Every week, Angela Espinoza Pierson looked at her recycling bin — filled with detergent jugs, shampoo bottles and clamshell containers that once held strawberries — with mixed feelings. Sure, it was a lot of plastic. But it was going to be recycled.
Or so she thought. Then her husband sent her some articles revealing that less than 6 percent of the country’s plastic gets recycled, and that even recycled plastic can only be reused once or twice. Ms. Espinoza Pierson, who lives in Buda, Texas, was shocked. “All the plastic that we thought was getting recycled, it’s not really, and it’s just going to sit there,” she said.
Determined to cut back on her plastic consumption, Ms. Espinoza Pierson got a starter kit from a company selling refillable household cleaners. In it were tablets containing concentrated hand soap as well as multi-surface, glass and bathroom cleaners — and four empty containers. She filled each one with tap water, then dropped in a tablet and watched it dissolve. If she is happy with the cleaners, she will order more tablets but reuse the containers. No new plastic required.
Given plastic’s detrimental effects on the environment, nearly three-quarters of Americans say they are trying to reduce their reliance on single-use plastic, according to Pew Research Center. Since plastic is everywhere and avoiding it altogether is extraordinarily difficult, some, like Ms. Espinoza Pierson, have revived a once-customary practice: refilling containers rather than disposing of them. If just 10 to 20 percent of plastic packaging were reused, a report from the World Economic Forum estimates, the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean could be cut in half.
“The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.” T.S. Elliot
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“At age 20, we worry about what others think of us; at age 40, we don’t care what they think of us; …at age 60, we discover they haven’t been thinking of us at all.” Ann Landers
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“The important thing to remember is that I’m probably going to forget.” Unknown
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“It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.” ~ Andy Rooney
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“The older I get, the better I used to be.” Lee Trevino
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I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a lot more as they get older, and then it dawned on me — they’re cramming for their final exam.” George Carlin
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“Grandchildren don’t make a man feel old, it’s the knowledge that he’s married to a grandmother that does.” J. Norman Collie
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“To get back to my youth I would do anything in the world, except exercise, get up early, or be respectable.” Oscar Wilde\
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“The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.” Will Rogers
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“We must recognize that, as we grow older, we become like old cars – more and more repairs and replacements are necessary.” C.S. Lewis
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I’m so old that my blood type is discontinued.” Bill Dana
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“The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened. Mark Twain
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“Old people shouldn’t eat healthy foods. They need all the preservatives they can get.” Robert Orben
Published March 9, 2023 Updated March 13, 2023 in the NYT
This article is adapted from Matthew Desmond’s book “Poverty, by America.” It is being published on March 21 by Crown.
In the past 50 years, scientists have mapped the entire human genome and eradicated smallpox. Here in the United States, infant-mortality rates and deaths from heart disease have fallen by roughly 70 percent, and the average American has gained almost a decade of life. Climate change was recognized as an existential threat. The internet was invented.
On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis. As estimated by the federal government’s poverty line, 12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent. To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills. The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years.
What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people. Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.
The American poor have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most.
Any fair assessment of poverty must confront the breathtaking march of material progress. But the fact that standards of living have risen across the board doesn’t mean that poverty itself has fallen. Forty years ago, only the rich could afford cellphones. But cellphones have become more affordable over the past few decades, and now most Americans have one, including many poor people. This has led observers like Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, to assert that “access to certain consumer goods,” like TVs, microwave ovens and cellphones, shows that “the poor are not quite so poor after all.”
No, it doesn’t. You can’t eat a cellphone. A cellphone doesn’t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care. In fact, as things like cellphones have become cheaper, the cost of the most necessary of life’s necessities, like health care and rent, has increased. From 2000 to 2022 in the average American city, the cost of fuel and utilities increased by 115 percent. The American poor, living as they do in the center of global capitalism, have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. As Michael Harrington put it 60 years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed or doctored.”
Why, then, when it comes to poverty reduction, have we had 50 years of nothing? When I first started looking into this depressing state of affairs, I assumed America’s efforts to reduce poverty had stalled because we stopped trying to solve the problem. I bought into the idea, popular among progressives, that the election of President Ronald Reagan (as well as that of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom) marked the ascendancy of market fundamentalism, or “neoliberalism,” a time when governments cut aid to the poor, lowered taxes and slashed regulations. If American poverty persisted, I thought, it was because we had reduced our spending on the poor. But I was wrong.
In July, Jennifer O’Brien got the phone call that adult children dread. Her 84-year-old father, who insisted on living alone in rural New Mexico, had broken his hip. The neighbor who found him on the floor after a fall had called an ambulance.
