All this boils down to is that there is nothing more expensive than first-world human labor. Without a doubt, nursing homes are increasingly run by sleazy profiteers, but the reason you can’t easily do better (i.e. find a high-quality nursing home) is because it’s simply expensive to employ enough people, who have sufficient skill and work ethic, to give the elderly care.
Yes, PE in healthcare is destroying the country in every imaginable way. The answer in this case is more complicated than get the for profit companies out of nursing homes, which is necessary but not sufficient to solve the problem. The scariest thought is that there may be no good solution.
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This is such a low effort response. I worked on the board of Directors for my daughter’s daycare in the US for 8 years. Literally none of this is true. We are a non-profit and our audits are public. Feel free actually look for the accounting for a child or elder care facility and you’ll find plenty of them. You’ll find them anything other than horrendous. They’re boring and exactly what you’d expect them to look like.
Even without margin as a factor because we’re a non-profit we are still charging as much as my mortgage for an infant.
This might sound obvious but operating a care facility is expensive. Labor is the driving cost, by far, and what makes it so is legally mandated caretaker ratios. 4 infants per. 6 Toddlers per. 10 children per. Imagine if you were splitting just an infant caretaker’s salary four ways, without benefits or other costs. Literally federal poverty wages would be $700/month for you. Without benefits. Without facilities. Without supplies. Just a person’s full time supervision. And that person would qualify for SNAP benefits.
While there are definitely orgs focused on investor returns they’re not the root cause. Care is just expensive.
Don’t get all righteous at the people who dedicate their lives to caring for people in need. Even those in charge of the facilities can be doing it for the right reasons. Look at the government. Why aren’t we supplementing these critical services? In my state Medicare and education are already the top tax expenditures by far. You might be able to shift some $ between priorities but the real answer appears to be that we’re just not funding the government sufficiently for it to do all things for all people. If we don’t take advantage of the scale of government then we’re going to be paying for this stuff out of pocket.
It’s just expensive no matter how you solve the problem.
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Productivity has soared since the 70s. Tax the fucking rich at 1950s levels. Then subsidize care work.
I feel like half these problems would be fixed if everyone woke up and unionized. Corpos would have no leverage left.
The Pinkerton agency has entered the chat.
If you’re curious, yes they’re still around, yes they’re still doing it, and they’re owned by Securitas now.
id be happy to see you stomp them flat like your country did last time.
I get what you’re saying, but even when the Pinkertons lost, the strike action was ultimately broken by force anyway. At one point the local sheriff was literally bombing coal miners.
I am very aware. Fuck them.
Yeah they’re the cucks who bullied some kid over magic cards.
They also bitched about being villains in Red Read Redemption 2.
i work in a nursing home, but im afraid i’ll not be able to afford to die in one.
I’d rather walk in front of a bus than die in a nursing home, frankly. Wasting away unable to care for myself seems uniquely miserable.
I’m not saying i want to end up in a home, just that i should be able to afford one if i end up needing and want to be in one.
My uncle decided on MAID yesterday, i support his choice.
edit - grammar
(Not so) fun fact : that is exactly what some end up doing ! Gf’s grandmother escaped her nursing home to walk in front of a train.
Reasonable “death with dignity” options would erase the need for such drastic measures but of course the Christian Nationalists hate that kind of thing.
What’s funny in a sad-not-haha way, is that labor for caretaking of small human beings is the enormous untenable driving cost here.
Parents can’t afford the rates, daycares can’t afford living wages doe the caretakers. This is an endeavor, like many, that the Hand of the Market™ is OBVIOUSLY unsuitable for solving.
The “funny” part: Parents would gladly do this job for free as they have for centuries and millennia. This problem was already solved, and wouldn’t be an issue if every member of the household wasn’t forced into full-time 40+ hour work plus hunting for side-hustles, and being taken away from their loved ones for most of their waking friggin lives, just to survive.
How many generations deep are we now? Where so many kids spend so long in daycare from infancy that they never even get to form a decent bond with their own parents? How healthy is that, for anybody, much less larger society?
“Parenting as a Service” is peak capitalistic hellscape…
“Parenting as a Service” is peak capitalistic hellscape…
JFC, I could see someone unironically marketing this.
I agree with you - if you need to pay someone a full time wage to go out and earn a full time wage, the sum will be nearly zero. The same issue applies for long term care facilities where a team of multiple specialized providers is needed to care for someone around the clock. The assumption that care should be cheap implies that care work is less valuable than whatever the worker themself does.
