You’re invited to celebrate Alzheimer’s and Brain Awareness Month this June! Join your First Hill neighbors for our first annual Brain Health Block Party. From 12:30 – 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday June 21, stop by any participating site to enjoy an outdoor brain-healthy activity such as bike-powered smoothie making, games and more. A free event for all ages. Event passports available at each activity station. Start wherever you like, and visit at least three stations for a chance to be entered into a drawing for a special brain-health raffle prize! Walking between all six stations is about 1 mile. Learn more and View Map
Mr. Appelbaum is a member of the editorial board. Ms. Keller is a photographer based in Seattle.
Electric vehicles are rare in Moses Lake, Wash., a small city in the fertile Columbia Basin about a three-hour drive east of Seattle. In that conservative farms-and-factories community, few people have the cash or the inclination. The only electric vehicle I saw during a two-day visit last month was a Tesla in the hotel parking lot.
Over the next few years, however, hundreds of Moses Lake residents are going to be entering the electric vehicle business. Two different companies, attracted by cheap hydropower, are opening plants there, each backed by $100 million in federal money, to produce a key ingredient for electric vehicle batteries.
The investment is part of the roughly half a trillion dollars the Biden administration is marshaling to transform an economy fueled by carbon into one fueled by clean, renewable energy, and it illustrates a gamble at the heart of that broader effort.
Instead of delivering electric vehicles, solar panels and other green technologies at the lowest possible cost, no matter their country of origin, the Biden administration is determined to use this opportunity to expand domestic manufacturing. And it is concentrating much of that effort in rural and Rust Belt communities, where reactionary politics have taken hold most strongly. The plan to combat global warming is also a bid for industrial revival and a transformed political landscape.
There is a real risk that President Biden’s economic and political aims will come into conflict with his environmental goals. If domestic production results in higher costs, that could suppress demand for electric vehicles. Political opposition to renewable energy, on the rise in many conservative communities, could impede production. But giving people an economic stake in the transition to green energy may well be the nation’s best chance to build a durable political consensus in favor of confronting global warming.
My cell phone started ringing just as I turned the key in my front door. George, my dear friend and neighbor in downtown Los Angeles, was calling.
We had just shared a celebratory lunch, and an unwelcome surprise awaited him when he returned to his apartment. Building management had installed a new digital lock on his front door while we were out.
And he didn’t have the code.
“One person’s efficiency tool can be another’s obstacle.” | Credit: Getty
On the eve of his 90th birthday, George found himself shut out of his long-time home.
I rushed across the plaza that separates our buildings. I had a hunch what must have occurred.
Can’t drive anymore? “Just call Uber” isn’t a solution for someone who doesn’t own a smartphone.
Building management, it seemed, had been alerting tenants about the upcoming change via email and text — methods of communication my friend didn’t use. As his eyesight had been faltering, George hadn’t been getting online much lately. His sole lifeline to the world was his ever-ringing flip phone.
Apps for All (Who Can Use Them)
In the name of efficiency, more companies are driving customers to conduct business digitally. QR codes for menus in restaurants. COVID-19 vaccines scheduled exclusively online. Apps for everything, from banking to health care to travel to routine maintenance requests.
The presumption that everyone’s life is fully digital — and that everybody is, or wants to be, comfortable with screens — shuts out many who may not be deft with the technology, or even have access to it.
George panicked last year when his building’s management company shut down its on-site office and began requiring tenants pay rent digitally. Having to mail in the check he used to deliver in person increased the possibility of late fees. Paying online was not something with which he felt comfortable.
Texted to Distraction
My 85-year-old mother just had a medical issue — the first in her life — and suddenly found herself barraged with texts directing her at an already stressful time to upload documents, respond to surveys and confirm appointments. Perhaps even worse, finding an alternative method of contact (such as . . . a phone number) was usually impossible.
Last year, the appliance store from which she’d purchased a new refrigerator demanded that she fill out a detailed form sent to her via text, and to upload a picture of the defective merchandise before a repairperson would respond.
