Texas-sized socialism!
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I couldnāt read this on WaPo, NYT or the Guardianās websites due to paywall issues. Also, footage of him can be seen in the video I just posted in Random Silly Grins.
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The answer to that oddly framed question, according to this paper, is āNO.ā
The past two decades have seen a rapid increase in Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare, a sector in which intensive government subsidy and market frictions could lead high-powered for- profit incentives to be misaligned with the social goal of affordable, quality care. This paper studies the effects of PE ownership on patient welfare at nursing homes. With administrative patient-level data, we use a within-facility differences-in-differences design to address non- random targeting of facilities. We use an instrumental variables strategy to control for the selection of patients into nursing homes. Our estimates show that PE ownership increases the short-term mortality of Medicare patients by 10%, implying 20,150 lives lost due to PE ownership over our twelve-year sample period. This is accompanied by declines in other measures of patient well-being, such as lower mobility, while taxpayer spending per patient episode increases by 11%. We observe operational changes that help to explain these effects, including declines in nursing staff and compliance with standards. Finally, we document a systematic shift in operating costs post-acquisition toward non-patient care items such as monitoring fees, interest, and lease payments.
The past two decades have seen a rapid increase in Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare, a sector in which intensive government subsidy and market frictions could lead high-powered for- profit incentives to be misaligned with the social goal of affordable, quality care. This paper studies the effects of PE ownership on patient welfare at nursing homes. With administrative patient-level data, we use a within-facility differences-in-differences design to address non- random targeting of facilities. We use an instrumental variables strategy to control for the selection of patients into nursing homes. Our estimates show that PE ownership increases the short-term mortality of Medicare patients by 10%, implying 20,150 lives lost due to PE ownership over our twelve-year sample period. This is accompanied by declines in other measures of patient well-being, such as lower mobility, while taxpayer spending per patient episode increases by 11%. We observe operational changes that help to explain these effects, including declines in nursing staff and compliance with standards. Finally, we document a systematic shift in operating costs post-acquisition toward non-patient care items such as monitoring fees, interest, and lease payments.
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I think that the one singular benefit OF private equity is TO private equity. Everything else is irrelevant, or grist for the mill.
Iād call them vultures, but actual vultures play an important role in the ecosystem, so I wonāt smear them with the comparison.
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The thread and replies, especially:
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In fact, a good hedge fund is kind of like a vulture ā and thus a useful part of the business ecosystem ā but most of them are, as you say, only about rewarding their own investors.
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I guess I think of it like capitalism, if all the participants are honest and moral in their actions, it can work fine. Private equity could absolutely work well, in theory. In reality, itās people doing the actions, so expecting morality is awfully optimistic, after generations of fetishizing the greed-is-good / profit-at-any-cost / youāre-lucky-you-even-have-a-job mentality.
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This is very relatable.
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Often the most knowledgeable and experienced people in the organization.
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So, this popped up in my timeline
And is a brilliant example of why IQ tests are bullshit. This is the kind of question you often see on those tests, which seems simple enough (for a given value of simple) but has a staggering number of built-in assumptions.
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That you are familiar with chess and therefore the rules of movement for each piece.
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That you are aware of exactly how many squares are on a chessboard.
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That you are playing the same variant of chess. 3-D chess isnāt just for Spock and Kirk, anymore.
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That you use the same terminology as the question.
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That you can assume the questioner is operating in good faith and this isnāt a āgotchaā style question.
Itās funny how things like The Bell Curve are gaining resurgence today when back in the 90s I had an old, white-guy Psych 101 prof who gave us a quick and brutal lesson on the cultural specificities and failures of IQ in general and the absolute trash that book was in particular. It was, honestly, one of my (and my mostly white suburban classmates) first lessons in systemic racism as his object lesson clearly showed how these types of questions (well, for IQ tests in particular) assumed a particular type of background/shared cultural knowledge. He did this by giving this bunch of white college kids a test based on knowledge available to / common to a Black kid growing up in a specific NYC neighborhood. Which, of course, not one of us āsmartā kids knew the answer to or were even really able to make an informed guess at. At which point he informed us that we had the intellectual capability below that of an average five-year-old, just to drive home the point.
Even now, with my spotty memory, I remember that lesson. I always say it was the Media and Communications and History classes that started my shift left, but that particular lesson was also a part of it. It was already percolating under the surface when the other pieces came into place.
Yet we still cling to these ideas that certain cultural signifiers are intellligence markers. We hold tightly to these racist, ableist ideas as having value, as measures of someone as a person.
Thereās nothing wrong with being able to solve problems like the above. There is absolutely a problem with assuming that being able to do so is a sign of superiority.
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Iād say 4 (to the Knight question), but Iām just a white guy with hours of unstructured time in front of the computer .
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Hmmā¦ Iām reasonably familiar with chess movement, and Iād like to think Iām at least reasonably intelligent, but I still think Iād blow a fuse reading āWhat is its longest shortest pathā. The attempt at a clarification afterwards doesnāt really help a whole lot either. Now that Iāve looked at the solution I sort of get what they were going for, but thatās a lousy way to phrase it.
And yeah, agreed that intelligence tests arenāt really measuring that. They have their place, but what theyāre too often used for really isnāt that place.
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The question is so badly composed with what seems to me like a contradiction. Iād have written ā2ā and moved on with disgust. Iām not a chess person so Iāve never analyzed the problem of a single knight on the board.
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If it doesnāt tell me what train Iām on and how fast itās going and the distance left to reach my destination, I really donāt care. hmph Some story problem!
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Iām not sure how X is supposed to vary.
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Board Size? On an 8x8 board, there should be enough room to complete it in 4 moves from any starting position. So are we supposed to consider values of X for different positions on different-sized boards? On a 1x1 board, X is infinite. I think most historical chess boards are are at least 8x8, often bigger.
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Move Variations?
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Knight Variations? Does a Rook count as a Knight? What if the Knights are honor-bound to advance and never retreat? Even Pawns can have such rulesā¦
If you want a neutral test, then you need to pick something equally unfamiliar to all players, and explain all relevant rules. And in a meta-question like this all permissible variations in the rules.
P.S. 4. Do Kings and Marshals (if using the Marshal) count as Knights? Which drops X to 1.
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In most positions, itās possible to complete it in two moves. Which was my knee-jerk answer, until I looked back and saw the ālongest shortestā rigamarole, and got a bit annoyed.
Whatās actually being asked is along the lines of: For some starting positions on a normal chess board, a larger number of moves are required. If you start from a position that requires the largest possible number of moves to complete, what is the smallest number of moves that will complete it?
Or, at least, thatās wording that would make slightly more sense to me. I think most of the problemās difficulty lies in how difficult it is to describe it. If an example were shown, it would suddenly be much easier to solve even without knowing the rules for moving a knight (simply because the example would pretty much have to show those rules)ā¦
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I interpreted diagonally-adjacent to mean the starting and ending squares share a common corner. But I guess thatās another ambiguity.
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Iām pretty sure thatās the intended interpretation. The adjacent squares would be the ones immediately surrounding the starting square (sharing a side or corner).
Though, thatād be another part that would be far easier to have in a diagram than describing it with wordsā¦
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