#its very much industrialized and full of exploitation here in California

[cultstatus]

the only people with money around here to buy a freaking cybertruck are farmers which is embarrassing bc that is certainly not a farmer truck. the big spotless lifted white brand new Fords were bad enough. for my non Central California friends, you have to understand that the farmers around here are rich business men who exploit undocumented people to do all their work. they have massive (Republican) political power too. we hate farmers here LOL there's a difference between Farmers and farm workers

[zenosanalytic]

People What Aint From Round Here Is The Problem...

So I just watched Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood and I have THOUGHTS:

Ive read a few reviews&ruminations on this film at this point and I can’t believe that none of them got(or at least, mentioned explicitly) the primary thesis of this movie, spcl given that Tarentino flatly states it out the mouth of his primary protagonist within, like, the first 15-20mins of the film: “...most important thing in this town is when you’re making money you buy a house in town. You don’t rent... Hollywood real estate means you live here. You’re not just visiting, not just passing through. You fuckin live here.” i.e., the most important thing in Hollywood, to Hollywood, is the people FROM Hollywood; Everyone else is just a filthy, trouble-making tourist or profiteer who is “Passing Through” and “Doesnt Get It” and  “Is Fucking It Up”(It being the film industry), and probably “Secretly Hates Movies”. There are places and aspects of this movie that are basically a Nativist Angeleno rant, written by a life-long Angeleno film-nerd-turned-film-maker, against Hollywood’s critics(and his critics which he just totally conflates with the former), and probably non-Angelenos(and non-Californians?) in general.

There are two ways to read this thesis: Straight and Subverted/Satirized.

The evidence for reading it straight is pretty plentiful. Lots of reviews have puzzled at where the line connecting the constant hippie-bashing, the weird focus on knocking Polanski’s Polishness & preference for shooting in London, and the inexplicable pot-shot at Bruce Lee is, and I think this is it. “The Hippies” are repeatedly presented as a corrupting force: digging through trash, living in squalourous filth at the Spahn Ranch dragging members of “Old Hollywood” like its owner into it with them, selling drugs, and using sex to “control” men. And attached to this is presenting “The Hippies” as foreign; not only from another place, but refusing to assimilate with the LA way of life and hostile to it. The Manson family are the only explicitly identified “Hippies” in the film(other than, possibly, the one who sells Cliff an acid cig). The only “positive” portrayals of Bruce Lee in the film are silent ones of him teaching anglos kung fu, which has some fairly obvs and well-understood Implications.

But there’s also good evidence for reading it as subverted and satirized. Both Tate and Dalton are NOT from California, let alone LA, and Booth’s origins are left unclear. Dalton’s the only one of them explicitly id’d as being from elsewhere(Missouri), but Tate’s easy to google and she was a military kid who grew up all over the place. When Dalton returns from Italy, that sequence and his look in it are VERY reminiscent of the scenes introducing Polanski at the beginning of the film. The side-characters around Tate, perennially shown in a positive light, are also non-Angelenos. Doing Spaghetti Westerns revitalizes Dalton’s career, despite his disdain for Italian cinema. Tate and her crew, while not explicitly ID’d as “Hippies” and often shown in Mod and other fashion styles, are also presented in “Hippie” fashion, shown listening to “Hippie” music, smoking the “Hippie” Reefer(Im sorry, but Comedy Demanded this phrasing and I am Devout u_u), and implied to be living a polyamorous “Hippie” life.

It really is difficult for me to say which predominates. On the one entirely metaphorical hand, the ways in which Dalton’s Angeleno chauvinism are subverted and mocked are fairly obvs, but on the other emh, the film is FILLED with LITERALLY GLOWING nostalgia for this pre-Hippy, pre-Lefty, pre-70s, Conservative and Republican California&Los Angeles. Dalton’s focus on property-ownership&the film industry in the opening thesis could easily be seen as resolving these subversive contradictions to allow for a straight read(ie: Tate, Booth, and Dalton are “Hollywood People” who’ve both bought real-estate in LA, and who’ve grown up in film or film-adjacent fields and choose to center their adult lives in the film industry). So much, in fact, that I kinda started to wonder abt QT’s politics while watching it. And, if it WAS satirical, then what’s the point of the knock to Bruce Lee and focusing criticisms of Polanski on his Polishness and shooting in London? Is that just meant to characterize Dalton and Booth as nativists and racists?

It really cannot be said enough that there are REALLY MORE APPROPRIATE CRITICISMS to make of Polanski than 1)begin Polish, 2)possessing boyish effeminacy, and 3)preferring to shoot movies in London instead of LA. Which are this movie’s only problems with him(though it also takes the time to show him bitchily smoking a cigarette in an evening gown while being rude to a dog). Obvsl I dont object to villainizing an ACTUAL REAL LIFE VILLAIN like this shitstain, but I DO object to being asked(albeit gently) to participate in this film’s understated nationalist bigotry.

It’s possible that Cliff’s turning Pussycat down during the drive to the ranch was intended to be this but I highly doubt it. And if it was it’d be misrepresenting Polanski’s misdeeds enormously, considering that Pussycat, the too-young girl, is the sexual instigator in this film. Polanski liked to manipulate, drug, and rape underaged girls(he pulled the same shit with models in Europe before getting busted for it in LA, btw, then continued doing it after fleeing back to Europe); really not the same situation.

There’s another irony in that, while the film goes out of its way to call Polanski “boyish” and imply that makes him feminine and that this is Bad, there’s also a subtle under-current that... Tarentino sees himself in his youth the same way? He’s certainly never been short like Polanski and Jay Sebring are/were, QT’s 6 1, but the actors he cast to play them and the description made of the pair in-film are more than a bit reminiscent of how Tarentino looked&was discussed in the press back in the 90s when he was starting out. AAAaaand the film explicitly calls that Tate’s “Type”; leaving me with the question: would Tarentino be able to stop himself from implying a dead starlet would have been attracted to him? I leave the answer to your imaginations, Dear Readers u_u

Having said all that it IS a really good film, which I liked, I dont think it’d be very hard to set aside this political stuff while watching, the driving sequences are especially emotive&exhilarating, and there’s some seriously great acting in it. IDK if I’d say I liked it more than the recent Emma movie, tho.

I feel like each of the trio, Tate, Dalton, and Booth, were meant to symbolically Embody LA/Hollywood/California? Like Pitt especially seemed to be channeling movie characters and CJ from GTA: San Andreas throughout his performance, while I couldnt help but think of Ronald Reagan watching DiCaprio(spcl given the character’s likely politics). So there’s this sense in which the film is a fantasy of “Old Hollywood”, embodied by these three, Vanquishing its “Enemies”, represented by The Hippies(moralizing, pretentious, gross leftist) and potentially Polanski&Lee(foreign film ppl who refuse to integrate into the LA scene). Again, given the political history of Cali after this era, this embodiment raises some questions for me abt the film and QT’s politics(particularly in re: misogyny and feminism).

Also DiCaprio is totally going to get pitched a Reagan biopic off of this role and I sincerely hope he has the good sense to turn that shit the fuck down.

Circling back to the ranting at his critics, this movie was definitely and consciously a response to them. Like: up until the last 5-15 minutes of the film, and aside from a handful of too-lingering too fetishistic too on-the-nose creep shots of the female cast that Tarentino simply could not stop himself from making, OUATiH is precisely the sort of “Serious” film Tarentino’s critics have been saying he should make for decades now(of course he did Jackie Brown, which was that and which he blew Completely out of the park). And then there’s that bloody, gross-out, exploitation-movie ending. I dont actually think it was as bad as many critics were saying it was? For some reason I was thinking there was gonna be a massacre of the ENTIRE Manson family, which would have been totally out of left-field. But it WAS clearly a stinger of a major tone-shift thrown in as a Fuck You to the ppl who’ve called out his violent and exploitative preferences throughout the years. As for me I generally like his movies and think he’s a great filmmaker but he absolutely does go too far sometimes.

Rick Dalton, in an evening-gown, with a mixer full of iced-margarita in one hand, getting all up in the face of the driver of a loud exhaust-spewing jalope in his PRIVATE STREET was TOTALLY Tarentino himself :| By which I mean NOT ONLY that That’s ABSOLUTELY the sort of cameo he would have given himself 30 years ago and if it made any sort of sense at all in the film(which here it wouldnt have, obvsl), BUT ALSO that I feel 94% confident that Tarentino has actually done that at least once in his lifetime :| :|

I think the monologue&interactions T gives Bruce Lee leading up to the fight were probably more insulting to him than the fight itself. Contrary to popular discussion, it isn’t Pitt’s character totally trashing Lee, he gets in one good throw after Lee repeats a successful attack at his request(which I doubt Lee would have ever done from what little I know about him; not being predictable in a fight was his whole Deal), but rather an even duel between them(most of the fight is just the two blocking each others’ attacks). I dont think the film was trying to say “Lee was full of hot-air”, if it wanted to say that it’d have shown him getting trounced instead of showing him knock Booth down then trade him blow for blow, but more “Lee was pretty arrogant and a bit pretentious”.

OK, that’s abt all that I can think of right now: thanks for reading ^v^

[foreverlogical]

The election season of 2015 and 2016 was defined by chaos, infighting and a pool of deep resentment that came boiling over when votes were cast. But this election was barely noticed. It happened on February 17, 2016, in a rundown labor union hall in Portland, Oregon. Union members were voting on a new contract with their employer, Koch Industries. The union members felt powerless, cornered, and betrayed by their own leaders. The things that enraged them were probably recognizable to anyone who earns a paycheck in America today. Their jobs making wood and paper products for a division called Georgia Pacific had become downright dangerous, with spikes in injuries and even deaths. They were being paid less, after adjusting for inflation, than they were paid in the 1980s. Maybe most enraging, they had no leverage to bargain for a better deal. Steve Hammond, one of the labor union’s top negotiators, had fought for years to get higher pay and better working conditions. And for years, he was outgunned and beaten down by Koch’s negotiators. So even as the presidential election was dominating public attention in late 2015, Hammond was presenting the union members with a dispiriting contract defined by surrender on virtually everything the union had been fighting for. He knew the union members were furious with his efforts. When he stood on stage to present the contract terms, he lost control and berated them. “This is it guys!” his colleagues recall him yelling. “This is your best offer. You’re not going to strike anyway.”

I thought of the free-floating anger in that union hall often as I travelled the country over the last eight years, reporting for a book about Koch Industries. The anger seemed to infect every corner of American economic life. We are supposedly living in the best economy the United States has seen in modern memory, with a decade of solid growth behind us and the unemployment rate at its lowest level since the 1960s. Why, then, does everything feel so wrong? In April, a Washington-Post/ABC Poll found that 60% of political independents feel that America’s economic system is essentially rigged against them, to the advantage to those already in power. Roughly 33% of Republicans feel that way; 80% of Democrats feel the same.

What reporting the Koch story taught me is that these voters are right— the economy truly is rigged against them. But it isn’t rigged in the way most people seem to think. There isn’t some cabal of conservative or liberal politicians who are controlling the system for the benefit of one side or the other. The economy is rigged because the American political system is dysfunctional and paralyzed—with no consensus on what the government ought to do when it comes to the economy. As a result, we live under a system that’s broken, propelled forward by inertia alone. In this environment, there is only one clear winner: the big, entrenched players who can master the dysfunction and profit from it. In America, that’s the largest of the large corporations. Roughly a century after the biggest ones were broken up or more tightly regulated, they are back, stronger than ever.

I saw this reality clearly when I went to Wichita, Kansas to visit Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, a company with annual revenue larger than that of Facebook, Goldman Sachs and U.S. Steel combined. Charles Koch isn’t just the CEO of America’s biggest private company. He also inhabits one extreme end of the political debate about our nation’s economy. A close examination of his writing and speeches over the last 40 years reveals the thinking of someone who believes that government programs, no matter how well-intended, almost always do more harm than good. In this view, most government regulations simply distort the market and create big costs down the road. Taxing the wealthy only shifts money from productive uses to mostly wasteful programs. Charles Koch has been on a mission, for at least 40 years, to reshape the American political system into one where government intervention into markets does not exist.

But for all the free-market purity of Charles Koch’s ideology, there is not much of a free market in the corporate reality he inhabits. Koch Industries specializes in the kinds of businesses that underpin modern civilization but that most consumers never see—oil refining, nitrogen fertilizer production, commodities trading, the industrial production of building materials, and almost everything we touch, from paper towels and Lycra to the sensors hidden inside our cellphones. This is the paradox of Charles Koch’s word – he is a high-minded, anti-government free-marketeer whose fortune is made almost exclusively from industries that face virtually no real competition. Koch Industries is built, in fact, on a series of near-monopolies. And it is these kinds of companies that do best in our modern dysfunctional political environment. They know how to manipulate the rules when no one is looking.

Consider the oil refining business, which has been a cash cow for Koch Industries since 1969, just two years after Charles Koch took over the family company following his father’s death. Charles Koch was just in his early 30s at the time, but he made a brilliant and bold move, purchasing an oil refinery outside Saint Paul, Minnesota. The refinery was super-profitable thanks to a bottleneck in the U.S. energy system: the refinery used crude oil from the tar sands of Canada to be refined into gasoline later sold to the upper Midwest. The crude oil was extraordinarily cheap because it contained a lot of sulfur and not many refineries could process it. But Koch sold its refined gas into markets where gasoline supplies were very tight and prices were high.

