6 Ways to Cultivate Hope When You Don't Have Any | China’s Digital Yuan Works Just Like Cash—With Added Surveillance | Everything I Thought I Knew About Nasal Congestion Is Wrong | What Financial Engineering Does to Hospitals

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6 Ways to Cultivate Hope When You Don't Have Any - TIME

There's a sense, once a whisper, that's growing louder every day. Glaciers are melting; children are being slaughtered; hatred runs rampant. Sometimes it feels like the world's approaching a nadir. Or like you are.

The antidote to any despair might be hope, experts say. It’s one of the most powerful—and essential—human mindsets, and possible to achieve even when it feels out of reach. “Hope is a way of thinking,” says Chan Hellman, a psychologist who’s the founding director of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma. “We know it can be taught; we know it can be nurtured. It’s not something you either have or don’t have.”

Many people, he notes, don’t fully understand what hope is—and what it isn’t. Being hopeful doesn’t mean engaging in wishful thinking or blind optimism. Rather, it’s “the belief or the expectation that the future can be better, and that more importantly, we have the capacity to pursue that future,” Hellman says. The opposite of hope, therefore, is not pessimism, but rather apathy, with its loss of motivation. And while wishing is passive, hope is about taking action.

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China’s Digital Yuan Works Just Like Cash—With Added Surveillance - WIRED

Visa has long paid to be the sole payments processor at the Olympic Games. But at the Winter Olympics in Beijing earlier this year it had competitionâfrom the Chinese government. Visitors could, after scanning their passports, exchange foreign bills for eCNY, a new digital currency being rolled out by the country's central bank, the People's Bank of China. Visitors could splash their digital cash by using a card or mobile app to pay for things around the Olympic Village.

China launched its first pilots of digital cash in 2019, but the eCNY's appearance at the Olympics was part of a project with global ambitions. As the first major country to roll out an official digital currency at scale, China is far ahead of the US and other countries, where the concept of an official form of digital cash is only at the discussion phase.

The hope for government-sanctioned digital currencies is that they will improve efficiency and spur innovation in financial services. But tech and China experts watching the country's project say that eCNY, also known as the electronic Chinese yuan or digital yuan, also opens up new forms of government surveillance and social control. The head of UK intelligence agency GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, warned in a speech last month that Beijing could use its digital currency to monitor its citizens and eventually evade international sanctions.

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Everything I Thought I Knew About Nasal Congestion Is Wrong - The Atlantic

Having caught a cold every month since my kid started day care, I’ve devoted a lot of time recently to the indignity of unclogging my nose. I’m blowing, always. I have also struck up an intimate acquaintance with neti pots and a great variety of decongestants. (Ask for the stuff that actually works, squirreled away behind the counter.) And on sleepless nights, I’ve spent hours turning side to side, trying to clear one nostril and then the other.

Nasal congestion, I’ve learned in all this, is far weirder than I ever thought. For starters, the nose is actually two noses, which work in an alternating cycle that is somehow connected to our armpits.

The argument that humans have two noses was first put to me by Ronald Eccles, a nose expert who ran the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, in Wales, until his retirement a few years ago. This sounds absurd, I know, but consider what your nose—or noses—looks like on the inside: Each nostril opens into its own nasal cavity, which does not connect with the other directly. They are two separate organs, as separate as your two eyes or your two ears.

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What Financial Engineering Does to Hospitals - The Atlantic

Riverton, Wyoming, a city of about 11,000 people at the feet of the Wind River mountain range, seems far away from the world of Big Finance. Yet like so much of America, Riverton has become well acquainted with the business that most epitomizes today’s Wall Street: private equity. In 2018, the local hospital, SageWest, was purchased by Apollo Global Management as part of the giant private-equity firm’s $5.6 billion deal to buy a chain of hospitals called LifePoint Health. Even before Apollo got involved, LifePoint had merged Riverton’s small hospital with the hospital half an hour away in Lander, the county seat. Vivian Watkins, a Riverton resident who once served as Wyoming’s economic-development director, told us that the idea sounded viable—at first. “They told us the new trend in hospitals is ‘centers of excellence,’ so you’ll have maternity care in one place and, say, orthopedics in another,” she said.

But in the Apollo era, Watkins and other Riverton residents concluded that, instead of dividing specialties between the two hospitals and beefing up the ones remaining at each location, hospital managers were simply stripping away essential services from their community. The drive to Lander isn’t hard in the summer, Watkins told us, but in the winter, the roads are often closed. Many more patients needed to be transported out of the county altogether. According to state data reported by The Wall Street Journal, the number of air-ambulance flights out of Fremont County grew sixfold from 2014 to 2019. “We went to the local CEO of both hospitals and said, ‘We’re quite concerned. What can we do to help? How can we keep services here?’” Watkins said. “To make a long story short, the answer was, ‘No, no, no—you don’t understand that we don’t want to do that.’” Apollo referred all questions about its role in Riverton to LifePoint. A spokesperson for LifePoint—which folded Riverton, Lander, and other hospitals into a new company called ScionHealth in 2021—said in an email that “our ownership structure had nothing to do with our approach to this market” and that “investment in the Riverton and Lander communities increased after the Apollo PE investment.”

A nascent effort by a group of prominent Riverton citizens to build a new hospital intensified after the Apollo takeover. In addition to raising several million dollars via community contributions and donated land for the new Riverton Medical District, the group just closed a $37 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which uses taxpayer money to help rural development efforts. This is hardly the only time that government dollars have been used to clean up after, or subsidize, private-equity firms’ self-enrichment. In Watsonville, California, state officials kicked in to help buy a local hospital out of bankruptcy after its own brush with private equity. During the pandemic, many hospitals owned by private-equity firms, run by billionaires and themselves flush with cash, got loans and grants from taxpayers.

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