Michael Frank ran his finger down his medical bill, studying the charges and pausing in disbelief. The numbers didn’t make sense.
His recovery from a partial hip replacement had been difficult.
He’d iced and elevated his leg for weeks. He’d pushed his 49-year-old body, limping and wincing, through more than a dozen physical therapy sessions.
The last thing he needed was a botched bill.
His December 2015 surgery to replace the ball in his left hip joint at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City had been routine. One night in the hospital and no complications.
He was even supposed to get a deal on the cost. His insurance company, Aetna, had negotiated an in-network “member rate” for him. That’s the discounted price insured patients get in return for paying their premiums every month.
But Frank was startled to see that Aetna had agreed to pay NYU Langone $70,000. That’s more than three times the Medicare rate for the surgery and more than double the estimate of what other insurance companies would pay for such a procedure, according to a nonprofit that tracks prices.
Month: May 2018
U.S. Placed Immigrant Children With Traffickers, Report Says
The Department of Health and Human Services placed more than a dozen immigrant children in the custody of human traffickers after it failed to conduct background checks of caregivers, according to a Senate report released on Thursday.
Examining how the federal agency processes minors who arrive at the border without a guardian, lawmakers said they found that it had not followed basic practices of child welfare agencies, like making home visits.
The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations opened its inquiry after law enforcement officials uncovered a human trafficking ring in Marion, Ohio, last year. At least six children were lured to the United States from Guatemala with the promise of a better life, then were made to work on egg farms. The children, as young as 14, had been in federal custody before being entrusted to the traffickers.
“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the subcommittee. “But what makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.”
In addition to the Marion cases, the investigation found evidence that 13 other children had been trafficked after officials handed them over to adults who were supposed to care for them during their immigration proceedings. An additional 15 cases exhibited some signs of trafficking.
The report also said that it was unclear how many of the approximately 90,000 children the agency had placed in the past two years fell prey to traffickers, including sex traffickers, because it does not keep track of such cases.
“Whatever your views on immigration policy, everyone can agree that the administration has a responsibility to ensure the safety of the migrant kids that have entered government custody until their immigration court date,” Mr. Portman said.
In the fall of 2013, thousands of unaccompanied children began showing up at the southern border. Most risked abuse by traffickers and detention by law enforcement to escape dire problems like gang violence and poverty in Central America.
As detention centers struggled to keep up with the influx, the Department of Health and Human Services began placing children in the custody of sponsors who could help them while their immigration cases were reviewed. Many children who did not have relatives in the United States were placed in a system resembling foster care.
But officials at times did not examine whether an adult who claimed to be a relative actually was, relying on the word of parents, who, in some cases, went along with the traffickers to pay off smuggling debts.
Responding to the report, the Department of Health and Human Services said it had taken measures to strengthen its system, collecting information to subject potential sponsors and additional caregivers in a household to criminal background checks.
Mark Greenberg, the agency’s acting assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families, said it had bolstered other screening procedures and increased resources for minors.
“We are mindful of our responsibilities to these children and are continually looking for ways to strengthen our safeguards,” he said.
U.S. Placed Immigrant Children With Traffickers, Report Says
“If you have a problem with something, explain it rationally, calmly, articulately, and with patience so that other people will understand and take you seriously.”
[does so]
“Hmm. If you actually felt strongly about this, you wouldn’t be so soft-spoken, composed, and emotionally detached. You don’t look the least bit upset! Someone truly in distrsss would be screaming right now.”
[screams and cries]
“Oof, wow, melodramatic much? You’re clearly acting out because you want attention. Use your words next time if you want people to believe you.”
the trick is to calmly explain while being backed up by a Greek chorus standing behind you howling and wailing
A cello heavy orchestra can also work if you haven’t a Greek chorus on hand.
If only it were that easy
I coined the term “genderqueer” back in the 1990s in an effort to glue together two nouns that seemed to me described an excluded and overlooked middle: those of us who were not only queer but were so because we were the kind of gender trash society couldn’t digest.
A prominent gay columnist immediately attacked me in print for “ruining a perfectly good word like ‘queer.’” (Harrumph!)
Joan Nestle, Claire Howell, and I then used the word for the title of our anthology of emerging young writers. But I don’t think anyone expected the term or the concept to really catch on.
Then one year I was attending the Creating Change conference and using the (wonderfully gender-neutral) bathrooms, and saw someone had posted a sticker on the wall that read, “A Genderqueer Was Here!” I thought, Hmm … that’s really interesting. Someone is using that not as a descriptor, but as the basis for their identity. So it begins.
Fast-forward about 20 years and I was just reading Matt Bernstein’s anthology Nobody Passes, and in it writer Rocko Bulldagger bemoans the term’s very existence, declaring, “I am sick to death of hearing it “
Such is the arc of a new idea.
But if you opened your eyes at all, you could see all this coming a long way off.