Much like mail delivery, daycare and elder care would be better as publicly funded services. They can’t necessarily turn a profit, but still need to exist for the betterment of society
“Parenting as a Service” is peak capitalistic hellscape…
bullshit
these are some strong opinions right there without much substance
i called my childcare guardians “comrade teacher” and i gladly pay half of my salary for a childcare in the “capitalist dream” now. neither has anything to do with the real reasons why we have childcare nor why it is expensive somewhere or free somewhere else.
childcare enables parents to do more with their life than just have kids and as such is good both for parents and for the society in general. it also enables children to access early childhood education and community that their parents wouldn’t be able to provide otherwise so - if done right - is also great for the kids.
but of course, as with everything with life, things can be messed up by the people. parents or teachers can screw up in many different ways or even the whole childcare might be organised for an entirely wrong reason… that doesn’t mean childcare is a bad idea in general.
Woah there, friend. Aren’t we being a little bit aggro here? I’m happy to hear your perspective.
I never meant to come off that childcare is bad as a concept! That was never the point.
What I am decrying is the requirement of families being coerced to put their children into a very expensive facility, because if everyone else in the house isn’t working a 5x40+ fulltime job, they can’t afford a reasonable quality of living. THAT is where it’s broken.
Childcare as an option is fantastic for all the reasons you mentioned. Childcare as “the market raises your children with underpaid and exhausted, overhelmed wageslaves unless you’re insanely privileged” is not cool.
I’m happy you’ve had a good experience though, and hope we can reach a solution where it’s done right for more folks.
well if childcare as an option is fantastic and all you are angry about is the childcare as an unaffordable necessity then we are totally in agreement…
the way you wrote your original comment didn’t entirely hit me that way though. it definitely gave me more of an impression that you consider childcare as bad (see the quote) and your solution to people struggling is traditional family values and housewives.
Sorry, no I don’t believe I conveyed myself in that way, updoots seem to agree.
I do think we’re in alignment here, but also I understand nuance is often lost over Internet posts so let me clarify my position. “Family values and housewives” as you put it being a great example:
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Women having the opportunity to leave the home of their own volition and be in a career the same as a man? Awesome. Progress.
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Women AND men alike, in a family unit, forced simultaneously into the career-style workforce or multiple garbage jobs because the family goes bust and destitute otherwise? Bullshit.
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Programs for kids to safely socialize and learn as a community? Fantastic!
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Overwhelmed daycares staffed by burned out underpaid care workers, costing half of everyone’s salary, because otherwise the only alternative is literally child abandonment, thanks to everybody needing to leave the home and devote a majority of their time to wage labor? Capitalistic nightmare.
That’s basically a systemic form of indentured servitude to pay ransom for one’s own children. It isn’t right.
Parents should be free to choose parenting their children over creating shareholder value without starving. Parenting is already a full time job, and outsourcing it entirely to someone else’s employees every “business day” sounds like a great way to wreck a society’s future adults.
Especially in the U.S when maternity leave is laughably short for many, and paternity leave is a fanciful myth from faraway lands, and those early years spent with one’s family are CRITICAL for a child’s early development.
So when I satirically said “parenting as a service” (mocking ‘software as a service’ / rent-seeking behavior), I wasn’t referring to “Watch our kids and enrich them a little occasionally.”
I literally meant “A paid service has to raise our children because we aren’t rich enough to spend much time with them besides breakfast and bedtime.”
That sounds pretty horrible to me.
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childcare enables parents to do more with their life than just have kids and as such is good both for parents and for the society in general. it also enables children to access early childhood education and community that their parents wouldn’t be able to provide otherwise so - if done right - is also great for the kids.
WAIT HOLD ON I GOTTA SHOW THIS TO MY WIFE (teaches kinder) she’s gonna love you
The irony is that this causes birth rates to plummet, which eliminates the future workforce for the very companies forcing childcare to be untenable. One of the major contradictions of capitalism is that it does not reproduce its own labor force. I guess the resolution is to replace human workers with AI.
On global level population is still growing. With globalization, companies couldnt care less if a worker is from US or Africa. ChatGPT’s training was supervised by kenia workers for laughable wages.
Society’s hyper-competitiveness to “get an edge” is ultimately self-cannibalizing.
This is something that drives me so mad, and it’s exactly why corporations need to be strictly regulated on a global scale.
If people are granted any voluntary dignity, someone out there is always willing to “undercut” their fellow workers to get an “edge” on the market or whatever and prove what a sweaty exploitable tryhard they can be, then it races to the bottom for all.
If a company wants to pay its workers a living wage, their competition will undercut them by stepping on their employees’ necks for an “advantage in the market.”
