I gather this is about retirement villages in the UK; are retirement villages new there?
These living communities are meant to house you, until you die, for a price. You have saved up money to pay for that service until you die. Why would they leave money on the table? Why would they spend any extra on someone who's "going to die anyway". Someone who is barely ambulatory; who has few outside connections.
It's the horrible result of end stage capitalism, but it's hardly unexpected.
Because if they don't, the customer will go to the competition who does.
The reality is that once that elderly person has moved to the retirement facility, they're pretty much a locked in customer. The firm (sadly) can pretty much do with them as they please within the extent of the law.
You are NOT going to be changing houses and care homes very regularly past a certain age.
The animal that you pilot, will simply not have the capability to power through the change, remember every item, keep on top of documents, bills and more. You will not necessarily have friends and family to help you through this.
Going to court is unpleasant, since it will mean you are going to spend the rest of your life fighting. You may count on the fact that some portion of people will be fighters, and willing to sue, but thats statistic is of little comfort if you are the one fighting.
The last time Capitalism went unchecked and tried to eat itself was the Great Depression. That was ended by controlling Capitalism with strong regulations, high taxes on the rich, and pervasive union membership of workers. And the Social Security system and Medicare were also a part of that deal.
When people talk of "end stage Capitalism" all they are saying is that they lack the will and the power to use the tools we already know work to solve these problems.
It was pretty clear to me they think the entire system is set up so that anyone with needs is milked to extract the maximum possible amount of money.
A rational society would be regulating those corporations to ensure they act in the public best interest at least some of the time. We're seeing the result of what happens when we are 50 years behind on that. And the current administration is generally rolling back regulations all over.
Think of the money at stake and it will become obvious that our current situation isn't mere happenstance. The chaos is a deliberate smoke screen -- perhaps not exactly planned by the current administration, but orchestrated by the oligarchs behind the scenes.
In reading the article, it doesn't seem to me that anyone is being taken advantage of any more than all of us are when we walk into a shopping mall, open amazon.com, or buy a home.
Children and other family squabble over the assets even before they pass. You'll see neighbors talking senile/demented seniors into giving away their stuff, or selling it for a silly low price (like a truck for a dollar, or my one neighbor asking my other neighbor for a free fishing boat). Then there's the scam calls...
Wrong! Because while their house is worth $3M, it will be fully leveraged to pay for the cost of their deathcare. Mom and dad will die broke in a retirement home, and your inheritance will be paying for their funeral out of your own pocket.
As a paramedic, this galls me. As much as it galled me that many of these times, the "care team" (mostly LPNs) would call 911, for anything larger than a bandaid, or simple care tasks. Why? "Because of our policy/liability insurance", generally.
The worst part? Often the big sign out front. "Round the clock nursing care!" - and a bill to match.
their buy-back prices dont let them reap the windfall from the wild growth of housing prices? or that they're complaining about too many "old people" in a retirement home? they need to pay 5 quid for a beer?
Surely, some of these people blocked development and did everything they could to boost their personal net worth at the expense of younger generations. Other people did the reverse. Most people just went with the flow and didn't bother to vote either way.
I run a weekly route with MealsOnWheels and deliver food/perform wellness checks to many people whom are homebound. There are much worse fates for seniors than a community home with social programs and meal service.
I think it is everyone’s duty to buy long-term care insurance (perhaps the government should provide this, as we will all need it). I also believe you must provide for the retirement you expect.
As a financial instrument the risk and overhead of long term care insurance is balancing the benefit from sharing risks over a larger pool. Your beneficiaries are inherently worse off on average in exchange for a lower risk of getting nothing.
One of my Grandfathers just stopped taking medication and going to the docs. And died quite peacefully within a couple years of retiring. Death and decay is just natural and quick. While my other grandfather has been kept alive 30-35 years post retirement popping a tray full of pills everyday, having gone through dozens of surgeries and has had hopeless quality of life post retirement.
The med-industrial complex is a run-away train that is detached for any moral system. It can't even produce any morality anymore. Because its not efficient or rational to do so :)
We've always lived past our 40s. We just stopped having a bunch of people die in childhood (or birthing children).
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
"If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency."
"As a result, much of what we think we know about ancient Rome’s statistical life expectancy comes from life expectancies in comparable societies. Those tell us that as many as one-third of infants died before the age of one, and half of children before age 10. After that age your chances got significantly better. If you made it to 60, you’d probably live to be 70."
Neanderthal elders probably took on lighter-duty tasks as they aged just like today's elders do.
But this is separate from the question of retirement as such, or the question of aging. Your grandfather, I presume, only refused to take medication and medical treatment, which falls under "extraordinary care", and this is morally licit. Had he refused food or offed himself intentionally (or with "assistance"), that would have been a different matter.
My company offers one that claims to be reliable (owned by an insurance company that's been around for over 100 years, albeit not in the LTC space).
