by Ellen Gabler, The New York Times
Subsequent articles have talked about how group-dysfunction at UNC has been fixed, and how the chief surgeon in the area has since been replaced. However what is glossed over in some discussions recently is that the economic forces driving this mediocrity are still present:
Reaching adequate case volumes to keep up skills is a challenge because so many hospitals are competing for patients — surgical programs are an important driver of revenue. The Orlando, Fla., and San Antonio metropolitan areas, for example, each have three hospitals doing pediatric heart surgeries. Cleveland has two about a mile apart. A study last year by Dr. Backer and other physicians found that 66 percent of hospitals doing the surgeries were within 25 miles of another one.
Several countries have consolidated programs to help ensure better, more consistent care. In Sweden, mortality rates dropped to 1.9 percent from 9.5 percent after surgeries in the early 1990s were consolidated to two hospitals from four. In the United Kingdom, the mortality rate fell from 4.3 percent to 1.9 percent — despite an increase in complex cases — after a series of babies’ deaths led to an overhaul in the late 1990s. Hospitals there must have multiple surgeons who each perform at least 125 operations annually.
If the pediatric heart-surgery group at UNC can’t get the volume to get good I don’t see how personnel changes will matter in the long run.
by Jon Evans, TechCrunch
The author discusses how gaming-aesthetics have changed movie-aesthetics (particularly in the action genre). It was interesting, but I thought this bit was funny:
Most of Jason Bourne’s action sequences are escapes; most of John Wick’s are hunts. And of course “one hunting a horde” has been the basic mode of first-person shooters since long before Doom.
I must be too old.
by Ankita Rao, Vice
Young people, the conventional wisdom goes, enjoy living in shared housing (i.e. apartments and townhouses) and communal green spaces, with surveys suggesting they value access to restaurants, shops, and walking above privacy. But a significant number of them still want to follow the trajectory of generations past: Rent until you can save enough money, and then settle down in a house of your own.
I’m not sure how realistic the case-studies are from this article, but median home-prices are still going up. I don’t like the implication of the article that the only way to raise a family is in single-family detached-housing:
Joel Kotkin, a fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in California who has advocated for affordable single-family housing, said this dynamic amounts to more than just an economic bind. It reflects our larger society—one in which cities are willing to go to great lengths to prop up big tech companies and young professionals put career before family. “Do we want to have another generation, or do we want single, childless people?” Kotkin, who is author of The Human City, asked. Tech companies like Facebook and Amazon prefer the proliferation of luxury rentals, he continued, because they appeal to young workers who don’t have families that would get priority above their jobs.
However it’s true that in many metro areas land-use regulations combined with land-values make it impossible to create affordable housing large enough to raise a family (without higher levels of subsidy than we seem willing to apply).
by Alexia Fernández Campbell, Vice. Found on HN
I don’t have any insights to pull from this, but I like following the “gig economy” legal problems.
This piece is a nice overview of recent developments in the California legislature and court-systems.
by Jay Greene, The Washington Post
Business-software giant Salesforce instituted a new policy barring retail customers from using its technology to sell semiautomatic weapons and some other firearms.
While on a socio-political level I agree with Salesforce’s position, having these sorts of things regulated by business-platforms and corporate relationships feels too much like a cyberpunk dystopia for my tastes.
If this were a grass-roots campaign against the retailers in question I would feel way less internal resistance against this sort of thing - even if it resulted in the same outcome (Salesforce dropping contracts). But when Marc Benioff comes up with the idea on his own (as presented by the above story) I feel queasy. That’s probably a sign of some inconsistency/hypocrisy in my worldview.
by Tim Carman, The Washington Post
The Trump administration’s proposed changes, critics say, chip away at an Obama-era mandate to provide SNAP recipients with access to more healthful foods. The 2014 Farm Bill authorized the USDA to draft regulations that would require authorized stores to stock a wider variety of healthful products, in an attempt to combat food deserts in low-income neighborhoods, where families routinely do not have access to fresh fruits and vegetables.
As much as I want to take every opportunity to call the current administration silly, I think I’m okay with this. I think we would be better off if programs like SNAP were directly handing out money, and this change brings us (slightly!) closer to that.
But I haven’t studied this (or read about the rationale behind the Obama administration’s change) so it’s possible that while this is a moving closer to a better end-state, this could be a move away from a local optima or something like that (for example, you could argue that as long as we have any market-distorting aspects to SNAP, we may as well be using these distortions to create incentives for food retailers to push policy-goals).
by Abha Bhattarai, The Washington Post
What is hopefully no longer surprising:
The findings, researchers say, “debunk many conventional wisdoms about the new-age consumer.” Millennials, they contend, are putting off home-buying and marriage not because they want to, but because rising costs are making it difficult for them to afford down payments and weddings.
However:
There is one area, though, where consumers are spending less than they once did: Clothing. Shoppers are spending half as much on apparel as they did a decade ago, even as they buy more items, the study found.
[Kasey M. Lobaugh, Deloitte’s chief retail innovation officer] said the reasons for that shift are both economic and cultural. Retailers are churning out cheaper clothing and selling it at lower prices as they try to compete with fast-fashion chains like H&M and Zara. At the same time, American are buying more casual and athletic wear, which tends to be cheaper than business suits and formal wear.