At Camp Trans, outside the now-defunct Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, I’d meet one young person after another simply known as “boychik,” “demigirl,” “transmasculine,” “tryke,” and any number of exuberant genders few of us had contemplated.
Camp Trans itself was always overrun by one set of teens and 20-somethings explaining patiently, if exasperatedly, to their lesbian mothers — who’d brought them in tow to experience the beauty of womanhood — that they needed to move beyond their transphobia and accept trans people as women and not men. And a totally different set of teens and 20-somethings were joyously destroying by example the categories of men, women, lesbian, and transgender.
We’ve spent almost 40 years fighting for a bunch of identity categories that are based entirely on the implicit acceptance that there are two and only two basic sexes, with the associated possible gender identities and sexual orientations that come from them.
And now young people are about to blow all that up.
I was reminded of this while watching Showtime’s hit TV show Billions, which introduced a new character, Taylor, whose gender I was having fun trying to puzzle out.
Taylor is an intense, brilliant intern, who wears a shirt, tie, and buzzed crew cut, but otherwise has no identifiable landmarks by which the viewer might navigate the gender terrain.
Finally, they are introduced to Bobby Axelrod, the head of multibillion-dollar hedge fund Axe Capital.
As played by Asia Kate Dillon, they reply: “Hello, sir, my name is Taylor. My pronouns are ‘they, theirs, and them.’”
Cutting-edge stuff. And a signpost for where the gender dialogue is going. Just like when student Maria Munir, 20, came out to a nonplussed President Obama as “nonbinary.”
In a recent article at Refinery29, Dillon explained that they didn’t just read for the part. As they read the part, “I did some research into non-binary, and I just thought, Oh my gosh, that’s me… When I read the script for episode two and I saw the ‘they, theirs and them,’ that’s when the tears started to well up in my eyes. Then when I read Axe’s response, which is, ‘Okay,’ and then the scene just continues, that’s what ultimately moved me to full-fledged tears.”
This is powerful stuff. And it’s only the start. The trans movement is going to have to accommodate and open the boundaries perhaps more than it would like.
But if it’s the job of young people to expose and explode their elders’ paradigm, these young people are off to a wonderful start.
“Hello. My name is Riki. My pronouns are ‘they, theirs, and them.’“
Riki Wilchins, “Get to Know the New Pronouns: They, Theirs, and Them
❤️BFFS❤️
SESTA & FOSTA: How two ‘unambiguously evil’ laws threaten sex workers | City Pages
Women in short skirts prowling the streets at the command of pimps
leering hawkishly from the gloom. That’s the popular stereotype of the
prostitute. It’s 20 years out of date.The
internet transformed the sex industry in every way, paving the road for
vast new enterprises such as video camming, pornographic clip sales,
and online roleplay. It also made the business much safer.Many
sex workers were no longer obligated to patrol the streets, removing
the need for pimps as protection. Initial encounters could be conducted
through computers, allowing for the negotiation of rates and boundaries
before meeting in person. Potential customers could be vetted through
peers, letting women avoid johns with histories of violence or refusal
to pay.For the first time in centuries, prostitutes took control of their industry, their safety, and their earnings.
By killing the sites sex workers used to advertise, Congress is pushing
them from the safety of their own homes back to the street. Most
practicing today have never known a time before the internet. Now
they’re fumbling to adapt to a resurrected dark age.There are a number of sites starting up or trying to expand, to make up for the loss of BP and others. Probably the most significant is Switter.at, run by the new company Assembly Four, co-founded by Lola Hunt who is a tech person as well as a sex worker herself.
It is based outside the US and runs on the Open Source server Mastodon, and works with the larger federated Mastodon network (federated meaning it is a bit like email, there are many servers run by different people/orgs but they can all talk to each other).
SESTA & FOSTA: How two ‘unambiguously evil’ laws threaten sex workers | City Pages
throwback to that time in my existentialism class where the professor asked ‘who thinks hell is other people’ and half the class slowly and meekly put their hand up
then the prof was like ‘…i mean who originally said it’
there are some posts that sound utterly made up for the joke or for the notes, but this one I whole heartedly believe
Sounds right to me…
That quote is amazing to me in that it’s quoted completely accurately and yet in a way that means something completely different from what it meant in context.
(Sartre was claiming that Hell was other people. He was not claiming that other people were hell.)
…I can’t actually tell what distinction you’re drawing there. Can you expand?
The line comes from No Exit, which is set in Hell. Spoilers for No Exit follow
In particular, three people who have been condemned to hell are trapped eternally in a room together. And at first they think they got off easy without any pitchforks or fiery lakes or anything. But over the course of the play they discover that they have been chosen very specifically to have neuroses and character flaws that interact with and torment each other.
Each one needs the approval of a second in an unstable RPS cycle so that any time one of them might be satisfied by a second, the third swoops in and ruins it.
And when they figure this out, one of the characters expresses his understanding, that hell isn’t physical torture. “Hell is just—other people.”
