skybrian's recent activity
-
Comment on Exporters without borders: why you should start a company instead of working in aid in ~finance
-
Comment on The case of missing American mushrooms in ~food
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
I recently learned that Canada’s mushroom production has been growing over the last 20 years, and much of it is exported to the United States, while production in the United States has declined. Differences in policy toward migrant workers between the United States and Canada, and differences in investments in new technology may explain the divergence in mushroom production between the two countries.
[...]
You would be surprised to learn that almost 69% of the US mushroom production occurs in the borough of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. It is a small town of about 6000 people, but mushroom-growing facilities around town produce almost 451 million pounds of mushrooms annually (2024). 451 million pounds of mushrooms would occupy about 45 American football fields or 35 soccer fields. The dollar value of mushroom production in the US is roughly $ 1 billion per year.
China is the undisputed leader in mushroom production. China accounts for 93% of the world’s global mushroom production.
[...]
Growers use an old system called “Pennsylvania doubles” to grow mushrooms. Specialized, two-story cinderblock buildings with wooden shelves and intensive manual picking characterize the system. The system is designed with the assumption of cheap labor.
The growing houses provide a strictly controlled environment for growing white button, cremini, and portobello mushrooms on stacked beds, producing approximately 400 to 500 million pounds of mushrooms annually. Growers can manage the temperature, humidity, and airflow to create optimal conditions for mushroom mycelium to grow and fruit.
[...]
As you can see in the video below, the conditions inside the mushroom-growing facilities are hot, humid, and stinky! The process of harvesting mushrooms is fairly manual, unless the grower has invested in a robotic harvesting system from companies like 4AG Robotics. Most US production facilities lack an automation design.
[...]
Mushrooms are a type of fungus. If you have the right spawn available and can control the environment economically, you can grow mushrooms year-round. Mushrooms have a short shelf life. Mushrooms are 92% water. A mushroom starts losing water as soon as it is harvested. Anyone who has seen a fresh mushroom that has begun to dehydrate knows how unappetizing it can look.
[...]
Canada and the United States grow mushrooms year-round in climate-controlled, indoor warehouses. Readers of this newsletter are aware of my massive skepticism about the economic viability of vertical farming, but mushrooms provide a counterexample in which vertical farming actually works. The main difference is that mushrooms are fungi and do not need sunlight for photosynthesis.
[...]
Most mushroom production facilities in Canada are located in British Columbia and Ontario, close to the US border, and deliver their products to the northern United States within 36-48 hours of harvest. Production geography relative to population is the structural constraint that neither shelf-life extension nor improved cold chains can fully overcome.
[...]
Mushrooms are fragile and bruise under their own weight. Vibration and pressure can cause bruising in transit. Each bruise initiates a localized decay, which accelerates from the point. It limits the number of handoffs or transfer events, since each event is a risk. Mushrooms can lose quality if they dehydrate or become too heavy, and they require an ideal relative humidity of 90-95%.
[...]
So, why is US production dropping while production in Canada is rising, even though 99.6% of Canada’s exports go to the US? A big part of the answer to this question lies in how the United States and Canada provide support to migrant workers who come over to pick mushrooms.
[...]
As mushroom farming is a year-round specialty crop, it doesn’t qualify for the H-2A temporary guest worker program. Without the H-2A labor option, growers concentrated in the Pennsylvania region are competing fiercely for local workers in a tight labor market.
The industry has used a mix of undocumented workers, immigrant workers with temporary protections, and labor contractors. The termination of TPS (Temporary Protected Status) for Venezuelan migrants, combined with broader immigration enforcement, will likely shrink the pool of available workers further.
Canada has taken a more flexible and stable approach. The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) of Canada includes mushrooms. The national commodity list for SAWP workers includes mushrooms alongside fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, and other sectors.
[...]
The impact of seasonal H2A workers is not limited to mushrooms only.