Why didn’t some competitor open up a refinery next to Koch’s to seize this opportunity? It turns out that no one has built a new oil refinery anywhere in the United States since 1977. The reason is surprising: the Clean Air Act regulations. When the law was drastically expanded in 1970, it imposed pollution standards on new refineries. But it “grandfathered” in the existing refineries with the idea that they would eventually break down and be replaced with new facilities. That never happened. The legacy oil refiners, including Koch, exploited arcane sections of the law that allowed them to expand their old facilities while avoiding the newer clean-air standards. This gave them an insurmountable advantage over any potential new competitor. The absence of new refineries to stoke competition and drive down prices meant that Americans paid higher prices for gasoline. Today the industry is dominated by entrenched players who run aged facilities at near-full capacity, reaping profits that are among the highest in the world. In this industry and others, the big gains go to companies that can hire lawyers and lobbyists to help game the rules, and then hire even more lawyers when the government tries to punish them for breaking the law (as happened to Koch and other refiners in the late 1990s when it became clear they were manipulating Clean Air regulations).

The oil refining business is just one example of how Koch has benefited from complex regulatory dysfunction while public attention was turned elsewhere. In the 1990s, for example, a Koch-funded public policy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) pressured states to deregulate their electricity systems. California was a pioneer in this effort, and the results were disastrous. Lawmakers in Sacramento created a sprawling, hyper-complicated system that surgically grafted a free-market trading exchange onto an aged electricity grid. Virtually no one paid attention to the 1,000-page law as it was being written. Almost immediately after the markets went online in the early 2000s, electricity traders at Koch Industries and Enron began gaming the system. They earned millions of dollars doing so, even as prices skyrocketed and the state’s grid collapsed in rolling blackouts. Lawmakers were blamed when the lights went out, and then Governor Gray Davis was recalled. The role that traders played in the crisis was hard to understand and hidden from view. Federal regulators filed a case against Koch for manipulating markets in California, but the legal proceedings dragged on for more than a decade. Koch ended up settling the charges and paying a fine of $4.1 million, long after the damage was done.

To take another example: In 2017, Koch helped kill part of the Republican tax reform plan to impose a “border adjusted” income tax that almost certainly would have hurt Koch’s oil refining business. The plan was being pushed by none other than Paul Ryan, a onetime Koch ally who was then Speaker of the House. Ryan wanted to include the border adjustment in President Trump’s tax overhaul because it would have benefited domestic manufacturing and would have allowed the government to cut corporate taxes without exploding the deficit. But former Koch oil traders told me that the border adjustment tax would have hurt profits at the Kochs’ Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota. Koch played a vital role in killing the border adjustment tax before a vigorous public debate about it could even begin (A Koch Industries spokesman insisted that the Koch political network opposed the border-adjustment measure only on ideological grounds, because it was basically a tax, and not to protect profits at Koch’s oil refineries) . By the time most people started paying attention, Paul Ryan admitted defeat and jettisoned the border adjustment.

Charles Koch doesn’t talk about issues like this when he talks about free markets. When I met him, Charles Koch was giving interviews for his new book that described his highly detailed business philosophy, called Market-Based Management. I had heard a lot about this philosophy, but what surprised me most when I interviewed the people who worked with him, some for decades, is how much they admire him. They said he was brilliant, but also unpretentious. He was uncompromising, but fair. I felt this way too, the minute I met the billionaire. I remember him telling me something along the lines of: “Hello, Chris! You didn’t need to put on a tie just to see me,” when I walked in the door (my audio recorder wasn’t even running yet, so the quote might be inexact).

Charles Koch’s avuncular, aw-shucks persona masks his true nature. I think of him instead as an uncompromising warrior. He has been fighting since he was a young man. He fought his own brothers, Bill and Freddie, for control of the family company (and won). He fought a militant labor union at the Pine Bend refinery (and won). Most of all, he fought against the idea that the federal government has an important role to play in making the economy function properly—even while taking advantage of government laws to maintain his company’s advantages.

When Charles Koch became CEO in 1967, the U.S. economy operated under a political system that is almost unimaginable today. The government intervened dramatically in almost every corner of the economy, and it did so to the explicit benefit of middle-class workers. This happened under a broad set of laws called the New Deal, which was put in place in the late 1930s. The New Deal broke up monopolies, kept banks on a tight regulatory leash, and even controlled energy prices, down to the penny in some cases. It greatly empowered labor unions and boosted wages and bargaining power for workers. Charles Koch dislikes every element of the New Deal. He has formed think tanks to attack the ideas behind it, donated money to politicians who sought to dismantle it, and built a company that was hostile to it.

As it turned out, the American public joined Charles Koch, to a certain extent, during the 1970s. Vietnam, Watergate, rampant inflation and multiple recessions shattered Americans’ confidence in the government’s ability to solve problems for ordinary people. Passage of the Civil Rights Act shattered the political coalition behind the New Deal, which had relied on Southern segregationists for support. Ronald Reagan rode the tide of antigovernment sentiment to the White House. But even Reagan wasn’t able to repeal the New Deal. He failed miserably when he tried to repeal Social Security, for example. He cut taxes, but never could restrain spending. What emerged during the 1980s and 1990s was an incoherent governing system, one that is deregulated in some key areas, like banking and derivatives trading, but hyper-regulated in others like the small business sector.

If the American political system is confused, Charles Koch is not. He rules over his company with undisputed authority, and he uses that authority to spread his Market-Based Management doctrine. This philosophy inspires the rank-and-file employees at Koch Industries—the company cafeteria is full of young, entrepreneurial workers who thrive in a system that heaps promotions and bonuses on top performers, while unsentimentally weeding out employees considered weak. But the unbending nature of Market-Based Management, and how it applies to the factory floor, played a big role in building the rage that swept through that union hall in Oregon.

When Steve Hammond, the union boss, tried to bargain with Koch, he found himself fighting over ideology, not benefits. In one case, the Koch negotiators wanted to strip down workers’ health care benefits, requiring employees to pay more money out of pocket for their benefits. The Koch team framed their request not as a way to make more money for Koch, but to create a system that better reflected the ideals of Market-Based Management. “It’s a matter of principle,” recalled union negotiator Gary Bucknum. “The principle is that an employee should be paying something toward their healthcare, or otherwise they’ll abuse their health care.” It was hard to bargain against principle. And the unions didn’t have the leverage to fight. The policies that once supported labor unions have been steadily undermined since the 1970s, dragging union participation in the private sector down from about 33% of the workforce to less than 10%. The union took the cut in health care benefits.

The current American political debate is focused on the shiny objects, the high-profile contests between Team Red and Team Blue. But companies like Koch Industries have the capacity to focus on the much deeper system, the highly complicated plumbing that makes the American economy work. This is where Charles Koch’s attention has been patiently trained for decades, as administrations have come and gone in Washington.

Thanks to this focus, Koch wins every time.

VISIT WEBSITE

[dipulb3]

The $185 million campaign to keep Uber and Lyft drivers as contractors in California

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/the-185-million-campaign-to-keep-uber-and-lyft-drivers-as-contractors-in-california/

The $185 million campaign to keep Uber and Lyft drivers as contractors in California

The companies have built up massive fleets of workers over the years by treating them as independent contractors, who are paid on a gig-by-gig basis. But a new law which went into effect this year in California, threw a wrench into the model.

Richert, who is based in Southern California, said that, while he hasn’t driven since the onset of the pandemic for fear of contracting the coronavirus, he frequently checks the apps when there’s messaging about the importance of passing Proposition 22, or Prop 22 as it’s commonly called. When he flips on the television, he sees ads sponsored by the campaign touting the flexibility of the job, a perk which is popular with workers and the companies claim is contingent on maintaining their independent contractor status.

“This is an all-out battle royale to make sure they are ultimately victorious,” Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, told Appradab Business. “If it falls by the wayside, there are going to be serious business model changes to the gig economy.”

If the ballot measure fails to pass, the market for ride hail and delivery drivers could drastically change, according to Yes campaign spokesperson Geoff Vetter to Appradab Business by email. It could mean their services would become more expensive for consumers and that the companies would employ just a fraction of the drivers who are on the road today, Vetter said. Those workers would have stricter schedules and wouldn’t be able to just turn on their apps and work whenever they want, according to the Yes campaign.

By comparison, the opposition, backed by labor and union groups, has put over $12 million into fighting the initiative, according to California Secretary of State records. They argue that Prop 22 is an “attempt to strip away drivers’ rights to wages and benefits like unemployment insurance,” said Mike Roth, spokesperson for the No on Prop 22 campaign.

“Do you believe for one second that these companies are spending $180 million on a ballot measure that’s going to benefit drivers more than it benefits Uber-Lyft-DoorDash’s bottom line?” he said.

Veena Dubal, a labor law professor at University of California, Hastings, and a vocal advocate for labor rights, told Appradab Business that the implications for labor could be much broader than the drivers covered by Prop 22. “There is a strong likelihood that if [Prop 22] passes, it would create lower labor standards across the board for the delivery and logistics industry.”

What will Prop 22 do

Prop 22 seeks to side-step Assembly Bill 5, or AB-5, which went into effect on January 1 and codifies an “ABC” test to determine if workers are employees who are entitled to labor protections and benefits. Under the test, employers must meet three requirements to prove their workers are independent contractors, including that the workers are providing a service that is outside the company’s core business.

The law has proven to be a thorn in the side of gig companies.

In May, the California Attorney General and a coalition of city attorneys sued the best-known companies — Uber and Lyft — accusing them of misclassifying drivers as independent contractors and depriving them of protections they would be entitled to as employees.

An Uber spokesperson said in a statement at the time that it plans to “contest this action in court, while at the same time pushing to raise the standard of independent work for drivers in California, including with guaranteed minimum earnings and new benefits.”

A Lyft spokesperson said it is “looking forward to working with the Attorney General and mayors across the state to bring all the benefits of California’s innovation economy to as many workers as possible.”

Other legal battles in California challenge the classification of workers of the on-demand food and grocery delivery companies.

Prop 22 presents alternatives to the protections under AB-5, such as a minimum earnings guarantee of “120 percent of minimum wage,” or $15.60 based on the California minimum wage of $13 for companies of 26 employees or more. But an analysis from UC Berkeley Labor Center estimates that the pay guarantee for Uber and Lyft drivers would actually be equivalent to a wage of $5.64 per hour, because of “multiple loopholes” in the proposition. These loopholes include that Prop 22 only counts “engaged time” as time when a driver is fulfilling a ride or delivery request, but not the time they spend waiting for a gig.

A working paper released this week from UC Berkeley economist Michael Reich, who co-authored the earlier analysis, found that making drivers employees would boost overall compensation by 30%. Under Prop 22, workers would receive $0.30 reimbursement per engaged mile. The UC Berkeley Labor Center also points out that’s lower than the IRS’ estimated 58 cents per mile cost of owning and operating a vehicle.

It also includes a health care contribution from the company for certain qualifying workers, also based on “engaged time.” In lieu of worker’s compensation, it offers capped benefits for medical and disability in cases of on-the-job injuries.

Critics of Prop 22 argue it undermines the spirit of AB-5, which is intended to ensure workers aren’t exploited by gig companies. Notably, for its concessions, Prop 22 does not offer explicit protections such as workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, family leave, or sick leave, or allow workers to unionize.

The importance of these protections has been underscored by the pandemic. As ride-hail requests plummeted with people increasingly staying home, some drivers watched their income dry up. Other parts of the on-demand economy, such as meal and food delivery, have surged, serving as job opportunities for Americans out of work. These workers have had to weigh their own health against their financial needs.

“Here we are in a pandemic and the drivers — who have by definition exposure to the public — are being denied sick pay,” said William Gould IV, a law professor at Stanford University and former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. “To me, it is scandalous.”

The gig economy companies set up various financial assistance programs during the pandemic, largely providing some limited funds to who had contracted the coronavirus or were quarantined by a doctor. But these programs aren’t the same as established benefits.

What about flexibility?

Yes on 22 has positioned worker flexibility at the center of its television and social media campaigns, and indeed, for many workers the ability to work whenever they want by just opening an app is very appealing.

But contrary to the Yes campaign’s positioning, there’s nothing in California law that prevents companies from providing such flexibility to workers, regardless of employment status, as some labor experts have pointed out. Terri Gerstein of the Harvard Labor and Worklife Program and Economic Policy Institute called it a “faux concern.”

In fact, it’s spelled out in AB-5 that “nothing in this act is intended to diminish the flexibility of employees to work part-time or intermittent schedules or to work for multiple employers.”

What is true is that, if companies are required to classify workers as employees, companies might rein in the flexibility in order to efficiently operate their businesses. As Uber economist Alison Stein put it: “Businesses simply won’t survive if they have zero control over what their hourly employees, whether full- or part-time, actually do.”

“Uber’s incentive as an employer, then, would be to limit the number of employed drivers, hiring fewer drivers to each do more trips, and requiring them to work a certain number of hours (but likely preventing them from working overtime),” Stein wrote.

According to Uber’s analysis, if Prop 22 fails, prices of rides could be driven up as much as 25% to 111% to cover costs associated with making its workers employees. Moreover, Uber estimates that 158,000 of its drivers — or 76% — in the state would be out of work. Making drivers employees across the country would result in nearly 1 million jobs lost, Uber argues in a second analysis.

In a statement, Lyft spokesperson Julie Wood said the company is “fighting to provide drivers independence plus benefits with Prop. 22 in California.”

Instacart and DoorDash referred requests for comment to the Yes on 22 campaign. Uber and Postmates declined to comment for this story.

Expect a fight: ‘It’s a nailbiter’

So far, the impact of the aggressive campaign on both sides remains unclear.

“It’s a nail biter; and that’s why they’re aggressively going after this from a resource perspective,” Wedbush’s Ives said of the Yes campaign.

Roth said that while the No on 22 campaign “always knew it would be outspent,” it has resources to communicate with voters ahead of November 3. Last week, it unveiled its response to the Yes campaign’s commercials: its own statewide television ad.

In a press release, the No campaign said the spot “drives home for voters how the deceptive Prop 22 was written by Uber, Lyft and DoorDash to deny their drivers benefits.”