Ms. O’Brien is a health care administrator and consultant in Little Rock, Ark., and the widow of a palliative care doctor; she knew more than family members typically do about what lay ahead.
James O’Brien, a retired entrepreneur, was in poor health, with heart failure and advanced lung disease after decades of smoking. Because of a spinal injury, he needed a walker. He was so short of breath that, except for quick breaks during meals, he relied on a biPAP, a ventilator that required a tightfitting face mask.
He had standing do-not-resuscitate and do-not-intubate orders, Ms. O’Brien said. They had discussed his strong belief that “if his heart stopped, he would take that to mean that it was his time.”
Listening in on the phone while a hospital palliative care nurse-practitioner talked to her father about his options, Ms. O’Brien provided a blunt translation to an always blunt man: “Dad, your heart and lungs are done.”
The next day, he declined surgery to repair his hip. A startled anesthesiologist and an orthopedist called his daughter, apparently expecting her to talk her father into agreeing to the operation. She didn’t try.
“He was dying,” she said in an interview. “He’d either die comfortably or, with a big surgical incision, he’d die uncomfortably. Or die of something more complicated — potential infections, bowel obstructions, so many things that can happen.” Mortality rates after hip fractures, though improving, remain high.
Her father, who wasn’t cognitively impaired, had decided that surgery was “silly” and unnecessary. She supported his decision and contacted a local hospice.
Families often have to run interference in such scenarios, and a new study in JAMA Network Open helps explain why. The authors, most of them at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, analyzed five years of data from a cancer registry, nursing home assessments and Medicare claims to look at “aggressive end-of-life care” among 146,000 older patients with metastatic cancer.
Rain was pouring down outside O’Connor’s Irish Pub….
There standing in front of a big puddle outside the pub was an old Irishman, drenched, holding a stick, with a piece of string dangling in the water.
A passer-by stopped and asked him, “What are you doing?
“Fishing”, replied the old man.
Feeling sorry for the old man, the gent says, “Come in out of the rain and have a drink with me.”
In the warm ambiance of the pub, as they sip their whiskies, the gentleman, being a bit of a superior smart ass, cannot resist asking, “So how many have you caught today?”
“You’re the 8th”, replied the old man…
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on How many have you caught today?
Hello readers! The UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, in partnership with the UW Memory and Brain Wellness Center, is pleased to bring you the Spring 2023 edition of Dimensions!
In this issue:
The Memory Hub: One Year In!
Sleep and Dementia Risk
Research Highlights: ADRC Discoveries Made Possible By You
Finding Beauty in Unlikely Places: The Art of a Neuropathologist
The Power of Connection in Dementia Care
Posted inDementia|Comments Off on Quarterly edition of the UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center
Ed note: It’s disheartening that there is still controversy about wearing masks. One camp feels that “it’s time to live with COVID and get on with life without masks.” Another group feels that “it’s no big deal to wear a mask and I can still get on with life.” In our independent living areas, prior to the recent increase in COVID, most residents were wearing masks, yet only a few staff were. I asked one waiter in the dining room why he was wearing a mask and others weren’t. He replied, “Well, I like to think I’m protecting residents who might be vulnerable to infection.” Currently, given the uptick in cases, the staff now is required to wear masks. I hope there is less of a disconnect in the future. If masks are recommended, shouldn’t management set the example?
The debate over masks’ effectiveness in fighting the spread of the coronavirus intensified recently when a respected scientific nonprofit said its review of studies assessing measures to impede the spread of viral illnesses found it was “uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses.”
Now the organization, Cochrane, says that the way it summarized the review was unclear and imprecise, and that the way some people interpreted it was wrong.
“Many commentators have claimed that a recently updated Cochrane review shows that ‘masks don’t work,’ which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Karla Soares-Weiser, the editor in chief of the Cochrane Library, said in a statement.
“The review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses,” Soares-Weiser said, adding, “Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask wearing itself reduces people’s risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses.”
She said that “this wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize,” and that Cochrane would revise the summary.
Soares-Weiser also said, though, that one of the lead authors of the review even more seriously misinterpreted its finding on masks by saying in an interview that it proved “there is just no evidence that they make any difference.” In fact, Soares-Weiser said, “that statement is not an accurate representation of what the review found.”
Cochrane reviews are often referred to as gold standard evidence in medicine because they aggregate results from many randomized trials to reach an overall conclusion — a great method for evaluating drugs, for example, which often are subjected to rigorous but small trials. Combining their results can lead to more confident conclusions.
