3 stars
When Private Equity Takes Over a Nursing Home | New Yorker
At the organization’s peak, in the nineteen-fifties, the Little Sisters of the Poor owned fifty-two nursing homes in the United States. Today it runs twenty-two. “In general, we like to have ten Little Sisters in each home,” Sister Mary John, a former assistant administrator at St. Joseph’s, said. But, since 1965, the number of Catholic sisters in the U.S. has dropped from roughly a hundred and eighty thousand to some thirty-nine thousand, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. As a result, the Little Sisters have withdrawn from many of their nursing homes. Typically, the facilities have been sold to nonprofits. A large Catholic health-care system had expressed interest in buying St. Joseph’s, as had the Catholic Diocese of Richmond. “But the pandemic and the lockdowns of nursing homes made it difficult,” Sister Mary John said, of securing a buyer. In the spring of 2021, an offer materialized from the Portopiccolo Group, a private-equity firm based in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, which then had a portfolio of more than a hundred facilities across the East Coast. “They said they like to keep things the way they are,” Sister Mary John told me.
The deal was finalized by June. Portopiccolo’s management company, Accordius Health, was brought in to run the home’s day-to-day operations. Staffers recall that, at an early town hall, Kim Morrow, Accordius Health’s chief operating officer, repeatedly said the company wouldn’t institute significant changes. But many staff members felt a disconnect. Someone asked if the number of residents in each room would change. A staffer remembered Morrow saying, “That might change. We might double it.” (Morrow doesn’t recall saying so.) At another town hall, Celia Soper, Accordius Health’s regional operations director, told St. Joseph’s staff, “We see that you all work hard. But it’s time we start working smart.”
Nearly a quarter of the hundred-person staff had been with the home for more than fifteen years; the activities director was in her forty-fifth year. But the ownership change precipitated a mass exodus. Within two weeks, management laid out plans to significantly cut back nurse staffing. Some mornings, there were only two nursing aides working at the seventy-two-bed facility. A nurse at the home, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, told me, “It takes two people just to take some residents to the bathroom.” (When reached by e-mail, a Portopiccolo spokesperson said, “We never made any staffing cuts during the transition.”)
The Simple Secret of Runway Digits | YouTube [CGP Grey]
CGP Grey is so good at what he does.
Book Review: What We Owe The Future | Astral Codex Ten
An academic once asked me if I was writing a book. I said no, I was able to communicate just fine by blogging. He looked at me like I was a moron, and explained that writing a book isn’t about communicating ideas. Writing a book is an excuse to have a public relations campaign.
If you write a book, you can hire a publicist. They can pitch you to talk shows as So-And-So, Author Of An Upcoming Book. Or to journalists looking for news: “How about reporting on how this guy just published a book?” They can make your book’s title trend on Twitter. Fancy people will start talking about you at parties. Ted will ask you to give one of his talks. Senators will invite you to testify before Congress. The book itself can be lorem ipsum text for all anybody cares. It is a ritual object used to power a media blitz that burns a paragraph or so of text into the collective consciousness.
If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He’s been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded. […]
MacAskill is quick to say that he is not advocating that we sacrifice present needs in favor of future ones.
This is good PR - certainly lots of people have tried to attack the book on the grounds that worrying about the future is insensitive when there’s so much suffering in the present, and this gracefully sidesteps those concerns.
Part of me would have selfishly preferred that MacAskill attack these criticisms head-on. If you really believe future people matter, then caring about them at the expense of present people isn’t insensitive. Imagine someone responding to abolitionist literature with “It’s insensitive to worry about black people when there’s so much suffering within the white community.” This argument only makes sense if you accept that white people matter more - but the whole point of abolitionist arguments is that maybe that isn’t true. “It’s insensitive to worry about future people when there’s suffering in the present” only makes sense if you accept that present people get overwhelming priority over future ones, the point MacAskill just wrote a book arguing against. So these aren’t really criticisms of the book so much as total refusals to engage with it. MacAskill could have said so and repeated his arguments more forcefully instead of being so agreeable.
But this is a selfish preference coming from the part of me that wants to see philosophers have interesting fights. Most of me agrees with MacAskill’s boring good-PR point: long-termism rarely gives different answers from near-termism.
Has Technological Progress Stalled | Scholar’s Stage
There are three arguments here. Each deserves independent comment. Thiel’s first claim is that scientific and technological progress has stagnated since at least the ‘70s. His second claim, which is explored in greater depth in the rest of Harrington’s interview, is that this stagnation is the root cause of most American social strife. Finally, he argues that the central reason we do not recognize all of this is because progress (similar to words like “freedom” or “equality”) is a notion so fundamental to our culture that we cannot admit its erosion.