It creates a legal labor vacuum across all commodities that operate year-round. It includes year-round industries such as dairy, beef cattle and other livestock operations, hog and poultry production, mushrooms, nursery and greenhouse operations, some tree fruit operations, aquaculture, and forestry. These sectors are a significant portion of the US agriculture GDP and the food system.
-
The case of missing American mushrooms
5 votes -
Comment on Exporters without borders: why you should start a company instead of working in aid in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] Easier said than done and I'm not going to do it, but I think it's good for someone who's been there to highlight the positive impact of...From the article:
In developing countries, many people become entrepreneurs by default. Most have informal, cash-in-hand jobs. There is no certainty in entrepreneurship. At any given time, there could be a glut of opportunities, or income could completely dry up, and individuals have little control over this. When your income can differ markedly from month to month, it is hard to plot a path forward. Should you take out a loan to grow your hustle when your income could disappear the following month?
[...]
To lift the floor for the 800 million people living on less than $3 a day, we don’t need more projects; we need more payrolls.
[...]
Non-governmental organizations often try to limit the damage from this massive deficit of employment opportunities. Cash transfers can allow people to invest productively, and asset transfers mean that people do not have to save for those purchases. But NGOs are inherently limited by the generosity of donors. What if there is a better option?
A successful commercial firm does something no NGO can: it issues “cash transfers” to a large group of people every month, indefinitely, funded by the market rather than donor whims. Indeed, private sector growth is the key to the structural transformation required to create hundreds of millions of jobs. No rich country today has become wealthy through the intervention of NGOs.
Rather, it is businesses that make a country rich. Take Singapore as an example. It became an export hub, first in goods and later in services. As the private sector grew, the state had more money to invest in public goods and advanced infrastructure, enabling further private-sector growth. Growth laid the foundation for everything else.
[...]
I started Wasoko in Kenya in 2015. The seed of the idea had come from a month spent living in a rural village in Egypt a few years earlier, where I was doing remote coding work while learning Arabic. What I kept noticing was a simple, persistent problem: the neighborhood shops kept running out of basic items, such as soap, cooking oil, flour, and sugar. The shopkeeper then faced a half-day trip to the nearest city’s wholesale market to restock, at a significant cost in time and transport.
Wasoko replaced that trip with a mobile phone order and same-day delivery. By consolidating dozens of individual restocking runs into a single route—one driver, one truck, serving many shops—the marginal cost fell significantly for each shopkeeper. What had once taken half a day and eaten into thin margins could now be done on the phone in two minutes.
Wasoko eventually grew to serve more than 100,000 small businesses across six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a team of 2,000 people. Most held entry-level logistics and customer support roles—the vital first rungs of the formal economy. Each drew a monthly paycheck; that payroll helped support the lives of more than 10,000 family members. Those paychecks paid school fees, covered medication, and funded improved housing.
[...]
There are legions of historical examples. Consider Floramérica, the first cut-flower exporter in Colombia. Floramérica was founded by a few Americans in their early thirties who brought US-style business management to their pioneering venture. Within six months, they were exporting to the US and, within three years, employed 400 people.
But Floramérica didn’t just grow flowers; it engineered a multinational cold chain from scratch. It negotiated with airlines to create cargo space, designed specialized refrigerated trucks to navigate Andean mountain roads, and mastered the stringent plant import standards of US Customs. This required a level of organizational knowledge that Colombian domestic business did not have at the time. By solving these complexity problems, it created a high-productivity blueprint for an entire nation.
The knowledge didn’t stay inside Floramérica. Local employees mastered the trade and left to launch their own ventures, seeding an entire industry. Today, Colombia is the world’s second-largest flower exporter, with an ecosystem generating US$2.4 billion in annual value with 200,000 formal jobs as of 2025.
