When Sheltering Possesions Trumps Sheltering People

With roughly 2.311 billion square feet of rent-able space for things, junk, stuff, possessions, etc., in the United States--a $38 billion industry!--America is a demonstrably materialistic society and becoming more materialistic every single day. It's  to the point where things, junk, stuff, possessions matter more than human beings....far more than people, it seems, considering the increasing number of homeless people across America,  the wealthiest nation on earth! 

“...the United States boasts more than 50,000 facilities and roughly 2.311 billion square feet of rentable space. In other words, the volume of self-storage units in the country could fill the Hoover Dam with old clothing, skis, and keepsakes more than 26 times.”

This "need" for storage doesn't stem from frugal "depression babies" who feel the need to save everything just in case, because  the square footage of American homes has essentially doubled since the children of the Depression era started buying houses. No, the need for storage has increased right along with the  cache in our homes, which implies that, for the most part, things, junk, stuff, possessions have taken on an importance that just isn't there.  Not to say that  there are not legitimate reasons to rent storage for belongings: moving; changing circumstances; incarceration; future business endeavors, and ironically, homelessness ...but, certainly not  $38 billion worth! 

Take Orange County, California, one of the wealthiest counties in the United States.  It is home to four of the industry’s top 20 storage firms, in addition to the California Self Storage Association, the industry trade group, which is based in Irvine. Ironically, with its immense capacity to house junk, its capacity to house people is not so great. The 2017 federally mandated snapshot, taken every two years in Orange County, recorded 4,792 homeless people, more than half living without shelter. That's an 8% increase since 2015 because as one homeless man, Patrick Hogan, in Orange County said after losing his job after the 2008 financial crash ten years ago, "$10 an hour jobs doesn't cut it" in one of the most expensive corners of the nation.

“My experience has taught me one thing, the most discriminated group of people, at least in America, are the poor." -- Patrick Hogan

Today, Orange County is making headlines as it  faces bitter backlash over homeless relocation plans  as it is now under federal pressure to address what homeless advocates in court filings have called a humanitarian crisis.  According to the Los Angeles Times, affluent Orange County "faces special challenges because it has a relatively sparse infrastructure of services and support for homeless people." Of course, Ocean County is not unique. There is a relatively sparse infrastructure of services and support for homeless people all over America.

“A lot of people in America don't realize they might be two checks, three checks, four checks away from being homeless," -- Thomas Butler Jr., who stays in a carefully organized tent near a freeway ramp in downtown Los Angeles.

And you can't trust the official homeless rate in America.  To be sure, the reported rate is far lower than the actuality. The point-in-time (PIT) homeless counts often occur on a single night in January and are thus subject to significant sampling variability.  The accuracy of the count itself depends on   the number of volunteers, the weather, the count methodologies, and countless other variables that contribute to its inaccuracy.    In other words, the homeless population is hugely under-represented.

 For instance, Compass Family Services in San Francisco gathered their own data and discovered more than 35 times the number cited in the city’s report. 

“After a count of people on the streets and in shelters, conducted one night in January, and a follow-up survey, the city report found just nine families, or a total of 26 individuals in families who are homeless. Moreover, 87 percent of them live in some sort of shelter.

But between January and May, Compass recorded 319 homeless families — more than 35 times the number cited in the city’s report. And even that, Keller suggested, might be low.

According to a new study. the number of people living on the streets in San Diego County may be 50 percent higher than thought.

The bottom line is don't count on the PIT for accurate statistics on the homeless population, as it always under-counts, under-represents, and/or underestimates by a significant percentage.  The reason is, of course, obvious: the less homeless they count, the less money and resources they have to fork out.   

Links:

Self-storage: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38 billion industry

Self-storage business owners on alert for people living in units

Living in a Storage Unit: Alexander Ruggie’s Story

Self-storage industry keeps on keeping

Orange County At A Loss Over What To Do With People It Evicted From Homeless Encampment

Protests Push O.C. to Kill Its First Real Plan to Help the Homeless

America's Homeless Population Rises for First Time in Years

Dynamics of Homelessness in Urban America

Read more...