Here I focus on the first of these claims. This post is about technology, innovation, and scientific advance. My main criticism of Thiel’s view is that he is not pessimistic enough in his account of scientific achievement.
Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals | New Yorker
The four years of the Trump Presidency were characterized by a fantastical degree of instability: fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms, abrupt dismissals. At first, Trump, who had dodged the draft by claiming to have bone spurs, seemed enamored with being Commander-in-Chief and with the national-security officials he’d either appointed or inherited. But Trump’s love affair with “my generals” was brief, and in a statement for this article the former President confirmed how much he had soured on them over time. “These were very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system,” he said.
It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise, not blind loyalty. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”
“Which generals?” Kelly asked.
“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.
“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.
But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the President was determined to test the proposition.
By late 2018, Trump wanted his own handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had tired of Joseph Dunford, a Marine general who had been appointed chairman by Barack Obama, and who worked closely with Mattis as they resisted some of Trump’s more outlandish ideas. Never mind that Dunford still had most of a year to go in his term. For months, David Urban, a lobbyist who ran the winning 2016 Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, had been urging the President and his inner circle to replace Dunford with a more like-minded chairman, someone less aligned with Mattis, who had commanded both Dunford and Kelly in the Marines.
2 stars
The Humiliating History of the TSA | The Verge
People cry at airports all the time. So when Jai Cooper heard sobbing from the back of the security line, it didn’t really faze her. As an officer of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), she had gotten used to the strange behavior of passengers. Her job was to check people’s travel documents, not their emotional well-being.
But this particular group of tearful passengers presented her with a problem. One of them was in a wheelchair, bent over with her head between her knees, completely unresponsive. “Is she okay? Can she sit up?” Cooper asked, taking their boarding passes and IDs to check. “I need to see her face to identify her.”
“She can’t, she can’t, she can’t,” said the passenger who was pushing the wheelchair.
Soon, Cooper was joined at her station by a supervisor, followed by an assortment of EMTs and airport police officers. The passenger was dead. She and her family had arrived several hours prior, per the airport’s guidance for international flights, but she died sometime after check-in. Since they had her boarding pass in hand, the distraught family figured that they would still try to get her on the flight. Better that than leave her in a foreign country’s medical system, they figured.
The family might not have known it, but they had run into one of air travel’s many gray areas. Without a formal death certificate, the passenger could not be considered legally dead. And US law obligates airlines to accommodate their ticketed and checked-in passengers, even if they have “a physical or mental impairment that, on a permanent or temporary basis, substantially limits one or more major life activities.” In short: she could still fly. But not before her body got checked for contraband, weapons, or explosives. And since the TSA’s body scanners can only be used on people who can stand up, the corpse would have to be manually patted down.
“We’re just following TSA protocol,” Cooper explained.
Her colleagues checked the corpse according to the official pat-down process. With gloves on, they ran the palms of their hands over the collar, the abdomen, the inside of the waistband, and the lower legs. Then, they checked the body’s “sensitive areas” — the breasts, inner thighs, and buttocks — with “sufficient pressure to ensure detection.”
Only then was the corpse cleared to proceed into the secure part of the terminal.
Not even death can exempt you from TSA screening.
The Death Cheaters | Toronto Life
The members of Longevity House are united by two things: a willingness to hand over $100,000 and a burning desire to live forever. Inside the weird world of cryotherapy, biocharging and fecal transplants
After the Zodiac Killer's '340' Cipher Stumped the FBI, Three Amateurs Made a Breakthrough | Popular Mechanics
Here’s the YouTube video mentioned in this piece.
The envelope arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969 without a return address, its directive to the recipient, in handwriting distinctively slanted and words unevenly spaced, to “please rush to editor.” The Chronicle newsroom had seen the scrawl before, on previous letters sent from the Zodiac, a self-monikered serial killer who threatened to go on a “kill rampage” if the paper didn’t publish his writing on its front page. By the time of the November letter, the Zodiac had already attacked seven people, murdering five. His most recent murder—of a San Francisco cab driver, by gunshot—had occurred just four weeks before this new envelope arrived. The Zodiac had mailed the Chronicle a piece of the victim’s bloodied shirt as evidence of the crime.
