> housing and healthcare (the third is education.) For the first one we know roughly what we need to do but won’t. For the second we don’t even have that.
Healthcare costs increasing is of very little concern to nursing facility ownership. Almost none of that is borne by the facility itself. They'll often hire skeletal crews of CNAs and LPNs (I was a paramedic, rare was it to see a facility in our area that even had an RN, and if they were, they were the DON, Director of Nursing, and had no direct hand in patient care). The facilities would contract with a physician service who oftentimes would not even speak to the patient, let alone -see- them.
And every, every single interaction with actual care provision was fully billed to the patient/resident's insurance. Anything that is not a profit making center for facility ownership is ruthlessly subcontracted out. A solid portion of the SNFs in my county will openly call 911 for anything beyond the most absolute basic first aid, even when their employees are ostensibly better educated/trained than the EMTs who might be responding.
Healthcare costs in the US are an abomination, but that's not the issue here, or not directly.
It’s worse than that — not only are the subcontracted entities often affiliated with the owners, but when your EMTs transport a resident, the SNF “holds their spot” (ie invoices the government) for 30 days.
It’s in their interest to dump the resident on the hospital and get paid for services not rendered. Also, as residents decline they need more care, are often on Medicaid (lower reimbursement), each time they go to the hospital there is a probability they they won’t come back, and will be replaced by a Medicare patient (Medicare pays for ~90 days) at a higher rate, and perhaps higher margin services like PT/OT.
It’s an evil system. Most of the people who died in NYC during early phases of COVID did because of intense lobbying to send them back to the SNF.
As a (former) paramedic, PE-run SNFs (skilled nursing facilities) are an absolute evil that absolutely kills people. I do want to be clear before any of the following that while there is a truth that many of the nursing staff at these facilities are often the lower quality tier of nursing care, they often care greatly for their patients/residents.
Staffing/flooring ratios? Laughable correlation to reality. Many a time? A single LPN "supervising" a floor of CNAs. Doctor consultation? The CNA oftentimes leaves a voicemail for the physician to review and care decisions are made without the physician talking to either the patient or a nurse (I'm not sure how this isn't malpractice, and I'm not convinced it's not). Facility "policy", often hidden behind "insurance requirements" have the facility overburdening the local EMS system because "we are required to call 911 for anything larger than a bandaid", and we can find ourselves doing anything from the most basic wound care to pointing out to a sleep-deprived CNA "you know your patient appears to have had a stroke sometime recently, right?". EMS arrives and often gets woefully incomplete or inaccurate history information (often for patients who are unable to be reliable historians themselves).
There is, however, ALWAYS money for the colorful glossy brochures/books at the front desk, or the big shiny billboard or TV ad that talks about "mom being in good hands with round the clock nursing care!" (and of course, a facility fee per month that would make you feel like she has her own personal RN and on-call MD 24/7").
> There is, however, ALWAYS money for the colorful glossy brochures
OMG, so much this! One of the things that happened after the acquisition is that they changed the phones to play a marketing pitch whenever you were on hold. (They even did this on the resident's phones!) One of the things the pitch said was that the place featured "chef-inspired meals" which was about as disconnected as you could possibly get from what I knew first-hand to be reality. It was one of the most bald-faced lies I have ever heard in my life, and it really steamed my clams because I knew there was nothing I could do about it.
Also a former medic, the best care homes I ever went to were the Jewish Home for the Aged. They were so much nicer and the patients there never had decubitus ulcers or staph infection in skin folds from not being cleaned.
The worst place I ever saw was Atherton Long Care which supposedly is fancy and expensive but they had neglected an old lady so poorly I actually reported them to CDPH and the ombudsman. She had full on necrotized tissue under both her breasts and a rotted unchanged g-tube that you could smell all the way down the hallway to the nursing station it was so sad. John George Psych hospital and Cordilleras MHRC are both also very sad hellholes. Patients sleeping laying on the floor in the hallways with a blanket because the rooms are full etc. We had a lady who purposely stabbed herself in the eye so she could go to the ER to get out of Cordilleras because it was so awful.
What I found if you ever need to place your loved on in a care home is the sniff test is the best assessment of how well it's run and if the patients are cared for. If patients are cleaned regularly and not left to sit in their own diapers it really shows there is enough staff ratio and attention given to the patients. Go on a random evening or day and at different times. Food quality is also a good indicator - eat lunch with your parents there. Would you eat this yourself voluntarily? If yes, it's probably a good place not run on a shoestring budget.
