I haven’t posted any pictures of Maddox and Sydney in a while, but I couldn’t resist posting this picture from the Oregonian’s website.
I had a wonderful Thanksgiving – we had 20 at dinner (Maddox and Sydney included), lots of turkey, ham, at least 15 pies, mushrooms, potatoes, brussel sprouts, and conversation. Plus, we have a new (well, used, but new to us) stove, which worked SO much better than our old stove did. (Imagine, being able to cook with all four burners!) I hope that everyone here had a great day yesterday, whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not.
This is an open thread – post what you like, when you like it, wearing clothing just as loud as your loved ones can take. License for self-link love is legally given.
Only ten links, because hey, it’s a holiday weekend, aynnit?
- Governor Christie: It’s Bad Enough I Said The Word “Twinkie” Behind This Podium
- Republicans ‘Test’ For Voting Fraud, Wind Up In Custody
- Good article by Jennifer Jenkins on what ridiculously overextended copyright does to intellectual and creative commons
- How the 2012 election polling really was skewed for Mitt Romney
- The Twinkie Defense, or What Does “Uncompetitive” Mean?
- Why rich guys want to raise the retirement age
- Grandfather Of The Year Nominee. And damn, he looks good.
- Airport Security Is Killing Us – Businessweek The more people are driven (p.i.) to cars instead of planes, the higher the death rate.
- Dear Mr. Obama, the “Grand Bargain” is neither Grand…nor a Bargain – New Economic Perspectives
- Grantham To Climate Scientists: ‘Be Persuasive. Be Brave. Be Arrested (If Necessary)’
By the way, that’s Sydney on the left and Maddox on the right. I think. The two of them have been mistaken for twins, so it can be hard to tell. Sydney is now nine, and Maddox is seven. Probably there are folks reading this post who were reading this blog when they were born. Weird.
Right on Maddox, Sydney and their parents!
Link self-love! :) This week on the Secret Histories Project, meet Mark Weston, a British athlete who was assigned female at birth and transitioned in 1936, and Percy Grainger, a problematic figure (racist and anti-Semitic) who nevertheless left us meticulous photographic and documentary records of the life of a BDSM practitioner in the 1910s-1960s.
Now THAT is an appropriate person/pie ratio.
We had six people (one of whom doesn’t eat dessert), two pies, and a fruit salad. Apple pie because I think that there should be apple pie at Thanksgiving, chocolate pudding pie because my sister thinks that anything that has fruit in it doesn’t count as dessert, and fruit salad because my cousin was trying to be healthy.
We had about 25 people at my sister-in-law’s and her husband’s place. Nothing remarkable, the meal stuck pretty close to traditional – and so did the beer/whiskey and the football watching and the kids running around underfoot. And you know, if any holiday should be traditional, it should be Thanksgiving. I hope everyone here had a good one.
I think this is a fine thing. WalMart should be free to pay their employees what they want within the law, and people should be free to protest their policies and to go shop somewhere else. Like I do. I don’t know what Target’s labor policies are, but their stores are a lot cleaner.
My wife’s rationale for us getting a new stove was that the oven heated VERY unevenly. The new one – and in this case I do mean new – is a convection oven and it sure does work a lot better.
Convection ovens are amazing.
We had a little Thanksgiving dinner with just us and Matt’s parents. It was the first time we had cooked a Thanksgiving dinner, and it went pretty well. My mom-in-law can’t have gluten, so that added a little challenge. I learned that apparently you can’t substitute brown sugar for white sugar in a cookie crumb pie crust, unless you’re trying to make concrete. I had gluten free graham crackers, but what I really wanted for the pumpkin pie crust was GF gingersnaps, so I was hoping brown sugar, along with some added spices, would give that gingersnappy flavor. It did, judging by the small bits of pie crust we were able to scrape out of the pan. But the pumpkin pie itself turned out good.
I can also strongly recommend those cookie sheets that are made of two layers of aluminum with an air space in the middle. You are much less likely to burn the cookies that way. They do a pretty good job on frozen pizza as well.
