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Nine Weird Things About the Internet Today
By J Edward Neill humor, life
One-hundred years from now, I'm convinced most of the modern world will have almost no reason to walk outside their front door. Ever.
The internet (if it isn't already) will be all-powerful. Every consumer good will be deliverable instantly. Anyone will be able to contact anyone FTL (faster than light.) All services will be available always. If we think communication is fast today, imagine where it'll be a century from now.
Pretty crazy, right?
But for now we're still kind of in the internet's adolescence. The net survived its www.infancy and it's gotten just big and smart enough to be dangerous.
Consider, if you will, these nine observations about the strange state of the modern internet.
Observation 1 – Each social media hub has its own personality
I'm not sure anything can illustrate the differences better than this graphic. But what I'm really not sure of is just when it was each site evolved into its own little solar system.
Examples: Twitter and Facebook, though wildly different in interface, are for funny stuff, news bytes, porn, and marketing (some of which I've been guilty of.) Instagram seems to appeal to younger crowds, artists, and photographers. The Pinterest fan base is mostly female, while pretty much no one uses Google+. Obviously I'm generalizing a bit, but it's undeniable how the quirks of each social media site have attracted user bases that are so very different from each other.
I think it's pretty cool. Except for LinkedIn, which pretty much sucks. 🙂
Observation 2 – People still argue about politics online
If you added up every occurrence of a political debate in the history of the world, you'd probably have a hard time finding ten instances in which someone's mind was actually changed for the better. In polite society, political debates in conversation are verboten, but no so much on the internet. A quick scan and breakdown of my own personal Facebook feed reveals that 60% (not kidding) of the posts are political in tone. And no, it's not open-ended, objective stuff taking place. It's hostile, "I'm right! You're wrong!" incendiary warfare. Personally, I find it obnoxious. But perhaps more relevant is that everyone on the net is happy to say lots of stuff, but rarely does anyone actually do anything about it.
Observation 3 – The ascension of spam and clickbait
I despise clickbait with such passion I wrote a big piece on it. But let's be serious for a moment. Spam and clickbait are existential threats to our beloved net. They crowd out marketing for actual, quality goods. They take up space that might otherwise be inhabited by cool, interesting content. Despite these facts, most people struggle to spot spam or clickbait at first sight. And the real trouble is that since the internet has no singular governing body, there's no one-stop elimination strategy to get rid of this junk. It just keeps spreading.
What does it mean? Well…we'd better prepare ourselves for sneakier, smarter, and more diabolical clickbait. Because while we're busy going nuts on Amazon Prime, the spammers are out there designing better ways to siphon money and time from the rest of us.
And I think it sucks.
Observation 4 – Free porn for everyone
More than anything, I just really, really want to know how pay-for-porn websites stay in business. I mean, with literally thousands of free porn sites out there, it feels like the entire triple-x pay-per-view industry should collapse. Right? Imagine if a bunch of companies started giving away free, high-quality cars, TV's, and houses. Wouldn't all the legitimate industries dry up within weeks? But no…not with porn. Making it free seems only to inspire more and more videos to be created.
I guess even when sex doesn't sell, it sells.
Observation 5 – All the @#$%*&! memes
In my web series Anti-Meme Fridays, I surmised that one day in the future everyone on Earth will communicate solely via memes, thus eliminating the need for actual spoken language.
Ok, maybe that's a little heavy handed. But in all truth, memes are everywhere. They're not stopping anytime soon, even though 90% of them are misspelled, unfunny, cheesy, or annoyingly motivational in tone. What I can't figure out, and what I need your help in solving, is how it is we arrived at this point. I can't imagine anyone on this planet who actually likes a bunch of boring pictures and quotes crowding out everything else on their social media feed.
And yet….here we are.
Observation 6 – The prevalence of perverts
Based on the tales pretty much all my female friends and family have told, nearly 100% of the adult male population has sent unsolicited photos of their anatomy to a woman at least once in their life. But seriously, there are way more creepers among us than we ever could've guessed. They're everywhere, and the internet makes it easy for them. I'm willing to bet we all know several dudes who are like this, but we have no idea what they're up to. And it's not just the rapey dudes spamming junk pics to every woman they can, but also other creeper types, not limited to but including: guys who threaten violence, guys who get irrationally angry when rejected, and guys who get extremely insulting in everyday social media forums.
Gentlemen, we're better than this, right?
Guess not.
Observation 7 – Everything is based on opinion
The headline tags for several major news websites are as follows:
CNN – 'Breaking News, Latest News and Videos'
Fox – 'Breaking News Updates, Latest News Headlines'
Huffington Post – (Their description is too long to type, but it's pretty much similar to CNN and Fox, while admitting a sprinkle of 'entertainment.')
And so and so forth…
As a kid, I remember learning about this little thing called Journalism. I was taught such terms as "unbiased" "objective" and "factual." I remember the days when news reporters were calm, serious, and almost indifferent in most scenarios.
Those days are dead. Scour the blogs, articles, and links of every major news outlet on the internet these days, and what do you mostly see? Editorials. Not that the articles in question typically identify themselves as opinion-based, but that's what they are nonetheless. Objectivity appears to go as far as reporting names and body-counts, but that's where it stops. Everyone has an angle, especially the reporters. Media isn't where one goes to find truth. Nowadays, it's all about entertainment.
Observation 8 – No one knows how to use hashtags
Seriously. Just stop.
Observation 9 – Artists around the world have a home
…even this douche.
By and large, it's a good time to be a writer, painter, graphic designer, or any other kind of artist. The modern net allows things that just weren't possible as recently as ten years ago. Authors can self-publish via dozens of outlets. Artists like this awesome lady here have a home to display their work without needing to hunt down big, pretentious galleries. I mean…these are good times.
But there is one little drawback: piracy. No, not Blackbeard holding a cutlass to our necks. If you've ever posted a cool piece of art, uploaded an awesome song you've created, or written something digitally awesome, it's likely (even probable) that many other individuals have downloaded it illegally, plagiarized it, or otherwise distributed your work against your wishes. Some won't care about a few pirate raids. But for others (me among them) piracy is seriously bad for bizniz. It sucks.
Seems no matter what infrastructure a society settles into, there will always be those who nip at the edges, seeking an advantage. Digital society is no different.
Be assured, there are darker (much darker) corners of the internet than the things I've touched on above.
But that's a list for another day…
If you like dating on the aforementioned web, this is for you.
But if you prefer seeing your friends face-to-face, try this.
Tagged dark corners of the net, digital world, Free internet, top nine, Web searches, Web surfing.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


(In. Bellingham chapel). Reginald Remington 1782, also of Jane his wife 1797, Robert Remington their Son 1791, Reginald Remington 1829.
(In. E). Sacred memory of Reginald Remington of Melling in the County of Lancaster, who died 12th May 1782 aged 55, also of Jane his Wife who died 9 April, 1797 aged 67, also of Robert Remington their Son, Lieut. K. N. who died 20th July 1791, aged 32. Reginald Remington their Son, who died 16th June 1829, aged 76. Arms, party per pale, dexter barry az. and ar. a bend or; sinister ar. a bend chequy or and az. between two roundels. Crest a hand erect, holding a broken tilting spear.
(N. cross). In. m. Alice Remington, died July 14th 1887 in her 23rd years. "Thy will be done."
(N). In. m. Thomas Remington of Kirkby Lonsdale who died February . 18th.1873 aged 43 years. This stone was erected as a token of respect by his affectionate friends. "Watch and pray, for ye know not when the time is."


