plant lover, cookie monster, shoe fiend
15945 stories
·
19 followers

Living in privately rented homes linked to faster biological ageing, study finds | Housing | The Guardian

1 Comment

Living in a privately rented home is linked to more rapid biological ageing, according to researchers who tested DNA and found the tenure is associated with twice the ageing effect of obesity and half that of smoking.

The peer-reviewed study of 1,420 UK householders found housing circumstances can “get under the skin” with significant consequences for health, said academics at the University of Essex and the University of Adelaide . Their findings were published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Falling repeatedly into arrears and exposure to pollution were also linked to faster biological ageing – the cumulative damage to the body’s tissues and cells, irrespective of actual age.

The study tracked a process called methylation in people who are part of the ongoing UK Household Longitudinal Survey. Methylation is regarded as a fundamental mechanism that drives human ageing.

About 5m households live in privately rented accommodation in the UK – a a figure that has doubled in the last 20 years. Costs are higher, conditions are worse and tenure is more precarious than in owner-occupied housing or socially rented housing.

The study concluded: “Our finding that tenure is associated with faster ageing at nearly half the rate of that associated with current smoking and twice that with obesity suggests that our results may have clinical significance.

“Policies to reduce the stress and uncertainty associated with private renting, such as ending no-fault evictions, limiting rent increases and improving conditions, may go some way to reducing the negative impacts.”

The impact of renting in the private sector, as opposed to outright ownership, was almost double that of being out of work rather than being employed.

As an observational study, the research was not able to determine what is causing the link between housing tenure and biological ageing, and the DNA samples analysed so far were only from white, European householders.

But the good news for renters is that the process is reversible and “improving or changing the conditions for people with faster biological ageing can correct this”, the authors state.

By contrast, the study found that despite the stigmatisation associated with social renting, it was not found to differ from outright ownership in terms of association with biological ageing. Social renting is typically lower cost and offers greater security of tenure than private renting. The authors stressed that the DNA methylation-derived measures are relatively new and more data will be collected to assess how biological ageing markers change over time.

Private renters typically live in worse conditions that other householders, with greater problems such as cold, damp and disrepair. The English Housing Survey estimated that in 2021, 23% of private rented homes did not meet the Decent Home Standard, compared with 13% of owner-occupied and 10% of social-rented homes.

Responding to the study, Dan Wilson Craw, the deputy chief executive of the campaign group Generation Rent, said: “Our home is so important to our health. Uncertainty about how long we can live somewhere is stressful, while disrepair and damp conditions make us physically ill. Private renters, who face the threat of arbitrary eviction and live in the worst quality housing, are particularly vulnerable to poor health as a result. As more older people have no option but to rent, policymakers need to act urgently.”

Read the whole story
sarcozona
34 minutes ago
reply
Making renting only “for the poor” and having weak protections for renters adds so much strain and uncertainty to your life as a renter
Epiphyte City
Share this story
Delete

Israel Gaza: Hamas raped and mutilated women on 7 October, BBC hears

1 Share

Read the whole story
sarcozona
4 hours ago
reply
Epiphyte City
Share this story
Delete

2 patients die in ER waiting room of hospital on Montreal's South Shore | CTV News

1 Share

An investigation is underway after two people died while waiting in the emergency room at Anna-Laberge Hospital in Châteauguay on Montreal's South Shore.

The Centre intégré de santé et de services sociaux de la Montérégie-Ouest confirmed the news, offering its sympathies "to the families involved."

The centre says it will not comment further.

"We take these situations very seriously and will cooperate fully with the ongoing investigations," it said. "We are currently experiencing a very busy period and wait times are very high."

The centre says it has met "in recent days" with the Quebec Health Ministry and other CISSSs in the Montérégie region to find ways to reduce pressure in the ERs.

"Further meetings are scheduled for early this week," it told CTV News. "Every effort is being made to reduce the pressure on emergency rooms for the well-being of both teams and patients. We will never compromise on patient safety."

Extended pressure on ERs is a major problem, according to the ASMUQ (Association des spécialistes en médecine d'urgence du Québec).

"In the emergency, for two-three days to be at 150-200 per cent, we can survive, we manage, but when it's been two, four, six weeks in Anna-Laberge case, it does become dysfunctional," said ASMUQ president Dr. Gilbert Boucher. "At 200 per cent there are people everywhere. You basically put patients anywhere they will fit, computer systems have problems keeping track of those patients, the ratio of nurses-per-patient explodes and it becomes to the point where triage nurse is basically the worst job in the hospital because the waiting room is full and nobody gets seen and then bad things happen to patients, which is really, really unfortunate."

