Time to prepare is very important because we have crap labor laws. It can be very hard for people to get time off work and missing a day can be very painful. For folks living paycheck to paycheck, missing a day of pay means missing a rent payment or not being able to afford food. In a lot of jobs, time off is very limited, even for illness, and is highly likely to be unpaid.

The robber barons have done an extremely good job at nailing our bootstraps in the pits of Tartarus through debt and indenture.

Tim signed the bill that guaranteed free breakfast and lunch for every K-12 student in Minnesota public schools. No needs-testing, no “lunch debt”…just free healthy food for children.

It was using secretions from cowpox lesions as protection from smallpox. Cowpox is a similar, but much less dangerous pathogen, so it conferred some cross-immunity without risking actual smallpox infection.

I worked in a nursing home/assisted living facility for a little while for minimum wage. I quit when I found out that they were expanding the memory care unit without increasing staffing requirements. Most of my 8 hour shifts were by myself caring for 9 adults with severe dementia that required help with everything…and they were talking about increasing that to 13 residents. I left because I did not want to be responsible for one of them falling and getting hurt while I’m stuck trying to clean up another one that forgot how to use a toilet about 10 years ago.

There is no proposed solution. The proposed solution is for the poor people to just die already.

There are many healthcare facilities here in America that would pay minimum wage if they could get away with it (and many of them do). Hospital administrators and managers hate the word “union” with a fiery passion and will fight tooth and nail to prevent their workers from forming or joining unions.

And this is part of the problem with the reduction in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. The community hospitals and clinics are already strapped for cash to pay their workers well enough, and if the majority of their patients are on government-funded insurance, then the cuts to that insurance will mean that the hospitals and clinics (and thereby the workers) get paid even less than before.

It’s like that in some other countries as well. In the UK, the NHS funding has been whittled away to the point that people with the means to do so are turning to private healthcare because of the wait times and the physicians are going on strike because of the poor pay and working conditions.

Healthcare around the world is a house of cards right now, and we really didn’t do anything to reinforce it in a meaningful way during/after the pandemic. The next pandemic is going to be quite bad.

Given that my background includes working as an ER tech, I am planning on writing some pieces about EMTALA and its implications. Everything you brought up is spot on (if sometimes a little understated) in my experience.

I think the adults in the room at Tesla saw it coming which is why they came with a contract that forbids the sale of the swasticars for a period of time after the initial purchase.

There are a variety of jobs available, and I’ve seen some workers with physical disabilities or older workers that aren’t very strong working things like the register or the administrative things like the return counter. For the most part, everything arrives on pallets that are moved around with forklifts anyways. Unless you’re in the butcher, baker, or display departments, there probably isn’t that much physical labor involved.

What are the qualification requirements besides paying the membership fee?