American Theater Company from 1985 to 2018.
American Theater Company — the storied Chicago theater company that first staged the Broadway hits "Disgraced" and "The Humans," opened a new musical by the creators of "Urinetown," staged a revival of "Rent" directed by Broadway's David Cromer and rediscovered the original version of "Grease" — has ceased operations and announced its closure.
That show, set during the Cuban Missile Crisis and directed by current artistic director Will Davis, closed March 4.
The statement went on the say that the theater had "suffered from a reduction in earned revenue" under Davis.
Davis was let go from his job and has returned to New York, where he worked before coming to ATC in 2016. He was not immediately able to be reached for comment Friday.
American Theater Company, which has been in Chicago's North Center neighborhood at 1909 W. Byron St. for 25 years, had been struggling to recover after the death of its gifted artistic director, PJ Paparelli, who was killed in an automobile accident in May 2015 while on vacation in Scotland.
The theater was founded in 1985 and moved to the Byron Street location in 1993.
Even during the Paparelli years, when the theater churned out a slew of plays and musicals that attracted attention in New York and beyond, the theater's financial footing always was shaky.
In 2009, shortly after Paparelli's arrival, 29 members of the company's acting ensemble announced their departure. Many of those artists went on to found the American Blues Theater, which continues to operate, although it does not have its own space. The artistic director of that company, Gwendolyn Whiteside (herself a former ATC ensemble member), said Friday that American Blues had an interest in the ATC space.
After the split, Paparelli continued with an ensemble that he said was more diverse and thus more reflective of Chicago. Over the years, ATC's work was often innovative, emotionally engaged and remarkably prescient.
Memorable productions included "Speech and Debate" in 2008, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and the zesty musical "Yeast Nation" in 2009 and "Speed-the-Plow" in 2010.
But ATC's relationship with the Broadway producers known as the Araca Group brought to Chicago the 2012 world premiere of Ayad Akhtar's "Disgraced," one of the most successful and widely produced plays of the last decade. Paparelli's long, close relationship with the playwright Stephen Karam brought ATC the world premiere in 2014 of "The Humans," which had a successful Broadway run two seasons ago and now is on a national tour. Demonstrably, the future commercial success of those works did not provide sufficient sustenance for the theater that gave them birth.
Paparelli and Karam co-wrote "Columbinus," a well-known play about the school shooting, and they returned to the work at ATC in 2013 and fashioned a new third act. It was both a devastating and a prescient piece of programing. So was 2015's "The Project(s)," a hugely successful work of docudrama focused on public housing in Chicago.
Bubba Weiler (Doody), Tyler Ravelson (Miller), Robert Colletti (Roger), Patrick De Nicola (Sonny), and Adrian Aguilar (Danny Zuko) in "The Original Grease" in 2011.
Usman Ally (Amir), Alana Arenas (Jory), Lee Stark (Emily) and Benim Foster (Isaac) in the world premiere of "Disgraced" at American Theater Company.


Zenutrients are so generous as well as for Sample Room. For two consecutive renewal of my VIP membership from Sample Room, I always get a full size items from Zenutrients. The photo above are the products I got from Zenutrients through my first Sample Room VIP gift and when I attended the Blogapalooza last year. Sample Room gave its members gifts at the Blogapalooza event.
The Epsom salt and the bug repellant cream smells relaxing and nice. It has a mint like fragrance.
Today, together with my new items for sampling from Sample Room, new items from Zenutrients are included for my VIP membership renewal gift. I am so excited to try all of it soon and share my insights.
I feel like Sample Room and Zenutrients felt my need for a body relaxation as I got two Massage Oils from them. Ever since 2015 started, there was a great increase in number of patients at the hospital I am working at. So I am pretty much stressed and tired lately. I come home and just sleep most of the time until my next shift. I think its a sign that I should take care of my body too. I know I need a massage soon to loosen up my sore muscles and hopefully I can do it on my next day off.
Thank you so much Zenutrients and Sample Room!!!


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Published on Friday, November 16, 2018 by Truthdig
The 'Pelosi Problem' Runs Deep
Whether our concerns involve militarism, social equity, economic justice, civil liberties, climate change or the overarching necessity of a Green New Deal, the Democratic Party must change from the bottom up
by Norman Solomon
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California speaking in Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo: Charlie Neibergall / AP)
Nancy Pelosi will probably be the next House speaker, a prospect that fills most alert progressives with disquiet, if not dread. But instead of fixating on her as a villain, progressives should recognize the long-standing House Democratic leader as a symptom of a calcified party hierarchy that has worn out its grassroots welcome and is beginning to lose its grip.
Increasingly at odds with the Democratic Party's mobilized base, that grip has held on with gobs of money from centralized, deep-pocket sources—endlessly reinforcing continual deference to corporate power and an ongoing embrace of massively profitable militarism.
Pelosi has earned a reputation as an excellent manager, and she has certainly managed to keep herself in power atop Democrats in the House. She's a deft expert on how Congress works, but she seems out of touch—intentionally or not—with the millions of grassroots progressives who are fed up with her kind of leadership.
Those progressives should not reconcile with Pelosi, any more than they should demonize her. The best course will involve strategic confrontations—nonviolent, emphatic, civilly disobedient—mobilizing the power of protest as well as electoral activism within Democratic primaries.
Such well-planned actions as Tuesday's "Green New Deal" sit-in at Pelosi's Capitol office serve many valuable purposes. (Along the way, they help undermine the absurd right-wing Fox News trope that portrays her as some kind of leftist.) Insistently advocating for strong progressive programs and calling Pelosi out on her actual positions despite nice-sounding rhetoric can effectively widen the range of public debate. Over time, the process creates more space and momentum for a resurgent left.
There is much to counter at the top of the party. Pelosi still refuses to support single-payer enhanced "Medicare for all." As on many other issues, she—and others, such as the more corporate-friendly House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer—are clinging to timeworn, Wall Street-friendly positions against powerful political winds generated by years of grassroots activism.
Increasingly, such leadership is isolated from the party it claims to lead. Yet the progressive base is having more and more impact. As a Vox headline proclaimed, more than a year ago, "The stunning Democratic shift on single-payer: In 2008, no leading Democratic presidential candidate backed single-payer. In 2020, all of them might." The Medicare for All Caucus now lists 76 House members.
Any progressive should emphatically reject Pelosi's current embrace of a "pay-go" rule that would straitjacket spending for new social programs by requiring offset tax hikes or budget cuts. Her position is even more outrageous in view of her fervent support for astronomical military spending. Like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (who was just re-elected to his post), Pelosi went out of her way last winter to proclaim avid support for President Trump's major increase in the already-bloated Pentagon budget, boasting: "In our negotiations, congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense."
Whether our concerns involve militarism, social equity, economic justice, civil liberties, climate change or the overarching necessity of a Green New Deal, the Democratic Party must change from the bottom up. That means progressives across the country should run candidates from precinct levels upward and maintain pressure on all elected officials, including the congressional Democrats with progressive records.
Newly elected House members will raise the total membership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to about 90. A dozen caucus members are in line to chair House committees in the new Congress; another 30 are set to chair subcommittees. The Progressive Caucus is now co-chaired by Raul Grijalva of Arizona and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, two of the strongest progressive lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The contrasts between their advocacy and the meanderings of the caucus's more tepid members are sometimes striking.
During the Obama years, by deferring to top-tier party leaders, many in the Progressive Caucus showed themselves to be unreliable advocates for progressive causes when push came to shove—during the 2009 health care debate, for example. Yet the left-leaning tendencies in the caucus can now be strengthened and reinforced—if constituent pressure is insistent. When necessary, that insistence should include credible threats of launching primary challenges.
While the governing body of the party, the Democratic National Committee, gave ground this year on such matters as internal party democracy (disempowering superdelegates in the process), senior Democrats have retained a firm hold on such powerful mechanisms as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). It is emblematic of a larger problem that in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, an unrelenting series of DCCC emails to millions of recipients featured appeals from such standard party figures as James Carville, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer—none of whom supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primaries. The emails reflect how lopsided and corporate the power structures of the DCCC and top-ranking Democrats in Congress remain.
In sync with such corporate sensibilities, some of the party's big mainline names are now mobilizing to pressure incoming Democrats to support Pelosi for speaker. "Democratic Party luminaries are calling members-elect on Pelosi's behalf," Politico reported this week; they include New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, former Vice President Al Gore and former Secretary of State John Kerry.
This year, many progressive individuals and organizations have moved beyond the false choice of either building movements or seriously trying to win elections. We can and must do both—simultaneously, not sequentially—to the benefit of both parallel tasks. The Republican Party's loss of the House was largely due to decisions by substantial numbers of people on the left to engage with the electoral process as never before. Moving forward, we need to strengthen social movements, as well as electoral capacities, so we can end Republican rule and replace it with genuinely progressive governance.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State." He is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
© 2019 TruthDig
Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Party


Is it time to officially declare Florida the bravest state in America?
First, they have videos of people calmly recording giant alligators and now we see a couple of divers just peacefully recording a huge whale shark off the coast of West Palm Beach, Florida.
It's rare to see a whale shark this close to the shore, so it's understandable that these two divers were in awe but remember to always be safe when dealing with wild animals.