It is difficult for an NGO to compete with that level of impact. This outcome was achieved through entirely different mechanisms outside of standard aid practices: The founders of Floramérica didn’t write policy papers, disburse cash transfers, or run a randomized control trial. They built a scale-up business in a poor country selling to global markets. In so doing, they catalyzed the structural transformation that gave hundreds of thousands of people exactly what June Jambiha spent years looking for: a reliable paycheck and a path forward.
And it’s repeatable. One of the Floramérica founders, Thomas Kehler, went on to launch SalmoAmerica in Chile—one of the first salmon exporters in what is a $6.5 billion industry employing 86,000 people in the country as of 2023.
[...]
Through that decade of venture building in Africa, I came to understand a harder truth: the path to widespread prosperity would not come from simply helping local businesses operate more efficiently. Wasoko was a start, but local purchasing power was deeply constrained. Creating genuine engines of income growth requires businesses built to serve markets beyond developing countries—using global purchasing power to drive convergence.
Easier said than done and I'm not going to do it, but I think it's good for someone who's been there to highlight the positive impact of international trade every now and then?
-
Exporters without borders: why you should start a company instead of working in aid
9 votes -
Comment on US Mint buys drug cartel gold and sells it as ‘American’ in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Every year, the United States Mint sells more than $1 billion of investment-grade gold coins. Each is stamped with an icon like the bald eagle, signifying the government’s guarantee, required by law, that the gold is 100 percent American.
[...]
But a New York Times investigation has found that the government’s program of gold sales is based on a lie. The Mint is actually the last link in a chain that launders foreign gold, much of it illegally mined, for an insatiable market.
The Mint buys gold that originates in a Colombian drug cartel mine. It makes Lady Liberty coins out of gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and from a Congolese mine that is part-owned by the Chinese government, records show. Some Mint gold has come from a company in Honduras that dug up an Indigenous graveyard for the ore underneath.
[...]
Mr. Cuevas showed us ledger entries on the shop’s computer. His suppliers from La Mandinga, he said, have registered under a Colombian program for small-scale miners, or barequeros. Nearly anyone can get a license, as long as they mine in authorized areas using only hand tools and no mercury.
Of course, La Mandinga’s workers are not mining only with hand tools. Or in authorized areas. And they are using mercury. Mr. Cuevas knows all of this. He mines in La Mandinga himself. But it is not his job to look beyond the paperwork. And the Colombian authorities rarely examine barequero gold’s origins to determine legality.
Instead, they ask one question: Does it have paperwork?
[...]
Gold industry players know how this works. “If you’re buying from barequeros, you’re buying illegal gold,” said the trader Patrick Schein. He said his firm, Gold by Gold, will not buy barequero gold.
The shop where Mr. Cuevas works, like others in town, sells to a government-owned exporter. The exporter said it checks the same database that Mr. Cuevas uses, verifying that the gold is legal. The gold from La Mandinga is mixed with supplies from around Colombia and melted into bars. Export records show that many of them, worth about $255 million over the past year or so, arrive in Texas.
[...]
At a refinery outside Dallas called Dillon Gage, workers dump the imported gold into a glowing cauldron, mixing it with molten gold from other suppliers: South American mines, secondhand U.S. jewelry dealers and Peruvian pawn shops, according to records and interviews.
But to Dillon Gage’s customers, once that gold leaves the Dallas cauldron, it ceases to be foreign. Dillon Gage is in the United States and mixes American gold with Colombian gold. So, the industry logic goes, the end product must be American. “As far as they’re concerned, it originated within the U.S.,” said Terry Hanlon, Dillon Gage’s chief executive.
[...]
A full supply chain audit in the United States would flag the risk of Clan del Golfo gold. Colombian gold is considered high-risk by industry standards, and the U.S. government itself has documented the Clan’s operations in Caucasia, in particular.
But for two decades — a period covering nearly all of the post-Sept. 11 gold boom — the Mint never asked its suppliers where they bought gold, a Treasury Department inspector general audit found in 2024.