The Zodiac’s letters were replete with grisly imagery. He signed his “name” with a crosshairs symbol. He shared haunting details of his attacks. He promised to blow up buses of schoolchildren and unleash a “death machine” on San Francisco. But in addition to these overt threats, he included baffling ciphers for investigators to crack, troubling grids of symbols and letters that presumably masked a secret about his identity, intentions, or victims (to this day, the killer has never been found). The Zodiac’s first cipher, included in the July 31 letter, had been solved within a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team—but it had only revealed more of the killer’s raving. The second, now known as “the 340” due to the number of characters in it, would prove a much more difficult challenge. It came with a letter for the Chronicle, reading in part:
PS could you print this new cipher in your frunt page? I get aufully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing !!!!!!
The paper’s editors, along with local law enforcement officials, had no reason to doubt the Zodiac’s most recent threat. They published the 340 the next day, hoping it might bring them one step closer to the serial killer’s identity, or lead them to his next victims.
But the 340 stumped both amateur and professional cryptographers alike—not just in the weeks following its publication, but for decades. The NSA couldn’t crack it. Neither could the Naval Intelligence Office or the FBI. For more than fifty years, the cipher remained an unsolvable enigma, one that grew to almost mythic proportions among codebreakers and cryptography sleuths. Some speculated that the cipher would never be solved—that it was too sophisticated, too challenging for even contemporary cryptographers.
The Curious Afterlife of a Brain Trauma Survivor | Wired
All her life, Sophie had been a “fairly introverted, cautious girl,” Jane remembered. As her time at the hospital progressed, though, that young woman faded more and more from view. When a nurse went through the neurology wing and marked each room with colored tape, Sophie snuck around and mischievously peeled all the tape off. One night, after most of the patients had gone to sleep, she wheeled around the floor and changed the dates on all their whiteboards to December 24. When a technician explained that he would be doing something called a “propeller rotation” while she was in the MRI machine, she told him, “It’s not a helicopter, so fuck you.” She found one of the neurosurgeons who made rounds on her wing handsome, and she asked him out on the spot. With intense sincerity, she queried one of the physicians on her care team about where the source of consciousness lay in the brain. “She was really, really social, and that wasn’t the Sophie that we knew from before,” Jane recalled.
For U.S. troops who survived Kabul airport disaster, guilt and grief endure | Washington Post
From a guard tower overlooking Kabul’s airport, two U.S. Marines spotted a man matching the description of a suspected suicide bomber. They radioed their commanders: “Do we have permission to engage?”
Request denied, one of the Marines, Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, recalled being told. Too many civilians nearby.
The man vanished from view among a crush of people clamoring outside the airport’s Abbey Gate, he said. It was Aug. 26, 2021. Hours later, an explosion ripped through the crowd, killing an estimated 170 Afghans along with 13 U.S. troops.
Vargas-Andrews contends that “unfortunately, a lot of people died” because he was directed to stand down. “That’s a hard thing to deal with,” he said. “You know, that’s something that, honestly, eats at me every single day.” […]
The small contingent of U.S. troops, linked arm-in-arm at times, attempted to hold back the masses. But the determined civilians broke through, with some boarding parked C-17 cargo planes without permission, and others climbing onto the outside of aircraft before takeoff only to fall to their death moments later.
“That’s how desperate they were to get out of there,” said Army 1st Lt. Timothy Williams. “It was one of those defining moments, I think, for everybody where it was just like, ‘Wow, this is terrible.’ ”
Africa’s Cold Rush and the Promise of Refrigeration | New Yorker
At one in the morning, several hours before fishing boats launch, François Habiyambere, a wholesale fish dealer in Rubavu, in northwest Rwanda, sets out to harvest ice. In the whole country, there is just one machine that makes the kind of light, snowy flakes of ice needed to cool the tilapia that, at this hour, are still swimming through the dreams of the fish farmers who supply Habiyambere’s business. Flake ice, with its soft edges and fluffy texture, swaddles seafood like a blanket, hugging, without crushing, its delicate flesh. The flake-ice machine was bought secondhand a few years ago from a Nile-perch processing plant in Uganda. A towering, rusted contraption, it sits behind a gas station on the main road into the southeastern market town of Rusizi, on the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its daily output would almost fill a typical restaurant dumpster, which is considerably less than the amount required by the five fishmongers who use it.
“The first one who comes gets enough,” Habiyambere told me when I accompanied him one day in May. “The rest do not.” He said this in a tone of quiet resignation. The machine is five and a half hours’ drive south of where he lives, which is why his workday begins in the middle of the night. He rides in one of the country’s few refrigerated trucks, driven by a solid, handsome twenty-eight-year-old named Jean de Dieu Umugenga, and laden with spring onions and carrots bound for market. The route is twisty and Umugenga swings around the hairpin bends with panache, shifting in his seat with each gear change, while twangy inanga music plays on the radio.