Boucher said the ASMUQ has spoken to doctors at Anna-Laberge and they were very distressed. Losing patients who haven't seen a doctor is "our nightmare."

"People are going to be pointing fingers at the people who made the decision to put them in the waiting room, but, really, we're putting them in an impossible situation where day after day after day nobody gets seen, and the waiting room is full," he said.

Boucher said some doctors have told the ASMUQ that they can only see between eight and 10 patients a day because there are no rooms, no nurses and no stretchers.

"It's quite distressing," he said.

In addition, Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé visited Anna-Laberge Hospital on Sunday.

"The events reported are extremely worrying," he said. "Our thoughts are with the families affected."

Dubé says he hoped "to take the pulse of what was happening on the ground" and speak with the people working.

"One thing is certain: we need to improve the situation in our emergency rooms," said the health minister. "But also throughout the patient pathway, from before they arrive at the hospital to after they leave."

Anna-Laberge Hospital has a reputation for having the longest ER wait times in Quebec.

According to a recent study by the Montreal Economic Institute, patients spent an average of 10 hours and 27 minutes in the ER in 2022.

Across the province, patients needing immediate medical attention waited an average of five hours and 11 minutes.

Boucher said that if nothing is done to relieve stress on emergency rooms that are well above capacity, more situations like the one at Anna-Laberge will happen. 

"Anna-Laberge is over 200 per cent again this morning!" he said. "Despite the minister going there on Thursday, despite the tremendous amount of pressure in the hospital, they're still in their same set up and there are other hospitals at 200 per cent day in and day out for many weeks... We need the entire system to help us."

Read the whole story
sarcozona
5 hours ago
reply
Epiphyte City
Share this story
Delete

UCSF tries new antibodies tactic to eradicate long COVID symptoms

1 Share

|Updated

Nanette covers California's public universities - the University of California and California State University - as well as community colleges and private universities. She's written about sexual misconduct at UC and Stanford, the precarious state of accreditation at City College of San Francisco, and what happens when the UC Berkeley student government discovers a gay rights opponent in its midst. She has exposed a private art college where students rack up massive levels of debt (one student's topped $400k), and covered audits peering into UC finances, education lawsuits and countless student protests.

But writing about higher education also means getting a look at the brainy creations of students and faculty: Robotic suits that help paralyzed people walk. Online collections of folk songs going back hundreds of years. And innovations touching on everything from virtual reality to baseball.

Nanette is also covering the COVID-19 pandemic and served as health editor during the first six months of the crisis, which quickly ended her brief tenure as interim investigations editor.

Previously, Nanette covered K-12 education. Her stories led to changes in charter school laws, prompted a ban on Scientology in California public schools, and exposed cheating and censorship in testing.

A past president of the Society of Professional Journalists' Northern California chapter, Nanette has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a B.A. in sociology from Queens College. She speaks English and Spanish.

She can be reached at nasimov@sfchronicle.com.

Read the whole story
sarcozona
7 hours ago
reply
Epiphyte City
Share this story
Delete

Supreme Court hears a case that could wreak havoc on the tax code : NPR

2 Shares

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in an obscure tax case with potentially trillions of dollars in tax consequences for the federal budget. It is a case that has tax law specialists both gobsmacked and alarmed.

The words of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution do not roll off the tongue. Enacted in 1913, it says: "Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

In reality, the amendment was passed to reverse a Supreme Court decision that basically had made it impossible to have a federal income tax.

The Trump tax cuts at the heart of the case

The operative understanding of what the amendment has meant for more than a century is now being challenged by Charles and Kathleen Moore. Backed by anti-regulatory groups, they are specifically challenging a provision in then-President Donald Trump's huge 2017 corporate tax cut, a provision that helps pay for some of those tax cuts.

The Moores contend that they have never actually made money from their foreign investment in an Indian company. Yes, they concede their investment has increased in value by well over a half-million dollars. But, they maintain that because they have not yet received any actual money, they are being unconstitutionally taxed on unrealized income.

Some of the facts the Moores have put forth are disputed, but importantly, the case is widely viewed by advocates on both sides as a preventive strike against any wealth tax of the kind proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Not that anyone thinks such a tax has any chance of passing in Congress.