It Makes Perfect Sense.

I've read about, posted about, watched about, listened about big brother, big data, big tech, big "you-name-it", knowing full well that every keystroke I've every keyed; every website I've ever visited; every search I've ever searched; every Youtube I've ever watched; every post I've ever posted; every "like" I've ever liked; every download I've ever downloaded, etc., were and still are most certainly being stored, recorded, and/or deposited somewhere out there in the great big beyond, but it wasn't until I came across this post in Threadreaderapp.com-- and apparently this understates the problem considerably because what you get when you request your data, even if it's comparatively nothing because you'd already disabled all that, is still only a fraction of the total data they have for you -- that it really hit me, and kind of, sort of blew my mind., yet, like I said, of course, this didn't surprise me at all if that makes any sense. There's a kind of disconnect between what I know and what I know if that makes any sense. I mean, I know things in my head in an abstract intellectual sense that I don't really know in my heart if that makes any sense.

No, it doesn't make any sense?

Well, for example,  I might know lots about evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plans formulated in secret by two or more persons, yet when I see real life evidence of these, dare I say, conspiracies, I'm startled, as in my heart beats faster, my eyes get larger, my blood pressure rises, while at the same time, I'm  telling myself, "no surprise here," and to the very few people I have tried to convince of these, dare I say, conspiracies, whether they're there or not, I say, "I told you so."

I know this sounds like the ramblings of a lunatic, and maybe it is, but I need an outlet.  I need to pretend someone's paying attention to me, pretend that's someone is taking me seriously,  pretend that someone's reading this and just hope it's not anyone I know, or that if they do know me that they don't find out it's me blogging all of this stuff.  Because, yes, I'm a coward.

 However, now it's very clear to me that whether or not anyone's reading this stuff now, there is no doubt that everything I've ever posted about, read about, watched about, listened about, etc, is all out there for anyone to pull up in a heartbeat, connect it to me and...and that's kind of scary because those certain someones--multi-millionaire/billionaire class of data owners--certainly won't like what I've posted about, read about, listened about, watched about, etc...in other words, they won't like what I thought about.

But I'm just a nobody.  Why in the world would they care what I think?  That's what I've told myself all along so I kept on posting, reading, watching, listening, downloading....

More than ever before, I hope I'm being paranoid because surely, I'm a needle in a haystack or more aptly, a needle in a mountain of needles.  Surely, I'm a winning half-a billion-dollar lottery ticket,  a grain of sand on a beach, a book at the Library of Congress, a leaf in a forest, a blade of grass in a meadow...well, you get the picture.  

See how that works?  My need to outlet far exceeds my need to shut the hell up.

“So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years. -Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of user growth @Facebook.

Links:

How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met

The Social Ties that Unbind

GDPR Reports

On May 25th, 2018, the new EU rules called General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR) goes into effect. It applies to companies who have users that are EU citizens, residents or visitors. The fine to companies that violate the rules can be 20 million euro or up to 4% of global revenue. The new rules requires opt-in for data collection and deletion of data when users withdraw their consent. It also lets a user request user data from a company that has data on a user, the company has to send it within a month for free.

GDPR Subject Access Requests

Everybody (in the EU) vs. Facebook

Framasoft runs various open source services

Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy

TrackMeNot

Read more...

Dollars for Docs

Pharmaceutical and medical device companies are now required by law to release details of their payments to a variety of doctors and U.S. teaching hospitals for promotional talks, research and consulting, among other categories. Use this tool [link below] to search for general payments (excluding research and ownership interests) made from August 2013 to December 2015.


The following link includes payments from 2013 to 2015

Dollars for Docs

The following link includes payments made through 2016:

Open Payments Data

Other Links:

About the Dollars for Docs Data

“ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs database contains payments to doctors and teaching hospitals from pharmaceutical and medical device companies made between August 2013 and December 2015. The disclosures were required under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, a part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

The database includes “general payments” — 15 categories including promotional speaking, consulting, meals, travel and royalties. It does not include research payments nor does it include physicians’ ownership stakes in companies. Research payments will be included in Dollars for Docs in the future. Detailed descriptions of the payments can be found here.