So the point isn’t that other people, generically, are hellish; it’s rather that you can build a hell out of other people.
But when I hear people quote it, it’s usually sort of an introvert-pride thing. “Other people are hell; you should spend time alone.” And that’s not the point at all. It’s a statement about how bad unhealthy relationships can be, not a statement about how all relationships are unhealthy!
See also Sartre’s own comment here:
“hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell.
Reblogging for the original post which was hilarious and also for that explanation which is beautiful
So how do you tell which parts of your routine are load-bearing? I wish I knew, but some heuristics:
Things that are part of your access to food which you’ll reliably eat are often load-bearing. If you get a lot of your calories from the free food at work, you should expect changing jobs to one without free food will throw you off your game. If you rely on the corner store then you should expect that moving to a new place where you have to get int he car to get groceries will be a problem. Going vegetarian can screw up something load-bearing for a lot of people (and I say that as someone who believes that factory farming is morally horrible). Going on a diet is reasonably likely to fuck up something load bearing, and I suspect this is part of why statistically dieting doesn’t work at improving peoples’ lives or health.
Things that are part of the environments you spend the most time in are reasonably likely to be load-bearing.The length of your commute, the environment you work in, whether your bedroom is clean, well-ventilated, high-ceilinged, has natural light, whether you have any space that you don’t share with another person…. for some people ‘having a car’ is loadbearing because it’s a space that is theirs and will reliably have their stuff and get them places. For other people, living somewhere where they can get places without a car is load bearing.
Cleanliness needs are often load-bearing. This one especially sucks because you can get into a trap where your space gets chaotic/cluttered/awful and this breaks your brain and makes it harder to keep your space clean.
Pets are often load-bearing.
This might be influenced by who I hang out with, but I think personal time when you’re alone and no one has any claims on you is load bearing for a lot of people. Some people have their own room and know they need their own room, but lots of other people make do with a long commute where they can quietly listen to the radio, and don’t even realize that this is filling their need for introvert time until it changes.
I think people often have a particularly bad time if they have something load-bearing that’s considered ‘indulgent’ or a ‘luxury’, like ‘living in an apartment building with a pool’ or ‘having a big yard I can garden in’ or ‘having an ensuite bathroom with a tub’ or ‘having a soundproofed practice room’ or ‘having a grand piano’. But, like, having expensive load-bearing bits of your life does not say anything about you morally; it may mean that it’s harder for you to get your needs met, and it may not be a preferable situation, but it doesn’t make you selfish or greedy or bad. And, you know, trying to just not have things you need because you believe you’re bad for wanting them doesn’t often work out great.
load-bearing
Sometimes people hit a place in their life where things are going really well. They like their job and are able to be productive at it; they have energy after work to pursue the relationships and activities they enjoy; they’re taking good care of themselves and rarely get sick or have flareups of their chronic health problems; stuff is basically working out. Then a small thing about their routine changes and suddenly they’re barely keeping their head above water.
(This happens to me all the time; it’s approximately my dominant experience of working full-time.)
I think one thing that’s going on here is that there are a bunch of small parts of our daily routine which are doing really important work for our wellbeing. Our commute involves a ten-minute walk along the waterfront and the walking and fresh air are great for our wellbeing (or, alternately, our commute involves no walking and this makes it way more frictionless because walking sucks for us). Our water heater is really good and so we can take half-hour hot showers, which are a critical part of our decompression/recovery time. We sit with our back to the wall so we don’t have to worry about looking productive at work as long as the work all gets done. The store down the street is open really late so late runs for groceries are possible. Our roommate is a chef and so the kitchen is always clean and well-stocked.
It’s useful to think of these things as load-bearing. They’re not just nice – they’re part of your mental architecture, they’re part of what you’re using to thrive. And when they change, life can abruptly get much harder or sometimes just collapse on you entirely. And this is usually unexpected, because it’s hard to notice which parts of your environment and routine are load bearing. I often only notice in hindsight. “Oh,” I say to myself after months of fatigue, “having my own private space was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a scary drop in weight, “being able to keep nutrition shakes next to my bed and drink them in bed was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a sudden struggle to maintain my work productivity, “a quiet corner with my back to the wall was load-bearing.”
When you know what’s important to you, you can fight for it, or at least be equipped to notice right away if it goes and some of your ability to thrive goes with it. When you don’t, or when you’re thinking of all these things as ‘nice things about my life’ rather than ‘load-bearing bits of my flourishing as a person’, you’re not likely to notice the strain created when they vanish until you’re really, really hurting.
Baby bear hangs out
One of two newborn Himalayan bear cubs, which were named Yashin and Streltsov in honor of well-known Soviet football players and Olympic champions Lev Yashin and Eduard Streltsov, is seen inside an open-air cage at the Royev Ruchey Zoo in Krasnoyarsk, Russia April 26, 2018. Photo by
Ilya Naymushin/Reuters
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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