Tim Rosales, a California-based political strategist, said that “money does not always equal success” when it comes to ballot initiatives.

“David can absolutely beat Goliath,” he said, adding that “passing an initiative is always much more difficult than opposing an initiative.”

According to Rosales, a ‘Yes’ vote typically requires a full buy-in on the issue being raised, whereas highlighting one red flag in a proposition can get someone to oppose an initiative. “A ‘No’ side can do a lot with much less money in order to defeat an initiative.”

[bmjnews-blog]

Joel Schumacher, Director of Batman Films and ‘Lost Boys,’ Dies at 80

Joel Schumacher, costume designer-turned-director of films including “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “The Lost Boys” and “Falling Down,” as well as two “Batman” films, died in New York City on Monday morning after a year-long battle with cancer. He was 80. Schumacher brought his fashion background to directing a run of stylish films throughout the 1980s and 1990s that were not always critically acclaimed, but continue to be well-loved by audiences for capturing the feel of the era. Schumacher was handed the reins of the “Batman” franchise when Tim Burton exited Warner Bros.’ Caped Crusader series after two enormously successful films. The first movie by Schumacher, “Batman Forever,” starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey and Nicole Kidman, grossed more than $300 million worldwide. Schumacher’s second and last film in the franchise was 1997’s “Batman and Robin,” with George Clooney as Batman and Arnold Schwarzenegger as villain Mr. Freeze. For “Batman Forever,” the openly gay Schumacher introduced nipples to the costumes worn by Batman and Robin, leaning into the longstanding latent homoeroticism between the two characters. (In 2006, Clooney told Barbara Walters that he had played Batman as gay.) Several years after the Batman debacle, Schumacher directed the feature adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “The Phantom of the Opera.” Despite tepid reviews, it received three Oscar noms. In 1985 Schumacher struck gold with his third feature film, “St. Elmo’s Fire,” which he directed and co-wrote. Brat Packers including Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy as well as a young Demi Moore starred in the story of a bunch of Georgetown grads making their way through life and love. Even the theme song was a hit and is still played to evoke the era. The film offered a pretty smart take on the complexities of post-college life. His next film was a big hit as well: horror comedy “The Lost Boys,” about a group of young vampires who dominate a small California town, starred Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, Corey Feldman and Corey Haim. It became a cult favorite, and a TV series adaptation has long been in the works. Schumacher had a high-concept screenplay by Peter Filardi and an A-list cast — Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin — for the 1990 horror thriller “Flatliners,” about arrogant medical students experimenting with life and death, and the director hit it fairly big again, with a domestic cume of $61 million. While those hits captured the era well, others during that period were misfires, such as the 1989 remake of the French hit “Cousin/Cousine” called “Cousins” and starring Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini and the sentimental “Dying Young,” starring Roberts and Campbell Scott. But in 1993 he showed what he was capable of with the critically hailed “Falling Down,” starring Michael Douglas as a defense worker who’s lost it all and decides to take it out on whomever he comes across. The film played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The New York Times said the film “exemplifies a quintessentially American kind of pop movie making that, with skill and wit, sends up stereotypical attitudes while also exploiting them with insidious effect. ‘Falling Down’ is glitzy, casually cruel, hip and grim. It’s sometimes very funny, and often nasty in the way it manipulates one’s darkest feelings.” Schumacher’s next film was also a solid hit. “The Client,” based on a John Grisham novel, was a highly effective legal thriller that also boasted terrific rapport between Susan Sarandon’s lawyer and her 11-year-old client, a boy played by Brad Renfro who has witnessed a murder. Between the two “Batman” films, Schumacher directed another Grisham adaptation, “A Time to Kill,” which sported a terrific cast (including Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd and a career jump-starting turn by a young Matthew McConaughey) and, while not without its own weaknesses, asked important questions about race. After the second “Batman” he made the much darker, smaller-scale thriller “8MM,” which followed a miscast Nicolas Cage as a family-man private detective in pursuit of those who made what appears to be a snuff film. His next film, 1999’s “Flawless,” about a homophobic cop who’s suffered a stroke, played by Robert De Niro, and a drag-wearing Philip Seymour Hoffman, was formulaic — the odd couple who couldn’t be more different find out they have a lot in common — but it sported excellent performances by the leads and certainly had heart. Switching gears dramatically, Schumacher made “Tigerland,” starring a young Colin Farrell in the story of young recruits preparing to go off to Vietnam. It had a gritty look, but while some critics saw an earnest quality, others saw cynicism. Schumacher’s 2002 thriller “Phone Booth,” which reunited the director with Colin Farrell and Kiefer Sutherland — and intriguingly trapped Farrell’s antihero in the title New York City phone booth for almost all of the film’s running time — had critics and audiences alike talking, even if the ending was a cop-out. His other films included actioner “Bad Company,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock; “Veronica Guerin,” starring Cate Blanchett as a journalist crusading rather recklessly against the Irish drug trade; and Jim Carrey thriller “The Number 23” and “Trespass,” starring Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman. Schumacher started out in showbiz as a costume designer, earning credits on 1972’s “Play It as It Lays,” Herbert Ross’ “The Last of Sheila” (1973), Paul Mazursky’s “Blume in Love (1973), Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” (1973) and “Interiors” (1978) and 1975 Neil Simon adaptation “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.” He was also credited as the production designer on the 1974 TV horror film “Killer Bees.” He also started to write screenplays, including 1976’s “Sparkle,” 1978 hit “Car Wash” and the adaptation for 1978 musical “The Wiz.” Schumacher’s first directing assignments came in television: the 1974 telepic “Virginia Hill,” which he also co-wrote and starred Dyan Cannon, and the 1979 telepic “Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill,” which he also penned. He stepped into the feature arena with the 1981 sci-fi comedy “The Incredible Shrinking Woman,” starring Lily Tomlin, followed in 1983 by “D.C. Cab,” an action-comedy vehicle for Mr. T that Schumacher also wrote. Born in New York City, he studied at Parsons the New School for Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. He worked in the fashion industry, but decided to instead pursue a career in filmmaking. After moving to Los Angeles, he applied his fashion background to working first as a costume designer and worked in TV while earning an MFA from UCLA. Schumacher directed a couple of episodes of “House of Cards” in 2013, and in 2015 he exec produced the series “Do Not Disturb: Hotel Horrors.” Camerimage, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography, awarded Schumacher a special award in 2010. He also received the Distinguished Collaborator Award at the Costume Designers Guild Awards in 2011. Click here to view original web page at variety.com Read the full article

[wristwatchjournal]

Hands-On: Seiko Lukia Women’s Automatic Watches Make World Debut In 2020

For 2020, Seiko introduces its long-standing JDM (Japanese domestic market) Lukia women’s watch collection as a globally available product — though with a new form. Today, aBlogtoWatch looks at the Seiko Lukia references SPB133 (white on white strap), SPB135 (red on red strap), SPB137 (blue on blue strap), SPB138 (two-tone on green strap), and the SPB140 (gold-tone on purple strap). There are more versions available, such as those with and without diamond decoration on the bezels. While in Japan, the Seiko Lukia timepiece collection has ranged from entry-level models to those squarely in the luxury space, the 2020 Seiko Lukia women’s watches available in the United States and other parts of the world are certainly skewed toward the luxury segment.

Beautiful and practical, Lukia Collection watches are ideal for women seeking a decorative daily wear — powered by an in-house-made automatic movement. There are still very few watches of this type, at this price range, that are available in any mainstream manner. That makes the Seiko Lukia part of a still-rare breed, and the watch industry has high hopes that this segment will grow. What segment is that, exactly? Good question. For years now, the watch industry has faced market growth stagnation with men’s mechanical watch products. While there are still plenty of men’s luxury timepiece markets and price points still to exploit, it would be wrong to suggest that the luxury watch industry didn’t entirely over-saturate most markets with far more products than consumers are willing (or able) to purchase. Thus, the dream is that at least some of the success of selling higher-end mechanical watches to men could be replicated in the women’s market.

While women can covet a timepiece as much as men can, the psychology of women wodesiring and purchase a watch has proven to be a different enough animal that the same techniques used to get men excited about watches don’t always work for women. The result has been that women wearers of luxury watches typically spend less than men per watch and also tend to be interested in a far narrower breadth of brands. A big reason for this is that unlike the relatively few wearable luxury accessory categories men can wear in a socially acceptable manner, women have far more options, including product categories such as handbags, many forms of jewelry, clothing, shoes, makeup, and more. Men are usually limited to perhaps shoes, sometimes a wallet, clothing, and their watches. Thus, interest in luxury accessories for men is much more consolidated in the watch category than it is for women.

Not taking into consideration important factors such as marketing and advertising, the watch industry has regularly asked the question, “What does a woman want in a luxury timepiece if she is interested in the segment beyond the most known, popular brands such as Rolex, Cartier, and Chanel?” Some women prefer the practicality of quartz watches, and others appreciate the romance and timelessness of mechanical watches. Some women actually prefer wearing noticeably men’s watches on their wrists, and other women demand original designs that are more than just sized-down, dressed-up men’s watches. Where do these roughly $1,300 Seiko Lukia watches fit in the mix?

At first glance, the Lukia watches benefit from not looking like any of Seiko’s popular men’s watches. The cases and dials are original, even if they embody a series of “design codes” that seasoned timepiece fans will recognize from other Seiko products. The round cases (in steel, with some of them being coated in gold tone) have curved delicate feminine lugs, and a 12-sided angular bezel that plays nicely with the geometric designs of the dial and hour markers. While these watches are elegant in their coloring (inspired by various places in the Ginza, a ritzy shopping district in Tokyo), they are actually quite sporty in their durability featuring a sapphire crystal and 100 meters of water resistance for the case.

The cases are each 34.8mm-wide, which is about as large as you’d want to go for a watch that is still inherently feminine in its proportions. The watch is relatively thin, but given the mechanical automatic movement on the inside, it isn’t going to be as thin as Seiko’s most svelte quartz-based timepiece. On the average woman’s wrist, this nearly 35mm-wide case size is large enough to be bold, but not so large as to be visually overpowering or mistaken for something masculine.

Seiko did a beautiful job with the dials of the SPB1XX Lukia watches, which are all mother-of-pearl. The base mother-of-pearl dial is printed on, giving the dials the look of complex artistic marquetry (whose geometry, along with diamond-set hour markers) and is what I earlier referred to as being harmonious with the case design. It is very interesting to see how the printed (and colored) mother-of-pearl Lukia watches look in red, white, blue, gold, and pink. They look very attractive in person, in my opinion.

Eight of the 12-hour markers are applied with a small set diamond. One hour marker is missing to make room for a date window, and the other three hour markers are applied and stylized Roman numerals. With the angular, strong hands, the Lukia faces have an interesting mixture of bold (almost masculine) lines contrasted with colors, textures, and decoration that feel inherently feminine. Legibility is strong, and the powerful look of the colored mother-of-pearl helps the watches to be eye-catching and attractive — something all high-end watches should be.

Attached to the cases are very nice crocodile straps that use a favorite technique of mine that hides and of the stitching. I believe this is called a “rolled edge” technique and pulls the crocodile skin over the side edges of the strap and attaches it to the padding on the underside of the strap. I really can’t see anyone being disappointed by these straps, but a bracelet option would have been nice. I will, however, guess that not everyone wants the fold-over locking deployant clasps that are attached. While these deployants help prolong the life of the strap (and retailers believe consumers feel they are more high-end and thus more easily command higher prices), these deployant clasps are inherently bulky and can add unnecessary fuss to the strap-wearing experience. I also lament that, in California, none of the crocodile straps will be available. The state I live in recently passed a law outlawing the sale of many animal skins in order to reduce the market for illegally sourced exotic skins. Given that alligators and crocodiles are mostly farmed and, to my knowledge, not hunted in nature, I personally don’t understand the wide breadth of the law. I also am curious what straps these Lukia watches will have on them for those pieces that are sold in California’s large timepiece market.

Inside the Seiko Lukia watches is the in-house-made Seiko caliber 6R35 automatic movement, which is also visible through a sapphire crystal window on the rear of the case. The mechanical movement operates at 3Hz (21,600 bph) and has a longish power reserve of 70 hours. This is a decent-grade mechanical movement that will serve its wearer well at this price point. I am actually not very familiar with women’s automatic Seiko timepieces, so I am not sure of the full breadth of movement choices Seiko offers in this smaller diameter size. While some Swiss Made automatic movements inside women’s watches can be better decorated and slimmer, I don’t think most of them would be able to compete with Seiko in terms of pricing.

The Seiko of 2020 and beyond is less and less about being a discount alternative to luxury Swiss watches given that Seiko is upping its value propositions (and prices) over time. That said, the vast majority of Seiko watches still offer more bang for your buck than most comparable Swiss-made watches. Popular brands such as Rolex, Omega, TAG Heuer, Chanel, Hermes, Cartier, and others that produce mechanical (or otherwise) women’s watches offer nothing or very little at this price point. Seiko is increasingly able to hold its own in a fight, which is why even if pricing isn’t as aggressive as some people remember it, these days the brand is making very clear moves to give consumers a lot more for their money.

The Seiko Lukia automatic watches for 2020 will, for many women (outside of Japan), be the first time they have been romanced by a decorative, mechanical watch from the historic company. Having seen similar pieces sold in Japan-only, I know how popular these “daily decorative” women’s timepieces can be in the market. Seiko will have to take some steps toward educating a more global women’s audience about why mechanical timepieces are interesting, but once they do, I think there is a lot to love (as well as appreciable value) in the Seiko Lukia automatic SPB133, SPB135, SPB137, SPB138, and SPB140 (along with the rest of the collection’s SKUs). Price for the Seiko Lukia watches (without diamonds on the bezel but rather only on the dial) ranges from $1,300 – $1,400 USD, depending on the steel case tone. Learn more at the Seiko website here.

