thebartermyth

lmao

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As Steward Health Care struggled to provide services and pay vendors in many of its three dozen or so hospitals in Massachusetts and across the country, its executives spent millions on intelligence firms, according to corporate records, videos, and other files obtained by the global journalism outlet the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and shared with the Boston Globe Spotlight Team.

In all, senior Steward executives authorized and spent over $7 million from 2018 to 2023 on firms that provide research, intelligence-gathering, and surveillance services, according to emails, encrypted messages, and financial records reviewed by the Spotlight Team.

In the US, Steward is currently mired in bankruptcy, the fate of its network hazy, while its Massachusetts properties head for the auction block. In recent years, crippling staff shortages at Steward hospitals have put patients at risk, records show. Dozens of lawsuits from unpaid vendors — from elevator companies to orthopedic suppliers — have piled up in court.

Records show that Steward executives prioritized intelligence-gathering over most everything else. Monthly bills ran as high as $440,000. They were to be paid on time and in full.

While much of this investigative intelligence work was taking place across the globe, Steward’s hospitals in the United States were struggling under the weight of the coronavirus. From 2020 to 2021, Steward hired hundreds of temporary staff to meet the need. But by March 2021, Steward was disputing 3,400 invoices and withholding over $42 million from one staffing agency, who eventually pulled their staff from Steward hospitals, court documents show.

On one night in fall 2021, there were 101 patients in the emergency department with only six nurses to care for them, creating a 14-hour wait for some patients in the waiting room, the memo noted. On another, seven full ambulances idled outside the hospital as 11 nurses juggled 71 patients in the emergency room.

A day after Thanksgiving, 11 nurses were assigned to 95 patients and a patient with acute renal failure was left unattended.

That patient was later found dead in the hallway.

While this kind of thing isn't quite 'theory', it definitely has some elements of theory within it, but it also uses very grandiose writing and mythological references. This one seems to be created as a museum exhibit with some connection to Mozilla.

Is there a name for this type of essay or a way I could find more like it? This sort of thing is very fun to read even if it's not serious theory. The subject matter is more or less unimportant to me.

If you need to explain, never ever shorted the phrase. Just keep saying "bourgeois nihilism".

The bourgeois nihilism of today is distinct from the bourgeois nihilism of Nietzsche's era...

"bro, it's all so stupid and shitty we just slapped a couple open source functions together, bro. It's all just hacked together and could break at any time. It's got so many bugs, but they just shipped it anyway. The only computer I would have in my house is a printer and I would shoot it if it made a weird sound cause I don't trust technology, bro. Security software, dude, it's like, everybody has bad passwords and it could just, like, break anytime - really makes you think, man."

Sorry, this post came out more angry than expected. I promise that I'm actually not mad about this; I just think it's funny. When you visualize me making this post, imagine me chuckling to myself and sipping on a nice cool aperol spritz through a novelty straw.

They were hemming and hawing over the morality of it to me and I was like "I feel like the psychic effects of working there would destroy you, no?" They have actually read some theory and I think consider themselves a leftist. Very funny stuff. Anyway, they didn't get the job for non-political reasons (insufficient microsoft outlook experience presumably). Sorry to use hexbear for gossip, my 'apolitical' friends wouldn't understand why this is funny and my leftist friends would think less of me.

I know this post is like a decade late and very boring, but I gotta post it anyway

Basically, with employer-sponsored health insurance the employer pays half and the employee (you) pays half. The cost of your insurance goes way down if you have a high deductible, and a deductible is basically what you'd have to pay before the insurance actually pays anything. So 'high-deductible' means you have to pay a lot before insurance pays anything, and it's a lot cheaper to buy that insurance cause the insurers often just don't pay anything ever. If it's $5,000 before insurance pays a dime, often times you have to just pay as though you had no insurance. This is obviously bad, but it's also cheap so like maybe you just luck out an never get sick or injured, right...?

Anyway, HSAs. Yeah, it's called "Health Savings Account". It's marketed as a tax-advantaged, investor-y, bougie-"we're comfortable" lifestyle way to really feel like a keen insider. Picture this: what if health insurance was individualized in the same way 401k and retirement stuff was, and you could "call your broker" at your "health savings account" to tell them to invest your tax-free "medical dollars" in the latest gizmo or whatever. Just deeply bad for solidarity and also very weird. And this is how basically everyone thinks about HSAs. A "tax-loophole" for the rich that I can also use because "I'm actually very financially savvy, just like the rich, who got where they are because of a weird hyper-individualized investment thing rather than any underlying systemic basis of societal organization".

And you're probably thinking: "But I already hate the suburban petite-bourgeois and their annoying mannerisms for reasons that are way less boring and meaningless." Well you're right, but also: high deductible plans are a requirement of HSAs so the employer's half decreases significantly. Your employer doesn't contribute to the HSA (they technically could, but if you're reading this post they don't [incredibly silly losing battle available there for libs]), so hopefully you do at least up to your deductible, but it's pretty likely that's not possible even if you had the money (no one does) because you literally aren't allowed to due to contribution limits. (if people did have the money it would probably be better to get different / better / additional health insurance anyway.) But importantly and I guess obviously: nobody contributes to their HSA. It's basically the chance for each person to individually manage an insurance fund for only themselves, which is almost exactly the same as paying out of pocket, the main difference being the additional bank account and a make-work program for MBAs. I've talked to almost a dozen office workers about this and they mostly have no idea what I am saying at all or say "yeah, I added money in onboarding, but I canceled it once I realized it came out of my pay."

There's no non-scam option btw if that wasn't clear. And, yeah, obviously all health insurance is a scam, but this is a different scam run by a slightly different set of people (there's def overlap though don't get me wrong). The office job benefits world is basically a choice between varying levels of high-deductible plans + HSA (ie. $1.5k, $3k, $5k...) with maybe one ridiculously expensive low-deductible plan.

Anyway, thoughts? I needed to get this rant out, I guess. Maybe I just missed the discourse on this because I was a child at the time lol.

We've had threads on how D&D itself has a colonial mindset, but I think that undersells how fucked up and racist players can be. I want this thread to be about players who go out of their way to make characters that break the fourth wall and ruin friendships outside of the game.

I'll start: I had a player come to me with their character: "Gucci, the rapping goblin bard". The details were what you would expect. Like he literally put a picture of Gucci Mane in the chat. I told him that this was blackface and I wouldn't allow it. He had a tantrum about being called racist, and now we no longer speak (lol).