Washington DC — Considering the site of Tuesday night's game and the futility of their plate appearances against baseball's latest phenom, who just happened to live up to all the hype, it would be easy to say that the Pirates played the role of the Washington Generals to perfection in their 5-2 loss to the Washington Nationals at Nationals Park.
Stephen Strasburg struck out 14 in seven innings and 96 pitches in his much-anticipated major-league debut. Thus, the Pirates certainly made like the Generals, the perennial patsy of the Harlem Globetrotters.
Yet Nationals manager Jim Riggleman went out of his way to praise the Pirates' hitters in his post-game press conference.
However, the Pirates ultimately proved to be of little match against Strasburg's heater, his gravity-defying curveball or his 90-mph changeup.
After getting their three of their four hits off Strasburg in the fourth inning, including a two-run home run by Delwyn Young, the last 10 Pirates the 21-year-old faced were set down in order, including the final seven by strikeout.
All the Pirates hitters could do were shake their heads in amazement as they kept parading from the batter's box back to the dugout.
"He was very good, very poised," left fielder Lastings Milledge said. "The kid had great, great location. Coming in, we were focused on his fastball but he didn't really give us anything to drive. He was so good with off-speed stuff and putting away righties with his changeup. There are a lot of things to be excited about this kid.
Of Strasburg's 94 pitches, 65 were strikes and 43 were thrown outside the strike zone. What Strasburg did on those 43 pitches outside the zone was telling both about him and the Pirates' lack of plate discipline.
They chased 16 of those pitches, including 10 of 19 with two strikes, for 37 percent. The average major-league team chases 23 percent of pitches outside the zone this season, according to figures from InsideEdge.com.
Furthermore, the Pirates missed on 18 of the 41 pitches they swung at for 44 percent, more than double the major-league norm of 20 percent. They swung and missed on 12 of 19 two-strike pitches and 14 of 22 pitches when Strasburg was ahead in the count.
Finally, the Pirates were able to put just 10 of the 41 pitches they swung at in play for 24 percent. The major-league average is 42 percent.
They connected on just 2 of 19 two-strike pitches, 1 of 22 pitches when Strasburg was ahead in the count, 7 of 26 fastballs, 2 of 9 curveballs and 1 of 6 changeups.


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Home Opinion Featured Articles $34 Billion Needed To Fix Ghana's Housing Deficit
$34 Billion Needed To Fix Ghana's Housing Deficit
The Chief Executive Officer of Danywise Estate and Construction, Mr Frank Aboagye Danyansah, has decried Ghana's growing housing deficit, which he said would require $34 billion to address the shortfall.
The country's housing needs is in short supply of 1.7 million units, and is projected to climb to two million by 2018, which he said, required the introduction of pragmatic and deliberate policies and private sector participation to raise supply.
"Our housing deficit has reached 1.7 million units which is expected to reach two million by 2018 and we would need about 34 million dollars to fix it," he told the Ghana News Agency Thursday.
He said the government would have to build 190,000 to 200,000 units each year for the next 10 years to bridge the gap. This is expected to cost around $3.4 billion for the 200,000 units.
He urged the newly appointed sector minister to revise the current Ghana Revenue Authority tax laws which he described as "bogus."
He said the law states inter alia that before one could build affordable housing, it must be in consultation with the sector Minister and the Minister of Finance without spelling out modalities to qualify the company or person venturing into the construction.
"Which I think is an avenue for corruption and will encourage loot and share as it happened in the previous government," he said.
He lauded government for creating a separate Ministry for Works and Housing that would largely focus on addressing challenges in the estate sector and close the demand and supply gap.
He said the new Ministry showed government has given priority to the housing sector to "help us achieve what we have been talking about that the affordable housing deficit gap is always increasing the ability of a household to spend up to 30 per cent of their gross annual income on rent."
"What I am saying is that whoever spends more than 30 per cent of his/her annual income on rent, you are not living in an affordable way, you are living in an expensive way in terms of housing," he said: "and to be able to do that, the house has to be broken down."
"If the demand is less than the houses then it would force people to come down with the housing rent which would meet their pockets, something of that sort and that is the clear cut definition for affordable housing."
The World Bank, in May 2016, reported that about 48 per cent of the youth from 15 to 24 years in Ghana did not have jobs and estimated that the figure would peak in the coming decade, thus raising concerns about the preparedness of Ghana to deal with the problem.
But the construction expert said the unemployment challenges could be solved substantially by paying attention to the housing industry – which had a value chain that could engage more than 80,000 unwaged youth.
Mr Danyansha said the new administration ought to look at ways of finishing all the 4,900 housing units started during President John Agyekum Kufuor's era and another 5,000 units by President John Dramani Mahama government as part of austerity measures to fight joblessness.
Source: GNA
Danywise Estate and Construction
housing deficit
Mr Frank Aboagye Danyansah
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Tag: LEGACY Around The Fleet
History of the Navy Reserve
LEGACY Around The Fleet
LEGACY History and Heritage
Since its establishment on March 3, 1915, millions of individuals across the country have answered the call and chosen to serve in the U.S. Navy Reserve.
190108-N-TP976-001 - 190108-N-TP976-001
Li-Fi Technology in the U.S. Navy
Build Capacity
Whether Sailors are aviation maintenance administrationmen documenting maintenance before an inspection or machinist mates looking up standard operating procedures for preventative maintenance on equipment in the main engine, a common problem they face aboard ships is the lack of access to a computer during crunch time.
181029-N-TV402-001 - 181029-N-TV402-001
Transnational Crime Unit
On average, 115 Americans die from an opioid overdose each day in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The country has been grappling with a worsening drug epidemic for decades. In 2016, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids was five times higher than in 1999, for example. From 1999 to 2016, more than 630,000 people died from drug overdoses nationwide, including in communities where Navy personnel live and operate.
From UFC to 'Out to Sea'
One thing about the Navy is that every Sailor has a different background. Some come from the city and some from the farm. Some joined right out of high school, while others have been to college. Different countries, different languages and different cultures - one thing is sure, each Sailor has a story.
The First PACT Sailors Advanced With New NAVADMIN 118/18
When guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey (CG-61) shipmates Anthony White and Kiara Reyes arrived at the recent MyNavy Career Development Symposium in Norfolk, Va., they were undesignated E-3s.
180601-N-XP477-004 - 180601-N-XP477-004
Always Ready
Thousands of Sailors could be affected by this year's hurricane season. If you are in a hurricane prone area and you aren't prepared, you should be.
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The Wait of the World
It's hard not to stare; it's the first thing you notice. A mass the size of a pineapple hanging from the right side of his face, pulling and stretching his eye and mouth under its weight. Harder to see though are the years of relentless torment he's had to endure, and the lonely boy lost behind the mask. That was the boy discovered by the Continuing Promise 2018 team.
180410-N-MS318-001 - 180410-N-MS318-001 SAN DIEGO (April 10, 2018) At the Naval Health Research Center (NHRC), we use science and research to support the youngest members of our military community. Two projects within our Deployment Health Research Department—the Department of Defense (DoD) Birth and Infant Health Research (BIHR) program and the Millennium Cohort Family Study—focus on the health of service members and their families. Researchers study exposures and experiences, particularly those unique to military service, and whether they have an impact on the physical or mental health of military children. (U.S. Navy graphic by Amanda Wagner/Released)
Boots, Birth, Beyond
They may not come issued with a seabag, but children are an important part of military families. Healthy, resilient children and families contribute to the readiness of individual service members.
Laying the Keel
Building trust, developing leaders, and driving high performance teams are never ending tasks. For the enlisted force, "Laying the Keel - Developing the Backbone of Our Navy" sets the structure and continuous learning conditions towards those ends.
You Stand No Watch Alone
Some 40 years ago, a young aviation electronic technician stood a cold and lonely mid-watch, the only sound the slap of waves against his ship and the echoing of his own thoughts. It was one of hundreds of watches Richard H. Thayer Jr. would stand over 13 years in the Cold War-era Navy, and almost 12 more in the Reserves.