-
US Mint buys drug cartel gold and sells it as ‘American’
20 votes -
Comment on NHTSA tells US Congress: advanced impaired driving detection tech isn't ready in ~transport
skybrian Link ParentLooks like the Supreme Court will be hearing arguments on whether geofence warrants are legal soon. But meanwhile, Google changed how they handle location data, so maybe that won't work anymore?Looks like the Supreme Court will be hearing arguments on whether geofence warrants are legal soon. But meanwhile, Google changed how they handle location data, so maybe that won't work anymore?
It is not clear how broad the impact of the court’s decision in the case will be, because Google now stores location data on mobile devices themselves, rather than in its own database. Additionally, even if the court ultimately determines that the search violated the Fourth Amendment, the government contends that the evidence against Chatrie can come in based on the the lower court’s finding that law enforcement acted in good faith in obtaining the location data from Google.
But as one “friend of the court” brief, filed by the Cato Institute, points out, the court could still clarify a variety of issues related to cellphones, technology, and the Fourth Amendment – for example, whether Americans have a property interest in digital records, even if they are stored with tech companies like Google, and when the government must obtain a warrant if it seeks to search digital records.
-
Comment on How Google’s Sergey Brin helped fuel a political war in California in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.ph/E0cMc From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Brin’s political push reflects a broader awakening among California’s ultrawealthy. Over the past six months, the proposed billionaire tax and a heated governor’s race have drawn tech titans and business leaders more directly into the state’s affairs — a space many of them have traditionally kept at arm’s length.
Prior to this year, Brin’s last contribution in a California election cycle was 2010 when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor and the Google co-founder largely backed climate causes. He’s now spent more than $58 million in the last four months, including an extra $9 million disclosed late Friday, but more importantly has helped mobilize a network of fellow tech titans in a push to sway state issues.
“The wealth tax was a wake up call, it was a fire that just lit up Silicon Valley literally in a matter of weeks,” said Steven Maviglio, a veteran Democratic strategist. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Altogether, ultrawealthy donors have injected more than $270 million into California’s political scene in this election cycle. Outside of the wealth tax, billionaire Tom Steyer is emerging as a top Democratic candidate for governor after the downfall of former Representative Eric Swalwell following allegations of sexual assault. Steyer, a former hedge fund manager, has spent more than $140 million in his election bid, crowding TV airwaves with ads and labeling himself a “class traitor” with a campaign modeled after Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
[...]
Ballots for the June 2 primary election start going out next week. Brin and a cohort of the ultrawealthy including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and venture capitalists Vinod Khosla and John Doerr have plowed millions into supporting Matt Mahan, a Silicon Valley mayor, with a back-to-basics agenda and a penchant for taking on the state’s Democratic establishment.
[...]
That money has helped Mahan buy airtime and attracted controversy, but his polling numbers remain stuck in the single digits while Steyer’s well-funded progressive campaign is gaining favor with voters. Brin has also backed Republican Steve Hilton, who’s currently leading polls.
[...]
“You have two polar opposites going on. You have a billionaire running who has actually fully adopted an agenda that the vast majority of voters agree with: Taxing billionaires, funding healthcare, fighting back against ICE,” said Lorena Gonzalez, head of the state’s largest union group, the California Federation of Labor Unions. “And then you have billionaires pushing a candidate whose talking points are apologetic to the tech industry.”
[...]
In California, Brin’s newfound political action was catalyzed by the wealth tax proposal, which would levy a one-time 5% tax on billionaires to help offset federal health-care cuts. In a Signal group chat earlier this year with other Silicon Valley elite, Brin floated the idea of raising hundreds of millions of dollars to influence California politics, according to a person who saw the message.
[...]
Shortly after leaving California, Brin contributed $20 million to a new group dedicated to fighting the tax and pushing pro-business policies, Building a Better California, making him the single largest contributor. He gave it another $37 million over the spring, as the group quickly started supporting a trio of anti-wealth tax measures that could nullify a billionaire tax if it gets passed in an election.