Also - hn readers - if your mom is in a care home please always check under her breasts to ensure she is clean and dry there every time you visit. Far far too many old ladies get candida and bacterial infections under their breasts that are never cleaned or taken care of because it's embarrassing to check or clean and dry so then it just gets wet and rots and is painful, sad and gross and can lead to even worse things like cellulitis or an abscess.
I do love the Mac Studio. I had a 2019 Mac Pro, the Intel cheesegrater, but my home office upstairs became unpleasant with it pushing out 300W+. I replaced it with the M2 Ultra Studio for a fraction of the heat output (though I did had to buy an OWC 4xNVMe bay).
> I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines.
This I'm not actually as sure about. The current Studio offerings have done away with the 512GB memory option. I understand the RAM situation, but they didn't change pricing they just discontinued it. So I'm curious to see what the next Studio is like. I'd almost love to see a Studio with even one PCI slot, make it a bit taller, have a slide out cover...
> and to Tesla's credit they have amazing free docs
Not to Tesla's credit, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it (primarily by Massachusetts) and their right to repair legislation through a solid chunk of malicious compliance:
1. When told that they had to have a site for people to order parts, Tesla put up a site that had every single item as "Call us", including the most simple of bolts. And when a few places called, "Sorry, that's not available to you".
2. The service manual was originally only available in a few locations in MA, and had strict conditions: you had to book in advance, there was a $100 fee per booking, and you could only view the manual on premises, and could not bring electronic devices into the room with you, just pen and paper.
The docs they have are great, and who knows how their attitude would have changed over time, but they absolutely didn't want you to have it, initially.
> The access story has been inconsistent over the years. Tesla has opened up free access to both the service manuals and diagnostic software in the past, but that was apparently a mistake, and loopholes were quickly closed.
"Always ... all free to use". Not so much.
And before that, even less available.
I will grant you for number 2, there seems to be some ambiguity - some people claimed it was only if you needed to actually use their diagnostic tools, because Tesla wouldn't sell them to anyone at the time (which is also in contradiction to your "everything you need, all free, always").
You seem to miss my point. The OP wanted to pat Tesla on the back for their amazing commitment to freeness and openness. My point was that even if they are doing good/much better now, much of the time they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to it. MA's AG had to wave the right-to-repair laws.
It's not uncommon knowledge that third party repairs have been, for years, difficult to impossible because Tesla wouldn't supply either the information or the parts to third parties. I'm not sure why, in the face of repeated evidence otherwise, you seem determined to retcon those details out of existence.
No, you’re wrong. I have a Tesla and service mode is free and amazing, I can look at any system and subsystems with it, look at logs, and do testing, all from the built in touch screen all for free. No other car manufacturer comes close. Not sure why you hate Tesla so much and are so bent on spreading false information. Maybe you should help save the planet and get one.
Maybe you should read Tesla's own documentation. The service mode you have is an elementary version of diagnostics. There is an actual diagnostics mode that costs $700/year to have access to.
> No safety data, no reporting, no oversight: the classification has significant consequences for transparency. The CPUC collects detailed per-trip data from actual AV operators — including location data, passenger data, vehicle miles traveled, idling time, and “stoppage events” (instances where a vehicle is stuck for more than two minutes or requires remote intervention). This data is published in quarterly reports available to the public.
> None of that applies to Tesla.
Shocking that Tesla, who Musk claims, and Tesla-stans, here and elsewhere claim to be the "most transparent" company re self-driving choose a license that barely makes any sense (limousine/chauffeur car permitting) for anything to do with autonomous driving for anything other than a complete lack of transparency and reporting on vehicle events.
> ripped a music CD directly with itunes (yes, that was an actual feature. hard to imagine these days).
These days? Last week (though WMP). My retired father's old computer died, his new one, no CD slot. Emails me from Australia asking how to rip his CDs for his media player. He's not an audiophile but he's not a technophile (and his blues music collection is sufficiently large that at least one of the blues radio stations in his city will on occasion ask him to borrow something because they don't have it in their library.
Told him to get a USB CD player and a card reader (his media player is on micro/SD).
Yeah, the most notable "use", not necessarily "value", is when the airline is still prevaricating over the delay, you're approaching boarding time and you can see from ADS-B that the inbound aircraft hasn't even begun initial descent.