I’m trying to remember if I bought those at WalMart. It’s possible. If so it was a long time ago, though.
Remember when WalMart used to brag that it sold mostly products made in the USA? These days, I’ve seen articles that allege that WalMart alone buys more goods from China than all but 4 entire countries.
KellyK – I did most of Thanksgiving dinner and geared as much of it as possible for a friend who is GF. I bought frozen GF pie crusts from Whole Foods because the boxed mix required time and made way more crust than I needed.
Unfortunately the GF crusts were absolutely, positively AWFUL. Hard as rocks on the edge (seriously, I thought I was getting a bit of pecan shell while I was chewing and it turned out to be some pie crust edge), and the manufacturer had wrapped the crust edge around the edge of the foil tin so it was nearly impossible to pry slices out as well. I took home a LOT of pumpkin and pecan pie; the fillings are great (if I may say so myself) but the crusts are just inedible. V. sad.
Isn’t this really a minimum wage issue?
Certainly, WalMart pays very little. (For those who are interested in specifics, you should look at the fascinating HuffPo article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/walmarts-internal-compensation-plan_n_2145086.html which contains a hotlink to Walmart’s internal compensation plan.)
But the jobs for which Walmart pays so little are, generally speaking, fairly unskilled. They are not worth much. They also may not provide much training, and therefore fewer opportunities for advancement: The difference value of a 5-year employee as compared to a new hire isn’t as large in retail as it is in more skilled areas.
I mean, we have a minimum wage of $7.25 and we have to assume that a lot of companies are going to use it as a floor for relatively unskilled workers that are relatively simple to replace. Aren’t these workers largely in that category?
I don’t think anyone disagrees that minimum wage jobs really suck. Or that you can’t really live on minimum wage. And in that respect I don’t blame folks for wanting to work for $26k/year plus benefits, rather than $20k/year without them. (the strike group is asking for full-time jobs with benefits, that pay $13/hour.)
But beyond the obvious “we want more money in our pockets” and “Walmart has more money than we do,” is there any particular reason why Walmart workers in particular are claiming that they in particular are worth more than minimum wage, and/or more than they’re getting paid? I mean, if the real issue is “nobody should have to work for less than $13/hour with benefits,” then it’s not really about Wal-Mart.
If WalMart has to pay it’s employees more then it’ll have to raise prices. If it raises prices then why would you shop at WalMart?
I remember when WalMart claimed it sold only products Made In The USA! I also remember doing work at that time for a toy company that sold mainly to Walmart. I was surprised to find out that all their toys were made in China. When I asked how they could sell to Walmart, the Toy Company told me that Walmart just required them to have an office in the US.
Walmart, a company you can trust.
I just had a heated discussion with my wife about this article.
One of our arguments went: it’s the airlines responsibilities to accommodate their passengers, they pretty much killed her, and 6 million dollars is not nearly enough.
The other went: the airlines spent thousands upon thousands of dollars and hours of theirs and their passengers time trying to secure her into three planes at two airports, and it’s unfair to punish them for choosing, in the absence of sufficient equipment, the safety of everyone on that plane.
Both of us agree on what needs to be done: forcing all planes over a certain size to have seats that can be converted, if necessary, to properly secure passengers of all kinds. Yes, it will be expensive, but it’s for a good cause, and most of us will be happy to foot the (tiny) bill.
What we cannot agree is whether Delta, KLM, Air France, and Lufthansa should pay the millions the law suits are asking for.
Man shows up, tries to murder family.
Finds that sleeping mother is Krav Maga expert.
Things do not end as he planned.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/162588#.ULU8NIYfKCI
Well, he must have earned his ticket to Heaven. I wonder whether he gets points off for taking neither the mother nor her children with him. I guess I need a Holy man to clarify that for me. I just wish that what Holy men told me did not vary so widely with the Holy man.
Sebastian, if that news article you linked to is accurate, then I think it’s KLM’s fault.