The post Hands-On: Seiko Lukia Women’s Automatic Watches Make World Debut In 2020 appeared first on Wristwatch Journal.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2YsFFaM via IFTTT

[sciencespies]

Op-ed | NASA: Need Another Space Assignment?  

https://sciencespies.com/space/op-ed-nasa-need-another-space-assignment/

Op-ed | NASA: Need Another Space Assignment?  

Civil aviation is one of the premiere success stories of the 20th century. Airmail was authorized by the US government in 1911 and began scheduled service in 1918. The federal government then authorized private contractors to carry the mail in 1925. An aviation boom followed. With the establishment of passenger airline service — initiated by the Air Commerce Act of 1926 — federal authorities established air routes, mandated standards for navigation, outlined licensing procedures for pilots, provided certification for aircraft, and created accident investigation standards. Commercial aviation was turned over to private industry and flourished. With full deregulation in 1978, aviation became more affordable, competitive and safer than ever. 

Here’s what did not happen next: the government did not step back in, redefine the routes, and nationalize the airlines who were plying ever-wider routes across the US and the globe. To do so would obviously have spelled disaster.

Sadly, some members of Congress are ready to do just that in space. They are preparing to turn back the clock and shut the door on an emerging golden age of lunar exploration and development. While the National Space Council has laid out a clear path to a prosperous American future in space and NASA leadership have embraced ambitious goals with quick and efficient plans, H.R. 5666, the National Aeronautics Space Administration Authorization Act of 2020, would return American spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit to governmental control. It would dictate the destination — Mars — and engineer the systems — governmental landers on governmental rockets.

In contrast to NASA’s current, innovative plan to return to the moon with a robust, competitive mix of commercial and governmental hardware, H.R. 5666 would send only a handful of short sortie human missions to the moon, abandoning the significant water and metal resources there to our international competitors. These are the resources that will unlock sustainable access to the rest of the our solar system and define the future of humanity for years to come.

Our congressional rocket scientists have not surprisingly designed the most expensive solution with the lowest possible economic return. H.R. 5666 would mandate “a minimum set of human and robotic lunar surface activities that must be completed to enable a human mission to Mars” — a certain path to high cost, low return missions, and the likely collapse of a space program capable of surviving a change in administrations. Worse, the plan mandates that NASA own its landers and rely only on the long-delayed and grossly over-budget Space Launch System for carriage.

Who wins here? In the short run, the traditional aerospace giants who have had trouble delivering their systems will keep plodding along. Who loses? Ultracompetitive and efficient companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, who have been demonstrating the technical and economic superiority of their innovative spaceflight methods. In fact, Congress’s plan is terrible for our revered traditional firms in the long run, because it subsidizes their noncompetitive postures and kills a future market full of opportunities for them. And who will pay? The American taxpayer, who will bear the burden of Congress choosing the least expeditious and most expensive toll road in the heavens. 

If you have a sense of Déjà vu, you’re not alone. We’ve seen this space opera before. When President Obama took office, George W. Bush’s Constellation moon program was terminated. Prominent voices, including moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, decried that decision. They dreaded the fallow period in American space activity that would follow the shuttle program. What NASA got instead was an endless “Journey to Mars,” a program that would theoretically put humans on the Red Planet in no specific year using a rocket specified by senatorial rocket scientists. Nobody outside of NASA’s communication department, the kids at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center and science fiction authors took the Journey to Mars seriously. NASA wasn’t building any landers, ascent vehicles or habitats to serve as Mark Watney’s Martian potato farm. Needing to actually send the rocket somewhere, NASA concocted the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), an unloved muddle that most everyone was happy to see the Trump transition team lay its ax to. 

H.R. 5666’s top-down, government-owned plan is like a bad sequel to a bad movie. The world’s premiere space agency is proceeding with SLS/Orion and also plans to work with entrepreneurial space companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin who, according to NASA’s own internal studies, can provide routine services (and even novel ones like lunar landings) for as little as 10 percent of the conventional approach. The public also loves the new excitement these firms have brought to spaceflight. So why would the House not listen to the world’s greatest experts who are in their ultimate employ or to their constituents? Use your imagination. (hint: entrenched financial and political interests).

Space enthusiasts have long pined for another “Kennedy moment,” in which the President would stride to the podium to announce a new, dramatic and time-delimited space goal that would galvanize NASA and the aerospace industry to do what they do best. Unfortunately, in the three attempts since 1961 (Space Station Freedom under Ronald Reagan, the Space Exploration Initiative under George H.W. Bush, and the Constellation program under George W. Bush) none were sufficiently funded, and none gathered broad support from the Congress or the public. They all hung on the Hill and damaged public confidence in NASA’s ability to execute on human spaceflight programs. One more cancellation or extended delay of a large program — in this case, the Artemis lunar landing by 2024 — could be calamitous for NASA’s image. Our international partners in space who would like to invest millions into helping NASA achieve these ambitious goals are aghast. Why should they invest in another politically doomed U.S. program when they can surely count on the Chinese to achieve their stated goals? Does the U.S. Congress seriously want to see European and Canadian astronauts beaming down at them from a Chinese space station?

Humans on Mars can wait. It can wait until we have worked out the many complex technical challenges, such as long-term life support tech, radiation abatement, and learning to work in an environment saturated with dangerous and potentially toxic dust. Mars can wait until these technologies have been tested and proved by working on the lunar surface and in lunar orbit aboard an orbiting platform, the Gateway. Mars can also wait until we learn how to “live off the land” on the moon by using lunar resources — that’s why very smart people in China and India are dedicating vast resources in their national space programs to accomplish that lunar goal. (If they succeed in doing so before the U.S. does, it could become much more difficult to accomplish that goal ourselves.) Finally, Mars can wait until cislunar infrastructure exists to make the push for the Red Planet affordable, sustainable and realistic. Otherwise we are likely to find ourselves spent and exhausted, both in terms of public support and national treasure, when H.R. 5666’s pointless Martian sorties — should they ever occur — lose their excitement, just as the Apollo program did in 1972. 

Finally, a return to closed-end Apollo-style human spaceflight programs, which will ignore the critical development of sustainable orbital and cislunar infrastructure, cripples our ability to respond quickly to potential foreign interference with American space assets. Russia and China are developing an increasingly robust ability to field tactical weapons in space and to interdict American assets there. Space infrastructure, developed by entrepreneurial companies, would establish an inherently strong cislunar posture for America — defending a territory is ultimately about occupying and exploiting it. H.R. 5666’s expeditionary mentality would blow right past the development of enduring infrastructure and economic development, leaving the protection of timid U.S. space assets to strictly military operators as the only responses the weak can make in the face of aggression, concession or violence.

Those on the Hill should listen to the distant echoes of the Space Race and learn. Reject the drumbeat of nationalism and antiquated governmental models. NASA is on the right course, with the right leadership and the support of our entrepreneurs and our international partners; let them do their job. Most importantly, embrace the most significant lesson of the 21st century: releasing space to free enterprise will secure prosperity for the next generation of Americans, just as releasing the internet from the grasp of government did for their grandparents.

  Greg Autry is founder of the Commercial Spaceflight Initiative at the University of Southern California. He served as a member of the Trump administration’s NASA transition team and as the White House liaison to NASA. He is Vice President of Space Development at the National Space Society. 

Rod Pyle has authored 15 books on spaceflight, including 2019’s Space 2.0 with a foreword by Buzz Aldrin. He is a consultant and keynote speaker for aerospace and in public venues, and is the Editor-in-Chief of Ad Astra, the print periodical of the National Space Society. Rod can be heard on iHeart’s Cool Space News podcast.

#Space

[maxihealth]

Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2020

Today as we appreciate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I post a photo of him in my hometown of Detroit in 1963, giving a preliminary version of the “I Have a Dream” speech he would deliver two months later in Washington, DC.

Wisdom from the speech: “But now more than ever before, America is forced to grapple with this problem, for the shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy. The price that this nation must pay for the continued oppression and exploitation of the Negro or any other minority group is the price of its own destruction. For the hour is late. The clock of destiny is tickling out, and we must act now before it is too late.”

As I meditate on MLK, I think about health equity. By now, most clued-in Americans know the score on the nation’s collective health status compared to other developed countries: suffice it to say, We’re Still Not #1 for health outcomes, albeit we’re the biggest spender on healthcare, per health citizen, in the world.

Underneath that statistic is a shameful state of health affairs: that people of color and the LGBTQ communities in the U.S. have lower quality of health and many services than white people do:

Black women have higher breast cancer death rates than White women

Asian women are less likely than White women to receive a pap smear

Hispanic women are more likely than non-Hispanic White women to be diagnosed with cervical cancer at an advanced stage

Rates of hospital admissions for uncontrolled diabetes are higher for Black women than for women in other racial/ethnic groups

The rate of hospital admissions for lower extremity amputations due to uncontrolled diabetes is higher for Black women than White women

The rate of new AIDS cases is higher for Black and Hispanic women than for non-Hispanic White women. Black and Hispanic men had even higher rates than women, as well as higher rates than non-Hispanic White men

Black women receive treatment for depression less frequently than White women and Hispanic women received treatment less frequently than non-Hispanic White women

Hispanic women received treatment for substance abuse less frequently than non-Hispanic White women.

If these statistics don’t move you, then here’s a finding from the National Academy of Science’s Shorter Lives, Poorer Health that might surprise you: today, people in the U.S. under 50 have poorer health outcomes than our cohorts in other developed countries. For women under 50, we’d rather live in other industrialized countries where fewer women under 50 die from noncommunicable diseases, heart disease, injuries, perinatal conditions, drug-related causes, and communicable and nutritional conditions.

Yes, more younger women in the U.S. — the wealthiest nation in the world — lose more life-years due to malnutrition, infectious disease, injury, and lifestyle-borne diseases like diabetes and heart disease than in our fellow rich countries.

And in 2018, a new statistic emerging that the rate among women for deaths due to opioid overdoses rose. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of this concerning trend is a link to pregnant women and newborns.

What’s new today versus previous MLK Days is that the rate of white male middle-age deaths is on the rise, as well. So when we consider health disparities and public health, it’s important to realize there’s one boat, one health commons, and every person in America is impacted by those social determinants of health beyond the healthcare system: clean air (ask a miner in West Virginia), clean water (ask your cousin in Flint, Michigan), good jobs (with health benefits – ask any worker without them), nutritious food (ask someone living in a food desert), social connections (ask an isolated senior), and in my growing appreciation, access to connectivity/broadband networks (ask anyone looking for a job  or a clinic for a lab test without a good smartphone data plan).

In 2019, an emerging concern is how the growth in adoption of artificial intelligence and cognitive computing among health care organizations – particularly, insurance plans, providers, and pharma. AI can be used for good, to be sure. The promises of Big Data in health cover a wide range: hospitals anticipating and preventing inpatient readmissions; health plans deploying more effective population health programs; and research-based life science companies being more intelligent and efficient in finding cures.

But AI also can mine data from sources beyond the medical claim that mashed together profile people in ways that can be used to bias business choices in the interest of cost-saving or simply-put, prejudice. We must guard against exacerbating health disparities with these sorts of AI applications in health and medical care.

Last year’s U.S. District judge ruling against the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S . Census is another example of how institutions, and public ones at that, can try to mis-use data or mis-appropriate data. For an in-depth look into this phenomenon, see my report, Here’s Looking at You: How Personal Health Information is Getting Tracked and Used, written for the California Healthcare Foundation.

Finally, read what U.S. doctors have to say about health disparities in JAMA. The top line for doctors lies in the concluding sentence: “Apart from the human and economic consequences affecting today’s adults and workforce, the health disadvantages faced by today’s children carry profound implications for tomorrow’s adults, the nation’s economy, and national security. Now the question is what US society is prepared to do about it.” 

To this end, I am encouraged (immediate-term, anyway) by the growing understanding and embrace of the role of social determinants for health in America among both providers and health plans.

Coming full circle to Dr. King, there’s a paragraph from MLK’s speech delivered at the Great March of Detroit that especially resonates on his special Day:

“We are coming to see now, the psychiatrists are saying to us, that many of the strange things that happen in the subconscious, many of the inner conflicts, are rooted in hate. And so they are saying, ‘Love or perish.’ But Jesus told us this a long time ago. And I can still hear that voice crying through the vista of time, saying, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.’”

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  I am a child of metro Detroit. As a very little girl, I lived through the Detroit Riots of 1967, a few days after which my father drove us through the fire-devastated neighborhoods of his friends and clients who lived and worked around 12th Street and Grand River. It was a visceral moment for me in my life, one of my earliest memories, seeing burned-out shops on pedestrian main streets. I remember still the smoky smell which my young lungs breathed in. I wondered why something like this happens.

In a few years’ time, I was reading Martin Luther King’s book, Why We Can’t Wait; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Native Son by Richard Wright — still, one of my favorite books. In college, I delved deeply into urban economics and urban planning, soaking in Jane Jacobs’ seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, among other influential books on the syllabus.

At the University of Michigan School of Public Health, I then learned to connect the dots between our environment, our socioeconomic status — especially the role of education — and health.

Addressing health disparities is as much about access to health insurance as it is to access to good and well-priced food, safe schools, education, good jobs, and sound social policies about gun ownership and use. We must also attend to seeing that broadband and connectivity, and net neutrality for access to the online world, services, and communities, are guaranteed to all health citizens in America.

These interrelationships are fundamental to public health thinking. Those of us whose work touches any aspect of health and health care must attend to public health and commit to reducing health disparities in America. A healthy populace is more productive across so many dimensions. As we continue the hard work to re-build the national economy and continue to expand affordable health care access, public health should and must be seen and used as a pillar for economic growth.