Last year Flighty literally saved me from an overnight delay because it notified me the incoming aircraft was still on the ground at the previous airport. I was able to snag the last couple seats on a later scheduled flight which actually departed. My original flight ended up getting canceled.
As airline crew, I stay in the lounge (employee lounge, not bar lounge) when I know I'm not going anywhere on time.
Flighty gets heavy use from US airline employees. We're frequently in the airport with a brief break before flying the next flight. Usually, this next flight will be on an aircraft that hasn't arrive to the airport yet. Most of us will find a quiet place to relax for awhile and it's really irritating to pack stuff back up and walk to the gate just to find out there's no plane.
Another scenario is you arrive to an airport and need to switch aircraft. The "turn" time might be scheduled for 45 min. It's really nice to know as you walk off the aircraft that "Hey, it's actually delayed. Now I have 2 hours." I'll go grab a bite to eat or catch up with family back home etc.
My particular airline will show you what the next inbound aircraft is and it's flight number and ETA but it's a "fetch" experience. You open the app, wait for a refresh, click like 4 times to navigate to the right page, get the tactical information. Flighty keeps it on the lock screen. Just lift your phone and it's there.
We're constantly asking our employer to emulate Flighty. Tech isn't their strong suit though.
Sounds like you identified a business opportunity for Flighty - license the functionality or just sell app access to the entire airline, at least for employees.
> There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.
And realistically we don't want that. Similar with Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, better to sit on things until Trump is out of office, so there can be no pardon.
Apple and MDM has always been a shit show. In the days as recently as Ventura (last time I tried it), MDM bypass was as simple as "null route 4 DNS entries during install process, remove null routing after install complete, and never be bothered by it again". This is on Apple Silicon. With no workarounds or anything, upgrades work all the way up to Tahoe.
Like really Apple, that's your device "locking"? I could test activate my work Mac with my personal Apple ID while doing this, no alarm bells, nothing, effectively "It's your laptop now".
MacOS used to be excellent for a short period of time when Fleetsmith existed. Then Apple purchased Fleetsmith around 2020 and killed the product not long after.
Fortunately around the same time, JamF ended the practice of the mandatory Jamf JumpStart (£5K fee), which finally made Jamf a feasible option for the company I was in at the time.
Of course there is a kill switch. This is one of the key features of an MDM/endpoint manager. You won't be able to sell one without it. It's also built in to apple's management protocol (which most endpoint management systems leverage) and in activesync.
You just have to secure it properly. Have limits to how many one admin can wipe etc. But trust me every company with managed IT assets has this capability. Often even in BOYD scenarios! Stryker just failed to secure access to it properly and to set sensible limits.
However, the feature isn't very effective in the field. It's very unlikely for an attacker to be smart enough to bypass the password on a stolen Mac which is needed to connect it to WiFi, yet at the same time be dumb enough to connect it to the unfiltered internet so it can receive the wipe command. The overlap between these sets of people is almost zero. We do fire a wipe at every stolen computer but I doubt it ever actually happens. If it ever happens it'll be a total end user fail (like writing the password on a post-it with the laptop)
Either you will lose it to a common thief who won't be able to breach the login (99% of cases), or to a really targeted adversary who has cellebrite or something similar and won't connect it to the internet ever again. This is still the most risky scenario because if someone like that steals it, there's bound to be something really valuable on it.
In practice this is something more suited to mobile devices.
Certainly not all departments, but many fire departments have an upper hiring limit for new hires. Above that age you can only be hired as a "lateral" (transfer hire from another department).
Healthcare costs increasing is of very little concern to nursing facility ownership. Almost none of that is borne by the facility itself. They'll often hire skeletal crews of CNAs and LPNs (I was a paramedic, rare was it to see a facility in our area that even had an RN, and if they were, they were the DON, Director of Nursing, and had no direct hand in patient care). The facilities would contract with a physician service who oftentimes would not even speak to the patient, let alone -see- them.
And every, every single interaction with actual care provision was fully billed to the patient/resident's insurance. Anything that is not a profit making center for facility ownership is ruthlessly subcontracted out. A solid portion of the SNFs in my county will openly call 911 for anything beyond the most absolute basic first aid, even when their employees are ostensibly better educated/trained than the EMTs who might be responding.
Healthcare costs in the US are an abomination, but that's not the issue here, or not directly.
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