Can’t drive anymore? “Just call Uber” isn’t a solution for someone who doesn’t own a smartphone.
One person’s efficiency tool can be another’s obstacle, said Dr. Caroline Cicero, a gerontology professor and director of the University of Southern California’s Age Friendly University Initiative. While helping her father recently to deposit a check at a bank, she found herself frustrated when the branch manager tried to steer him to instead use an app.
“I don’t think we should assume that everyone, young or old or middle-aged, is better off using an app to do our banking,” she said. “Companies need to provide humans to talk with. Automation and robots cannot handle questions that may not be pre-written.”
Like the situation with George. That afternoon during his lockout, we each stood in his hallway on our respective phones, frantically calling various numbers in search of help.
The digital keypad company representative petulantly told my friend that the records indicated he’d been emailed and texted codes.
Blinded by Technology
“But I can’t receive texts, and I’m locked out,” said George, indignant. “I’m not able to access my computer.”
To the millennial on the other end of the phone, the idea that one couldn’t access information on their phone was preposterous.
“Check your email on your phone,” he insisted, oblivious to the idea that someone couldn’t. “I also texted you a code.”
After an hour, a friendly building maintenance person showed up, extolling the virtues of the new system as if he were a salesperson.
“People just love these new digital locks,” he said, ignoring the addled state of the tenant before him. “You can give the code to friends. You don’t have to bother with a key!”
Looking at me, he added, “You can use the app to open the door for him, from wherever you are.”
“Can’t I just have a key?”
“He’s my friend, not my father,” I said, annoyed that this person didn’t understand how demoralizing it was for a person not to be able to open his own front door. “How would your grandmother deal with this system?”
Well, he shrugged, she probably couldn’t. Then, he called up a temporary code that allowed us to enter George’s unit. Inside, we logged onto his email, and retrieved the company-assigned digits that would now serve as his lock. They hadn’t even paid for the upgrade that allowed you to choose your own code.
How Will He Remember?
George panicked. How would he remember these random series of numbers, much less punch them in on a tiny keypad?
“Can’t I just have a key?” George asked, pointing to the old-fashioned keyhole above the keypad. “There’s no way I’ll remember that, much less be able to see those numbers.”
In the meantime, I rooted on the countertop for a pen, and began writing out cheat-sheets. Sticking a piece of paper in George’s wallet, I also made a record of it for myself.
“This is your new key,” I said, trying to feign optimism.
Landlord with a Heart
Later on, I, along with George’s daughter — a lawyer who lives in a different city — composed stern emails to management explaining the severity of having locked a tenant out of his apartment — and installing a system that was challenging for him to navigate.
The next morning, the friendly maintenance man appeared at the front door of George’s apartment — old-fashioned key in hand.
George was happy, and relieved, at this work-around that relieved him from digital jail.
Later that day, I ran into another neighbor, Nicole, who just turned 83.
“Did you hear we got new locks?” she said. “They’re amazing! I love not having to carry a key.”
Lisa Napoli covered the dawn of the World Wide Web for The New York Times, MSNBC and Marketplace on National Public Radio. She is the author of four books, most recently about the “founding mothers” of NPR.
BY JESSICA GRESKO, ASSOCIATED PRESS – 06/08/23 3:08 PM ET from The Hill
Thanks to Sylvia P.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled for the family of a nursing home resident with dementia that had sued over his care, declining to use the case to broadly limit the right to sue government workers.
The man’s family went to court alleging that he was given drugs to keep him easier to manage in violation of his rights. The justices had been asked to use his case to limit the ability of people to use a federal law to sue for civil rights violations. That outcome could have left tens of millions of people participating in federal programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, without an avenue to go to court to enforce their rights.
The Supreme Court has previously said that a section of federal law — “Section 1983” — broadly gives people the right to sue state and local governments when their employees violate rights created by any federal statute.