You’re right, it’s simply not a system that solves for human well-being, it solves solely for hoarding and growing large numbers of imaginary value.
no we just need to import workers from outside the environment.
well we have that situation in germany right now where supposedly daycare is good because it allows women to work more hours (full time instead of half time)
it’s … let me tell you, it’s a shitshow. i have come to understand that the internet is largely a propaganda apparatus. they install the thought in you that a certain way of seeing things is “normal”, because everybody sees it that way. in other words, the other bots or paid influencers (idk which one) that the algorithm then pushes sothat everybody sees it.
you got 1 crazy person saying things like “actually, we should all work more, i like it, it’s fun” and you know what, they can say that. anyways, that’s 1 person in 1000. then the algorithm pushes it on everybody’s front page sothat now everybody thinks “ah, that’s a normal thing to think”. and since most people follow group-think, that’s now society’s opinion.
internet exists to cause a shift in public opinion by astroturfing. the illusion that the thought comes from within society organically.
WHO guidelines say children should stay with mother until 3 to bond and go to childcare from 3 to get social skills. But germany only pays up for like 1 yr and even that only limited. Grandparents have to work until they are barely fit enough to help too.
Makes you wonder, with all those technical advances we have, why we work more and more having worse living conditions down the drain.
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My wife is starting her own home daycare Monday for many of the reasons you listed. Almost a decade at a YMCA run Montessori, ~18/hr.
And the poor kids! The caregivers are all burnt out by terrible management and shit pay, have no motivation to provide anything beyond the necessities, and God bless them, at least a few spend their own money on supplies to at least try and enrich the time the kids spend there.
I’m really proud of her, taking a huge step into somewhat unknown water. I know the kids she cares for are going to get so much more value from her, here in her space, on her terms, than they ever would have at the center.
My wife is starting her own home daycare Monday for many of the reasons you listed. Almost a decade at a YMCA run Montessori, ~18/hr.
good luck. the regulatory hurdles are not fun, but regulations are written in blood. they don’t go to the trouble of setting regs unless someone had been seriously harmed.
If you want to keep her employees (if she has any) happy, don’t push the limits of the caregiver:child ratios. I’m not sure what [the amount of money you want to have saved up so your business doesn’t fail] in early childhood education is, but a good rule of thumb is start with 2 years worth of expenses saved as most businesses take at least that long to break even. Restaurants, 5 years.
[BOILERPLATE CYA WARNING]
i did accounting for 25 years and virtually all of my clients were small businesses and their owners, so while this is arguably professional advice, it is not tailored to your specific situation. it is general advice and not intended for you to rely on. if you want advice tailored to you and your situation that is intended for you to rely on, hire an accounting consultant.
That sounds daunting but also incredibly noble of her. Prayers and well wishes to both you and your wife, especially in the early days of this endeavor!
I love hearing about when someone sees a need they can fill in their community and they’re passionate about solving it. That’s so awesome. :)
A job that requires wiping bums at any age should be very well paid.
There was a nurse in my province who killed eight nursing home residents at her job. She just enjoyed doing it. What a tragedy, to have someone use their power over you to kill you when you are most vulnerable.
(As far as we know)Women are a very small % of psycho(or-any-type?)killers. Like shabby mass (violent) slaughter attempts is absolutely a mostly-male thing
BUT
The tiny % of female psycho killers is mostly all elderly/disabled care, and when convicted 10s-100s of kills. And thats what an official thinks its easy to prove to a dead-beat-jury, so truth be told, some of those gals did 100s or 1000s!!!
So the rare “Venus-Libertina” of infrequent-occurence yet maximum-slaughter does indeed put men to shame
For the paycheck thing: the daycare takes the parent’s entire paycheck because daycare is so expensive because the working class hasn’t gotten a raise in almost 20 years. Providers need the second job because inflation is so high because people are getting what they voted for.
Because nursing homes are mostly ran by private assholes that only care about making money? Go on the rounds to interview them, the smoke and mirrors are real. It’s like all of healthcare.
nursing homes could literally drain the elderly of their blood and sell it for extra income and they wouldnt be that much worse morally.
My friend was the director of a daycare, and she’s leaving because she works 60 hour weeks, has no help from above, and her pay is literally canceled out by sending her kids to camp over the summer. And obviously they won’t pay her more. And she’s the head of the daycare. It’s insane.
It’s because private equity capitalists took over daycares, nursing homes, funeral services, and veterinary clinics. They’re leeches on even the most indispensable aspects of society.
Just based on the outrageous “strata” fees on “owned” lots for pre-fab/trailer parks (not the rental pad lots, totally different(same?) Story)
More per month just to get your (wife’s, ass) grass mowed than to maintain my ancient building…
Private Equity got anywhere you could move also
What, you think either of you matter? They don’t give a fuck about you.
it is to avoid paying RNs/NP, and MDs. its a cost cutting measure.
What’s not to understand? The owning class owns the facilities and sets both the prices and the wages, and they will do this in the way that maximally benefits themselves, i.e., maximizes profits. It’s a really, really basic feature of capitalism (yes, also whatever super duper special unicorn flavor of capitalism you think works better than “crony” capitalism).