This is a key call-to-action I raise at the conclusion of my book, HealthConsuming: From Health Consumer to Health Citizen, most Americans, having morphed into payors and consumers, see health care as a human or civil right. As health citizens, people in America would be covered by universal health insurance and more comprehensive data privacy protections. That’s the rights side of the civics ledger. On the responsibilities side, Americans must become more politically engaged, embracing their role as citizens and the blessings of the freedom to vote and engage in public policy in the commons. That’s what MLK would have wanted.

This post was updated from previous versions that have run here on Health Populi to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday. 

The post Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2020 appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2020 posted first on https://carilloncitydental.blogspot.com

[michaelfallcon]

A Coffee Drinker’s Guide To Detroit

What is left to say about Detroit? By now, you’ll have heard the boom and bust stories, the tales of failure and recovery. It’s old (and frankly rather boring) news—let’s just agree that Detroit is back.

Instead, let’s talk about how cool Detroit is. It has famous sons and daughters, from superstars like Madonna and Eminem to, well, Kid Rock. It’s the home of Motown, the birthplace of techno, and the den of oft-beleaguered Tigers and Lions.

And Detroit’s coffee scene is booming. Brand new cafes open seemingly every week, in monied suburbs and trendy urban neighborhoods. Detroit’s sprawling size—San Francisco, Manhattan, and Boston could all fit within the city’s 139 square miles—means there’s plenty of scope for new businesses to begin, expand and grow.

Here are ten of the best, both new and established.



The Red Hook Detroit

Originally based in the suburb of Ferndale, The Red Hook has since expanded to Detroit proper with this charming neighborhood space. The rotating roaster lineup is a mixture of star coffee names such as Parlor Coffee and Stumptown Coffee Roasters, as well as more local representation from Astro Coffee, all made via batch brew, Hario V60, or a white La Marzocco FB80.

In-house baked goods round out the menu, while plants and colorful murals make the cafe feel lively and welcoming. Its location in the heart of West Village makes it a local favorite, as well as a perfect spot for dog-watching if my time spent there is any indication.

The Red Hook is located at 8025 Agnes St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Populace Coffee

To downtown now, and Populace’s lobby cafe inside The Siren Hotel on Broadway. I’ve written about this space before, and it bears repeating that the regal opulence of the interior is a sight to see. Heavy curtains, antique furniture, and just so much marble make sitting in the lobby and drinking a latte a distinctly fancy experience.

Populace roasts out of Bay City, Michigan, where its original cafe also resides, but this expansion to Detroit is another sign that the city’s coffee scene is flourishing, and still welcoming new players.

Populace Coffee is located at 2114, 1509 Broadway St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Ashe Supply Company

On the same block of Broadway, a couple of buildings up from Populace, sits Ashe Supply Company, a self-styled “Lifestyle Brand” that combines clothing, artwork, prints, and coffee. Started by two Detroit natives, the cafe features industrial-chic interior design, with a curved bar clad in wood, hand-written signs, and pieces of Detroit ephemera dotted around.

Part of the space is dedicated to coffee roasting, while the rest is filled with community tables and cozy nooks, from which to gaze through the big glass windows at the comings and goings from the Detroit Opera House across the street.

Ashe Supply Company is located at 1555 Broadway St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters

Another downtown expansion for another Detroit suburb stalwart, Dessert Oasis opened this second location after beginning life 26 miles north in Rochester.

The downtown space is big and softly lit, with high ceilings, exposed ductwork and light fixtures—in fact, if it feels a bit like a music venue then that’s because it sort of is. Dessert Oasis started life as a dessert- and music-focused cafe, before adjusting its focus to include more of the coffee side of the business.

The cafes still host regular gigs, with both local and national acts passing through most weekends.

The big octagonal bar sits in the middle of the space, featuring a pour-over station and Slayer espresso machine, as well as a refrigerated display case for all the house-made cakes (dessert is in the name, after all).

Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters is located at 1220 Griswold St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

  Astro Coffee

Started by a couple who met while working at Monmouth Coffee Company in London, Astro is regarded by many as the center of Detroit’s coffee scene. Since 2011, Astro has offered a distinctive take on specialty coffee alongside an expansive menu of house-made goodies (plus they make their own nut milk, always a bonus).

A rotating selection of US and international guest coffee is available (Heart Roasters from Oregon and Bonanza Coffee Roasters from Germany are two recent offerings), in addition to Astro’s own roasting program, which they set up just last year.

The cafe itself is cozy and welcoming, with mural-covered chalkboard walls, plenty of seating, and a busy, community-minded feel.

Astro Coffee is located at 2124 Michigan Ave, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Lucky Detroit

A brand new cafe above a barbershop a block down from Astro on Michigan Ave, Lucky has the feel of a laid-back saloon. Interior design is big on dark wood, exposed brick and plenty of antiques (not to mention a moose head on one wall), and a huge three-part mirror behind the reclaimed butcher-block bar.

A La Marzocco Linea Mini serves espresso drinks, while manual and batch brews are also available, all made with coffee from Populace. Lucky is the ideal place to grab a coffee, relax on a comfy sofa while gazing upon the puzzled visage of a flag-draped moose, and await your turn in the barber’s chair.

Lucky Detroit is located at 2000 Michigan Ave, 2nd Floor, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

  Anthology Coffee

Previously located within the Pony Ride business incubator in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood, Anthology’s roastery and cafe has been a Detroit favorite since 2012. The new space at the Eastern Market retains an open plan and communal feel, with the roastery on one side and a semi-floating coffee bar featuring a striking Mahlkönig EKK43 grinder and full Modbar system on the other. Everything is arranged to give the customer maximum interaction with their coffee as it is roasted and brewed.

Anthology Coffee is located at 1948 Division St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

  Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Company

Another of Detroit’s coffee elders, Great Lakes Coffee has been wholesale roasting since 1994 and serving coffee at its flagship location on Woodward Ave in Midtown since 2012. A big, light-filled space, utilizing wood reclaimed from two demolished Hamtramck houses, Great Lakes combines a full coffee service with an extensive alcohol menu and inventive food lineup.

One part of the enormous bar features a La Marzocco GB5, Mazzer grinders, and a Hario V60 pour-over station for all your coffee needs, while another hosts a rotating selection of wines, draught beers, and specialty cocktails. It’s a harmonious blend, keeping the communal tables and bar stools that fill out the rest of the space in constant demand.

Great Lakes Coffee has multiple locations around Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Cairo Coffee

On the outskirts of the bustling Eastern Market, tucked discreetly at the back of a retail shop, sits Cairo Coffee, a multi-roaster cafe anchored by North Carolina’s Counter Culture. Whether you happen upon it by chance or hear about it through word of mouth, visiting Cairo feels like visiting the kitchen of an old friend who just happens to have made a pot of coffee.

The cafe might be small, with space for just a few tables, but the coffee experience is taken very seriously, with a La Marzocco GS3 and Mazzer Major taking up most of the counter, and rotating guest coffees supplementing the ever-present Counter Culture (most recently Máquina Coffee Roasters from Pennsylvania).

In a nod to community engagement, the cafe also hosts the Library of Cairo, encouraging visitors to borrow (and hopefully return) a variety of books from the shelves below the counter.

Cairo Coffee is located at 2712 Riopelle St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Bikes & Coffee

Another Detroit coffee newbie, having only opened in late October and located across Trumbull Ave from Wayne State University’s athletic complex, Bikes & Coffee focuses on, well, you can probably guess. The bar, big and rectangular, sits in the middle of the space, while the walls showcase bicycle paraphernalia for sale and the back of the space houses the already busy repair shop.

Another multi-roaster setup, Bikes & Coffee features local heroes Anthology as well as Hyperion from down the road in Ypsilanti and, fittingly, bicycle-themed Legal Speed from California.

There seems to be a natural intersection between bicycle people and coffee people, making it the perfect niche for Bikes & Coffee to exploit.

Bikes & Coffee is located at 1521 Putnam St, Detroit. Visit there official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Fionn Pooler is a journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the publisher of The Pourover. Read more Fionn Pooler on Sprudge.

The post A Coffee Drinker’s Guide To Detroit appeared first on Sprudge.

A Coffee Drinker’s Guide To Detroit published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

[shebreathesslowly]

A Coffee Drinker’s Guide To Detroit

What is left to say about Detroit? By now, you’ll have heard the boom and bust stories, the tales of failure and recovery. It’s old (and frankly rather boring) news—let’s just agree that Detroit is back.

Instead, let’s talk about how cool Detroit is. It has famous sons and daughters, from superstars like Madonna and Eminem to, well, Kid Rock. It’s the home of Motown, the birthplace of techno, and the den of oft-beleaguered Tigers and Lions.

And Detroit’s coffee scene is booming. Brand new cafes open seemingly every week, in monied suburbs and trendy urban neighborhoods. Detroit’s sprawling size—San Francisco, Manhattan, and Boston could all fit within the city’s 139 square miles—means there’s plenty of scope for new businesses to begin, expand and grow.

Here are ten of the best, both new and established.



The Red Hook Detroit

Originally based in the suburb of Ferndale, The Red Hook has since expanded to Detroit proper with this charming neighborhood space. The rotating roaster lineup is a mixture of star coffee names such as Parlor Coffee and Stumptown Coffee Roasters, as well as more local representation from Astro Coffee, all made via batch brew, Hario V60, or a white La Marzocco FB80.

In-house baked goods round out the menu, while plants and colorful murals make the cafe feel lively and welcoming. Its location in the heart of West Village makes it a local favorite, as well as a perfect spot for dog-watching if my time spent there is any indication.

The Red Hook is located at 8025 Agnes St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Populace Coffee

To downtown now, and Populace’s lobby cafe inside The Siren Hotel on Broadway. I’ve written about this space before, and it bears repeating that the regal opulence of the interior is a sight to see. Heavy curtains, antique furniture, and just so much marble make sitting in the lobby and drinking a latte a distinctly fancy experience.

Populace roasts out of Bay City, Michigan, where its original cafe also resides, but this expansion to Detroit is another sign that the city’s coffee scene is flourishing, and still welcoming new players.

Populace Coffee is located at 2114, 1509 Broadway St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Ashe Supply Company

On the same block of Broadway, a couple of buildings up from Populace, sits Ashe Supply Company, a self-styled “Lifestyle Brand” that combines clothing, artwork, prints, and coffee. Started by two Detroit natives, the cafe features industrial-chic interior design, with a curved bar clad in wood, hand-written signs, and pieces of Detroit ephemera dotted around.

Part of the space is dedicated to coffee roasting, while the rest is filled with community tables and cozy nooks, from which to gaze through the big glass windows at the comings and goings from the Detroit Opera House across the street.

Ashe Supply Company is located at 1555 Broadway St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters

Another downtown expansion for another Detroit suburb stalwart, Dessert Oasis opened this second location after beginning life 26 miles north in Rochester.

The downtown space is big and softly lit, with high ceilings, exposed ductwork and light fixtures—in fact, if it feels a bit like a music venue then that’s because it sort of is. Dessert Oasis started life as a dessert- and music-focused cafe, before adjusting its focus to include more of the coffee side of the business.

The cafes still host regular gigs, with both local and national acts passing through most weekends.

The big octagonal bar sits in the middle of the space, featuring a pour-over station and Slayer espresso machine, as well as a refrigerated display case for all the house-made cakes (dessert is in the name, after all).

Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters is located at 1220 Griswold St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

  Astro Coffee

Started by a couple who met while working at Monmouth Coffee Company in London, Astro is regarded by many as the center of Detroit’s coffee scene. Since 2011, Astro has offered a distinctive take on specialty coffee alongside an expansive menu of house-made goodies (plus they make their own nut milk, always a bonus).

A rotating selection of US and international guest coffee is available (Heart Roasters from Oregon and Bonanza Coffee Roasters from Germany are two recent offerings), in addition to Astro’s own roasting program, which they set up just last year.

The cafe itself is cozy and welcoming, with mural-covered chalkboard walls, plenty of seating, and a busy, community-minded feel.

Astro Coffee is located at 2124 Michigan Ave, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Lucky Detroit

A brand new cafe above a barbershop a block down from Astro on Michigan Ave, Lucky has the feel of a laid-back saloon. Interior design is big on dark wood, exposed brick and plenty of antiques (not to mention a moose head on one wall), and a huge three-part mirror behind the reclaimed butcher-block bar.

A La Marzocco Linea Mini serves espresso drinks, while manual and batch brews are also available, all made with coffee from Populace. Lucky is the ideal place to grab a coffee, relax on a comfy sofa while gazing upon the puzzled visage of a flag-draped moose, and await your turn in the barber’s chair.

Lucky Detroit is located at 2000 Michigan Ave, 2nd Floor, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

  Anthology Coffee

Previously located within the Pony Ride business incubator in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood, Anthology’s roastery and cafe has been a Detroit favorite since 2012. The new space at the Eastern Market retains an open plan and communal feel, with the roastery on one side and a semi-floating coffee bar featuring a striking Mahlkönig EKK43 grinder and full Modbar system on the other. Everything is arranged to give the customer maximum interaction with their coffee as it is roasted and brewed.

Anthology Coffee is located at 1948 Division St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

  Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Company

Another of Detroit’s coffee elders, Great Lakes Coffee has been wholesale roasting since 1994 and serving coffee at its flagship location on Woodward Ave in Midtown since 2012. A big, light-filled space, utilizing wood reclaimed from two demolished Hamtramck houses, Great Lakes combines a full coffee service with an extensive alcohol menu and inventive food lineup.