The court by a 7-2 vote reiterated that Thursday, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing that Section 1983 “can presumptively be used to enforce unambiguously conferred federal individual rights.” Both liberal and conservative justices joined her majority opinion while conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
The court had been asked to say that when Congress creates a federal spending program — giving states money to provide services such as Medicare and Medicaid — they shouldn’t face lawsuits from individuals under Section 1983. The court rejected that invitation.
The specific case the justices heard involves the interaction of Section 1983 and the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act, a 1987 law that outlines requirements for nursing homes that accept federal Medicare and Medicaid funds. The court was being asked to answer whether a person can use Section 1983 to go to court with claims their rights under the nursing home act are violated. The answer is yes, the court said.
The Biden administration had argued to the high court that Congress did not intend to allow Section 1983 lawsuits when it enacted the nursing home legislation.
The case in front of the court involved Gorgi Talevski, who was a resident of Valparaiso Care and Rehabilitation, a government nursing home in Indiana. His family said the nursing home found it difficult to care for Talevski, and so gave him powerful drugs to restrain him, then involuntarily transferred him to another facility. The facility says Talevski repeatedly acted violently and in a sexually aggressive manner and that drugs were prescribed by doctors.
Talevski’s family sued under Section 1983, saying his rights had been violated. A trial court dismissed the case, but a federal court of appeals said it could proceed. Talevski died in 2021.
The opinion was one of four the court issued Thursday, including a 5-4 ruling in favor of Black voters in Alabama in a congressional redistricting case. That case had been closely watched for its potential to weaken the landmark Voting Rights Act.
If you are attending the lecture series arranged by our Chaplain Helen McPeak about Living Well with Loss, I’d suggest you visit this NPR web site to get a head start for the June 14th workshop (not a lecture!) . It fits in well with her discussion about a variety of plans and actions we need to consider.
Also FYI, in October, we are planning an update focused on the medical aspects of choices, trying to define our goals of care and what medical interventions we might (or might not) want. Then if there’s interest, we can have individual or small group follow-up sessions for further discussion.
Posted inAdvance Directives|Comments Off on Life Kit – upcoming workshop on June 14th
Ed note: This essay by David Brooks raises all kinds of questions that also apply to us as “elite seniors.” He argues that college admissions should help right historical elitism by having economic class based preference for college admissions. Well, should we? Yes, there are economic advantages passed down to our children and grandchildren. Is this wrong? How can we level the playing field? How can more people have the advantages we have had and still do have? The problem of inequity is imbedded in our history, our culture, our economics and educational system. Improvements are needed, but we still need to reward hard work, planning, and scholastic achievement. What do you think of this essay?
Within days or weeks, the Supreme Court is going to render a decision on the future of affirmative action in higher ed. If things go as expected, conservatives will be cheering as these policies are struck down — and progressives will be wailing.
But maybe we can all take this moment to reimagine the college admissions process itself, which has morphed into one of the truly destructive institutions in American society.
The modern college admissions era was launched over half a century ago with the best of intentions — to turn finishing schools for the Protestant establishment into talent factories for all comers. But, in the end, the elite universities merely exchanged one privileged elite for another. Today, you don’t need bloodlines stretching back to the Mayflower to have a decent shot at getting into an elite school, but you do need to be born into a family with the resources to make lavish investments in your early education.Listen to “Matter of Opinion”Four Opinion writers discuss what’s going on with men in America.Opinion | Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia PolgreenWhat Does Healthy Masculinity Look Like?May 25, 2023
In 2017 research led by Raj Chetty found that students from families in the top 1 percent of earners were 77 times as likely to get admitted into the Ivy League as students from families making less than $30,000 a year. In that year, students from the top income quintile were 16 times as numerous at the University of North Carolina, a state school, as students from the bottom quintile.
We now have whole industries that take attendance at an elite school as a marker of whether they should hire you or not. So the hierarchies built by the admissions committees get replicated across society. America has become a nation in which the elite educated few marry each other, send their kids to the same exclusive schools, move to the same wealthy neighborhoods and pass down disproportionate economic and cultural power from generation to generation — the meritocratic Brahmin class.