peroxide | Frozen Pizza, Again?
no more yellow armpit stains!
I did not intend for this blog to be just for food recipes, though you wouldn't know that from my posts. My intention was/is to post about the new things I've tried as I am learning to be a housewife. Lately, the only new things have pretty much been recipes, but I finally tried something new in the field of laundry.
2. no one sees his undershirts, but I was curious about a new cleaner I saw on Pinterest and I do get tired of his shirts looking dirty even though they are clean. So I gathered several of his most used undershirts (that just so happened to also be dirty) and set out to try this new stain remover.
Mix up the ingredients in a small bowl. Take the scrub brush, dab a bit of the cleaner on the spot, and scrub away. Let the shirt sit for about an hour, and then launder as usual.
This stain remover should not be mixed in large quantities and saved for later use. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) breaks down when exposed to light and turns into regular H2O (which is why it is always sold in a brown bottle).
I took before and after shots so you can see the difference. When Russell saw me taking pictures of his undershirts, he asked if I was going to share them with the internet and seemed quite amused when I said "yes." So here now for all the internet to see are Russell's undershirts, freshly washed and relieved of their yellowness (mostly*).
*The lighter stained shirts came clean on the first try. The darker stained ones (including the one pictured above) did lighten up significantly but did not come completely clean. I was disappointed, but upon closer inspection I think I figured out why: I discovered that the inside of the shirt, which I had scrubbed, had indeed come clean and the yellowness that remains is only on the outside, which I had not scrubbed. The stain remover had, in fact, done its job, but I just had not realized that the shirts needed to be scrubbed on both sides.
So, in conclusion this stain remover is super awesome and actually makes me a little bit excited about doing laundry!


All rankings of the Mediterranean Cup in Puget-Sur-Argens 2014 are online!
As well you find the CPL draw for Bitburg at the CPL News page.
Valken Sports signed on as a Gold Level sponsor for the Millennium Series and will set up a booth with all of the Valken products at each event.
Sewell, NJ, March 31, 2014 – Valken Sports has been waiting for the right time to sponsor the Millennium Series. With recent moves into the European paintball market, the time has come. Valken will set up a booth with the full product line of Valken gear and accessories, including the Fate, Crusade, and Redemption tournament playing gear. Valken makes paintball equipment for every player, on every level, from head to toe. Players and dealers can stop by the booth to see the latest innovations and products that Valken has to offer.
Valken Sports started in the U.S. as a distributor and manufacturer of paintball products. The company has grown rapidly and recently expanded to Europe with a distribution location in Rotterdam and a dedicated sales team.
Supporting a league like the Millennium Series is a great opportunity for Valken Sports to introduce its product line and quality sales team to the tournament paintball market. Valken looks forward to supporting more players and teams as time goes on.
If interested in becoming a Valken sponsored team or Valken dealer, email Europe@valken.com.
Are you ready for the first 2014 Millennium event?


Summer Internship 2016 in East Africa is underway! This summer we are hosting five interns at our headquarters in Uganda. They arrived in Uganda on Monday and will spend three weeks on the ground there. These interns include--Austin Milliron (22) from Caitlin, IL, Darbie Guess (20) from Memphis, TN, Georgie Busbee (18) from Frankin, TN, Rachel Foster (23) from Becker, MN, and Ty Carey (17) from Hopewell, TN. They spent two weeks at our headquarters in Nashville prior to trip to Uganda. During that time, they participated in daily bible study, Camp Skillz Old Hickory and Antioch, SLAM NSHVLL, and various cultural immersion opportunities, activities, and seminars.
While in Uganda, the interns will join in the everyday work of our community there. They will be assisting teachers in the classrooms at St John's Primary, further developing the school garden at St. John's, and participating in building improvements at St. John's. They will also be working in our community garden on our property, building rocket stoves for local widows, and hosting a seminar on female hygiene and distributing feminine pads for local girls and women. On a daily basis, they will engage in bible study and worship led by our Ugandan and Kenyan cooperatives.
Their trip is facilitated by East Africa team member Skylar Aaseby, assisted by team participant Corey Foster.
Please pray for the interns. They are being challenged each day to consider the needs of the poor around them. Some of their personal prayer requests include--an increase in faith and trust in God, to not be anxious or afraid, that they will be faithful and obedient to God every day, and that God will open their eyes and hearts.
For more information on these interns, and to read their weekly blog updates, click here.
Older PostWhat Makes for a Healthy Marriage?


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This couple is very much in love. That's why they sleep separately.
Just because sharing a bed is considered the cultural norm, doesn't mean it's always the best option.
Mary Kozelka
Melissa Bunker has been sleepwalking since she was a little kid.
It was harmless enough at first. She has silly stories, like the time in college when she walked around her dorm, took all the pictures off the wall, and then crammed them into the fridge.
After Melissa got married and began sharing a bed with her husband, Leon, the stories got stranger. One night, she woke up in the hospital and was told she had driven, in her sleep, from her home in North Carolina to the border of South Carolina.
Her sleepwalking, combined with Leon's snoring ("He sounds like a werewolf in heat," Melissa says), means there aren't many restful nights for the pair.
Eventually, Melissa's excessive sleepwalking, or somnambulism, was diagnosed as a symptom of sleep apnea, a serious disorder that occurs when a person's breathing is disrupted during sleep, often causing snoring.
After working with a sleep disorder specialist and getting CPAP treatment, Melissa is often able to spend a full night in bed.
But even with the diagnosis, Melissa and her husband don't share a bed every single night.
Melissa says she doesn't like the general judgment society seems to have about the practice of a couple sleeping in separate beds.
"It works for me and my husband," Melissa says. "What's more socially acceptable nowadays? Multiple partners in one bed or multiple beds with one partner?"
Image courtesy of Everett Collection.
Perhaps the instinct to judge co-sleeping — and deciding not to — is a result of popular culture, suggests Lisa Medalie, a behavioral sleep medicine specialist at the University of Chicago.
"Interestingly, co-sleeping with a spouse was not always the norm," she says. "If you look back to television shows from the '60s, for example, shows like 'Dick Van Dyke' showed separate beds for the spouses in the bedroom. At this point in time, sitcoms largely show spouses sleeping in the same bed."
Image via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images.
About 1 in 4 couples sleep separately, according to a survey from the National Sleep Foundation. And more recent surveys indicate that number could be climbing.
With so many couples sleeping apart, it's hard to understand why the phenomenon is associated with shame.
Part of it may be in the assumption there is no sexual intimacy, but Melissa says for Leon and her, that's not true at all. She wouldn't see Leon for long stretches of time while he was in an active duty military post. "Was I lonely? Yes. But did our intimacy wane? Absolutely not."
"Intimacy is going to be a case by case study," Melissa continues. "You can have someone who has a picturesque relationship — same bed or different country, they'll have that bond."
Just because sharing a bed is considered the norm, it's not necessarily better or more healthy.
"It would be great if people were more comfortable talking about things that troubled them so that others going through the same thing did not feel alone with their struggle," Medalie says.
We use beds to get a good night's sleep. You do not need to share a bed to have a loving and intimate relationship, but you do need a good night's sleep to be a high-functioning, happy partner.
"If a couple simply prefers to sleep separately, there is no need to feel wrong or bad about that preference," Medalie says, freeing us all from cultural judgment.
There you have it, doctor's orders.
couples sleeping


It always startles us how fast it can go from chilly to hot where we live. The small golden period of "just right" is usually only a few weeks, and then we're looking at triple digit days! If you're like us and looking for ways to stretch out your cold weather wardrobes, we've got two easy no-sew ideas today.
First take those long sleeve sweaters and tees and turn them into the perfect Summer Tee. Cut the sleeve off at about 3/4th of the way down, roll twice and you're done!
With crazy growth spurts, we usually find that the boys jeans are getting a little too short in the length even though they just fine in the waist! No need to get rid of them, simply turn them into some cut-off shorts! Tip: for the single fold cut-off, mark the knee caps of the jeans while your kiddo is wearing them for the most precise cut. If you just want a standard frayed cut-off, make your mark just above the knee before cutting.
Do you guys have any great tips for extending winter wardrobes, we'd love to hear!
Also a reminder, Little Giraffe has an exclusive discount code for Small Fry readers! It expires 5.20.2013. Use "H2TFLOVE13" at check out for 15% off apparel!
I love the stripes! I wish we had that sweatshirt! Think a dark gray with a little skull face on it would be cute cut? I have a little target sweatshirt that I think I may try!
the cut-offs is such a great idea, especially since my little girl has all but ruined the knees of her pants this spring!
i might make her some bike shorts from old leggings to put under her skirts as well!
This is a GREAT idea!!! I love it so much! Too bad my oldest despises wearing anything jean material. I hope she grows out of that soon because it drives me bonkers! I love jeans!! What the….
Love the cuffed sleeved sweaters….stylish transition from winter to summer and a super easy DIY! Going to tweet this today!!
My toddler runs hot, so we rarely use all the hand-me-down sweatshirts we receive. Now I know what to do with them! Great post.