Masks and mask mandates have been a hot controversy during the pandemic. The flawed summary — and further misinterpretation of it — set off a debate between those who said the study showed there was no basis for relying on masks or mask mandates and those who said it did nothing to diminish the need for them.
Michael D. Brown, a doctor and academic who serves on the Cochrane editorial board and made the final decision on the review, told me the review couldn’t arrive at a firm conclusion because there weren’t enough high-quality randomized trials with high rates of mask adherence.
Credit…Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times
While the review assessed 78 studies, only 10 of those focused on what happens when people wear masks versus when they don’t, and a further five looked at how effective different types of masks were at blocking transmission, usually for health care workers. The remainder involved other measures aimed at lowering transmission, like hand washing or disinfection, while a few studies also considered masks in combination with other measures. Of those 10 studies that looked at masking, the two done since the start of the Covid pandemic both found that masks helped.
A hydrogen-powered commuter airplane just made a historic, record-setting flight Last week in Washington state, a 40-person airplane powered by hydrogen fuel successfully made a historic flight. The plane had a traditional jet engine on its left side and an electric motor completely powered by hydrogen on its right. After takeoff, the Universal Hydrogen airplane essentially turned off the gas engine and relied almost entirely on the hydrogen-powered engine. It flew for 15 minutes and became the largest plane ever “to cruise principally on hydrogen.” It’s just one carbon-free travel innovation scientists are working on to help the aviation industry reach its emission-reduction goals. Whereas traditional jet fuel releases emissions and particulate pollution, this plane’s hydrogen system gives off only water vapor and heat. What’s the nuance? Some critics say hydrogen fuel won’t be a magic solution (there rarely are!) to getting the aviation industry to lower its emissions enough to make a difference in fighting climate change. Additionally, it requires a lot of storage space on board the plane, which would significantly reduce the number of seats on the plane, especially for longer flights. Still, transitioning away from fossil fuels is non-negotiable, so we’re glad to see some progress and innovation being made in the airline industry. → Read more
Good Partner
Get equal college sports coverage If you’re a sports fan, it’s time you have free women’s and men’s sports coverage in your inbox. The GIST’s college sports newsletter sends regional coverage to your inbox 3 times a week, full of game results, rivalry updates, athlete interviews, and more. Score! → Sign up for free!
We Should All Be FeministsBy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie This personal, eloquently-argued essay was adapted from the much-admired TEDx talk of the same name — and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century. Why we’re reading: We love a good Ted Talk, but sometimes the shorter format leaves us wanting more! In audiobook format, this book is a 45-minute lesson — so still short and digestible, but expands on the author’s brilliant talk. → Get the book (it’s under $10!) → Get the audiobook
Here’s a link that will get you to the PIONEERS IN AGING series. The presentations are on Zoom but you will need to register separately for each talk, on Mondays at noon.
April 24, Maria Kliavkoff, “Creating Compassionate Grief Communities”
Most of us have never been taught what to do with grief or how to mourn our losses. In today’s talk based on her book, Healthy Mourning, Happy Loving, Maria will shine a light on a topic that has remained buried for too long, sharing clarity in the chaos and hope for the grief journey.
May 1, Dori Gillam, “What’s Age Got to Do with It?”
Dori Gillam takes a lighter look at aging while showing us how ingrained ageism is in our society through birthday cards and advertising. After all, age is the only identity group of which we are all always a member, so let’s start being positive and proud of every age!
May 8, Diane Gillespie, “There’s Nothing Like a Good Night’s Sleep”
Author Diane Gillespie will discuss sleeping challenges and describe inexpensive, non-pharmacological sleeping strategies. Her book Stories for Getting Back to Sleep contains 17 stories to help you get to sleep. (Five of her stories are widely used on sleepiest.com.) She also provides a resource sheet for other cognitive behavior strategies for increasing natural sleep.
May 15, Dr. Jim deMaine, “Our Lives Our Choices”
Dr. Jim deMaine joins us to discuss his memoir Facing Death: Finding Dignity, Hope, and Healing at the End. Reaching beyond the traditional scope of a physician, Dr. DeMaine explores the role of spirituality, conflicts between doctors and families, cultural traditions, and more. He invites us to a wise and large-hearted conversation with advice pointing the way toward a grace-filled transition out of life.
Sponsored by the KCLS Foundation in partnership with Aging Wisdom, the Northwest Center for Creative Aging and ERA Living.