So, according to the article, Soltesz did in fact board the aircraft. And she definitely successfully boarded (and flew on) a KLM aircraft to get to Europe in the first place.
There remain two issues: The mysterious “seatback” issue, which I suspect is bullshit. But if they were really concerned that the seatbacks couldn’t take her weight (and it’s not like 400-pound people don’t fly, and I’ve never heard of a seatback breaking), they could have seated her in the back row, where the seats can’t recline and are supported by a wall.
And the lack of a seatbelt extension. Which KLM could have easily solved within a day by having one of their other flights from the US bring an extra seatbelt extension with them.
Maybe there’s more going on here, or the article is inaccurate in some way. But from what the article says, I think KLM is totally at fault. My guess is that they initially refused to fly Soltesz because they didn’t have the seatbelt extender, and then as they got more entrenched in their position they invented more and more reasons why they couldn’t fly her to the US, even though they had clearly flown her successfully already.
Your theory is quite plausible, but I have a different one.
I think that they flew her to Europe with the existing equipment, and could have flown her back just the same way, but at some point someone claimed that in an emergency the seat/belt could have failed (and supported it with his sliding rule, like we annoying engineers do)
At that point, the stakes change, and they would be deathly afraid of letting her fly. Forget the nightmare scenario of something actually going wrong. If any of the passengers hears of the issue, they could claim that they were endangered during the flight.
People have personally tried to bribe me (twice, in the US) to just be willing to say if asked that I had never pointed out to them safety issues with their machine shops. I.e. they were fine with their workers (or themselves) taking the risks, but they wanted to be able to claim that no one told them of the possible danger.
In one case, it was after the fact… someone’s forehead had been -grazed- by a flying piece of metal. About 90 pounds of metal, which then proceeded to go through the shop’s wall. Fortunately for them, and for my self-esteem or livelihood, the guy was happy to just get a new 50K car to replace his beater. I honestly do not know what I would have done otherwise. I am self-employed, and once I’d been on the stand against a shop owner, I’d have been finished.
But what kind of risk could they have found that would endanger her but not other heavy people? I mean, plenty of football players are around 350 pounds, and I can’t recall ever hearing about an airline saying that a football team couldn’t fly because it would be dangerous.
I don’t know about football teams, but NBA teams – who have their own challenges fitting into standard airline seats – generally fly charter, which I presume are outfitted to their passengers specific needs.
First, she was a bit heavier than 350. A more than 20% increase is not trivial. Second, she was a bit thicker at the belting point, and a belt extension is likely an added weakness. Third, there might have been a danger to her if the belt actually had had to act to restrain her, for example in a disturbance.
I am not saying there was an actual safety concern, but once the issue has been raised… I’m all for mandating one set of three seats that can be used to properly secure a 500kg lead ball if need be.
I read a post which argued that the issue may not have been her weight (I’ve seen plenty of people who weigh over 400 pounds get on planes), but her girth – she looks as if her health condition may have, in the weeks before her death, made her stomach swell to much more than her usual size. (In the news video, you can see that her clothes don’t fit her properly, which would make sense if she had recently grown larger due to illness.)
Key phrase: “in the weeks before her death”. Which were spent in Hungary. The person who flew into Hungary was not the same (sized) person who wanted to fly out. Self-evidently, the airline was willing to fly this person; they did so several weeks ago. It seems fairly likely, given the widespread failure to accommodate her, that she did in fact get much larger due to the illness. One airline captain being a fat-bigot I could easily see; carrier after carrier after carrier hitting the same issues seems to point to a problem of physics, not of attitude.
Data is sparse, but on the issue of responsibility for her death, it seems as though she was avoiding Hungarian health care and wanted to go see her doctor at home. But Hungary is not some pestilential backwater; it’s not the medical leader in the EU but it’s a modern nation with a generally excellent health system. If the woman had health concerns that *only* her amazing magical US doctor could treat, then she needed to stay at home, not go spend weeks abroad. That to me would mitigate the responsibility of the airlines for her death, even if they were totally wrong in refusing to fly her. If I refuse to drive you home so you can get a good meal, and you starve to death with a wallet full of money outside a Village Inn because you wanted your mom’s potato pancakes and no other, I bear no liability for your death.