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State audit shows multiple concerns at York City's Thackston Charter
A state audit on a York City charter school revealed multiple areas of concern.
State audit shows multiple concerns at York City's Thackston Charter A state audit on a York City charter school revealed multiple areas of concern. Check out this story on yorkdispatch.com: https://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/archives/2017/07/28/state-audit-shows-multiple-concerns-york-citys-thackston-charter/521149001/
Jessica Schladebeck, The York Dispatch Published 3:38 p.m. ET July 28, 2017
(Editor's note: This story was originally published June 11, 2015.)
A state audit on a York City charter school revealed multiple areas of concern, including a general lack of accountability and transparency as well as an insufficient number of certified teachers and a failure to keep proper financial and health records.
The routine audit, which reviewed Helen Thackston Charter School operations from 2010 to 2013, also exposed a potential ethics violation, concerns about reimbursements and double-billing for tuition reimbursements from local school districts, said Auditor General Eugene DePasquale.
"In the Thackston charter school's case, there is no way to account for every dollar, or to know if the school operated as intended, because a breakdown of internal controls," DePasquale said. "The lack of documentation makes it nearly impossible to draw any sound conclusion."
DePasquale emphasized that this was not only a local issue, but reimbursements are also coming from the state's Department of Education.
"Those are all of our tax dollars..." he said. "We owe it to parents, taxpayers, and especially the students to make sure that every education dollar is focused on improving learning opportunities."
School officials did not return calls for comment.
Compliance: The 63-page report on the charter school outlines 12 findings, two observations and 52 recommendations for improvement.
"The number of findings and recommendations indicates a systemic breakdown in accountability, effectiveness and transparency," DePasquale said. "Our audit shows not only a clear need for changes within this charter school, but for legislative reforms of the Charter School Laws and the Department of Education's regulations, guidelines and policies."
The school's new leadership has been very cooperative, DePasquale said.
"I believe that it was just an administration in over their and head, and most of the evidence points to that," he said.
Based on responses from school officials included in the report, DePasquale said he's hopeful there will be noticeable improvement when he audits again in two years.
"They agreed with our recommendations and have outlined plans to come into compliance," he said. "Some of the changes are already under way."
Teachers: Charter schools, which are held to different standards than traditional schools, are required to make sure at least 75 percent of their staff members are certified.
Thackston reported that 100 percent of its staff was certified, when in reality, the school employed fewer certified teachers than required, the audit showed.
For the three years contained in the audit, the percentage of certified staff ranged from 63 percent to 71 percent. "I have yet to come up with a logical explanation for that," DePasquale said. "It could only mean one of two things: you're making up a number because you couldn't be bothered to figure it out, which is unacceptable, or you're lying about it."
Health: The charter school was also being reimbursed for a certified nurse that it did not employ, the audit showed.
Instead of being reimbursed at about $1 per student, the school - because it reported having a certified nurse on staff - was receiving about $7 per student from the Department of Health, DePasquale said.
The school also failed to provide mandated health screenings, and mandated dental services were not documented, according to the audit.
Academics: The charter school serves students from eight different districts: City of York, Central York, Dallastown, Donegal, Northeastern, West York Area, York Suburban and Dover Area school districts.
According to the Department of Education's School Performance Profile, the charter's school scores are declining. The school's score dropped from 57.5 percent in 2012-13 to 45.8 percent in 2013-14, ranking it lower than six of the seven public schools in the city of York, DePasquale said.
"The quality of the administration matters," he said. "When there is a lack of quality leadership at the top and a lot of turnover, it will affect the quality of the education."
To view the report in full, visit www.PaAuditor.gov.
Read or Share this story: https://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/archives/2017/07/28/state-audit-shows-multiple-concerns-york-citys-thackston-charter/521149001/
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Prosecutors: Justice served
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Killers can't rest: Justice is still possible, prosecutor says
Snow possible in York County this weekend
PSP: Probe into deadly shooting of N. Hopewell car passenger could take months
Homicide detective's magic touch: Using card tricks at work and at weddings
Crash snarls traffic on Route 116 near Spring Grove


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Reader Car Reviews
XXX hp Modified Duramax
Ghrankenstein
Discussion Starter · #1 · Nov 8, 2003
My dealership sells its own dealer-modified "Duramax SS," a 2500 HD Crew Cab with the Allison 5000-series transmission. This example is a black 4x4 LS, which hardly mattered to me, and I really don't need to comment on the rest of the truck. It's big, it's bad, and it's really wacky goofy buttery fun.
The guts of the conversion, is a performance chip (I still don't know which) that allows the Duramax to snort out 400 hp and a grotesque, writhing, cyclopean 690 lb-ft of torque. I don't know of any other mechanical modifications, but if there are, I'll follow up with them.
As you all know, a 2500 HD Crew Cab 4x4 is huge, but that kind of power makes it go, in a really REALLY (sic) manner. It feels about as fast as a 1500 SS (low sixes to sixty) off the line, and much quicker at speed. Stomp the gas at 65 mph, and, after a brief delay as the Allison upshifts, you get a solid kick in the turd-slicer. You can race against a lot of stuff in this, and win.
Very though it may be, this tuner's acceleration is still weird, as it still redlines at about 3000 rpm. It almost feels like the Allison is doing the accelerating, while the engine just sits there, CVT style. The low first gear dulls the standing start, but the rest of the ratios really make stuff happen.
For a behemoth, the 2500 HD's stiff chassis makes it feel pretty good, like a 6000 lb skull and crossbones. The recirculating ball steering does what it's supposed to do, and it has very little play. Cornering ain't much, especially since the wheels and tires are stock (this is still a 4x4), but the new (for 2003) brakes feel really good, and the real fun in driving this truck is in lighting the afterburner coming out of a corner.
According to our techs, the drivetrain is more than up to the 690 lb-ft of torque going through it. Say that a few more times, and 690 lb-ft of torque keeps sounding like more and more, even though it's actually still 690 lb-ft of torque. GM agrees, enough that this tuner still carries the full factory warranty at least. I'm not sure I'd ever want to put this in 4x4 low though.
Now that I'm geeked, I'd really like to see this truck done as a 2x4 regular cab, maybe even a dually, with the ZF 6-speed. Clunky though it is, by car standards, it might make this an even more stupid, fun ride.
The verdict: what Cthulhu would drive.
NEW RIDE: 2008 Carp Poseidon (for fish-head delivery)
The chip on this conversion was the Hypertech Power-Programmer for diesels.
Party on down.
Ghrank
Ghrankenstein Nov 25, 2003


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Eldey (The Fire Island) is a 77 m high, sheer rock, with an area of 0,03 km² about 15 km south of the Reykjanes Peninsula. Its structure is hyaloclastite and the shallows continue about 84 km to the southwest. This cluster of skerries and rocks is called Fuglasker or Eldeyjar (Bird Skerries or Fire Islands). One of the cliffs, which disappeared in 1830 was the Great Auk Rock, where this magnificent bird had one of its last shelters before it was hunted to extinction in the late 19th century.
The Eldey (The Island of Fire) boasts one of the largest gannet colony in the world. At least 70.000 birds have been counted there. The Rock has been conquered several times by climbers and brave people almost certainly sought birds and eggs there in the past. Geologists estimate that 10 eruptions have taken place in this area during historic times and the eruption in 1783 is the best documented one.
At that time an island was created and called Nyey (The New Island). It was immediately dedicated to the Danish king, but it soon disappeared again. Some tectonic movements and small eruptions took place in 1970-71. British fishermen and sailors called the Eldey island "Count Rock" and "Flour Sack". During heavy seas and high winds the breakers on the cliffs and skerries are several dozen feet high. In this relatively unstable and unsafe ocean area are rich fishing grounds (herring, lobster etc.). The main sailing route lies between Island Eldey and the mainland and about 5 nautical miles further to the soutwest are the skerries Geirfuglasker (Big Auk Skerries).