Still, if the Moores were to win, the federal government could be forced to pay back billions of dollars in corporate tax collections, and the effects for lots of other tax provisions could be profound.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, shepherded the 2017 tax law through the House, including the provision before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

"As a person who drafted that ... the goal was to finance a conversion from one system to another," Ryan says. "I'm not for a wealth tax but I think if you use this as an argument to spike a wealth tax, you're going to basically get rid of ... a third of the tax code."

The background to the arguments

The Moores are portrayed as sympathetic plaintiffs in Supreme Court briefs and a video posted on the webpage of the anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Charles Moore described how he invested $40,000 in his friend Ravi Agrawal's power tool business in India 18 years ago, an investment now worth more than $500,000. "If Indian farmers could be made more productive by bringing power tools to them that are suitable for their types of farms, that would be great," Moore said in the posted interview on the CEI website.

Lawyers for the Moores describe the couple as playing no active role in the company. But documents disclosed by the publication Tax Notes show that Charles Moore was far more involved in the company's management than he suggests. Records show he served on the board of the company for five years between 2012 and 2017, that he was reimbursed for thousands of dollars in travel expenses to and from India, and that he provided the company short-term infusions of cash, that were never used, but repaid with interest 60 days later with 12% interest.

George Callas, who served for 15 years as a Republican staffer for tax-writing committees in Congress, sees all this as suspicious.

"Why would you loan a company money for 60 days, have it sit in a bank account, never be used, and then repay it with a big interest rate, unless you were just trying to find a way to get money out of the company without calling it that?" Callas says.

All of this gets to the critical question posed by the Moores, and their objection to paying a one-time $15,000 tax on an investment that is now worth more than 15 times its original value.

Why the tax was levied

The tax was imposed by Congress as a one-time payment to cover the transfer from one international tax rule to another. Under the old system, if you earned foreign income overseas in a foreign corporation that you owned, you wouldn't have to pay taxes on those earnings until you brought the profits back to the United States. Congress saw that as a perverse incentive to keep profits offshore, and by some estimates there was as much as $3 trillion in shielded offshore profits.

In order to move to a new system, the idea was that a one-time transition tax, at a low rate, was needed. For the Moores, their one-time tax was $15,000, coincidentally roughly the amount Charles Moore was reimbursed for travel expenses. The Moores paid the tax and then challenged it in court as unconstitutional.

"They never saw income. It never hit their bank account. They never got cash. They never got a check," says Ilya Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute, who wrote a brief siding with the Moores in the case. "Their stake in the company increased but they did not get any income." Although the value of the Moores' investment has grown, he contends, they "have never seen a red cent from this investment."

But Callas, who, with Speaker Ryan, drafted and steered the 2017 tax bill through the Republican House, says the Moores' tax is realized income, in just the same way that real estate and other business partnerships are taxed, whether or not the income is distributed. Similarly, he says Congress has over time used various devices to prevent corporations from setting up what are called corporate pocketbooks to escape paying taxes.

"So in the international context, I'm going to set up a corporation in the Cayman Islands ... and I'm going to contribute money, capital to it, and that corporation is going to make investments around the world ... and as long as the profit stays in my Cayman subsidiary, I would never have to pay any tax. So, we have something in the tax code that congress enacted in 1962 ... that prevents that," Callas says.

Broader impact of a ruling

In other words, it's not just the Moores' one-time tax at risk in this case. Remember, this is a tax that is expected to yield $340 billion by 2027, from mainly huge corporations, and the lion's share of those taxes have already been collected.

What's more, various other tax regimes have been enacted to prevent tax dodges by the rich, and those too could be at risk, according to Callas. In the Moores' case, they owned 11% of the Indian company, and under federal law, that is considered a controlling interest, meaning the owners have influence over the timing of any distributions and dividends, a leverage that Congress wanted to rein in to prevent tax avoidance.

"It's not the Supreme Court's job to second-guess Congress on exactly what percentage of ownership should constitute control," Callas says. "That's not their job."

And tax law experts from liberal to conservative warn that if the Supreme Court were to strike down the tax provision, the effects would be disastrous.

Chye-Ching Huang, director of the NYU Tax Law Center, says, "It would be chaos, and we would be facing a tsunami of tax litigation over years and decades trying to sort through the rubble of this."

The justices "are not playing with fire," says Callas. They are playing with "enriched uranium," and they don't even know they could "blow up large portions of the tax code."

