are subsidizing the lot of it.
- they are often mandating this waste by requiring unnecessary short "use before" periods
- they've been stacking up milk-lakes and butter-mounts in the past
- when the EU exports more excess food to developing countries, it pushes local farmers out of the market, increasing dependence and poverty (same goes for US agricultural exports BTW)
- people get arrested and convicted for dumpster-diving, which is seen as theft

Fixed.

The other day I walked past an office building very late on Saturday night, after midnight. Even though there wasn't anyone inside (since Friday afternoon!), the lights were on in most of the windows, and I could see through the glass doors that the escalators were going and going, carrying nothing but air between the floors all day and all night. Also, the lobby was all lit up and the fountain was on. I'm willing to bet that most of the computers were also on, and that the thermostat isn't set for different temperatures during the day, night, and weekend:rolleyes:

On a different level, a day earlier I noticed another wastefulness. I am a blood donor - I don't get money for it, only a few bars of chocolate, but that's not why I do it - and it is hard on me when I realise how much waste is generated. All of the bandages, needles, bags, tubes, etc., are disposable, and since they are treated as medical waste, they don't get recycled. Unfortunately, even things that don't actually come into contact with blood (clothes and shoe covers, for example) also get thrown away with the medicals.

Took son to Dr the other day, his eye was swollen from allergies. He wrote a script for some magic cream. Went to pharmacy, $300 bucks. This was an out of pocket purchase so I asked the pharmicist to replace it with something that would do the same job but cheaper. He squawked..."we can't just replace a script sir, i'd have to call the doctor....pause....pause....pause....." Me: "Ok call the doctor then, get me something cheaper." the result ?

10 BUCKS!!!! 10 BUCKS for an older generic instead of $300!!! W T F ???? Why don't the drs do that in the first place? The pharmacists wasnt' happy about *HAVING* to call the Dr but so what, that's $290 bucks in my pocket....WOW!!

Quote:

Originally Posted by XDotNet (Post 308304)

Why don't the drs do that in the first place?

Because he wanted to go somewhere nice for vacation. It's no secret about how large companies sponsor doctors.