Ed note: We’re fortunate to have Dr. Peters-Mathews return to Skyline once again. This time he’ll be talking about the common problem of insomnia. He’s one of the few sleep specialists who has an active interest in this subject. He’ll give many ideas to help us all improve the quality of our sleep–hence improvement in our physical and mental health.
Brandon R. Peters, M.D., FAASM, is a double board-certified neurologist and sleep medicine specialist and fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine who currently practices at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle. He is a leading voice in sleep medicine who works at the cutting edge of medicine and technology to advance the field.
After receiving his undergraduate degree from Seattle Pacific University in biology and English, he studied medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford University in England. Interest in sleep began when he worked as a polysomnographic technician before attending medical school at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. Having been trained as a neurologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he completed his sleep fellowship at Stanford University’s School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, Calif., viewed internationally as the world’s leading training program for sleep disorders medicine. Unique in his qualifications is that Dr. Peters-Mathews was additionally trained at Stanford as a practitioner of cognitive behavioral therapy of insomnia (CBTI) and has served academic appointments as a consulting assistant professor, clinical affiliate, and adjunct lecturer in the department.
He is the author of Sleep Through Insomnia. He is the creator of Insomnia Solved, a self-guided online cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI) program. He has written more than 1000 articles on sleep over the past decade, presently hosted at Verywell.com and read by millions of people each year. His published research includes study of the sleep habits of university students, circadian rhythm disorders, abnormal sleep behaviors called parasomnias, comorbid insomnia and sleep apnea, transgender health, and sleep ethics. He lectures extensively, frequently appears in media, and works as a scientific advisor and business consultant for sleep-related industries.
Washington ecologists and farmers are scrambling to slow the avian flu — and get cartons back on grocery shelves.
While people search for fresh chicken eggs for their frittatas and avocado toast, Washington farmers and egg suppliers say shortages are going to continue until avian bird flu is eradicated. And according to one Seattle environmental microbiologist, the timeline for that remains unknown.
Eggs have almost always been an easily available and relatively inexpensive staple, but the egg shortage that began last year with the latest sweep of avian flu has made them increasingly expensive and difficult to find. According to the Consumer Price Index, nationwide egg prices have gone up 60% in one year.
“I’ve been to Trader Joe’s and Target near my apartment frequently during the past month, but I never saw a box of eggs in both of the places. Eventually, I found two dozen eggs in H Mart and spent $26 in getting them. That’s crazy,” said Lisa Li, a shopper at H Mart, one of Seattle’s Korean grocery stores.
As with other rising food costs, the high price of eggs results from shortages. Avian flu has been the major reason, because so many birds have been affected and killed. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that over 58 million birds have been affected in 47 states. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife reported 151 cases of avian flu in Washington in December 2022.
To control the potential spread of avian flu here, the Washington State Department of Agriculture has established policies for quarantine and the elimination of infected flocks. Farmers have been forced to destroy entire flocks of chickens if even a single bird tests positive.
An empty shelf in the University District Trader Joe’s. (Sophia Sun for Crosscut)
An empty shelf in the University District Trader Joe’s. (Sophia Sun for Crosscut)
“Many farmers spent years building up their flock,” said Kevin Scott-Vandenberge, the owner of Portage Bay Grange, a small chicken farm in Seattle. “Now bird flu has become their most sensitive topic. Once their chickens were infected with the virus brought by wild birds, they lost everything they had.” According to Vanderberge, wild pigeons are one of the most persistent avian flu threats.
John Scott Meschke, an environmental microbiologist and the associate chair of the UW Department of Environmental Health Sciences, sees avian flu through an ecology lens.
“Climate change has altered the flight paths of many bird species,” Meschke said. “As a result, the species of birds that come to Seattle have become unpredictable, and these exotic birds bring more potential viruses with them.” A report by the National Audubon Society found that over the past 40 years, more than 60% of North American bird species have shifted their ranges northward, by an average of 35 miles.
Seattle grocery stores have managed the current egg shortage through their long-term collaborations with food distributors who work with a wide range of suppliers and have the resources to quickly identify alternative supply sources when shortages occur. A University District neighborhood grocery store, District Market, is one example of how this can work.
“We haven’t predicted this crisis, but our routine of forecasting the egg demands and pre-ordering helps us maintain our supplies,” said warehouse lead Nihad Delic. While stores like Fred Meyer and Whole Foods in Seattle have limited egg purchases to one or two cartons per person, District Market’s egg display has never been empty and the price has not gone above $2.99 a dozen.