The doctors included in our tool include medical doctors (MD), dentists, osteopaths (DO), optometrists, podiatrists and chiropractors. The tool does not include nurse practitioners and physician assistants (because companies are not required to report payments to them.) The tool also allows you to search teaching hospitals.

We’ve taken the payment reports, which were released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and compiled them into a single, comprehensive database that allows patients to search for their physician and receive a listing of all payments matching that name. We provide rankings for each doctor to allow comparisons to peers in the same specialty and state.

Our analysis found that most doctors take payments, and that doctors who receive payments are, on average, more likely to prescribe a higher percentage of brand-name drugs. For each physician in Dollars for Docs, we document the number of payments he or she received, the total of those payments, and the number of different companies that paid him or her.

The bulk of each physician’s page is taken up by information on each payment he or she received, the company making the payment, the date of the payment, the names of the drugs and medical devices associated with the payment, and whether the payment was made to a third party entity. Sometimes, payments are not made directly to doctors but instead are provided to their universities, medical practices or research centers. We also note whether a doctor has disputed the payment.

By default, a physician’s page shows aggregate amounts received by year and details of payments in the most recent year reported. Users can display other years by using the dropdown at the top of each doctor page. Company and product pages display aggregate totals across all payment years (2013 to 2015).

Sometimes, more than one company makes payments related to a single drug or device. On each product page, we note the number of companies making payments, as well as the names of those companies. Each payment can also be attributed to more than one product, so we note the percentage of payments that relate only to that product (meaning no other products were mentioned in the payment).
Use the Data

Get the data that powers this investigation. A digital download is available for purchase in the Data Store.

ProPublica has published Dollars for Docs since 2010, at first using payment reports that certain companies were required to publish as part of legal settlements with the federal government. Often, these settlements were related to whistleblower lawsuits alleging improper marketing or kickbacks by the company. The now-archived version of our database includes $4 billion in payments from 17 companies, from 2009 to 2013. An archive of those payments is still available at projects.propublica.org/d4d-archive.

We have made some effort to normalize the data and eliminate duplicates, but data is primarily as it has been reported by the companies to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

About Open Payments

“Open Payments is a national transparency program that collects and publishes information about financial relationships between the health care industry (i.e. drug and device companies) and providers (i.e. physicians and teaching hospitals). These relationships may involve payments to providers for things such as research, meals, travel, gifts, or speaking fees. One of the ways that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) provides data to the public is through this search tool, which allows the public to search for physicians and teaching hospitals receiving payments, as well as companies that have made payments.

The purpose of the program is to provide the public with a more transparent healthcare system. All information available on the Open Payments database is open to personal interpretation and if there are questions about the data, healthcare consumers should speak directly to the healthcare provider for a better understanding. More information about the program can be found on the CMS Open Payments website.

There you can get an overview of the data that is collected and displayed and learn more about what is included in the data. For other Open Payments related questions, contact the Open Payments team at openpayments@cms.hhs.gov.

Read more...

Liberty and Justice for All?

With more than two million people behind bars, the United States has the world's largest prison population, a 500% increase over the last 40 years.  Changes in law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase. In fact, crime rates have decreased. The U.S. also has the second-highest rate of incarceration and that doesn't include the more than six million, or almost 3% of the voting population, who are disenfranchised due to past convictions, “felony disenfranchisement.”    Nor does it include over 23 million widely stigmatized people, the "vast underground army of released felons — adult men and women convicted of serious criminal offenses for which they have been punished with prison time or probation, and who now form part of the general population.

Click image to enlarge

Links:

Prison Policy Initiative

The Sentencing Project

Lawsuit reveals how tech companies profit off the prison-industrial complex

The end of American prison visits: jails end face-to-face contact – and families suffer

Read more...