That said, a phalanx of conservative, anti-regulatory, and anti-tax groups is arrayed against the tax in Tuesday's case, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — even though they supported the 2017 tax bill that included the provision before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

That clearly alarms tax experts, including Callas, who served as Speaker Ryan's chief tax counsel at the time the bill was negotiated and passed. He notes that at the request of the Chamber of Commerce and other stakeholders, House Republicans made many specific changes to the bill, but there was "no discussion" of any "constitutional vulnerability." It was "purely a discussion of how to design the policy appropriately."

As Callas caustically observes, for the chamber and other stakeholders years later "to discover constitutional concerns that they didn't raise before" strikes me as "opportunistic."

Read the whole story
sarcozona
8 hours ago
reply
Epiphyte City
acdha
14 hours ago
reply
Washington, DC
Share this story
Delete

Tesla whistleblower calls cars with Autopilot “experiments in public roads” | Ars Technica

2 Shares

A former Tesla employee who leaked thousands of accident reports and other documents expressed his doubts about the safety of Tesla's Autopilot system in an interview with the BBC published today.

"I don't think the hardware is ready and the software is ready," ex-Tesla employee Lukasz Krupski said. "It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads. So even if you don't have a Tesla, your children still walk in the footpath."

The nonprofit group Blueprint for Free Speech recently awarded Krupski with its Whistleblowing Prize. "In late 2021, Lukasz realised that—even as a service technician—he had access to a shockingly wide range of internal data at Tesla," the group's prize announcement said. "Not only did access controls seem almost entirely absent, other lapses were evident in the data Lukasz was seeing: serious lapses that risked putting Tesla's customers, and those sharing the roads with them, in danger." Those safety risks included sudden accelerations and braking.

Krupski was also featured last month in a New York Times article titled, "Man vs. Musk: A Whistleblower Creates Headaches for Tesla." Tesla CEO Elon Musk once thanked Krupski after the employee "put out a fire at a Tesla car delivery location in Norway, seriously burning his hands and preventing a disaster," the report said.

"Congratulations for saving the day!" Musk wrote to Krupski in a March 2019 email after the incident, a few months after Krupski was hired. But Krupski now says that "he was harassed, threatened and eventually fired after complaining about what he considered grave safety problems at his workplace near Oslo," the NYT report said.

Tesla took legal action against Krupski

Krupski "was part of a crew that helped prepare Teslas for buyers but became so frustrated with the company that last year he handed over reams of data from the carmaker's computer system to Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper," the report said.

The data Krupski leaked included lists of employees and personal information, as well as "thousands of accident reports and other internal Tesla communications." The documents helped form the basis of reports on Tesla's difficulties in manufacturing the long-delayed Cybertruck.

Krupski was fired last year. Among other things, his bosses accused him of taking pictures at a Tesla facility in violation of company policy. Krupski said he took photos at the facility to document safety problems.

Tesla "accused Mr. Krupski of misappropriating company information and threatened to seek damages from him," and "obtained an injunction from a Norwegian court ordering Mr. Krupski not to distribute any more company information," the NYT wrote. "The court also seized his laptop and turned it over to Tesla."

Autopilot safety investigation

Meanwhile, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been investigating Tesla Autopilot safety in response to crashes, including some causing deaths. Krupski told the NYT that he was interviewed by the NHTSA several times, and has provided information to the US Securities and Exchange Commission about Tesla's accounting practices.

The ease with which Krupski obtained personal information about Tesla employees is under scrutiny, with the Netherlands Data Protection Authority investigating the data breach. Former Tesla employee Benson Pai sued the company in US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that it "failed to implement or follow reasonable data security procedures" to prevent unauthorized access. The lawsuit seeks class-action status.

Krupski reportedly intends to sue Tesla for compensation over his firing. But because he has used up all his savings, Krupski "cannot pursue the case further until he scrapes together enough money to pay a lawyer," the NYT wrote.

Krupski initially stayed anonymous after leaking the Tesla data but went public for the first time last month. Krupski told the BBC that the experience of being a whistleblower has been "terrifying" and that "I barely sleep at night sometimes."

Tesla says in its Vehicle Safety Report that in Q4 2022, there was "one crash for every 4.85 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology," compared to one crash for every 1.4 million miles driven in Tesla cars without Autopilot enabled.

Tesla has faced several lawsuits over crashes, but juries have so far sided with the car company. "Tesla has by far the best real-world AI," Musk said in a December 1 post on <a href="http://twitter.com" rel="nofollow">twitter.com</a>.

Read the whole story
sarcozona
8 hours ago
reply
Epiphyte City
acdha
10 hours ago
reply
Washington, DC
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories