As children’s mental health needs escalate, teens in the area would lose access to lifesaving treatment. And other nearby facilities would struggle to fill the gap, Sacred Heart executives wrote in an application for a state Department of Commerce grant in February 2024, obtained by InvestigateWest in a records request.

"If this unit downsized or closed, this would cause even less access in an under-resourced area resulting in patients and families having to travel several hours for inpatient care,” hospital leaders wrote.

Sacred Heart asked the state for $1.8 million to pay for facility upgrades to make the unit safer and “ensure that every child has access to high-quality, affordable and culturally competent mental health care.”

The pitch worked. The state awarded Sacred Heart the full amount it requested.

But Sacred Heart turned the grant down in April. In September, it closed the Psychiatric Center for Children and Adolescents anyway.

In the last decade, Sacred Heart repeatedly reduced services and long-term resources in the unit, according to internal emails, public records and interviews. Yet as Sacred Heart cuts youth services in Spokane, the Providence system is pouring more than $1 billion into a hospital expansion in Seattle that sees fewer Medicaid patients. And its executives are making millions.

https://www.investigatewest.org/investigatewest-reports/former-staff-at-spokane-youth-psychiatric-unit-blame-providence-for-closure-17784579

Yeah it is. I think the company must be trying to filter all user-supplied content in such a way as to make it maximally resellable to other AI companies. Even as a read-only platform, I sometimes wonder how many good posts I’m missing because they’ve secretly been banned/filtered.

They pay some (all?) of their C-level execs (and maybe others) tens of millions of $/yr in salaries and bonuses. What, you want that money spent on staff and patient resources? You must be a Communist! Some claimed numbers from 2019:

Providence is making enough money to give CEO Rod Hochman a 157% raise between 2015 and 2017, bumping his total compensation to more than $10 million. Top executives at Corporate Headquarters aren’t the only ones getting huge raises. Current Chief Executive at Sacred Heart Peg Curry earned more than $1.2 million in 2018 including a one-year bonus of $131,812. As Chief Nursing Officer, Susan Stacey’s total compensation increased by 35% between 2015 and 2018 including bonuses totaling $97,638. Previous Chief Executive Officer Alex Jackson’s total compensation increased by 47% between 2015 and 2017 including bonuses totaling $668, 468. https://www.wsna.org/union/update/spokesman-story-misleading-incomplete

Naturally they fight against their workers’ unions too

I’m blocked by Reddit “filters” from posting on the Spokane subreddit, but if any of you are on there I encourage you to repost this. I had not heard of this story before seeing the article today.

It’s a French dip. Comes with some extra hardware. Bon appétit!

I’ve got neighbs with their adult, autistic offspring living with them. The “kids” are 100% supported by SSDI+parents. When RFK comes up with an excuse for cutting their SSDI, they’re all f-cked. They’re renters, and have lucked into a much-lower-than-market rent (the owner is some weirdo who doesn’t pay much attention to the house or to the rental business and has not raised rents for a long time), but I don’t know that they can afford it all w/o the SSDI support for the “kids”. Also, the mother works for the state and is in the kind of job that the DOGE/Project-2025 scumbags would just LOVE to cut. If any of this comes to pass I can easily imagine them being at risk for ending up on the streets.

But on the bright side, thanks to Orange Diaper and president Felon, the landlord could then sell the house at some substantial multiple of what he paid for it back in the day.

Yeah I heard about the Chinese saying “take your damn plane back” to Boeing. If only there was Some Other manufacturer of well-made, sophisticated passenger aircraft somewhere in the world. Maybe in Europe or Brazil? A manufacturer that foreign airlines could buy from without having to pay US tariffs? If those foreign airlines find that manufacturer …welp, lots of layoffs in Seattle and Everett and S. Carolina. With that, and all the professional-class government and tech layoffs, and the resulting personal bankruptcies, and mortgage delinquencies and rental eviction/vacancies, Zillow might just have a point here.

Re: tech, I hear you, tech culture sucks and has sucked for at least the past 20 yrs. I’ve only been in small companies/startups and consulting though, never megacorps. It’s mindblowing to me that even after all the tech layoffs in SV and elsewhere, and all the RTO chain-yanking, techies still refuse to recognize themselves as the blue-collar salarymen that they are. Entirely disposable, and if you step out of line there’s someone or something (AI) to take your place.

It sounds like you might have a viable riches-to-rags story to write! Something like this: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a62875397/homelessness-in-america/ (everyone should read - it’s a great essay) . Podcast interview with the guy: https://youtu.be/Oq8ulw5yEuw?t=95 . But good luck w/the project if you’d rather write software. MN sounds like a good Plan B (to the PNW). Had a GF from there once, and thanks to her influence I still issue the occasional “uff-da”.

Spokane (or, as I call it, Spokanistan). I once lived in Seattle and liked to visit B-ham with its hippies and WWU and proximity to civilization (B.C.). But it was always WAY too expensive, even back in the 90s. I considered Tacoma and that probably would have been the smart move - Old Town is pretty cool and I don’t think I’ve noticed the Aroma of Tacoma since the 90s. I lived in Tumwater for a year and Oly still has a certain charm - pretty leftie and so very close to the Olympics and all that wilderness and of course the ocean.