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Home Health and Social Policy Care and Trembling
Care and Trembling
As provision of care for the sick and the elderly moves from the domestic sphere to the public realm and the market, caregivers often find themselves in the role of bedside bureaucrats.
by Deborah Stone
U ntil fairly recently, most caregiving was invisible to the public eye. Caring was done informally in the private sphere, mostly by women, for relatives, neighbors, and friends; and it was mostly unpaid. Gradually over the course of the twentieth century, caring has gone public. As middle-class women moved into the labor force, society responded by creating new entitlements to care for children, the sick and disabled, and the elderly. And as needs and entitlements expand, so does the provision of care. Much care is now provided by people who care for a living and by professionals who gain their work identity from caring. Caring is the business of firms that care for profit, and of nonprofit agencies that care as a mission. And much care is now paid for by public subsidies, tax credits and exemptions, and by private and public insurance plans that tightly monitor and regulate the caregiving they fund.
When care goes public, there is a clash between the norms of caring in private relationships and the norms of efficiency, professionalism, and accountability in business and government. Care gets reframed as a problem of bottom lines and cost containment. This cost squeeze comes from private enterprise, of course, but also from the public sector: legislators slash caregiving budgets to calm taxpayers and Wall Street, just as executives pinch caregiving outlays to protect their shareholders and profits. Since medical professionals, government, and business all use standards to define quality, care tends to get standardized-and restricted to what fits in the boxes of printed forms. As care is reduced to instrumental tasks, human relationships can get lost, and caregiving can be depleted of its emotional force and spiritual meaning. Most troubling of all, when care is recast as an economic and bureaucratic good, deep norms about altruism, generosity, and cooperation are reshaped as well.
Though cost-containment pressures have shifted more caregiving out of hospitals and into homes, Medicare's home health budget was nonetheless slashed by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. For two years the federal government has been running a cloak-and-dagger antifraud initiative known-quite inaptly-as Operation Re store Trust. To find out how recent Medi care and managed care changes are affecting caregiving at the bedside, I have been interviewing home care workers in New England and observing one nonprofit home health care agency in depth. The more I talked with people, the more I saw how financial tightening and the ratcheting up of managerial scrutiny are changing the moral world of caregiving, along with the quantity and quality of care.
Caregivers work under a constant moral burden. They cannot give enough to satisfy the needs they think people have or the care they think people deserve. Frequently, the rules of insurance plans or agencies prohibit them from doing what they think is right. Formal policies sometimes clash with what they understand to be the rules of ordinary human morality. When that happens, they are caught in a moral double bind, forced to violate one set of norms or rules in order to abide by another.
When care is done by strangers instead of by family and friends, strange things happen. Some of the home health aides I've talked with have pointed out the odd disparities between what they're allowed to do as certified and licensed paraprofessionals-in other words, as strangers-and what they're allowed to do as ordinary citizens, relatives, or friends. They can't give prescription medicines. They may dispense, apply, or feed any nonprescription lotions or potions, but they cannot even rub on prescription cream for a client who can't reach her own feet or back. They are not allowed to pick up a person who falls, because they might cause more injury if the client sustained a fracture. Cert ified nursing assistants, as these home health aides are called, are required to work under the supervision of a registered nurse, and as these examples show, they must observe strict boundaries between medical and personal care. Mean while, any child, or any ignorant but well-meaning neighbor, friend, or relative, may dispense prescription medicine or help someone up from a fall.
If a client asks a certified aide to just sit and talk, the aide cannot comply, because she is there to do bodily care. If the client doesn't want any type of bodily care, such as a shower, shampoo, or fingernail cutting, one aide said, "I try to coax them into something, because . . . in order for the agency to get paid, to pay me, I have to do some type of hands-on [care]." Of course, care providers usually do chat for a few minutes, because they understand how intrusive and demeaning needing help can be, and they know you can't just start doing tasks for people without establishing some kind of human connection. But they live with an undercurrent of tension between their clients' desires for company and companionship and the more instrumental care they are trained and paid to provide.
In some agencies, if a client asks an aide to do certain household chores, the aide is supposed to refuse. An aide in New York told researchers Ruth Glasser and Jeremy Brecher, "You're not going to do something that gets you in trouble, but sometimes the rules have to be bent a little bit. . . . Like for example, we're not allowed to get up on ladders and change curtains. But sometimes you have clients who don't have a relative or somebody to come over and do it, and if you think you're capable of doing it, you do it." When caregivers are asked for kinds of help they aren't supposed to give, they have to negotiate between their job definitions and their personal assessments of the care they think people want and need.
When I ask aides to tell me how they know when they have done a good job, they almost always say something like, "The client smiled," or "The client is all pretty and looks nice-you've made her happy," or "They say 'thank you.' " When I asked one aide to tell me about a time she felt she gave really good care, she replied, "It always makes you feel good when somebody says, 'I'm really glad to see you. I haven't seen anybody all day.' And you know you're bringing a little spark into them." They talk about how rewarding it is to make a difference-client happiness is their barometer.
Some aides told me that Medicare clients often ask them to continue care on weekends or on a private basis after the agency discharges them. The clients would love to keep the same aide, and often the aides have grown very fond of a client and would love to continue caring. But the agency maintains separate staffs for Medicare and non-Medicare clients, and aides are keenly aware that if they went to someone's home on a private basis, they wouldn't have workers' compensation or any benefits, and they would be wide open to suits if a client or family became disgruntled with their work.
Once they are paid and licensed, caregivers' concept of caring work changes subtly. They now think of caring work as something for which they need the benefits and legal liability protections that people expect in paid jobs but don't even think about when caring for friends and relatives. For their part, agency managers understand and regret the disruption in caring relationships when the division of labor is determined by the client's funding source. But if the agency were to allow more fluidity between its divisions, or between its services and its aides' private-duty services, it would engender suspicion that it was playing fast and loose with Medicare rules.
Also, when caregiving becomes formalized, it is controlled by someone who is neither the caregiver nor the cared for-it is no longer a matter of private obligations and gifts, personal affection and tiny personal struggles. Once a business or government agency gets involved, it has interests, concerns, rules, laws, and reputations to worry about.
Bureaucracies of Care
When organizations provide care as their raison d'être-whether they are for-profit firms, nonprofit agencies, or private or public financing programs-they must be concerned with things other than the people getting and giving the care. They must pay attention to productivity, costs, waste, fraud, and solvency. They must worry about pleasing their shareholders, boards of directors, bill payers, insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid offices, auditors, accrediting agencies, and congressional oversight committees. All of a sudden, the goals of staying in business, balancing the books, and lowering costs displace the goals of making patients feel cared for and improving their well-being.
This new reality reflects three distinct trends. First, with more women in the paid labor force-either out of choice or economic necessity-fewer are available to do the traditional woman's unpaid work of caregiving. And fewer extended families live in close proximity to one another, which makes it even harder for relatives, male or female, to be caregivers. Second, society has created a partial entitlement to paid caregiving by strangers. And third, this entitlement has given rise to severe cost-containment pressures that in turn intensify the bureaucratization. All of these dilemmas would arise in any system that shifted from unpaid to paid caregiving. But the contradictions surely would be less acute if there were more adequate financing and more respect for the caregivers' professionalism. Greater subsidies for paid family leave would help, too, so that more care could be done according to traditional norms but without economic sacrifice.
Sitting in on case conferences, I'm struck by how much talk there is of goals: "What are our goals here?" is the question about every case. Even more surprising is the most common answer: "Our goal is to be out by the end of the week," or "to be out by the end of the month." With the Balanced Budget Act's drastic cutbacks for home health care, and managed care's stringency as well, agencies seem to have had to shift their goals from providing care to terminating care. They can't provide care if they don't stay in business, and they can't stay in business on lower revenues unless they terminate unreimbursed care. Cost control, then, introduces a perverse logic.
If the focus on goals shows up in an emphasis on time frames and "getting out" of the client's home, it also shows up in the content of caregiving. Short-term goals and long-term goals must be defined and documented. Nurses and physical therapists tell me their care has had to become much more narrowly focused in the last few years. They have to document a specific medical problem for each patient, such as an unhealed wound or a knee injury, and they're not supposed to spend any time addressing other problems-even other medical problems-that are not listed as the reason for needing home care.
Caregivers also have to document patients' progress toward goals. If the reason for care is an unhealed wound, nurses must write down a date when the wound is going to heal. "This is such a crapshoot," said one nurse. "Would you mind telling me how in hell I'm gonna know when this wound's going to heal?" She and other nurses said they feel they are allowed much less time to teach patients how to care for themselves. They are allowed time to explain something only once-even if the patient forgets or needs more explanation. "Prior to all this push and shove," one nurse said, "[teaching] was more tracked in the patient's learning capacity. You didn't feel like if you told them something, whether they got it or not you just wrote down you told it to them."
Medicare requires that patients show progress toward their goals in order to remain eligible for services. In team conferences, I heard a fair amount of talk about patients who "weren't progressing" toward their goals, always followed by some discussion of whether there were legitimate reasons for this lack of progress, or whether it was a matter of what the caregivers call "noncompliance." The agency has to cover itself with Medicare, so the caregivers are forced into making uncomfortable judgments. Do they find a way of showing progress to protect patients' eligibility? Do they abandon patients who they feel are to blame for their own lack of progress? Should they be in the business of judging patients and assigning blame in the first place?
When ordinary people care for their own family members, they don't think about progressing toward goals. They think about their relationship. And if you ask them to articulate their goals, they are likely to say that they want to make their relatives as happy and as comfortable as they can, and preserve their dignity. This is especially true in the case of adult daughters caring for parents. Historian Emily Abel, author of Who Cares for the Elderly?, found that adult daughters are overwhelmingly concerned with reciprocating the care they received as children, but without reversing roles in a way that demeans their parent. They're acutely aware of how hard it is for a parent to be cared for like a child, by a child.