And, as Michael Sandel of Harvard has argued, the meritocratic culture gives the “winners” the illusion that this sorting mechanism is righteous and inevitable and that they’ve earned everything they’ve got.
And then we sit around wondering why Trumpian populists revolt.
Worse, this system is built on a definition of “merit” that is utterly bonkers. In what sane world do we sort people — often for life — based on their ability to be teacher-pleasers from age 15 to 18?
In 2018, the organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote a powerful essay for The Times making the point that “academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.”
We could have chosen to sort people on the basis of creativity, generosity or resilience. We could have chosen to promote students who are passionate about one subject but lag in the other subjects (which is how real-life success works). But instead we created this academic pressure cooker that further disadvantages people from the wrong kind of families and leaves even the straight-A winners stressed, depressed and burned out.
For the past few decades, Richard D. Kahlenberg, the author of “The Remedy: Class, Race and Affirmative Action,” has been arguing that we should replace the race-based system of affirmative action with a class-based system.
His proposal, to give preference to applicants from economically disadvantaged families, would address a core inequality in society. As Kahlenberg wrote in The Economist in 2018, social science research “finds that today, being economically disadvantaged in America poses seven times as large an obstacle to high student achievement as does race.”
Furthermore, he continues, if you structure the programs well, you can lift up the poor and middle class while simultaneously redressing the iniquities that have historically been visited upon African Americans. Writing in Dissent this year, Kahlenberg, an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case seeking to overturn affirmative action, describes an exercise he did with the Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono. Based on data from Harvard and the University of North Carolina, they built an admissions model that would end racial preferences and preferences for the children of faculty members and alumni, but boost applicants from poor families and disadvantaged neighborhoods.
At Harvard, under this model, the share of African American, Hispanic and other underrepresented minority students would rise, and the share of first-generation students would more than triple.
The case for Kahlenberg’s proposal gets stronger every year. If the Supreme Court ditches racial preferences it becomes overwhelming.
Maybe this could be a moment when we finally step back and acknowledge that the elite meritocracy has spiraled out of control. It’s ridiculous that we have built a culture in which people make fine status distinctions among Princeton, Northwestern and Penn State as if they were 18th-century courtiers arguing over which aristocratic family had the grandest name.
It’s ridiculous that we’ve built a system that overvalues the sort of technocratic skills these universities cultivate and undervalues the social and moral skills that any healthy society should value more.
It’s sad that we’ve spent decades trying to build a more representative leadership class, but we’ve ended up with an educated elite that doesn’t know much about the rest of America and doesn’t seem notably more competent than the elites that preceded it.
If SCOTUS rips off the affirmative-action Band-Aid, maybe we can address the underlying wounds.
Posted inEconomics, Education|Comments Off on Let’s Smash the College Admissions Process
With the creation of a new affordable housing arm and a handful of other notable developments in 2022, it has been a big year for Transforming Age. But the senior living nonprofit is not done evolving.
Earlier this month, the organization added 10 new locations formerly managed by Essex Corp. and announced it’s opening a new second headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska.
The nonprofit in the process hired four senior living leaders from Essex: President and COO Frankie Pane, CFO and Partner Julie Bennett, Vice President and Chief Development Officer Camille Burke and Legal Counsel Scott Braasch.
The move was not only meant to help support Transforming Age’s growth beyond its nearly 70-community affordable housing and senior living portfolio, it also fits in with a desire to “do things a little differently” than the rest of the industry as it diversifies its services and looks to the future, according to CEO Torsten Hirche.
“It’s maybe not the most usual thing for a nonprofit to do, but we’re super excited about the capabilities they bring to us to supercharge growth,” Hirche said.
New HQ, new capabilities
The new second headquarters in Omaha will have a primary goal of serving Transforming Age’s five main “spheres”: housing, services, technology, partnerships, and philanthropy.
One immediate benefit is that the organization will gain a stronger presence and more oversight in the U.S. Midwest. The headquarters also will give the organization more ability to take on new management contracts and development projects.
