> they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom.
Sorry, this sounds so absurd you can't just leave us hanging to guess what was specifically claimed ;)
In a similar vein, in my family we had a complaint to social care worker that our Grandma (who was immobile in a bed and without verbal contact because of terminal Alzheimer) was improperly taken care of. But as my mom is a nurse who did all the feeding, cleaning 2x a day and installed anti bedsore mattress, no fucking way.
We know 99% that the complaint was from one of the people in the family, as almost nobody else knew or cared what was going on.
We had a complaint like this for my dad when he was near the end.
We got in a verbal argument with a care worker who wouldn't do anything when she came to take care of him, wouldn't feed him, clean him, talk or even look at him. Except for the few times where she screamed at him she just waited for her time to leave. After the argument she sent a complaint letter to the local government claiming he was improperly taken care of (even though we cared for him every day in addition to paying people like her to help).
Here is where it gets good: He was put under care of the state until the matter was resolved, with a state appointed curator who received a percentage of his pension as payment and had full control of all decisions related to his care as well as his bank account.
That meant we could no longer make accommodations in his house without their approval, every decision we took for him had to go through them. We had to pay for the large costs of care ourselves because it's not remotely realistic to go through the government to expense food, hygiene supplies and everything needed to take care of an elderly man near death. In addition to that we couldn't get rid of the agency that provided the abusive care workers, they made sure to make buddy-buddy with the curator and to paint us as abusers.
We went to his home every day to care for him and we would see the care workers just sitting there doing nothing, perfectly aware we were powerless to change anything or even throw them out. Eventually, after months of legal costs and being treated like abusers, we got in front of a judge and we were put back in charge after my dad begged for it. He was very close to the end then and I will always be bitter at how the state and these people conspired to take him away from us and prevent us from getting him better care during his final months.
Pretty sure you were a victim of a criminal nexus that formed to take advantage of the laws, the machinery of the state, and private providers. Just like the (juvie) court-to-prison-pipelines that we hear about every once in a while.
This kind of predatory guardianship is what "I Care a Lot" was based on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Care_a_Lot). It's disturbingly frequent in a few states, I forget which, that have the right combination of laws and (lack of) oversight.
Had a terrible problem in the UK with my grandmother, we never got a lasting power of attorney for health, and by the time she needed it it was of course too late. Figured next of kin would be reasonable.
She's been incarcerated in a care home since the start of covid, although rather than one near to where family lived they refused to let us move her. Took 18 months of going through court to get her moved, she has degraded so far she barely remembers me now.
(And of course despite legally being kept in the car home she has to pay for it. Had she broken the law and gone to prison she'd have more freedom and wouldn't have to pay!)
Friend of mine from Bari had the same problem with their old grandma. She (my friend, not the grandma) showed up with a bunch of male friends and told the fake caretaker "Leave by the door or you'll be leaving by the window, either way do not come back". The scammer left by the door and that was the end of it. The grandma died 18 months later in her bed surrounded by her family.
Stuff like this turns me Anarchist in the "Government can't work" sense. The criminals are always 10 steps ahead of (or in cahoots with) the government, turning every attempt at "promoting the general welfare" into highway robbery, and no one in government is willing to prosecute and convict these criminals, because white collar crime gets the "it's too complicated to explain" Get Out of Jail Free card.
I would be lying if I said the situation didn't inspire urges of vigilantism in me at the time.
The government is a very, very scary thing. Because I'm disabled, I've had many encounters with the faceless and all powerful hand of the government, sometimes it feels like they'd want a medical certificate just to allow people like me to keep breathing. But paradoxically, I believe in a fairly strong government, I think it's best to have an organization at the top which is explicitly defined to serve the need of the people, rather than whatever would rise to the top in its stead. As long as one remains aware of how terrifying the government can be and is willing to go out and throw a few bricks at government buildings. I think it's served us well, comparing my country to the rest of the word.