In the private sphere, the goal of home health care, if we were to put it in these terms, might be to express love and gratitude, and to preserve identity and meaningful relationships in the face of one person's decline. In the public sphere, the imperatives of organizational survival displace these private purposes and motivations for caregiving. Yet the caregivers still care, and they care intensely; the emotions and the attachments are not diminished.
The main strategy of keeping costs down in home health care is to limit care to medical needs and medically related tasks, and to eliminate any care that is merely social. Medicare and most of the insurance companies will now pay only for skilled medical services and for care that is necessary to cure a medical problem. In a case conference, I heard about a woman who was just home from a rehabilitation center after an accident that left her paralyzed from the neck down. She and her husband, who was caring for her full-time, were overwhelmed with the problems of how to cope with everything from her bowels, to getting her from bed to wheelchair, to running their business. They'd already used up the three home health care visits their insurance company had allowed. When the agency called to get more visits authorized, the insurer at first refused, saying her medical condition was now stable. All their difficulties were only "emotional adjustment problems."
How Caregivers Cope
Payers, naturally, use the medical/social distinction as a way of limiting their expenditures. But agencies that provide caring services find it hard to sustain that distinction. As one aide put it, "You can't just go in and get out. I'm sorry. You know, my grandmother had people taking care of her. . . . I wouldn't want them to do the same-you know, just come in and wash her up and leave. They have to have some kind of relationship going." The caregivers are keenly aware that home health care is very intimate and very personal, and that it's very intrusive to have someone come into your home, much less touch your body. Caregivers must build rapport and trust before they can take care of their patients; and that's not just something that has to be done on the first few visits, when a client is new to home care. Making a social connection has to precede every episode of caregiving. "Even now," one aide said, "I still have patients that'll say, 'Come sit down and let's talk for a few minutes.' You know, they don't want to get right to business, they want to visit for a few minutes."
The line between medical and social, emotional, or spiritual evaporates in practice. Yet because both public and private payers use this line to try to manage their costs, agencies and individual caregivers are pressured into pretending they don't cross it. They joke about how they treat other problems in addition to the official reason for care; and they even sometimes care for other members of the patient's family. Good care often requires observing a patient's spouse and attending to his or her health problems as well, for the spouse is often the caregiver when the agency people aren't around. The agency caregivers know what not to write down, and they are frustrated by payers' blindness to the realities of human life.
Virtually all direct care pro viders I have talked with-all the nurses, physical and occupational therapists, and home care aides-say they've visited clients on their days off. They consider it normal, and when I ask about this practice, they tell me, "Oh, everybody does it." One woman said, "I have on occasion run into somebody's home when I wasn't treating the person. Or, we are treating but I wasn't normally going." I asked what she did on these occasions. She said she never gave a treatment, but she would just check on how someone was doing. "But I think that's called being a neighbor."
It is also, in effect, a subsidy from the caregiver's scarce free time. Caregiving bureaucracies are betting that the caregivers will dip into the well of their own humanity to offset the budget constraints and the stifling rulebooks.
Because Medi care, the largest payer of home care services, is currently scrutinizing and cutting back home care services, many long-term clients are in jeopardy of losing their home care benefits. Other insurance plans are tightening up as well. Increasingly, caregivers feel that insurance rules contradict their own sense of common decency and morality. Visiting clients on their time off becomes a form of resistance to new insurance rules-a form of protest.
When team members heard about the quadriplegic woman I mentioned earlier, one nurse burst out: "Well, I'll just go visit her as a friend. And if I happen to have a few little things in my pocket. . . ." Another team member chimed in, "Yeah, I told her I go to the market all the time, and if she needs anything, she should give me her list." A couple of different caregivers told me about a patient with a chronic crippling disease who'd been getting home care for ten years, but who they feared was going to be cut off by Medicare. One of his aides told me she had reassured him, "'Hey, if they cut you off, you won't go without a bath.'. . . I told him I'd stop after work and do it. They can't stop you on your own time. After 3:30, you're a private citizen."
Though agencies and their staff are under tremendous pressure to cut back the formal, reimbursed care they provide, nobody, as far as I can tell, is stopping caregivers from voluntarily picking up the slack. Aides and nurses tell me that the agency discourages them from getting too emotionally attached, but they get attached anyway. "You can't help it," they say. "If you're human," or "if you have any human compassion, you just do." The case managers and supervisors know this. They know that nurses and aides sometimes accept phone calls at home from their patients, even though they're not supposed to give out their numbers. They know that nurses and aides often visit clients on their days off and do special favors, even though they're not supposed to. The supervisors, who are nurses themselves, look the other way. They've been there.
Of course, everybody-taxpayers, insurance companies, agencies-benefits from the free, volunteer labor that caregivers provide when they do it on their own nickel. No doubt, supervisors and managers don't actively discourage this sort of thing, because it helps keep their clients happy at lower costs. But they also know the staff will do it anyway, and to a large extent, they share the direct caregivers' moral commitments. In this sense, the exploitation of women's generosity that characterized traditional, informal caregiving systems continues in the new systems of formal, socially financed care.
Compassion and Suspicion
The caregivers talk about their personal attachments to clients and their "extras" as though their deep affection, fierce loyalty, and overflowing generosity were somehow illicit. When I asked about ways they go beyond their duties, some of them, especially the aides, lowered their voices to a whisper. Some got visibly uncomfortable. They all said something to the effect that "the agency discourages" getting emotionally involved and doing things outside the job description or outside the care plan.
Several aides said they sometimes pick up milk, bread, or other items for a client. Such favors are against the agency's rules, but I didn't know this the first time an aide mentioned it. I only figured it out when she hesitated to talk about it, and when I realized she was trying to justify herself to me. The man lives three miles from the store, she told me, and his daughter lives even further away in a neighboring town. "It's very inconvenient for her to bring him milk. So how's he going to get milk? How's he going to get a loaf of bread? I'm going right by. It's on my way home." She then asked, "How can you say no? You can't. You're a human being. I go out of my way to do things for people. . . . I guess I'm guilty."
She used the word "guilty" three times when talking about her favors and kindnesses. Finally I asked her, "You're doing something nice for these people. Why should you feel guilty?" "They tell you you're not supposed to have contacts with patients outside of work," she answered.
Medicare's antifraud program and its stepped-up eligibility reviews create a climate of intimidation, fear, and guilt. Several caregivers said they believed there has been abuse in the home care industry, and that sometimes perhaps they or their agencies have kept clients longer than they should have. But they all talked about how the new climate "makes you feel like a criminal." "Now you feel like you can't make a mistake-you're being watched," one physical therapist told me. With Medicare reviewing and questioning more and more cases, "You feel like a crook from the start," said another. "I feel that I'm short-shrifting the patient," a nurse said about the speed-up in teaching. "We feel like we're abandoning our patients," another nurse said about Medicare's refusal to continue to pay for chronically ill patients. One nurse told me about a patient who benefits greatly from home care, but who, she thought, she was able to see only "because nobody's denied it yet. But I am feeling very guilty about it." They're waiting for the ax to drop on their patients-and meanwhile, they're feeling guilty for caring.
These are women who overwhelmingly love their work. Almost all of them volunteered that they find their work incredibly rewarding, and that they wouldn't want to do any other kind of work. When I asked explicitly how cutbacks have affected them, a few mentioned reduced client loads and working hours, but almost all of them used the word "sad." They still love their work, but more and more often they are having to watch their clients get hurt by the system. And they are forced to participate in the withdrawal of care.
Paradoxically, public accountability has brought moral confusion to the world of care. When people care in a public context as employees of an agency and, in effect, as agents of insurance companies or Medicare and Medicaid, they are made to feel that their personal relationships with clients are illegitimate-something to be hidden, kept in check, restrained, best left unspoken. Not only their professional judgment but their compassion comes under suspicion. They talk about caring and their caregiving work almost as if they were engaging in civil disobedience. They frequently justify themselves by using the terms "human," "friend," or "citizen" and insisting that insurance or agency rules shouldn't prevent them from doing what any human being or any citizen would and could do.
This dampening of generosity, this suppression of altruism, this check on the formation of social connections-these are the real dangers of making caring work formal and public. We are in a political time when a mean spirit dominates our public philosophy, and an obsession with cost control dominates our public policy. When these values infuse the work worlds of people who care for a living, they may become all citizens' way of seeing what is morally proper in their relations with fellow citizens. When empathy, generosity, and reaching out to your fellow human beings are perceived as civil disobedience, we are a society in trouble.
In grappling with the issue of long-term care for the elderly and chronically ill, most politicians and policy analysts have worried primarily about one danger-that if public programs pay for long-term care, they will displace much of the voluntary care currently offered. They worry that public responsibility for long-term care will erode family responsibility, and that hordes of people will crawl out of the woodwork to devour any new care that is subsidized by public funds or private insurance.
Policymakers ought to worry instead about a different kind of displacement: the displacement of caring relationships and social connections by narrow, task-oriented bodily maintenance; the displacement of empathy and affection by cool professionalism and calculated fiscal prudence; and the displacement of an ethic of responsibility for one's neighbors by an ethic of working-to-rule.
If we care about preserving the norms of reciprocity, trust, and mutual aid that make us a community, we had better take better care of our caring work. The solution to these dilemmas is not to shove caregiving back into the invisible world of women's unpaid, unacknowledged work. Instead, we need to look into the heart of caregiving, to remind ourselves what we truly value. Before we can have intelligent conversations about how much to socialize the costs of caregiving-how much for paid family leave, how much for paid professional care-we need first to decide that humane caring matters.
Issue: Health & Social Policy
Deborah Stone
Deborah Stone is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and holds an investigator award in health policy from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Read more by Deborah Stone


