Work Reform

It's honestly a major contributor to the labor shortage. For anyone with a decent job, it's significantly cheaper for the spouse to just stay home until the kids are old enough to take care of themselves.

I read an interview, probably from NPR, but I can't find it at the moment. The upshot was that caring for infants is insanely expensive, since they need one-on-one care pretty much continuously.

But parents can't afford that cost, so, essentially, the price they charge for infant care is a loss-leader, and parents of older children (who need less supervision and thus more favorable staffing ratios) subsidize the cost of caring for infants. Daycare operators are barely keeping afloat.

Edit: Ah, here it is: Baby's first market failure

It’s almost like somebody pays the workers much less than the revenues and pockets the difference

My wife and I had to pay $1600 a month for daycare as things opened up after the pandemic. The teachers there would have made more working at the Burger King across the street.

Run by private equity?

I've served on the board of non-profit daycares and I [vaguely] know at least one person who actually owns a for profit daycare.

Only a complete idiot would think they were going to make any money on a daycare. The overhead is nuts -- even when paying really shitty compensation -- and the competition is relentless.

My wife is starting her own home daycare Monday for many of the reasons you listed. Almost a decade at a YMCA run Montessori, ~18/hr.

And the poor kids! The caregivers are all burnt out by terrible management and shit pay, have no motivation to provide anything beyond the necessities, and God bless them, at least a few spend their own money on supplies to at least try and enrich the time the kids spend there.

I'm really proud of her, taking a huge step into somewhat unknown water. I know the kids she cares for are going to get so much more value from her, here in her space, on her terms, than they ever would have at the center.

well we have that situation in germany right now where supposedly daycare is good because it allows women to work more hours (full time instead of half time)

it's ... let me tell you, it's a shitshow. i have come to understand that the internet is largely a propaganda apparatus. they install the thought in you that a certain way of seeing things is "normal", because everybody sees it that way. in other words, the other bots or paid influencers (idk which one) that the algorithm then pushes sothat everybody sees it.

you got 1 crazy person saying things like "actually, we should all work more, i like it, it's fun" and you know what, they can say that. anyways, that's 1 person in 1000. then the algorithm pushes it on everybody's front page sothat now everybody thinks "ah, that's a normal thing to think". and since most people follow group-think, that's now society's opinion.

internet exists to cause a shift in public opinion by astroturfing. the illusion that the thought comes from within society organically.

The irony is that this causes birth rates to plummet, which eliminates the future workforce for the very companies forcing childcare to be untenable. One of the major contradictions of capitalism is that it does not reproduce its own labor force. I guess the resolution is to replace human workers with AI.

Thinking of going abroad for dental implants. An oral surgeon said it used to be an issue with poor-quality knock off parts, but that the manufacturing has gotten really good.

Countries keep cost low by subsidizing doctors' education, by the way, which is even more expensive for them when those doctors cash out to come to the US where doctors graduate with a debt of $250,000 from schools where graduation class size hasn't changed in decades.

By the by, intensive and indiscrimnate care by specialists--where doctors want to end up instead of low-paid primary care--is definitely more expensive without necessarily leading to better outcomes.

For the same reason, nurses are not fairly compensated for their work.

Worked in them for about 7 years.

You are correct.

We had one where could never get ANY supplies 1 year in despite a 25k lump sum buy in by residents. even before paying month to month rent.

My expeince is management will play the "heroes work here" type behavior and take advantage of people's passion for elderly to then underpay then and mistreat them to the degree they do.

Chronic Luigi Insufficiency.

The Pinkerton agency has entered the chat.

If you're curious, yes they're still around, yes they're still doing it, and they're owned by Securitas now.

It's because private equity capitalists took over daycares, nursing homes, funeral services, and veterinary clinics. They're leeches on even the most indispensable aspects of society.

This is such a low effort response. I worked on the board of Directors for my daughter's daycare in the US for 8 years. Literally none of this is true. We are a non-profit and our audits are public. Feel free actually look for the accounting for a child or elder care facility and you'll find plenty of them. You'll find them anything other than horrendous. They're boring and exactly what you'd expect them to look like.

Even without margin as a factor because we're a non-profit we are still charging as much as my mortgage for an infant.

This might sound obvious but operating a care facility is expensive. Labor is the driving cost, by far, and what makes it so is legally mandated caretaker ratios. 4 infants per. 6 Toddlers per. 10 children per. Imagine if you were splitting just an infant caretaker's salary four ways, without benefits or other costs. Literally federal poverty wages would be $700/month for you. Without benefits. Without facilities. Without supplies. Just a person's full time supervision. And that person would qualify for SNAP benefits.

While there are definitely orgs focused on investor returns they're not the root cause. Care is just expensive.

Don't get all righteous at the people who dedicate their lives to caring for people in need. Even those in charge of the facilities can be doing it for the right reasons. Look at the government. Why aren't we supplementing these critical services? In my state Medicare and education are already the top tax expenditures by far. You might be able to shift some $ between priorities but the real answer appears to be that we're just not funding the government sufficiently for it to do all things for all people. If we don't take advantage of the scale of government then we're going to be paying for this stuff out of pocket.

It's just expensive no matter how you solve the problem.