It’s a rhetorical device I forgot the name of. If I say “I don’t understand X”, that will have one of two effects on most people: either they also don’t know, realise that and hopefully get curious, or they do and know the point I’m aiming for. If they offer that explanation, it creates a Socratic approach to making an argument: Framing it as an explanation of a question the rest of the audience is hopefully also curious about.
You explanation is the second part of the argument.
So, I know of the existence of this rhetorical device, but I’ve been around enough people who operate in a theoretical framework where this statement cannot be taken as anything other than genuine, namely that of capitalist realism. This has two implications:
- the original tweet could’ve been written with this mindset (which, I should add, is the dominant mindset, btw), and should be taken at face value
- many of the readers will have this mindset, and will not have the theoretical tools on their belt to appreciate it for the rhetorical device it is, much less take advantage of it and learn something (they might walk away with anything ranging from “huh that is weird” to “it’s those darned republicans/democrats”)
In either case, making an explanation (there’s more than one) explicit is useful, if only to open up space for people to disagree with the explanation. (In fact I’d be willing to bet that the person who wrote the tweet disagrees with my explanation, specifically the part involving flavors of capitalism. I bet they’re advocating for something like the nordic model.)
- the original tweet could’ve been written with this mindset (which, I should add, is the dominant mindset, btw), and should be taken at face value
- many of the readers will have this mindset, and will not have the theoretical tools on their belt to appreciate it for the rhetorical device it is, much less take advantage of it and learn something (they might walk away with anything ranging from “huh that is weird” to “it’s those darned republicans/democrats”)
Those are good points I didn’t consider.
On the first, I tend to lean towards assuming the best of people where possible, mostly because it helps stave off defeatism. That doesn’t make it likely, just less depressing.
On the second, I genuinely didn’t see that angle. Thanks for pointing it out. They don’t need to appreciate it as rhetorical device (and in fact, it may be more effective if they’re not conscious of it), but if it leads them to make up their own conclusions to reinforce existing assumptions, instead of being curious and open-minded, that would indeed miss the mark.
I guess to some degree, it’ll be a “shotgun” approach to hopefully get some people curious, even if you’ll never get everyone. I’m not sure a more direct statement of facts would have gotten the others either.
In either case, making an explanation (there’s more than one) explicit is useful, if only to open up space for people to disagree with the explanation.
That’s the conclusion I was aiming for, yes. In thr context of the device, the question is a setup and framing for the answer. By “prompting” for it, it seems less like preaching (which may turn people away) and more like a “genuine” and natural conversation. Interviews are occasionally framed in a similar way, but with an open question on the internet, it may seem less “staged” if that makes sense?
(I’m not sure those are the best words to describe it, but I can’t put my finger on the nuances so I’ll just call it a vocab/language barrier)
In fact I’d be willing to bet that the person who wrote the tweet disagrees with my explanation, specifically the part involving flavors of capitalism. I bet they’re advocating for something like the nordic model.
The Nordic model tends to be idealised to some degree. I understand how it would look like a significant improvement over some other forms, particularly the US, and I’ll freely admit I’m also subject to bias, but it can’t cure all the problems baked into the system.
From the glimpses I’ve caught, it doesn’t seem to solve all social issues either. The specific example I’ve heard of is racism, but I didn’t do a thorough investigation about other effects. Then again, I’m not sure I have a good solution on hand to effectively shift cultural stances like that either.
for some reason, people working in healthcare don’t stand up for their rights, and rather accept a very shitty pay. it’s … because they do it “for the people who need help” without looking at economic issues (especially their own) at all.
they are being exploited. moreover, since they don’t stand up for themselves, we should stand up for their rights instead. we should be protesting sothat they get better treatment. because otherwise they burn out and won’t do the job anymore in 5 years. which would be bad for all of us.
In our society, if you don’t have a job, you die. A shit job is better than no job and standing up for your rights could lose you your job. The solution is unionizing, but unionizing is very difficult and dangerous because 1. Unions have been heavily propaganized against and 2. Bosses will do a bunch of illegal stuff to prevent unions.
Unions are becoming more popular as conditions worsen, but the capitalist owners are fighting harder than ever to prevent the growing unionization.
If you can afford it, it will be exactly that expensive.
When government of my country passed a bill that gives monthly payouts of X per child to parents who both work and have at least one child, all daycare centers in the country raised their prices by X next month citing inflation.
Supply and demand do not set the price, when people have no choice but to buy anyway.
It’s still super scummy for them to raise the prices after a bill passed to help struggling families went into effect
Profit makes right, no?
Funny thing: countries where govt cap what can be billed and a min bar on the quality of service and salaries (tied to inflation) fare better than countries where a sum of money is paid out or a sliding scale based on family income is used