[...]
Joining Brin in the effort were other billionaires, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and venture capitalist Michael Moritz. Peter Thiel, who also left California ahead of the New Year’s Day deadline, gave $3 million to a separate committee opposing the wealth tax.
[...]
Many in Sacramento are skeptical that Brin and his fellow ultra-rich will succeed in swaying California state politics. They point to the failed candidacy of former eBay executive Meg Whitman, who spent around $144 million of her own fortune to become governor, or even venture capitalist Tim Draper’s longshot initiative to split California into six separate states.
-
How Google’s Sergey Brin helped fuel a political war in California
4 votes -
Comment on NHTSA tells US Congress: advanced impaired driving detection tech isn't ready in ~transport
skybrian (edited )Link ParentI think the idea is that the sensor readings would only be used locally to somehow disable the car… which is itself a problem, but it’s not technically surveillance. By contrast, a ride share or...I think the idea is that the sensor readings would only be used locally to somehow disable the car… which is itself a problem, but it’s not technically surveillance.
By contrast, a ride share or even just using Google Maps for directions tracks your car’s location and speed. They use it for determining traffic. (They do promise that it’s anonymized.)
-
Comment on What’s the best 3D-printed thing you have? in ~talk
skybrian Link ParentMaking the encoder wheel bigger means that more holes fit per degree of rotation and therefore the speed that the lever angle changes (which controls the sound) can be measured more precisely. How...Making the encoder wheel bigger means that more holes fit per degree of rotation and therefore the speed that the lever angle changes (which controls the sound) can be measured more precisely. How small the holes can be printed is limited by the resolution of 3D printing, so I went bigger instead.
And sure, there are other ways to do it, but I like the look.
-
Comment on NHTSA tells US Congress: advanced impaired driving detection tech isn't ready in ~transport
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Back in 2021, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included a provision that forced the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to mandate "advanced impaired-driving prevention technology" in all new passenger vehicles. Essentially, the legislation would force automakers to install anti-drunk-driving technology in cars from the factory. These systems are supposed to be passive, much like the kind of eye-sight monitors present in many new cars made by Subaru, General Motors, Ford, and others—but with the ability to shut off the vehicle if it detects deviations in driving or driver behavior that suggest impairment.
Of course, ideological divisions ran rampant within Congress, with Republican representatives like Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced the No Kill Switches in Cars Act in February 2025. However, federal safety regulators are now weighing in from a more scientific point of view. In a February 2026 report directed to Congress, titled "Advanced Impaired Driving Prevention Technology," NHTSA officials said the passive anti-drunk driving technology isn't ready yet.
"Currently, detection technology around the legal limit continues to have an error rate that would be unacceptably high ... while NHTSA has not made a final determination about the necessary level of accuracy, even a 99.9 percent detection accuracy level could result in millions to tens of millions of instances each year where the technology would incorrectly prevent or limit drivers from operating their vehicles, or fail to prevent or limit impaired drivers from doing so," the report reads. "At this time, NHTSA is not aware of any technology that claims to achieve anywhere close to [the needed] level of accuracy."
[...]
The report goes on to say that while the technology is worth investing in over the long term, federal regulators aren't aware of any version with anywhere close to this level of accuracy in minimizing false positives and false negatives. It's not just the opinion of federal regulators that the technology is behind, either; the report says testing data shows that the current advanced impaired-driving prevention technology doesn't meet the "precision, speed, and reliability" required by the act.
[...]
Counteracting drunk driving is not just about stopping the car from being driven, but also about safely interfering with impaired drivers who are already in motion. Ensuring the car doesn't start for drunk drivers is one thing, but federal officials say disrupting an already-rolling drunk driver adds additional layers of complication; as NHTSA points out, simply stopping a vehicle operated by a drunk driver may lead to unintended consequences.