“As farmers kill birds carrying the virus and businesses raise the price of eggs, there is too much focus on how to minimize their harm from avian bird flu when the results have already been produced,” Meschke said. “People should put more attention on how to control avian bird flu.”
While the U.S. Department of Agriculture is working on monitoring avian flu, including developing guidelines for controlling outbreaks in commercial poultry operations, these efforts cannot control this illness in wild bird populations and among birds that do not appear to be sick.
“There is still a long way to go to effectively control bird flu,” said Meschke. “More people should be involved in this project.”
The twice-yearly ritual has roots in cost-cutting strategies of the late 19th century. A bill to make daylight saving time permanent has re-emerged in Congress.
Benjamin Franklin is often credited as the first to suggest daylight saving time after realizing he was wasting his mornings by staying in bed.Credit…Leon Neal/Getty Images
Hello. You may be here to learn when is daylight saving time, or what is the time that we’re saving, or why does daylight saving time even exist.
Hopefully, this will answer those questions, and maybe a few more that hadn’t crossed your mind, like what do the railroad companies of the 19th century have to do with it and whether golf course owners have an interest in your sleep habits.
Here goes.
When is it?
Unlike other, easier-to-remember federal events, like the Fourth of July, in the United States the clock change is tied to a roving day: Since 2007, it has taken place on the second Sunday of March, when clocks spring forward an hour, and the first Sunday of November, when they go back. (In 2023, those dates are March 12 and Nov. 5. The clocks spring forward again on March 10, 2024.)
In Britain, France and Germany, the clocks change on the last Sunday in March, and the last Sunday in October. (In 2023, those dates are March 26 and Oct. 29. The clocks spring forward again in these countries on March 31, 2024.)
American lawmakers in 1966, writing in the Uniform Time Act, decided that the right time of day for this shift was “2 o’clock antemeridian,” better known as 2 a.m.
What is it?
To farmers, daylight saving time is a disruptive schedule foisted on them by the federal government; a popular myth even blamed them for its existence. To some parents, it’s a nuisance that can throw bedtime into chaos. To the people who run golf courses, gas stations and many retail businesses, it’s great.
“When it’s dark or there are limited hours after work, people tend to go straight home and stay there,” said Jeff Lenard, a spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores, an industry group. “When it’s lighter, they are more likely to go out and do something, whether it’s in the neighborhood, a local park or some other experience. And that behavior shift also drives sales, whether at a favorite restaurant or the local convenience store.”
OK, if it wasn’t farmers, whose idea was this?
The idea is to move an hour of sunlight from the early morning to the evening, so that people can make more use of daylight. Benjamin Franklin is often credited as the first to suggest it in the 18th century, after he realized he was wasting his Parisian mornings by staying in bed. He proposed that the French fire cannons at sunrise to wake people up and reduce candle consumption at night.
Over the next 100 years, the Industrial Revolution laid the groundwork for his idea to enter government policy. For much of the 1800s, time was set according to the sun and the people running the clocks in every town and city, creating scores of conflicting, locally established “sun times.” It could be noon in New York, 12:05 in Philadelphia and 12:15 in Boston.
This caused problems for railway companies trying to deliver passengers and freight on time, as nobody agreed whose time it was. In the 1840s, British railroads adopted standard times to reduce confusion. American counterparts soon followed.
“There was the threat of federal intervention in all of this, so the railroads decided they were going to police themselves,” said Carlene Stephens, a curator at the National Museum of American History. Scientists were also urging a standardized system for marking time, she said.
One more action to go, and we need your help! The hearing for SB 5179, Protecting Access to Medical Aid-in-Dying, in the House Health Care & Wellness Committee is Monday, March 6, at 8 a.m. PT. Here’s the action we need to take:Register Your Position on SB 5179 Click the link below to register your position as ‘Pro’ by Monday, March 6, at 7 a.m. Required sections only are needed to complete registration. REGISTER HERE Please share with your friends! Let’s get this bill passed! Tune in to Watch the Hearing! Click the link below to watch the hearing live at 8 a.m. Watch the HearingClick Here to Learn More About SB 5179 End of Life Washington 9311 SE 36th St, Suite 110 | Mercer Island, WA 98040 206.256.1636 | info@endoflifewa.org
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One more action to go, and we need your help! The hearing for SB 5179, Protecting Access to Medical Aid-in-Dying, in the House Health Care & Wellness Committee is Monday, March 6, at 8 a.m. PT. Here’s the action we need to take: Register Your Position on SB 5179 Click the link below to register your position as ‘Pro’ by Monday, March 6, at 7 a.m. Required sections only are needed to complete registration. 
