DL Open Thread: Friday, April 5, 2024

Filed in Featured, Open Thread by on April 5, 2024

First, A Public Disservice Announcement:  Delaware Political Weekly will be a little late this week.  As in  tomorrow.  I’m working on the Bob Marshall piece, and I think I’ve finally figured out how to write it.

Algorithms Decide Assisted Living Staffing Levels.  Which is why the government must:

Two decades ago, a group of senior-housing executives came up with a way to raise revenue and reduce costs at assisted-living homes. Using stopwatches, they timed caregivers performing various tasks, from making beds to changing soiled briefs, and fed the information into a program they began using to determine staffing.

Brookdale Senior Living, the leading operator of senior homes with 652 facilities, acquired the algorithm-based system and used it to set staffing at its properties across the nation. But as Brookdale’s empire grew, employees complained the system, known as “Service Alignment,” failed to capture the nuances of caring for vulnerable seniors, documents and interviews show.

In emails and phone calls to Brookdale executives, building managers repeatedlycomplained that the company’s algorithm underestimated the amount of labor they needed to meet resident needs, according to court records, internal company documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with more than 35 current and former Brookdale employees. Several managers said they quit or were fired after objecting to the system, including Patricia McNeal, 53, who spent six years overseeing Brookdale facilities in Ohio and Florida.

While assisted-living chains promote their properties like all-inclusive resorts with round-the-clock care, many operate more like assembly lines, where low-wage workers perform a series of discrete, predictable tasks, documents and interviews with industry veterans show. Brookdale, based in Brentwood, Tenn., pioneered staffing systems based on algorithmic formulas, an approach experts say is ill-suited to caring for the elderly, who are growing more frail and are more likely to suffer from chronic conditions than previous generations.

It’s been over twenty years since Bob Marshall passed what was likely the most progressive package of legislation designed to protect residents in long-term care nursing facilities in the entire country.  It never dawned on us at the time that the industry would shuttle more frail and infirm residents into assisted living facilities with virtually non-existent staffing requirements.  But this low-life industry did.  Governors dating back to Ruth Ann Minner believed the bleats of industry apologists like Yrene Waldron and refused to require that the laws be carried out.  John Carney took it a step further by making Waldron the regulator of the industry in Delaware.  Idiocy.  Meredith Newman chronicled this in the News-Journal before moving on to greener pastures.  Sen. Spiros Mantzavinos is working to hold this rogue industry accountable.  If you are considering options for your loved ones, be informed.  The alternatives could be deadly.  And were, during the Carney Administration.

“Now I’m Getting REALLY Mad.”  OK.  What’re you gonna do about it? Joe has no feck. He’s feckless:

President Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday that the United States would reassess its policy toward the war in Gaza if the Jewish state does not take immediate steps to address the disastrous humanitarian situation in the enclave and protect aid workers.

Don’t you think he should have started reassessing the policy before now?

Economy Doesn’t Suck At Least.  303,000 new jobs in March:

The U.S. economy added 303,000 jobs in March, and the unemployment rate dipped slightly to 3.8 percent, according to new Labor Department data released Friday.

The March jobs report once again beat expectations. Economists had expected that the economy would gain 200,000 jobs and that the jobless rate would dip to 3.8 percent.

The latest data comes after several months of strong jobs numbers and the longest stretch of sub-4 percent unemployment since the late 1960s.

The labor market has remained surprisingly resilient in the face of the Federal Reserve’s decision to hold interest rates at a two-decade high in recent months. The central bank raised rates to their current range of 5.25 percent to 5.5 percent over the past year and a half in an effort to tamp down on inflation.

A Blue Wave–Of Hydrozoans?  I dunno–that picture looks like a bunch of used condoms to me.  Apparently, there are two types–one that eats, and one that reproduces:

From Oregon to California, blankets of alien-like blue creatures are washing up on rocky beaches. They are Velella velella, tiny colonies of organisms with a sombrero-esque fin sticking out the top and tentacles dangling down.

Though they look like one organism, velella – also known as by-the-wind sailors – are actually colonies of creatures from a class called hydrozoa that use the wind to speed along. They spend most of their lives out in the open ocean, searching the water column below them with tentacles that sting fish larvae or zooplankton, but are harmless to humans. One part of the colony is responsible for eating, another for reproduction. Coral is another colonial organism – but it’s uncommon to encounter such colonies on land, says Anya Stajner, a doctoral student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

What do you want to talk about?

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