One part of the enormous bar features a La Marzocco GB5, Mazzer grinders, and a Hario V60 pour-over station for all your coffee needs, while another hosts a rotating selection of wines, draught beers, and specialty cocktails. It’s a harmonious blend, keeping the communal tables and bar stools that fill out the rest of the space in constant demand.

Great Lakes Coffee has multiple locations around Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Cairo Coffee

On the outskirts of the bustling Eastern Market, tucked discreetly at the back of a retail shop, sits Cairo Coffee, a multi-roaster cafe anchored by North Carolina’s Counter Culture. Whether you happen upon it by chance or hear about it through word of mouth, visiting Cairo feels like visiting the kitchen of an old friend who just happens to have made a pot of coffee.

The cafe might be small, with space for just a few tables, but the coffee experience is taken very seriously, with a La Marzocco GS3 and Mazzer Major taking up most of the counter, and rotating guest coffees supplementing the ever-present Counter Culture (most recently Máquina Coffee Roasters from Pennsylvania).

In a nod to community engagement, the cafe also hosts the Library of Cairo, encouraging visitors to borrow (and hopefully return) a variety of books from the shelves below the counter.

Cairo Coffee is located at 2712 Riopelle St, Detroit. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Bikes & Coffee

Another Detroit coffee newbie, having only opened in late October and located across Trumbull Ave from Wayne State University’s athletic complex, Bikes & Coffee focuses on, well, you can probably guess. The bar, big and rectangular, sits in the middle of the space, while the walls showcase bicycle paraphernalia for sale and the back of the space houses the already busy repair shop.

Another multi-roaster setup, Bikes & Coffee features local heroes Anthology as well as Hyperion from down the road in Ypsilanti and, fittingly, bicycle-themed Legal Speed from California.

There seems to be a natural intersection between bicycle people and coffee people, making it the perfect niche for Bikes & Coffee to exploit.

Bikes & Coffee is located at 1521 Putnam St, Detroit. Visit there official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Fionn Pooler is a journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the publisher of The Pourover. Read more Fionn Pooler on Sprudge.

The post A Coffee Drinker’s Guide To Detroit appeared first on Sprudge.

from Sprudge http://bit.ly/2UYvS8I

[bmjnews-blog]

Joel Schumacher, Director of Batman Films and ‘Lost Boys,’ Dies at 80

Joel Schumacher, costume designer-turned-director of films including “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “The Lost Boys” and “Falling Down,” as well as two “Batman” films, died in New York City on Monday morning after a year-long battle with cancer. He was 80. Schumacher brought his fashion background to directing a run of stylish films throughout the 1980s and 1990s that were not always critically acclaimed, but continue to be well-loved by audiences for capturing the feel of the era. Schumacher was handed the reins of the “Batman” franchise when Tim Burton exited Warner Bros.’ Caped Crusader series after two enormously successful films. The first movie by Schumacher, “Batman Forever,” starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey and Nicole Kidman, grossed more than $300 million worldwide. Schumacher’s second and last film in the franchise was 1997’s “Batman and Robin,” with George Clooney as Batman and Arnold Schwarzenegger as villain Mr. Freeze. For “Batman Forever,” the openly gay Schumacher introduced nipples to the costumes worn by Batman and Robin, leaning into the longstanding latent homoeroticism between the two characters. (In 2006, Clooney told Barbara Walters that he had played Batman as gay.) Several years after the Batman debacle, Schumacher directed the feature adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “The Phantom of the Opera.” Despite tepid reviews, it received three Oscar noms. In 1985 Schumacher struck gold with his third feature film, “St. Elmo’s Fire,” which he directed and co-wrote. Brat Packers including Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy as well as a young Demi Moore starred in the story of a bunch of Georgetown grads making their way through life and love. Even the theme song was a hit and is still played to evoke the era. The film offered a pretty smart take on the complexities of post-college life. His next film was a big hit as well: horror comedy “The Lost Boys,” about a group of young vampires who dominate a small California town, starred Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, Corey Feldman and Corey Haim. It became a cult favorite, and a TV series adaptation has long been in the works. Schumacher had a high-concept screenplay by Peter Filardi and an A-list cast — Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin — for the 1990 horror thriller “Flatliners,” about arrogant medical students experimenting with life and death, and the director hit it fairly big again, with a domestic cume of $61 million. While those hits captured the era well, others during that period were misfires, such as the 1989 remake of the French hit “Cousin/Cousine” called “Cousins” and starring Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini and the sentimental “Dying Young,” starring Roberts and Campbell Scott. But in 1993 he showed what he was capable of with the critically hailed “Falling Down,” starring Michael Douglas as a defense worker who’s lost it all and decides to take it out on whomever he comes across. The film played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The New York Times said the film “exemplifies a quintessentially American kind of pop movie making that, with skill and wit, sends up stereotypical attitudes while also exploiting them with insidious effect. ‘Falling Down’ is glitzy, casually cruel, hip and grim. It’s sometimes very funny, and often nasty in the way it manipulates one’s darkest feelings.” Schumacher’s next film was also a solid hit. “The Client,” based on a John Grisham novel, was a highly effective legal thriller that also boasted terrific rapport between Susan Sarandon’s lawyer and her 11-year-old client, a boy played by Brad Renfro who has witnessed a murder. Between the two “Batman” films, Schumacher directed another Grisham adaptation, “A Time to Kill,” which sported a terrific cast (including Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd and a career jump-starting turn by a young Matthew McConaughey) and, while not without its own weaknesses, asked important questions about race. After the second “Batman” he made the much darker, smaller-scale thriller “8MM,” which followed a miscast Nicolas Cage as a family-man private detective in pursuit of those who made what appears to be a snuff film. His next film, 1999’s “Flawless,” about a homophobic cop who’s suffered a stroke, played by Robert De Niro, and a drag-wearing Philip Seymour Hoffman, was formulaic — the odd couple who couldn’t be more different find out they have a lot in common — but it sported excellent performances by the leads and certainly had heart. Switching gears dramatically, Schumacher made “Tigerland,” starring a young Colin Farrell in the story of young recruits preparing to go off to Vietnam. It had a gritty look, but while some critics saw an earnest quality, others saw cynicism. Schumacher’s 2002 thriller “Phone Booth,” which reunited the director with Colin Farrell and Kiefer Sutherland — and intriguingly trapped Farrell’s antihero in the title New York City phone booth for almost all of the film’s running time — had critics and audiences alike talking, even if the ending was a cop-out. His other films included actioner “Bad Company,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock; “Veronica Guerin,” starring Cate Blanchett as a journalist crusading rather recklessly against the Irish drug trade; and Jim Carrey thriller “The Number 23” and “Trespass,” starring Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman. Schumacher started out in showbiz as a costume designer, earning credits on 1972’s “Play It as It Lays,” Herbert Ross’ “The Last of Sheila” (1973), Paul Mazursky’s “Blume in Love (1973), Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” (1973) and “Interiors” (1978) and 1975 Neil Simon adaptation “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.” He was also credited as the production designer on the 1974 TV horror film “Killer Bees.” He also started to write screenplays, including 1976’s “Sparkle,” 1978 hit “Car Wash” and the adaptation for 1978 musical “The Wiz.” Schumacher’s first directing assignments came in television: the 1974 telepic “Virginia Hill,” which he also co-wrote and starred Dyan Cannon, and the 1979 telepic “Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill,” which he also penned. He stepped into the feature arena with the 1981 sci-fi comedy “The Incredible Shrinking Woman,” starring Lily Tomlin, followed in 1983 by “D.C. Cab,” an action-comedy vehicle for Mr. T that Schumacher also wrote. Born in New York City, he studied at Parsons the New School for Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. He worked in the fashion industry, but decided to instead pursue a career in filmmaking. After moving to Los Angeles, he applied his fashion background to working first as a costume designer and worked in TV while earning an MFA from UCLA. Schumacher directed a couple of episodes of “House of Cards” in 2013, and in 2015 he exec produced the series “Do Not Disturb: Hotel Horrors.” Camerimage, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography, awarded Schumacher a special award in 2010. He also received the Distinguished Collaborator Award at the Costume Designers Guild Awards in 2011. Click here to view original web page at variety.com Read the full article

[alldatmatterzfan]

14 strong facts about the Hoover Dam

The huge Hoover Dam has been blocking the Colorado River and generating energy for nearly 80 years, but it has been surprised to learn how much of its construction and community are unforgettable. Here are some Amazing Facts about the Hoover Dam-

You Might Also Like: Amazing Facts about the Hoover Dam

1. DAM BUILD FORZÓ LAS VEGAS TO CLEAN YOUR LAW.

Once the public learns about plans to build a dam in the Black Canyon in Nevada, nearby cities estimate the potential economic and economic gains to host such a company. Las Vegas was particularly keen to host the project headquarters, so they sacrificed their reputation as a "concert city" to appear worthy of this honor. When Interior Minister Ray Lehman Wilbur, Amazing Facts about the Hoover Dam an important project player, arrived in the city on a visit in 1929, the local authorities in Las Vegas closed a large number of shops and brothels for the day in an effort to look more elegant.

2. Full city of SPRANG to support the construction of DAM.

Sen City's efforts were ultimately futile and a planned community of 5,000 men was built. Miles were spotted from the street and railroad tracks were set up to connect the valley side village to the project location and nearby Las Vegas. The community, known as Boulder City, remains. However, delays in their development forced a large number of early workers to stay in nearby Ragtown, whose name was met with very modest living conditions.

3. The Dam contains sufficient concrete to progress through the country.

The reclamation office, which supports the project, has provided 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete for the dam, as well as another 1.11 million yards for the power plant and additional facilities. This amount of concrete will be enough to build 3,000 miles of road, a full-size road from one end of the United States to the other. In addition, the dam requires about five million barrels of cement, roughly equivalent to the total amount of cement used by the Office in the previous 27 years of existence.

4. Cooling the largest refrigerant in the world all this concrete.

As you can imagine, all this concrete poses some challenges. Without the intervention of the engineers, they were required to calm the massive masses of years of cast concrete, and this gradual drying left the pieces vulnerable to breakage. To speed up the process, the engineering team designed a giant cooling machine. The large size of the frieze has spread more than 1,000 tons of ice per day, which has accelerated cooling decades and cut the project timeline.

5. First separation of construction taken to raise performance temperature.

The giant refrigerator had cut its work so. Work began at Hoover Dam in April 1931, long before the resistance of Clark County, Nevada to some of the highest recorded temperatures. June showed a daily average of 119 degrees Fahrenheit, causing a wave of heat stroke among workers.

6. The workers of the same samples were awesome.

Despite the harsh temperatures, the building attracted curious spectators and magic from all over the country. The strange games of "climbers" were more fun than the technological exploits of the project. This group of ambitious tumblers toured the Black Canyon to remove loose rocks from the gorge walls. While one might expect such a job to be treated with great caution, climbers are becoming famous for their fun and misguided tricks.

The spectators in particular liked the pranky Louis Vagan prank, nicknamed the "human pendulum" and "the Fajan rope." When the teams worked on the bumps on the walls of the valley, they moved from one area to another by closing their arms and legs around Vagan and making it swing to its next place.

7. A high heroic climber saved the life of his boss during construction.

Vagan was impressive, but Oliver Kwan was ahead of his teammates when his supervisor pulled out of the sky. When the Burl R. Rutledge inspector lost control of the safety line at the top of the valley, it could have come to an end if it was not quickly intercepted by the Cowan neighbor. Shortly after the incident, the city of Las Vegas pressed the Carnegie Medal for the courage of the local man.

8. Chief Engineer curse his workers required to the local press.

Not everyone was impressed with the work force. Risks of the subscriber's location

9. No one really wants to name the news after Herbert Hoover.

When you go back, it seems strange that one of the country's most impressive achievements bears the name of one of its least loving presidents. In fact, it is understood that Herbert Hoover has only won honor and privilege of naming this new structure," he said, "at Black Canyon, under the Boulder Canyon project law, it will be called the hon through a political advertising trick. In 1930, Wilbur Home Secretary travel to the site on the occasion of the official opening of the dam project. "I have the Hoover Dam." Amazing Facts about the Hoover Dam

In other words, Wilbur appointed prey to his boss. Since Hoover had been widely misled by him at the start of the Great Depression, the name was very close. Wilbur's successor, Harold Eckes, was a particularly outspoken critic, and in 1933 he changed the name of the current structure to "Boulder Dam." Amazing Facts about the Hoover Dam

10. The hoof was not called upon to consecrate DAM.

Ickes was not alone in his low opinion of Hoover. President Franklin Roosevelt did not think much about Hoover's presidential vision. When Franklin Roosevelt supervised the dedication of the dam, which was still vague in name, in 1935, he refused his predecessor's invitation and even refused to give Hoover the expected nod in his celebratory speech.

11. The newspaper did not take its name until 1947.

The dam passed 14 years after the announcement of Ickes without an official name. In the end, on 30 April 1947, President Harry Truman signed a law authorizing the handling of the original Hoover, recognizing President No. 31 to restore life to the dam in the first place.

12. The Nazis tried to blow up the pump.

In 1939, the US government learned of a plan by German Nazi agents to blow up Hoover Dam and its electrical installations. The destruction of the dam itself was not the main goal, but the disruption of energy production was a key part of the agents' plan to undermine the airline industry in California. To protect themselves from air raids, the authorities considered the Hoover Dam camouflage as a paint job or even a dam at the end of the day. In the end, the Germans were able to access the research work on site before strangling their strategy.

13. Today, the BRAI helps in the strength of three countries.

The dam's power helps keep lights on for customers in California, Arizona and Nevada and generate enough energy for 1.3 million people.

14. The hoof was the most dangerous woman in the world.

When construction of the Hoover Dam was completed in 1936, construction was not yet complete two years earlier than planned, but also because of its unprecedented strength. The black valley structure extended 726 feet from the base up, practically above the previous record holder, the 420-foot Oweihi dam in Oregon. After winning the title for two decades, Hoover finally overcame the 820-foot Mauvoisin dam in Switzerland in 1957. Eleven years later, he lost his 770-foot national title to Oroville.