Posted inAging Sites, Economics, Health, Philanthropy, Retirement|Comments Off on Transforming Age currently has around 2 million square feet of development underway across the organization, with a footprint in 22 states.
Ed note: One Medical Clinics have popped up all around Seattle, some catering to seniors. In July 2022, it was announced that Amazon, Inc. agreed to acquire One Medical for about $3.9 billion in an all-cash deal. Prior to the announcement, pharmacy chain CVS Health had also bid for the company. Amazon formally acquired One Medical on February 22, 2023. This continues a trend in corporate for-profit entities owning health care delivery systems. The company, of course, has a highly compensated executive team and is beholden to its stockholders as well as to the customers (patients) they serve. Two promotional posters have appeared in our mail room bulletin board. Time will tell as to whether Amazon can deliver health care. Caveat emptor!
Amazon’s relentless push to become a primary care provider reached a milestone recently when the e-commerce giant completed its acquisition of One Medical for $3.9 billion.
But as is the case with most activities involving retailers trying to transform health care, the story is just beginning. Now comes the more difficult work of assimilating the concierge medicine provider’s services into Amazon’s operations and building out plans to meet consumers’ needs across the care continuum.
How successful Amazon is at integrating One Medical — with its prior acquisitions in pharmacy, consumer and employee health, diagnostics and therapeutics, care coordination and remote monitoring, and enterprise health IT — will go a long way in determining how great an impact the company can have in care delivery.
5 Takeaways from the One Medical Purchase (from the American Hospital Association)
1 | Amazon is still playing catch-up.
The transition to becoming a provider will broaden Amazon’s considerable health care portfolio, but the company has a long way to go if it plans to catch retail primary care providers like CVS Health and Walgreens Boots Alliance.
Takeaway
One Medical gives Amazon access to more than 200 brick-and-mortar physicians’ offices with about 815,000 members, according to its latest financial statement. That’s a far cry from the more than 1,100 Minute Clinics and 900-plus HealthHUBs CVS Health now operates and the 680 VillageMD clinics co-located near Walgreens stores. Walmart, meanwhile, now operates 32 health centers in five states with 16 more locations expected to open this year and 28 more locations in 2024. Many analysts believe the retailer will rapidly scale its health clinics nationally as it gains more operational experience.
2 | The real deal: Building trust with consumers.
The game changer may be Amazon’s ability to attain and keep consumer trust and permission because it offers products and services that are relevant, valued and hyperconvenient, notes Jim Fields, a partner at Oliver Wyman, in a recent report.
Takeaway
Amazon is looking to redefine consumer expectations of care. If Amazon’s bet pays off, it could require providers to invest significantly and redesign their delivery models to keep up with higher consumer expectations created by the One Medical-Amazon model. For consumers, this allows Amazon to blend its primary care doctor relationship with health care information and apps that offer suggestions and recommendations for health activities, prescription delivery (through PillPack), healthy food (through Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh) and have it all connected to a patient’s primary care physician.
3 | Expanding a model for more convenient, affordable care.
One Medical already has thousands of employer relationships for its tech-enabled primary care platform.
Takeaway
This deal gives Amazon the ability to present a relevant story to employers who are looking to shape a different, more efficient and affordable health care journey for their employees.
4 | A springboard to tackle price transparency.
Some believe the One Medical acquisition will be a key piece of the holy grail Amazon has been after for years now — unraveling price transparency.
Takeaway
One Medical has a strong relationship with health systems, which could give Amazon a path to see the true costs of referrals, Christina Farr, an investor at the venture capital firm OMERS Ventures, said in a recent Modern Healthcare report. Amazon could combine One Medical data with data it has from prescriptions and expenditures to develop a fuller picture of patient care costs.
5 | The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) isn’t done investigating Amazon.
Despite not pursuing a court case to block the One Medical purchase, the FTC still could challenge the deal.
Takeaway
The FTC continues to investigate the deal over concerns about possible harm to competitors as well as to consumers that may result from Amazon’s control and use of sensitive consumer health information held by One Medical, FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar recently told CNN. FTC concerns include the potential for Amazon to assert its economic dominance and misuse patient information for other purposes such as targeted advertising or e-commerce.