Self-evidently, the airline was willing to fly this person; they did so several weeks ago.
Robert, this is not self-evident. If it were, every incident of a passenger being told “you’re too fat, get away from our plane” would involve passengers who had never ever flown on that airline at their current weight. I do not find it astounding to consider that the same airline may employ different flight crews and personnel who do not share a hive mind.
Facts are, indeed, thin on the ground. I don’t see any reason to wallow in the Smug Pit by making some up, such as believing that this woman was an idiot who thought her US doctor was “magical” and deliberately chose death of being touched by grubby foreign MDs.
Having seen the video (if you haven’t watched it, you should) it sounds like some people are missing a likely scenario: the airlines may well have denied her boarding because she appeared to be in incredibly bad physical shape, and something appeared to be really really wrong with her, and for whatever reason, they really didn’t want her to die (or have a medical emergency) on their plane.
There are all sorts of reasons why they might not say that even if it was the real reason, ranging from politeness to legalities to the difficulty of providing emergency care to someone who can’t be moved out of their seat and/or placed in the aisle for treatment. But I bet that had something to do with it, even if it was unsaid.
I’m not saying that is an acceptable outcome but this doesn’t seem like an “ordinary” saying-no-to-fat-person scenario.
I do not find it astounding to consider that the same airline may employ different flight crews and personnel who do not share a hive mind.
That’s true, and that’s why I specified that it was the multiple declinations, by at least three airline from my reading of the story, after actual attempts to board her, that supported a non-bigoted reason for them not flying her. If it had been one attempt on one airline, then yes, it would be very plausible that a bigoted crew or captain was making one bad call. But it was attempt after attempt after attempt, by different crews and different companies. That points to a separate problem other than bigotry, in a world where – whatever real issues of bigotry may be – fat people, including this fat person, manage to fly all the time.
I don’t see any reason to wallow in the Smug Pit by making some up, such as believing that this woman was an idiot who thought her US doctor was “magical” and deliberately chose death of being touched by grubby foreign MDs.
I don’t know that she deliberately chose death, but I do know that, at least as reported, she did not seek medical attention at all during the crisis period in question, or during her visit. If you didn’t even go into the Village Inn, then again it undermines a presumption that it was the other people who starved you.
And I’m not in the “Smug Pit”, I try to avoid climbing in and out of things. I think that what happened to the woman was tragic at best, and very possibly colored by anti-fat sentiment on the parts of some of the actors. I just don’t think that sentiment seems to have arisen to a level where it was THE causal factor, or that, from what we’ve been told, the woman is entirely free of responsibility for her fate. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe she spent her last two days begging some cold-hearted Hungarian MD to see her – but there’s absolutely no indication of that.
Certainly from a legal “who is ultimately responsible for her death” standpoint, I doubt Mythago would disagree about the hypothetical causation issue. If valid alternatives exist, folks are generally supposed to make use of them (“mitigate” the harm), rather than refusing them and demanding damages for the unmitigated harm. If you refuse to seek readily available medical care and insist on dying in the airport then you can’t usually sue the airport for killing you.
HOWEVER, I don’t know whether any valid alternatives existed in this case; there’s not always an alternative. There’s a big difference between “she insisted on non-generic Bayer aspirin” and “she insisted that her own surgeon, who is the head of surgery at Mass General and who is intimately familiar with her medical situation, was the only one who could perform the necessary operation.” Without further information it’s hard to tell, though I agree that as a statistical matter a wrongful death seems unlikely.
I suspect that the disagreement is really about allowing the “she could have gotten medical help elsewhere” to become equivalent to “she had no damages from being denied access to the plane.” In that arena, the death is not the issue: what happened in the airport is he issue.