The one thing I didn't like about them: They don't adjust for cost of living. So if you sign up for a $100K plan, you'll get $100K - which will worth a lot less by the time I need it.
* People complaining that the cafe wasn't as good as they liked.
* The fact that old people have signed up for a retirement village.
* The fact that some of them get confused and need help.
What's the evidence base here?
I think running a care home isn't a great way to make a huge profit.
No job? No life? Stay here eating, sleeping and fucking around until some opportunity comes up.
Residents face service charges averaging £524 a month, on top of ground rents that can exceed £500 a year.
£500 a year would be implausibly low. I suspect a few missing nils or a thousands indicator.
prasadjoglekar•2h ago
UnHerd and our 877 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store/access and process personal data on your device.
hnuser123456•2h ago
SirFatty•2h ago
dheera•2h ago
ileonichwiesz•1h ago
SirFatty•59m ago
accrual•35m ago
dheera•2h ago
Ukv•1h ago
The notice is likely EU (+ UK) specific for GDPR compliance, if you're elsewhere.
> so it's not like they could store data even if they wanted to. I don't need to know about their attempts that are going to fail anyway
They're also using fingerprinting:
> > "[...] together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it [...] Actively scan device characteristics for identification [...] certain characteristics specific to your device might be requested and used to distinguish it from other devices (such as the installed fonts or plugins, the resolution of your screen) [...]"
If you're using something like Tor browser that does its best to hide those characteristics then you may be fine.
afavour•2h ago
Not that I'm defending this, it's all terrible. But how many of us reading this article about to stump up for a paid subscription for Unherd? I'd wager next to none.
dehugger•2h ago
50 cents flat to read the whole article, without being harassed by aggressive ads or tracked by 900 different companies? I'd be more than willing.
ta1243•1h ago
https://www.axate.com/
It worked well, I loaded it with about $3 and used it a few times.
Clearly not something publishers are fans of though as it's far easier to carefully select 987 partners to sell your data to.
rkomorn•1h ago
Workaccount2•1h ago
They say stuff like they whitelist, or donate (it certainly brings lots os social praise) but if you have ever been on the other side, you know that virtually nobody does this.
rkomorn•1h ago
The overhead, as a consumer, of managing any of this as actual subscriptions, transactions, or membership to some (likely multiple) sort of ecosystem would be substantial, even beyond just the money aspect.
nemomarx•40m ago
afavour•1h ago
Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism:
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...
righthand•1h ago
No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article.
Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. Implement a system with work arounds and people will use the work arounds.
rkomorn•1h ago
This sounds like no true Scotsman.
I guess it's tautological that nobody's tried the right model because nobody's been successful.
righthand•1h ago
rkomorn•1h ago
Ancestor comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45302115 already starts with the context of not wanting to subscribe to a random site, so I don't know how we don't end back up exactly there to have a non-leaky system with micropayments on top?
righthand•1h ago
afavour•1h ago
But different articles are worth different amounts of money. You can't really escape that fact. If a news org has spent three months doing a deep dive into political corruption and created a blockbuster report on it, in what world can it be justified for that to be the same price as someone recapping last night's episode of Survivor? This is all covered in the article I linked to.
> Implement a legitimate system
By whose definition of legitimate is the question, I guess. I think it's very easy to stand on the outside and say "duh, just do it the right way!".
It's not like things haven't been tried.
- Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
- Scroll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service)
- Google Contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
- Axate: https://www.axate.com
- Coil (to an extent): https://coil.com/
All these people tried to solve this problem and weren't able to.
righthand•1h ago
rkomorn•1h ago
I'd say I read an average of 10 articles per day (with various definitions of "read"). I can't see myself actually spending $5 a day.
At that point I'd be better off getting a few news site subscriptions, but I also highly dislike the idea of committing to a single news source, and committing to a few isn't much of an improvement.
Of course, you could introduce a "tip after you read" mechanism, which I assume would generate probably about 50c per article, and probably motivate various "remember to tip" mechanisms that (I suspect) the same people who say they'd pay/tip would hate with a passion.
oersted•1h ago
How do you know that the next month worth of articles from the publisher you are subscribed to is worth the fee before seeing it?
There is a such a thing as building trust in a brand, this is not a barrier to micropayments.
nemomarx•1h ago
Asking up front has the issue that you then have to think about money every time you open an article - a lot of friction
rkomorn•56m ago
People understand you gotta pay to go to the gym. News, on the other hand, you can get for free (give or take ads and tracking).
The gym question is "am I gonna use this?" The news question is "do I need this?" or "is this sufficiently better than the alternatives to justify the cost?"
Edit: and to touch on the "per-article" aspect, odds are that people might spend let's say ~$2/month with a publisher through article reads, but not $5/month for a subscription.
gniv•1h ago
You know how you are asked to agree to cookies even though you agreed recently on the same site? It's probably because they added a partner to the 1000 previous ones.