All those S. Sound cities have gotten crazy expensive but not as bad as Seattle and north as far as I can tell. I can kind of understand it - people getting pushed out of Seattle by gentrification but who can still find a job and afford an apartment or maybe even a house a bit further south.

I hadn’t heard that north of Seattle had gone to hell and I’ve got to wonder how the dumbass tariff stuff is going to hurt Boeing manufacturing in Everett and hurt their local suppliers (if any) too. I doubt it will be enough to cause an outright crash there - the demand always seemed to be, uh, “organic” rather than speculation, but it’s been a long time and I’m out of touch with that region.

Spokane is a cultural void for the most part, but politically it’s surprisingly purple and getting more so. The job scene, except perhaps for medical, simply blows. What’s inflated RE prices here seems to be people coming in from out of state who don’t need a job or who work remotely, and who have some kind of fantasies about “getting away from it all”. And of course the speculators and second-home buyers and developers. The skies here are full of corpo jets coming and going from Sandpoint (resorts) and CdA (resorts) and western MT (resorts) from Seattle and CA and the Southwest … wouldn’t break my heart to hear that their occupants’ RE portfolios have tanked one day.

Sorry to hear about your assault. I’d be super freaked out to have to depend on Social Security <anything> with this regime in power.

I’m constantly pestered by flippers mailing me their postcards offering me “all cash, as-is” deals to buy my house for 20% under assessed value. Medium-sized PNW city that’s seen a ton of appreciation due to 1) being relatively cheap to begin with, 2) having an airport w/OK connections to major coastal and SW cities, and 3) being perceived by outsiders as not having “big city problems” (very wrong). I wish these flippers would die, but if that won’t happen I wonder if bubble-popping will significantly hurt their ability to prey on the desperate?

reports of violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people will be removed, along with all references to DEI.

Among other topics ordered to be struck from the reports:

• Involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices.
• Arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy.
• Serious restrictions to internet freedom.
• Extensive gender-based violence.
• Violence or threats of violence targeting people with disabilities.

The rise in domestic chip orders is a direct result of former President Donald Trump’s …

If only.

tough export tariffs

I think they mean import tariffs. The tariffs that domestic buyers pay when importing goods from overseas.

“I’ve always just felt that as a Christian, my only job is to love on others,” Desi said. “God gave us free will, and God gave us the ability to choose, and my belief system doesn’t get to take away that choice of someone else.”

That doesn’t sound very Christian to me.

The statement attributed to Jesus “I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword” has been interpreted by some as a call to arms for Christians. Mark Juergensmeyer argues that “despite its central tenets of love and peace, Christianity—like most traditions—has always had a violent side. The bloody history of the tradition has provided disturbing images and violent conflict is vividly portrayed in the Bible. This history and these biblical images have provided the raw material for theologically justifying the violence of contemporary Christian groups. For example, attacks on abortion clinics have been viewed not only as assaults on a practice that Christians regard as immoral, but also as skirmishes in a grand confrontation between forces of evil and good that has social and political implications”, sometimes referred to as spiritual warfare. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_violence

anyone who voted for the orange cancer is complicit.

As is anyone who failed to vote against him. I’m not talking about stay-at-home Democrats either. I know Ayn Rand-ish “libertarian” old-time Republicans who always toed the old-school Republican lines on healthcare, social spending, global warming, taxes, offense spending &etc, who KNEW that Trump was a fraud and a nascent dictator, and who refused to vote against him because “my vote doesn’t matter, the Whole System is a charade, there are People in power who control everything including elections and who just pretend to give us the illusion of choice every few years at the polls”. Basically a stupid excuse to avoid admitting that they’ve spent a lifetime wallowing in the deep end of the conservative bullshit pool only to have it end in a dystopia that will drown them too. Anything is better than admitting to having been wrong with their whole ideology for their whole lives. Wrong = weak, and I suspect too that they’re thinking “anyway, I donated $100 to a Trump election PAC, surely I’ll be OK, they won’t be coming for me.”

The Democratic Party controls both the New Mexico state government and the city of Albuquerque. The deployment of troops by a Democratic governor is another part of the alignment of the national Democratic party with Trump since his election, and makes clear that the Democrats will not conduct a fight against Trump and his plans for dictatorship.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?.. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

It’s difficult for Vetrini to see the rhetoric espoused by right-wing media and not feel hurt. Since going viral, Vetrini has been subject to vulgar and offensive comments from people who disagree with her perspective.

“Those comments are really hard to deal with, mentally. The hardest part is my dad feels the same way as these vitriolic commenters,” she said.

But she still recognizes the qualities in her father that remind her of Walz. Those are what keep her maintaining a “complicated” relationship with him.

After her TikTok went viral, Vetrini called her dad to tell him about it – hoping to hear it from her first rather than a news show.

“He responded exactly the way I would predict he would respond. Which was to remind me that socialism will ruin America,” she said.