Cartoony Looney – Prattling before the Pratfall

Missed Management

There are countless reasons why businesses fail. Some are nobody’s fault. When the pandemic hit, restaurants did everything they could to survive, but many folded. Then there are the management failures. K-Mart wasn’t able to compete against Walmart. For much of the 20th century, Sears was what Amazon is today.

I will always be more than merely disappointed in my former employer of many years. Senior management’s hubris resulted in a total failure to respond in time to competition from Epic Systems. (No relation to Epic Games, other than they’re both software companies.)

The Federal Trade Commission needs to apply a different standard to its definition of a monopoly where Epic is concerned. A reasonable estimate is that Epic manages 75% of America’s non-military medical records. (Oracle Health, formerly Cerner, has the military systems.)

Epic’s power and influence is finally starting to get some attention…

… from conservative sources…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethjoseph/2024/02/26/epics-antitrust-paradox-who-should-control-the-levers-of-healthcare-innovation/

… as well as from the far left.

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/

Plowing Through the Piles

In an effort to dump a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have kept, I’m spending hours going through old boxes and cabinets. As always, this process gets bogged down very quickly as I find some long-forgotten things and take time to look them over. Was it really thirty years ago I drew this cartoon for an office event?

Artsy Smartsy

Before my cancer diagnosis, I was foolishly getting ambitious about actually doing something fun outside of the house. So I signed up for a drawing class. With my continued participation now in doubt, tonight’s class, the second, may be the last I am able to attend. I should definitely know more about my medical condition tomorrow.

Tonight’s warm-up was a “drawing from the right side of the brain” exercise, copying an upside-down picture, borrowed from a Picasso portrait of Stravinsky. On the left is the drawing as I saw it, on the right is what I drew.