You Might Also Like: Amazing Facts about the Hoover Dam

[titheguerrero]

Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2019

On this weekend as we appreciate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I post a photo of him in my hometown of Detroit in 1963, giving a preliminary version of the “I Have a Dream” speech he would deliver two months later in Washington, DC.

Wisdom from the speech: “But now more than ever before, America is forced to grapple with this problem, for the shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy. The price that this nation must pay for the continued oppression and exploitation of the Negro or any other minority group is the price of its own destruction. For the hour is late. The clock of destiny is tickling out, and we must act now before it is too late.”

As I meditate on MLK, I think about health equity. By now, most clued-in Americans know the score on the nation’s collective health status compared to other developed countries: suffice it to say, We’re Still Not #1 for health outcomes, albeit we’re the biggest spender on healthcare, per health citizen, in the world.

Underneath that statistic is a shameful state of health affairs: that people of color and the LGBTQ communities in the U.S. have lower quality of health and many services than white people do:

Black women have higher breast cancer death rates than White women

Asian women are less likely than White women to receive a pap smear

Hispanic women are more likely than non-Hispanic White women to be diagnosed with cervical cancer at an advanced stage

Rates of hospital admissions for uncontrolled diabetes are higher for Black women than for women in other racial/ethnic groups

The rate of hospital admissions for lower extremity amputations due to uncontrolled diabetes is higher for Black women than White women

The rate of new AIDS cases is higher for Black and Hispanic women than for non-Hispanic White women. Black and Hispanic men had even higher rates than women, as well as higher rates than non-Hispanic White men

Black women receive treatment for depression less frequently than White women and Hispanic women received treatment less frequently than non-Hispanic White women

Hispanic women received treatment for substance abuse less frequently than non-Hispanic White women.

If these statistics don’t move you, then here’s a finding from the National Academy of Science’s Shorter Lives, Poorer Health that might surprise you: today, people in the U.S. under 50 have poorer health outcomes than our cohorts in other developed countries. For women under 50, we’d rather live in other industrialized countries where fewer women under 50 die from noncommunicable diseases, heart disease, injuries, perinatal conditions, drug-related causes, and communicable and nutritional conditions.

Yes, more younger women in the U.S. — the wealthiest nation in the world — lose more life-years due to malnutrition, infectious disease, injury, and lifestyle-borne diseases like diabetes and heart disease than in our fellow rich countries.

And in 2018, a new statistic emerging that the rate among women for deaths due to opioid overdoses rose. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of this concerning trend is a link to pregnant women and newborns.

What’s new today versus previous MLK Days is that the rate of white male middle-age deaths is on the rise, as well. So when we consider health disparities and public health, it’s important to realize there’s one boat, one health commons, and every person in America is impacted by those social determinants of health beyond the healthcare system: clean air (ask a miner in West Virginia), clean water (ask your cousin in Flint, Michigan), good jobs (with health benefits – ask any worker without them), nutritious food (ask someone living in a food desert), social connections (ask an isolated senior), and in my growing appreciation, access to connectivity/broadband networks (ask anyone looking for a job  or a clinic for a lab test without a good smartphone data plan).

In 2019, an emerging concern is how the growth in adoption of artificial intelligence and cognitive computing among health care organizations – particularly, insurance plans, providers, and pharma. AI can be used for good, to be sure. The promises of Big Data in health cover a wide range: hospitals anticipating and preventing inpatient readmissions; health plans deploying more effective population health programs; and research-based life science companies being more intelligent and efficient in finding cures.

But AI also can mine data from sources beyond the medical claim that mashed together profile people in ways that can be used to bias business choices in the interest of cost-saving or simply-put, prejudice. We must guard against exacerbating health disparities with these sorts of AI applications in health and medical care.

This week’s news covering a U.S. District judge ruling against the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S . Census is another example of how institutions, and public ones at that, can try to mis-use data or mis-appropriate data. For an in-depth look into this phenomenon, see my report, Here’s Looking at You: How Personal Health Information is Getting Tracked and Used, written for the California Healthcare Foundation.

Finally, read what U.S. doctors have to say about health disparities in JAMA. The top line for doctors lies in the concluding sentence: “Apart from the human and economic consequences affecting today’s adults and workforce, the health disadvantages faced by today’s children carry profound implications for tomorrow’s adults, the nation’s economy, and national security. Now the question is what US society is prepared to do about it.” 

To this end, I am encouraged (immediate-term, anyway) by the growing understanding and embrace of the role of social determinants for health in America among both providers and health plans.

Coming full circle to Dr. King, there’s a paragraph from MLK’s speech delivered at the Great March of Detroit that especially resonates on his special Day:

“We are coming to see now, the psychiatrists are saying to us, that many of the strange things that happen in the subconscious, many of the inner conflicts, are rooted in hate. And so they are saying, ‘Love or perish.’ But Jesus told us this a long time ago. And I can still hear that voice crying through the vista of time, saying, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.'”

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  I am a child of metro Detroit. As a very little girl, I lived through the Detroit Riots of 1967, a few days after which my father drove us through the fire-devastated neighborhoods of his friends and clients who lived and worked around 12th Street and Grand River. It was a visceral moment for me in my life, one of my earliest memories, seeing burned-out shops on pedestrian main streets. I remember still the smoky smell which my young lungs breathed in. I wondered why something like this happens.

In a few years’ time, I was reading Martin Luther King’s book, Why We Can’t Wait; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Native Son by Richard Wright — still, one of my favorite books. In college, I delved deeply into urban economics and urban planning, soaking in Jane Jacobs’ seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, among other influential books on the syllabus.

At the University of Michigan School of Public Health, I then learned to connect the dots between our environment, our socioeconomic status — especially the role of education — and health.

Addressing health disparities is as much about access to health insurance as it is to access to good and well-priced food, safe schools, education, good jobs, and sound social policies about gun ownership and use. We must also attend to seeing that broadband and connectivity, and net neutrality for access to the online world, services, and communities, are guaranteed to all health citizens in America.

These interrelationships are fundamental to public health thinking. Those of us whose work touches any aspect of health and health care must attend to public health and commit to reducing health disparities in America. A healthy populace is more productive across so many dimensions. As we continue the hard work to re-build the national economy and continue to expand affordable health care access, public health should and must be seen and used as a pillar for economic growth.

  This post is updated from previous versions that have run here on Health Populi to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday. 

The post Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2019 appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Article source:Health Populi

[realselfblog]

Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2019

On this weekend as we appreciate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I post a photo of him in my hometown of Detroit in 1963, giving a preliminary version of the “I Have a Dream” speech he would deliver two months later in Washington, DC.

Wisdom from the speech: “But now more than ever before, America is forced to grapple with this problem, for the shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy. The price that this nation must pay for the continued oppression and exploitation of the Negro or any other minority group is the price of its own destruction. For the hour is late. The clock of destiny is tickling out, and we must act now before it is too late.”

As I meditate on MLK, I think about health equity. By now, most clued-in Americans know the score on the nation’s collective health status compared to other developed countries: suffice it to say, We’re Still Not #1 for health outcomes, albeit we’re the biggest spender on healthcare, per health citizen, in the world.

Underneath that statistic is a shameful state of health affairs: that people of color and the LGBTQ communities in the U.S. have lower quality of health and many services than white people do:

Black women have higher breast cancer death rates than White women

Asian women are less likely than White women to receive a pap smear

Hispanic women are more likely than non-Hispanic White women to be diagnosed with cervical cancer at an advanced stage

Rates of hospital admissions for uncontrolled diabetes are higher for Black women than for women in other racial/ethnic groups

The rate of hospital admissions for lower extremity amputations due to uncontrolled diabetes is higher for Black women than White women

The rate of new AIDS cases is higher for Black and Hispanic women than for non-Hispanic White women. Black and Hispanic men had even higher rates than women, as well as higher rates than non-Hispanic White men

Black women receive treatment for depression less frequently than White women and Hispanic women received treatment less frequently than non-Hispanic White women

Hispanic women received treatment for substance abuse less frequently than non-Hispanic White women.

If these statistics don’t move you, then here’s a finding from the National Academy of Science’s Shorter Lives, Poorer Health that might surprise you: today, people in the U.S. under 50 have poorer health outcomes than our cohorts in other developed countries. For women under 50, we’d rather live in other industrialized countries where fewer women under 50 die from noncommunicable diseases, heart disease, injuries, perinatal conditions, drug-related causes, and communicable and nutritional conditions.

Yes, more younger women in the U.S. — the wealthiest nation in the world — lose more life-years due to malnutrition, infectious disease, injury, and lifestyle-borne diseases like diabetes and heart disease than in our fellow rich countries.

And in 2018, a new statistic emerging that the rate among women for deaths due to opioid overdoses rose. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of this concerning trend is a link to pregnant women and newborns.

What’s new today versus previous MLK Days is that the rate of white male middle-age deaths is on the rise, as well. So when we consider health disparities and public health, it’s important to realize there’s one boat, one health commons, and every person in America is impacted by those social determinants of health beyond the healthcare system: clean air (ask a miner in West Virginia), clean water (ask your cousin in Flint, Michigan), good jobs (with health benefits – ask any worker without them), nutritious food (ask someone living in a food desert), social connections (ask an isolated senior), and in my growing appreciation, access to connectivity/broadband networks (ask anyone looking for a job  or a clinic for a lab test without a good smartphone data plan).

In 2019, an emerging concern is how the growth in adoption of artificial intelligence and cognitive computing among health care organizations – particularly, insurance plans, providers, and pharma. AI can be used for good, to be sure. The promises of Big Data in health cover a wide range: hospitals anticipating and preventing inpatient readmissions; health plans deploying more effective population health programs; and research-based life science companies being more intelligent and efficient in finding cures.

But AI also can mine data from sources beyond the medical claim that mashed together profile people in ways that can be used to bias business choices in the interest of cost-saving or simply-put, prejudice. We must guard against exacerbating health disparities with these sorts of AI applications in health and medical care.

This week’s news covering a U.S. District judge ruling against the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S . Census is another example of how institutions, and public ones at that, can try to mis-use data or mis-appropriate data. For an in-depth look into this phenomenon, see my report, Here’s Looking at You: How Personal Health Information is Getting Tracked and Used, written for the California Healthcare Foundation.

Finally, read what U.S. doctors have to say about health disparities in JAMA. The top line for doctors lies in the concluding sentence: “Apart from the human and economic consequences affecting today’s adults and workforce, the health disadvantages faced by today’s children carry profound implications for tomorrow’s adults, the nation’s economy, and national security. Now the question is what US society is prepared to do about it.” 

To this end, I am encouraged (immediate-term, anyway) by the growing understanding and embrace of the role of social determinants for health in America among both providers and health plans.

Coming full circle to Dr. King, there’s a paragraph from MLK’s speech delivered at the Great March of Detroit that especially resonates on his special Day:

“We are coming to see now, the psychiatrists are saying to us, that many of the strange things that happen in the subconscious, many of the inner conflicts, are rooted in hate. And so they are saying, ‘Love or perish.’ But Jesus told us this a long time ago. And I can still hear that voice crying through the vista of time, saying, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.'”

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  I am a child of metro Detroit. As a very little girl, I lived through the Detroit Riots of 1967, a few days after which my father drove us through the fire-devastated neighborhoods of his friends and clients who lived and worked around 12th Street and Grand River. It was a visceral moment for me in my life, one of my earliest memories, seeing burned-out shops on pedestrian main streets. I remember still the smoky smell which my young lungs breathed in. I wondered why something like this happens.

In a few years’ time, I was reading Martin Luther King’s book, Why We Can’t Wait; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Native Son by Richard Wright — still, one of my favorite books. In college, I delved deeply into urban economics and urban planning, soaking in Jane Jacobs’ seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, among other influential books on the syllabus.

At the University of Michigan School of Public Health, I then learned to connect the dots between our environment, our socioeconomic status — especially the role of education — and health.

Addressing health disparities is as much about access to health insurance as it is to access to good and well-priced food, safe schools, education, good jobs, and sound social policies about gun ownership and use. We must also attend to seeing that broadband and connectivity, and net neutrality for access to the online world, services, and communities, are guaranteed to all health citizens in America.

These interrelationships are fundamental to public health thinking. Those of us whose work touches any aspect of health and health care must attend to public health and commit to reducing health disparities in America. A healthy populace is more productive across so many dimensions. As we continue the hard work to re-build the national economy and continue to expand affordable health care access, public health should and must be seen and used as a pillar for economic growth.

 This post is updated from previous versions that have run here on Health Populi to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday. 

The post Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2019 appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2019 posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

[jamesgeiiger]

He’s a ‘tech addict’ who works in the tech industry

BELLEVUE, Wash. — The young men sit in chairs in a circle in a small meeting room in suburban Seattle and introduce themselves before they speak. It is much like any other 12-step meeting — but with a twist.

“Hi, my name is,” each begins. Then something like, “and I’m an internet and tech addict.”

The eight who’ve gathered here are beset by a level of tech obsession that’s different than it is for those of us who like to say we’re addicted to our phones or an app or some new show on a streaming video service. For them, tech gets in the way of daily functioning and self-care. We’re talking flunk-your-classes, can’t-find-a-job, live-in-a-dark-hole kinds of problems, with depression, anxiety and sometimes suicidal thoughts part of the mix.

There’s Christian, a 20-year-old college student from Wyoming who has a traumatic brain injury. His mom urged him to seek help because he was “medicating” his depression with video games and marijuana.

Seth, a 28-year-old from Minnesota, used video games and any number of things to try to numb his shame after a car he was driving crashed, seriously injuring his brother.