Posted inBusiness, Health, Uncategorized|Comments Off on 5 Things to Know about Amazon’s Recent One Medical Acquisition
There was the time last winter when President Biden was awakened at 3 a.m. while on a trip to Asia and told that a missile had struck Poland, touching off a panic that Russia might have expanded the war in Ukraine to a NATO ally. Within hours in the middle of the night, Mr. Biden consulted his top advisers, called the president of Poland and the NATO secretary general, and gathered fellow world leaders to deal with the crisis.
And then there was the time a few weeks ago when the president was hosting children for Take Your Child to Work Day and became mixed up as he tried to list his grandchildren. “So, let me see. I got one in New York, two in Philadelphia — or is it three? No, three, because I got one granddaughter who is — I don’t know. You’re confusing me.” He also drew a blank when asked the last country he had visited and the name of a favorite movie.
The two Joe Bidens coexist in the same octogenarian president: Sharp and wise at critical moments, the product of decades of seasoning, able to rise to the occasion even in the dead of night to confront a dangerous world. Yet a little slower, a little softer, a little harder of hearing, a little more tentative in his walk, a little more prone to occasional lapses of memory in ways that feel familiar to anyone who has reached their ninth decade or has a parent who has.
The complicated reality of America’s oldest president was encapsulated on Thursday as Congress approved a bipartisan deal he brokered to avoid a national default. Even Speaker Kevin McCarthy testified that Mr. Biden had been “very professional, very smart, very tough” during their talks. Yet just before the voting got underway, Mr. Biden tripped over a sandbag at the Air Force Academy commencement, plunging to the ground. The video went viral, his supporters cringed and his critics pounced.
Anyone can trip at any age, but for an 80-year-old president, it inevitably raises unwelcome questions. If it were anyone else, the signs of age might not be notable. But Mr. Biden is the chief executive of the world’s most powerful nation and has just embarked on a campaign asking voters to keep him in the White House until age 86, drawing more attention to an issue that polls show troubles most Americans and is the source of enormous anxiety among party leaders.
When Dr. Frank Clark was in medical school studying to be a psychiatrist, he decided to write his first poem.
“All that chatter that is in my head, everything that I’ve been feeling, I can now just put it on paper and my pen can do the talking,” he said, recalling his thoughts at the time.
Back then, he was struggling with depression and had been relying on a number of things to keep it at bay, including running, therapy, medication and his faith.
“I had to find something else to fill the void,” he said.It turned out that poetry was the missing piece in his “wellness puzzle.”
“I saw an improvement in my mood,” said Dr. Clark, who now sees patients in Greer, S.C. “It gave me another outlet.”
The notion that art can improve mental well-being is something many people intuitively understand but can lose sight of — especially if we have become disconnected from the dancing, creative writing, drawing and singing we used to enjoy as children.
But there’s a “really robust body of evidence” that suggests that creating art, as well as activities like attending a concert or visiting a museum, can benefit mental health, said Jill Sonke, research director of the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine.
Here are a few simple ways to elevate your mood with the arts.
Between the fields where the flag is planted, there are 9+ miles of flower fields that go all the way to the ocean. The flowers are grown by seed companies. It’s a beautiful place, close to Vandenberg AFB.
Check out the dimensions of the flag. The Floral Flag is 740 feet long and 390 feet wide and maintains the proper Flag dimensions, as described in Executive Order #10834.
This Flag is 6.65 acres and is the first Floral Flag to be planted with 5 pointed Stars, comprised of White Larkspur. Each Star is 24 feet in diameter, each Stripe is 30 feet wide.
This Flag is estimated to contain more than 400,000 Larkspur plants with 4-5 flower stems each, for a total of more than 2 million flowers.
For our soldiers…. When you receive this, please stop for a moment and say a prayer for our servicemen.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on THE ONLY FLAG THAT DOESN’T FLY
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