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Lonely In Lagos
Poet and broadcaster Wana Udobang meets people in her home city of Lagos, to find out what causes loneliness in Africa's most populous city.
Lagos in Nigeria is Africa's most populous city. But despite the hustle and bustle of this vibrant metropolis, many people here feel isolated and lonely.
Poet and broadcaster Wana Udobang, who lives in Lagos, discovers parts of the city she has never visited, to ask what causes loneliness, and how people are tackling it.
We hear stories from a gay man who has found the strict laws against homosexuality in Nigeria have led him to feel isolated and alone, and visit a group of women sex workers whose homes were demolished in one of the city's poorest areas, as they come together to tackle loneliness.
Wana also visits a community group tackling loneliness among the elderly population. By the Lagos lagoon she talks to a young man with clinical depression who has found solace in nature, and we hear how a group of cyclists are bringing people together in the city.
Produced by Jo Wheeler
Broadcast: 9th September 2017


If you're running a large Amazon business, you inevitably have more complex pricing needs than smaller retailers. For rapidly growing Amazon sellers, at some point it becomes clear that manually repricing each of your ASINs individually is simply unrealistic. The market is too dynamic, and your active inventory is too large. This is when many sellers decide to opt for a rule-based repricer.
Most repricing software on the market are rule-based, which means they change your prices based on pre-set rules, such as undercutting the lowest competitor by a certain amount. This can be fine if your goal is simply to sell as much quantity of product as possible. Yet the downside is that it leads to a race to a bottom, both for the individual seller and the marketplace as a whole — leaving money on the table for everyone involved.
In contrast to rule-based repricing, algorithmic repricing manages to bypass these issues by dynamically analyzing and adjusting to big data, seller metrics, and marketplace trends to select the ideal price for an ASIN.
An independent study by Northeastern University revealed a direct correlation between algorithmic pricing, higher Buy Box share, and increased profitability.
While rule-based repricers adjust your prices based on parameters set by humans, algorithmic repricers are driven by millions of complex data points. It would be impossible for an individual to determine what sort of rule should be applied and when, because each ASIN, each business, each category and each competitor is unique and dynamic. Algorithmic repricing is the only kind of repricing that is able to synthesize the complex combinations of factors to make truly unbiased decisions.
Algorithmic repricing won't leave money on the table because it's optimized to take into account all the variables Amazon uses to determine who wins the Buy Box. A seller with strong metrics can very often price higher than a lower-performing competitor and still win the Buy Box. Algorithmic repricing gives the right amount of weight to the various metrics Amazon cares about, allowing strong businesses with great customer service to price upwards and make more profits.
It's true — many repricers on the market change prices at regular intervals. But only algorithmic repricing continuously learns and adjusts not only to competitors' prices, but to dynamic market conditions such as stock levels, competitive landscape, and seller performance. This means more accurate pricing based on a multitude of variables.
While rule-based repricing takes a long time to set up and tweak, algorithmic repricing is designed to save you time by translating big data into actionable insights. This allows you to focus your time and efforts on making high-level business decisions such as product sourcing and scaling upwards.
Rule-based repricing may suffice for sellers who are just starting out, but a growing business needs a software that can handle its increasingly complex needs. Algorithmic repricing keeps profit margins high without compromising sales by taking a bird's eye view of the Amazon Marketplace.
This article was contributed by Feedvisor, the pioneer of Algo-Commerce – the discipline of using big data and machine- learning algorithms to make business-critical decisions for online retailers.
Feedvisor's algorithmic repricing and revenue intelligence solutions power millions of pricing decisions daily, providing online retailers with actionable insights to maximize profitability and drive their business growth.
Leor Farkas is a writer for Feedvisor. She's a native New Yorker who lives in Tel Aviv, where she has been producing content for the hi-tech world. She earned her B.A. in English and philosophy from Sarah Lawrence College.


I'm proud to be serving as the president of our statewide organization, The Suzuki Association of Minnesota. We offer a Fall workshop, statewide graduation programs and a fund raising gala. Check out our site for more information.


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Brad Bird: Not Directing 'Star Wars VII'
"The Incredibles" director Brad Bird posted on Twitter that he is not directing the seventh episode of the "Star Wars" saga despite speculation that he is.
Bird, Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams had been approached by Lucasfilm to direct the next "Star Wars" film, but Bird said he is focused on his current project, a sci-fi film for Disney, "1952," Entertainment Weekly reported.
"Not doing Star Wars," Bird tweeted Saturday. "Michael Arndt is a fantastic writer and Kathy Kennedy is a brilliant producer. I will be first in line to see the new STAR WARS."
Abrams told Entertainment Weekly last week he will not be directing the film either because he has "some original stuff I am working on next." Abrams is working on post-production on "Star Trek Into Darkness."
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