Wes, 21, an Eagle Scout and college student from Michigan, played video games 80 hours a week, only stopping to eat every two to three days. He lost 25 pounds and failed his classes.

Across town there is another young man who attended this meeting, before his work schedule changed — and his work places him squarely at risk of temptation.

He does cloud maintenance for a suburban Seattle tech company. For a self-described tech addict, this is like working in the lion’s den, labouring for the very industry that peddles the games, videos and other online content that long has been his vice.

“I’m like an alcoholic working at a bar,” the 27-year-old laments.

——

“The drugs of old are now repackaged. We have a new foe,” Cosette Rae says of the barrage of tech. A former developer in the tech world, she heads a Seattle area rehab centre called reSTART Life, one of the few residential programs in the nation specializing in tech addiction.

Use of that word — addiction — when it comes to devices, online content and the like, is still debated in the mental health world. But many practitioners agree that tech use is increasingly intertwined with the problems of those seeking help.

An American Academy of Pediatrics review of worldwide research found that excessive use of video games alone is a serious problem for as many as 9 per cent of young people. This summer, the World Health Organization also added “gaming disorder” to its list of afflictions. A similar diagnosis is being considered in the United States.

It can be a taboo subject in an industry that frequently faces criticism for using “persuasive design,” intentionally harnessing psychological concepts to make tech all the more enticing. That’s why the 27-year-old who works at the tech company spoke on condition that his identity not be revealed. He fears that speaking out could hurt his fledgling career.

“I stay in the tech industry because I truly believe that technology can help other people,” the young man says. He wants to do good.

But as his co-workers huddle nearby, talking excitedly about their latest video game exploits, he puts on his headphones, hoping to block the frequent topic of conversation in this tech-centric part of the world.

Even the computer screen in front of him could lead him astray. But he digs in, typing determinedly on his keyboard to refocus on the task at hand.

——

The demons are not easy to wrestle for this young man, who was born in 1991, the very year the World Wide Web went public.

As a toddler, he sat on his dad’s lap as they played simple video games on a Mac Classic II computer. Together in their Seattle area home, they browsed the internet on what was then a ground-breaking new service called Prodigy. The sound of the bouncy, then high-pitched tones of the dial-up connection are etched in his memory.

By early elementary school, he got his first Super Nintendo system and fell in love with “Yoshi’s Story,” a game where the main character searched for “lucky fruit.”

As he grew, so did one of the world’s major tech hubs. Led by Microsoft, it rose from the nondescript suburban landscape and farm fields here, just a short drive from the home he still shares with his mom, who split from her husband when their only child was 11.

The boy dreamt of being part of this tech boom and, in eighth grade, wrote a note to himself. “I want to be a computer engineer,” it read.

Very bright and with a head full of facts and figures, he usually did well in school. He also took an interest in music and acting but recalls how playing games increasingly became a way to escape life — the pain he felt, for instance, when his parents divorced or when his first serious girlfriend broke his heart at age 14. That relationship still ranks as his longest.

“Hey, do you wanna go out?” friends would ask.

“No, man, I got plans. I can’t do it this weekend. Sorry,” was his typical response, if he answered at all.

“And then I’d just go play video games,” he says of his adolescent “dark days,” exacerbated by attention deficit disorder, depression and major social anxiety.

Even now, if he thinks he’s said something stupid to someone, his words are replaced with a verbal tick – “Tsst, tsst” — as he replays the conversation in his head.

“There’s always a catalyst and then it usually bubbles up these feelings of avoidance,” he says. “I go online instead of dealing with my feelings.”

He’d been seeing a therapist since his parents’ divorce. But attending college out of state allowed more freedom and less structure, so he spent even more time online. His grades plummeted, forcing him to change majors, from engineering to business.

Eventually, he graduated in 2016 and moved home. Each day, he’d go to a nearby restaurant or the library to use the Wi-Fi, claiming he was looking for a job but having no luck.

Instead, he was spending hours on Reddit, an online forum where people share news and comments, or viewing YouTube videos. Sometimes, he watched online porn.

Even now, his mom doesn’t know that he lied. “I still need to apologize for that,” he says, quietly.

——

The apologies will come later, in Step 9 of his 12-step program, which he found with the help of a therapist who specializes in tech addiction. He began attending meetings of the local group called Internet & Tech Addiction Anonymous in the fall of 2016 and landed his current job a couple months later.

For a while now, he’s been stuck on Step 4 — the personal inventory — a challenge to take a deep look at himself and the source of his problems. “It can be overwhelming,” he says.

The young men at the recent 12-step meeting understand the struggle.

“I had to be convinced that this was a ‘thing,”‘ says Walker, a 19-year-old from Washington whose parents insisted he get help after video gaming trashed his first semester of college. He and others from the meeting agreed to speak only if identified by first name, as required by the 12-step tenets.

That’s where facilities like reSTART come in. They share a group home after spending several weeks in therapy and “detoxing” at a secluded ranch. One recent early morning at the ranch outside Carnation, Washington, an 18-year-old from California named Robel was up early to feed horses, goats and a couple of farm cats — a much different routine than staying up late to play video games. He and other young men in the house also cook meals for one another and take on other chores.

Eventually, they write “life balance plans,” committing to eating well and regular sleep and exercise. They find jobs and new ways to socialize, and many eventually return to college once they show they can maintain “sobriety” in the real world. They make “bottom line” promises to give up video games or any other problem content, as well as drugs and alcohol, if those are issues. They’re also given monitored smartphones with limited function — calls, texts and emails and access to maps.

“It’s more like an eating disorder because they have to learn to use tech,” just as anorexics need to eat, says Hilarie Cash, chief clinical officer and another co-founder at reSTART, which opened nearly a decade ago. They’ve since added an adolescent program and will soon offer outpatient services because of growing demand.

The young tech worker, who grew up just down the road, didn’t have the funds to go to such a program — it’s not covered by insurance, because tech addiction is not yet an official diagnosis.

But he, too, has apps on his phone that send reports about what he’s viewing to his 12-step sponsor, a fellow tech addict named Charlie, a 30-year-old reSTART graduate.

At home, the young man also persuaded his mom to get rid of Wi-Fi to lessen the temptation. Mom struggles with her own addiction — over-eating — so she’s tried to be as supportive as she can.

It hasn’t been easy for her son, who still relapses every month or two with an extended online binge. He’s managed to keep his job. But sometimes, he wishes he could be more like his co-workers, who spend a lot of their leisure time playing video games and seem to function just fine.

“Deep down, I think there’s a longing to be one of those people,” Charlie says.

That’s true, the young man concedes. He still has those days when he’s tired, upset or extremely bored — and he tests the limits.

He tells himself he’s not as bad as other addicts. Charlie knows something’s up when his calls or texts aren’t returned for several days, or even weeks.

“Then,” the young man says, “I discover very quickly that I am actually an addict, and I do need to do this.”

Having Charlie to lean on helps. “He’s a role model,” he says.

“He has a place of his own. He has a dog. He has friends.”

That’s what he wants for himself.

——

Online:

Internet & Tech Addiction Anonymous: http://www.netaddictionanon.com

reSTART Life: https://netaddictionrecovery.com

Children and Screens: http://www.childrenandscreens.com

——

Martha Irvine, an AP national writer and visual journalists, can be reached at mirvine//twitter.com/irvineap

He’s a ‘tech addict’ who works in the tech industry published first on https://worldwideinvestforum.tumblr.com/

[maxihealth]

Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2019

On this weekend as we appreciate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I post a photo of him in my hometown of Detroit in 1963, giving a preliminary version of the “I Have a Dream” speech he would deliver two months later in Washington, DC.

Wisdom from the speech: “But now more than ever before, America is forced to grapple with this problem, for the shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy. The price that this nation must pay for the continued oppression and exploitation of the Negro or any other minority group is the price of its own destruction. For the hour is late. The clock of destiny is tickling out, and we must act now before it is too late.”

As I meditate on MLK, I think about health equity. By now, most clued-in Americans know the score on the nation’s collective health status compared to other developed countries: suffice it to say, We’re Still Not #1 for health outcomes, albeit we’re the biggest spender on healthcare, per health citizen, in the world.

Underneath that statistic is a shameful state of health affairs: that people of color and the LGBTQ communities in the U.S. have lower quality of health and many services than white people do:

Black women have higher breast cancer death rates than White women

Asian women are less likely than White women to receive a pap smear

Hispanic women are more likely than non-Hispanic White women to be diagnosed with cervical cancer at an advanced stage

Rates of hospital admissions for uncontrolled diabetes are higher for Black women than for women in other racial/ethnic groups

The rate of hospital admissions for lower extremity amputations due to uncontrolled diabetes is higher for Black women than White women

The rate of new AIDS cases is higher for Black and Hispanic women than for non-Hispanic White women. Black and Hispanic men had even higher rates than women, as well as higher rates than non-Hispanic White men

Black women receive treatment for depression less frequently than White women and Hispanic women received treatment less frequently than non-Hispanic White women

Hispanic women received treatment for substance abuse less frequently than non-Hispanic White women.

If these statistics don’t move you, then here’s a finding from the National Academy of Science’s Shorter Lives, Poorer Health that might surprise you: today, people in the U.S. under 50 have poorer health outcomes than our cohorts in other developed countries. For women under 50, we’d rather live in other industrialized countries where fewer women under 50 die from noncommunicable diseases, heart disease, injuries, perinatal conditions, drug-related causes, and communicable and nutritional conditions.

Yes, more younger women in the U.S. — the wealthiest nation in the world — lose more life-years due to malnutrition, infectious disease, injury, and lifestyle-borne diseases like diabetes and heart disease than in our fellow rich countries.

And in 2018, a new statistic emerging that the rate among women for deaths due to opioid overdoses rose. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of this concerning trend is a link to pregnant women and newborns.

What’s new today versus previous MLK Days is that the rate of white male middle-age deaths is on the rise, as well. So when we consider health disparities and public health, it’s important to realize there’s one boat, one health commons, and every person in America is impacted by those social determinants of health beyond the healthcare system: clean air (ask a miner in West Virginia), clean water (ask your cousin in Flint, Michigan), good jobs (with health benefits – ask any worker without them), nutritious food (ask someone living in a food desert), social connections (ask an isolated senior), and in my growing appreciation, access to connectivity/broadband networks (ask anyone looking for a job  or a clinic for a lab test without a good smartphone data plan).

In 2019, an emerging concern is how the growth in adoption of artificial intelligence and cognitive computing among health care organizations – particularly, insurance plans, providers, and pharma. AI can be used for good, to be sure. The promises of Big Data in health cover a wide range: hospitals anticipating and preventing inpatient readmissions; health plans deploying more effective population health programs; and research-based life science companies being more intelligent and efficient in finding cures.

But AI also can mine data from sources beyond the medical claim that mashed together profile people in ways that can be used to bias business choices in the interest of cost-saving or simply-put, prejudice. We must guard against exacerbating health disparities with these sorts of AI applications in health and medical care.

This week’s news covering a U.S. District judge ruling against the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S . Census is another example of how institutions, and public ones at that, can try to mis-use data or mis-appropriate data. For an in-depth look into this phenomenon, see my report, Here’s Looking at You: How Personal Health Information is Getting Tracked and Used, written for the California Healthcare Foundation.

Finally, read what U.S. doctors have to say about health disparities in JAMA. The top line for doctors lies in the concluding sentence: “Apart from the human and economic consequences affecting today’s adults and workforce, the health disadvantages faced by today’s children carry profound implications for tomorrow’s adults, the nation’s economy, and national security. Now the question is what US society is prepared to do about it.” 

To this end, I am encouraged (immediate-term, anyway) by the growing understanding and embrace of the role of social determinants for health in America among both providers and health plans.

Coming full circle to Dr. King, there’s a paragraph from MLK’s speech delivered at the Great March of Detroit that especially resonates on his special Day:

“We are coming to see now, the psychiatrists are saying to us, that many of the strange things that happen in the subconscious, many of the inner conflicts, are rooted in hate. And so they are saying, ‘Love or perish.’ But Jesus told us this a long time ago. And I can still hear that voice crying through the vista of time, saying, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.'”

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  I am a child of metro Detroit. As a very little girl, I lived through the Detroit Riots of 1967, a few days after which my father drove us through the fire-devastated neighborhoods of his friends and clients who lived and worked around 12th Street and Grand River. It was a visceral moment for me in my life, one of my earliest memories, seeing burned-out shops on pedestrian main streets. I remember still the smoky smell which my young lungs breathed in. I wondered why something like this happens.

In a few years’ time, I was reading Martin Luther King’s book, Why We Can’t Wait; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Native Son by Richard Wright — still, one of my favorite books. In college, I delved deeply into urban economics and urban planning, soaking in Jane Jacobs’ seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, among other influential books on the syllabus.

At the University of Michigan School of Public Health, I then learned to connect the dots between our environment, our socioeconomic status — especially the role of education — and health.

Addressing health disparities is as much about access to health insurance as it is to access to good and well-priced food, safe schools, education, good jobs, and sound social policies about gun ownership and use. We must also attend to seeing that broadband and connectivity, and net neutrality for access to the online world, services, and communities, are guaranteed to all health citizens in America.

These interrelationships are fundamental to public health thinking. Those of us whose work touches any aspect of health and health care must attend to public health and commit to reducing health disparities in America. A healthy populace is more productive across so many dimensions. As we continue the hard work to re-build the national economy and continue to expand affordable health care access, public health should and must be seen and used as a pillar for economic growth.

 This post is updated from previous versions that have run here on Health Populi to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday. 

The post Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2019 appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Calling Out Health Equity on Martin Luther King Day 2019 posted first on https://carilloncitydental.blogspot.com