SHOW AND TELL

This is so odd that it might take a couple of reads to register, but the largest hospital system in New York has announced it is launching a “studio” division to develop “content”. That’s right: a company that owns 21 hospitals and almost a thousand other healthcare facilities is getting into the entertainment business.

Yes, for sure there is a long history of popular entertainment set in hospitals and featuring doctors, nurses, and patients. But, uh, hate to be the ones to break this news but… they weren’t real: actual surgeries didn’t happen on General Hospital, ER wasn’t actually providing emergency care, and Grey’s Anatomy isn’t even filmed in Seattle. Turning a healthcare system itself into a content studio is breaking new ground, and it’s fair to say there are a lot of untapped possibilities. Will there be stories based on aggressive efforts to collect medical debt from indigent patients? A show where the entire screen is blacked out due to HIPAA? Or maybe a blooper show about fun medical errors like amputating the wrong leg?

Make it make sense.

have passed since the federal minimum wage was increased. That means the federal minimum wage is now old enough to get a job in North Dakota.

in transaction charges have been assessed on parents simply trying to buy school lunches for their children. These junk fees are charged by private companies which contract with school districts to handle payment processing.

were assessed on residents of an apartment building in San Pedro, California after a public pension fund purchased their apartment building. Public pension funds have invested in real estate funds which now own more than 1 million homes in California.

It’s easy to be drawn into following the daily ups and downs of the stock market, but it’s much more clarifying when you zoom out from the noise and take a longer perspective. For example, this straightforward chart shows continued solid rates of economic growth in recent quarters. Of course, GDP isn’t everything — in addition to the growth rate itself, it certainly matters quite a bit what is driving that growth, and how the proceeds are being distributed.

That’s why this chart of our strong rebound from the pandemic period is even better than it looks. Economic growth in this most recent quarter was driven by strong consumer spending and a continued surge in business investment. In other words, the economy is doing well because it’s growing from the middle out.

Multi-billion-dollar computer security vendor Crowdstrike created internet-wide chaos when a flawed update shut down computer systems around the world, affecting banks, hospitals, airlines, libraries, and more. The mess seems to have resulted from a programming error which was compounded by a sloppy operations system that pushed the bug out to millions of customers before the problem was identified.

It was a huge black eye for a company whose business is selling computer security. So, of course, they had to do something to make up to their clients for the massive failure. They obviously had to show they understood the impact of the disruption they caused and the magnitude of the problem. So they dug deep, reached out to their customers, and communicated their heartfelt apology by providing a $10 Uber Eats gift card. It’s safe to say that as compensation for the snafu… this does not compute.

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