“… and who was covered by her insurance…”
Health care abroad is not necessarily free or covered. (Though man did I ever have a great experience in the UK this one time…)
A friend of mine recently had a sudden retinal detachment while she was in Canada on business (this is apparently a thing that can happen if you’re very nearsighted, you’re welcome). She was evaluated as a very dire emergency, and yet was told at the hospital that she had best fork over low four figures worth of cash or credit if she wanted to even be seen in the ER – I mean she was not actually dying, just going blind you see. Various circumstances combined to make it more worthwhile to purchase a last-minute (also low four figures) ticket back to the US to get surgery from a doctor here, and even then the delay was so great that the surgery she needed was much more serious than it might have had to be.
It’s still unclear whether she’ll get any reimbursement from her US health plan for the ER visit abroad, and she has absolutely top-of-the-line health insurance thanks to her husband’s employment at a tech company you’ve definitely heard of.
So an average person of average income with a very very expensive medical condition in a foreign country might well be facing a choice of “sure we can treat you here but be prepared to empty your bank accounts” vs. trying to get home where WellCrossBlueChoiceHealthPoint of Arkansas will actually pay their 60%.
Everyone who travels to Europe is supposed to get an EHIC, European Health Identity Card. In Hungary, at least, the EHIC entitles you to care on the same terms as a Hungarian national (which means mainly “free”) for all urgent care.
Ah, here’s another story in which her surviving spouse says that they did not trust the doctors in Hungary, and that she wanted to be treated by her physician back home who knew her case history. After five weeks of going without medical care for kidney disease and diabetes – neither of which require particularly sophisticated treatment, but both of which can easily rage out of control if you avoid your doctor for five weeks – she died from kidney failure. She spent nine days after being denied the first flight in her home in Hungary, dying of kidney failure and not going to a doctor.
I think there might be some criminal neglect going on here on the part of her husband, to tell you the truth. Autonomy, personal choice, etc., but if my wife starts dying from the chronic disease that I know she has, I don’t give a good goddamn what she says. I’m taking her to the doctor.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/11/26/Woman-dies-after-airline-turned-her-away/UPI-70441353953221/
Robert, it does not appear that the European Health Insurance Card entitles US visitors to free health care across Europe.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Health_Insurance_Card#section_2
I didn’t say that it did. I was explicit: in Hungary, the cardholder is treated as a Hungarian national for urgent care.
Yes, an EHIC works by mutual agreement between different European countries. European citizens don’t get free healthcare in the US, and American citizens don’t get free healthcare in Europe. I mean, if they did, then there would probably be a lot of healthcare “tourism” as plane tickets tend to be a lot cheaper than medical procedures for the uninsured in the US.
American travellers should get travel insurance, that normally would cover medical procedures, but not for pre-existing conditions, which this clearly was.
(Robert’s post came in while I was writing mine so I didn’t see it, but the point is that Americans aren’t legally entitled to EHICs in the first place, so it doesn’t matter what the cardholder policies are in Hungary)
Oh, I see. I stand corrected. (Fooled by an “anyone”.)
In the home of the Scouting Movement, the United Kingdom Scouting Association is seeking comment on whether to adopt a form of the Scout Promise that omits any reference to a duty to God. The BBC quotes UK Scout Chief Commissioner Wayne Bulpitt as follows:
Federal District Judge Enjoins California’s Law Prohibiting Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy
More at the link. The ruling itself is here
Hm. That’s interesting. Understand that they – and the BSA, and Scouting movements in about 150 other countries, but not the GSUSA – belong to the WOSM (World Organization of Scouting Movements). While there is disagreement among the various countries regarding female membership and eligibility of homosexuals to be members, the WOSM doesn’t take a stand on those issues. However, it does state conclusively that the member organizations must require all their members to recognize a duty to God (while leaving the interpretation of God open so as to encompass both theistic and non-theistic religions).
Other Federal District Judge Permits Enforcement of California’s Law Prohibiting Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy
More at the link. H/T Bruce.