Either way, the federal safety watchdog says that, even if the technology isn't quite ready, additional resources to combat drunk driving are essential. Behavioral approaches and ignition interlock devices are well-established methods in the anti-drunk driving tool kit, and advanced impaired-driving prevention technology could prove to be another worthy avenue ...in due time.
-
NHTSA tells US Congress: advanced impaired driving detection tech isn't ready
25 votes -
Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of April 20 in ~society
skybrian LinkTrump fires all 24 members of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s governing body But it's not like they were being listened to anymore anyway: ...Trump fires all 24 members of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s governing body
But it's not like they were being listened to anymore anyway:
The White House’s decision last month to ask Congress to give NSF $900 million next year for a new Antarctic research icebreaker is another example of how the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has prevented the board from meeting its obligations, says Stassun, who until yesterday chaired the group’s committee on large research facilities.
“OMB basically said very directly to NSF’s chief of research facilities that ‘you will build a new research vessel,’ and there was no involvement by the board, which is required to approve and authorize any major infrastructure investment by NSF,” Stassun notes. “And when the board asked, the response was, ‘Well, OMB was very clear in its directive.’”
...
Lofgren worries Trump will “fill the NSB with MAGA loyalists who won't stand up to him.” But Stassun believes it doesn’t matter whether Trump restocks the board or leaves its positions unfilled. As proof, he points to the increasingly awkward conversations in the last year between the board and NSF’s top two officials: Brian Stone, Panchanathan’s former chief of staff and now designated NSF head, and Micah Cheatham, its chief management officer.
“We would ask them, ‘Are you following board governance directives?’” Stassun says. “And their answer would be, in effect, ‘We don't listen to you anymore.’”
-
Comment on The people do not yearn for automation in ~society
skybrian Link ParentI think adoption of AI is higher in the US? People might have more experience with it, including with earlier models that were worse.I think adoption of AI is higher in the US? People might have more experience with it, including with earlier models that were worse.
-
Comment on Single, solo, poor, woman gets $500k pre-tax, how to make the most of it? in ~finance
skybrian (edited )Link ParentPerhaps the tax issue could be worked around by a 10-year mortgage, to be paid using the IRA. Living expenses come out of rent. After 10 years, the mortgage is paid off and the income from the...Perhaps the tax issue could be worked around by a 10-year mortgage, to be paid using the IRA. Living expenses come out of rent. After 10 years, the mortgage is paid off and the income from the rent is still there.
Without using real numbers, this is just a story, not a plan. But I've heard roughly similar stories before.
It's definitely having all your assets in one basket, though.
-
Comment on Sloth World will not open following animal deaths in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
A planned International Drive attraction called Sloth World will not open following dozens of animal deaths, conservation groups said late Friday, as its 13 remaining sloths were placed in the care of animal experts at Central Florida Zoo & Biological Gardens.
The 13 sloths arrived Friday and are in quarantine at the Sanford zoo, said Richard E. Glover, CEO of the zoo. Sloth World owner Ben Agresta reached out to zoo officials early in the week, Glover said.
In a joint statement, the Sloth Conservation Foundation and the Sloth Institute, two international conservation groups that had been critical of the attraction, said Sloth World would be closing permanently. It had been announced in December as a guided, walk-through tour with an emphasis on conservation and education. It was initially scheduled to begin public tours in February, and reportedly has sold many advance VIP tickets at $49 each.
[...]
News reports last week established that at least 31 sloths have died since late 2024 in a converted warehouse operated by Sloth World about a mile from the planned public venue. The conservation groups said Friday that another 24 sloths obtained by Sloth World are unaccounted for.
[...]
Also on Friday, Orange County said a county building inspector had sought access to the Sloth World warehouse Thursday because it does not have a required permit to hold animals, but was unable to gain entrance despite four separate attempts.
[...]