I Went to Trash School | Curbed
The white elephant, as it is sometimes affectionately called, is the Department of Sanitation’s standard collection truck. There are currently 2,100 of them in the city fleet, all standing nearly 12 feet high and 33 feet long. The vehicle’s tailgate — the overhanging rear end that raises skyward while the truck dumps mounds of garbage — is held in place with two locking pins, like hinge joints in a massive body. Hydraulic oil pumps through veinlike cylinders, with a nervous system composed of color-coded levers: red, red, black.
At 6:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in August, as the sun burns off the ocean mist at Floyd Bennett Field, I am standing alongside around a dozen other people, staring into the elephant’s hopper — the familiar gaping maw into which workers feed trash bags — as it slowly closes shut with a satisfying clank. The hulking blade that compacts the trash moves in a single, sweeping motion. We watch with quiet concentration. Over the sound of the rusty metal, the man operating the truck, in black sunglasses and a crew cut, yells: “Garbage goes in, then what goes out?” In unison, we respond: “Juice!”
Humpback Whales Pass Their Songs Across Oceans | New York Times
One of the most remarkable things about our species is how fast human culture can change. New words can spread from continent to continent, while technologies such as cellphones and drones change the way people live around the world.
It turns out that humpback whales have their own long-range, high-speed cultural evolution, and they don’t need the internet or satellites to keep it running.
In a study published on Tuesday, scientists found that humpback songs easily spread from one population to another across the Pacific Ocean. It can take just a couple of years for a song to move several thousand miles.
Ellen Garland, a marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the study, said she was shocked to find whales in Australia passing their songs to others in French Polynesia, which in turn gave songs to whales in Ecuador.
“Half the globe is now vocally connected for whales,” she said. “And that’s insane.”
How Life Looks Through My ‘Whale Eyes’ | New York Times
In the Opinion video above, James Robinson, a filmmaker from Maine, shows what it feels like to live with several disabling eye conditions that have defied an array of treatments and caused him countless humiliations. Using playful graphics and enlisting his family as subjects in a series of optical tests, he invites others to view the world through his eyes.
But his video is also an essay on seeing, in the deeper sense of the word — seeing and being seen, recognition and understanding, sensitivity and compassion, the stuff of meaningful human connection.
America’s Fire Sale: Get Some Free Speech While You Can | The Atlantic
Caitlin Flanagan:
Whenever a society collapses in on itself, free speech is the first thing to go. That’s how you know we’re in the process of closing up shop. Our legal protections remain in place—that’s why so many of us were able to smack the Trump piñata to such effect—but the culture of free speech is eroding every day. Ask an Oberlin student—fresh outta Shaker Heights, coming in hot, with a heart as big as all outdoors and a 3 in AP Bio—to tell you what speech is acceptable, and she’ll tell you that it’s speech that doesn’t hurt the feelings of anyone belonging to a protected class.
And here we are, running out the clock on the American epilogue. The people on the far right are dangerous lunatics and millions on even the center left want to rewrite the genetic code.
If you don’t want to stick around for the fire sale (The Federalist Papers! “Letter From Birmingham Jail”! Everything must go!) and you’re not too eager to get knifed on a Friday morning because of something you said, you might want to look into relocating to one of the other countries shaped by the principles of the American Revolution. They aren’t hard to find. Just go to Google and type in the free world.
The Cream Rises to the Top | Marginal Revolution
Can efforts to eradicate inequality in wealth and education eliminate intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status? The Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution aimed to do exactly that. Using newly digitized archival records and contemporary census and household survey data, we show that the revolutions were effective in homogenizing the population economically in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the pre-revolution generation re-emerges today. Almost half a century after the revolutions, individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 16 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from non-elite households.
1 star
Drum Juggling Street Performer | YouTube
A street performer in Zaragoza, Spain drew in and dazzled a crowd with his awe-inspiring drum juggling where he would toss his drumsticks at a far away drum set, then catch them when they bounced back to him, all while keeping a beat.
Why plastic doesn't dry in the dishwasher | BBC
Plastic is a staple of modern kitchens, but it comes with a frustrating problem – it doesn't dry properly in a dishwasher. Why?
An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition, and Artists Are Pissed | Vice
But Allen did not paint “Théâtre D'opéra Spatial,” AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs.
Are chess players worse when playing remote? | Marginal Revolution
Using the artificial intelligence embodied in a powerful chess engine to assess the quality of chess moves and associated errors, we find a statistically and economically significant decrease in performance when an individual competes remotely versus offline in a face-to-face setting. The effect size decreases over time, suggesting an adaptation to the new remote setting.