In December, Agresta described to the Sentinel his plans for Sloth World as a home for guided walk-through tours among sloths living in a re-created rainforest setting. He said he expected to have at least 40 sloths in the building.
But by that time, inspectors for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission had collected details about the deaths of 31 sloths imported from Guyana and Peru via Miami International Airport in late 2024 and early 2025.
The first 21 were taken to the warehouse, which had neither electricity nor water. Space heaters were added, but a tripped fuse kept the animals in the cold for at least one night. Later, 10 more sloths were delivered, but two were dead on arrival, and the others died due to health issues, an incident report said.
FWC detailed the warehouse conditions in a report of an August 2025 inspection disclosed by Inside Climate News. Some information in the state report was provided by Peter Bandre, who — at the time — was Sloth World’s vice president and a business partner of Agresta. Bandre has since left Sloth World.
-
Sloth World will not open following animal deaths
19 votes -
Comment on Planned Parenthood is turning to services like Botox to stay afloat in ~health
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
The Sacramento clinic is part of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, the largest Planned Parenthood affiliate in the country, covering Northern California and parts of Nevada.
It has started offering a new set of services, ranging from Botox to IV hydration for skin rejuvenation, or for after a night of drinking, all of which patients pay for with cash. They can also request sedation for certain procedures, like the placement of an intrauterine device.
The shift comes as Planned Parenthood faces financial uncertainty after President Donald Trump and Congress stripped funding for the abortion-rights organization as part of the tax and spending package passed last year. The cuts, which prevent Planned Parenthood and other organizations that perform abortions from accepting Medicaid as payment for non-abortion services, are set to expire this summer. Congress could renew them for another year.
The affiliate says about 75 to 80% of its patients are on Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program. Revenue from the new offerings could allow the affiliate to continue providing reproductive healthcare while it tries to fill the funding gap.
[...]
Planned Parenthood charges $9 per unit of Botox, which, depending on location, could be 25 to 50% cheaper than other providers.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and state lawmakers have allocated hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding to Planned Parenthood and other organizations like it since the federal cuts, including $90 million in February.
[...]
The organization's leaders, though, say it isn't clear whether that will cover costs for core services, including cancer screenings, STI testing and contraceptive care, in the long run if Congress reinstates cuts.
[...]
While the affiliate offers Botox and IV hydration at select locations for now, it's exploring an expansion into cosmetic fillers and GLP-1 weight-loss treatments. Dalton says the new services could serve as a blueprint for other clinics trying to keep their doors open.
Thanks for the additional context. (The first two links go to the same page; did you mean to link to something else?)
You’ve said some positive things about the author too, but some of what you wrote makes me wonder if we read the same article.
It seems rather cynical to summarize it as “you can get rich by doing what I did" when he didn’t appeal to greed or write anything about how he personally benefitted? Instead he made some claims about how what his company did benefited others. It’s appealing to an imagined reader who is interested in making an impact on the world rather than setting out to get rich, because they’re also considering working for an NGO.
(I suppose one would expect that he earned something from co-founding a business employing a so many people, but that’s left to the imagination.)
This seems like a rather cynical way to describe doing a better job at delivering food. I think you’re making assumptions going far beyond what we know, using loaded words like “abused” and “cornered.” When paying workers more means charging poor merchants and their customers more for food, it seems like there are tradeoffs to be made and we don’t know much about them. No prices are even mentioned. So how should we know whether their prices are too low or too high in the local context?
You’re also assuming that some competitors were harmed but we don’t know anything about them or what happened to them. If they charged more for worse service and lost to a more efficient competitor, maybe it’s for the best?
So maybe they did some things wrong, but we don’t actually know that. This is just a sketch using a few anecdotes and some round numbers for flavor.
And that seems like a downside of starting a business. There’s no scientific study because they didn’t need to do one to appeal to donors. So we know a lot less about what really happened.
I do think you’re right that there’s a place for nonprofits too.