Yeah, agreed. The mistake a lot of individuals make when they fall in the intellectual trap of Libertarianism is that power doesn't care about labels. Sure the state "has a monopoly on violence" but that is not an intrinsic thing. A weak state quickly finds violence being adopted by other centers of power within a society (just look at Haiti). We attempt to concentrate certain powers in government because it's the easiest way to keep those powers in check. In the end you don't want any center of power to get too powerful as it makes systems overall less stable. The best counter for a strong government is strong civic engagement and democratic norms as government is need to act as a counter to private centralized power (both legal and extralegal).
Sometimes the easiest way to keep the powers and check are to simply not grant them to the state. Some problems are better solved by decentralized power, even if it is imperfect and has collateral damage.
Sometimes is a real weasel word here. The unfortunate truth is we can’t trust government, but every other option tends to be vastly worse.
Government contractors introduce horrible conflicts of interest at every level. The US used to get projects done early and under budget before contracting took over, but that doesn’t make anyone wealthy.
Private individuals run into the tragedy of the commons.
Abusive legal guardianships demonstrate we can’t trust individuals not just the government.
So, my point is if you can’t trust people, companies, or the government then what’s left? IMO, the best option is to simply limit the number of things we need to trust. You don’t need to trust news organizations for them to act as a balance on government corruption. That only goes so far, but it’s still useful.
I also agree with limiting the number of individuals or institutions you have to rely on and Trust.
In this case, if durable legal guardianship against the wishes of the ward did not exist, there would be no need to trust anyone, the government or otherwise.
To be clear, what I'm proposing in this case is that nobody can have their assets seized without their permission.
Similarly, I don't have to invest trust in my underwear stain inspector, governmental or otherwise because nobody has the right to stop me inspect my underwear.
There isn’t a trust nobody solution to the guardianship issue. Your solution just means trusting the individual. That seems reasonable on the surface, but results in unpleasantness due to degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's etc. It’s an extremely vulnerable population that constantly get targeted by scammers who prey a people with diminished mental capacity.
To be clear I am not saying government is the right solution, just that the problem does exist. Not just because people get taken advantage of but because taxpayers gets stuck taking care of people who have lost everything.
PS: Being able to trust children is one solution that works at the individual level, but it unfortunately doesn’t scale.
Arguing about the ethics is one way to shape policy, but it doesn’t make problems disappear.
Every day people do lose the ability to make informed decisions without preparing for that change. How and why we respond to that doesn’t change the underlying biology.
In my province, rooms in long term care homes are (apparently) on some level, legally like a place of residence. Even though they exist in a public or private facility. Some families have caught on to this fact and installed cameras and audio recording equipment in their elderly parent's rooms. The staff don't like it but there isn't a whole lot they can do about it since it's the private property of the residents, in their residence.
What a terrifying experience. This goes into my growing list of reasons why it pays to just take note of negative people's behavior, and quietly terminate their contract without ever discussing anything with them.
Businesses learned this a long time ago, which is why they never tell you why they get rid of you. They just say your services are no longer required.
This is horrific and is caused by the pride of those who are too lazy to lift a finger. Just know that bitterness will only poison you from the inside out. Don't allow this to fester or it will make you like them. I have seen the effects of this in my own family and it ends in evil.
I'm sorry about the effect it's had on your family, these are hard things to bear.
I've started praying again last year, and generally trying to live according to the kinder values of Catholicism but it's a work in progress.
The person who doesn't properly care for your dad, complains that he's not properly cared for, and thereby ensures that he gets worse care? That is backwards in every possible way. How is any of that shit legal?
My daughter was having a very bad day, very pouty and whiny. Around age 8 or so. My wife had put her in a timeout, and then our daughter kept “needing” to go to the bathroom over and over again (usually to play in the sink). Fed up with this, my exasperated wife force marched her to the bathroom with her hand on her back to ensure she went to the bathroom and wasn’t loitering about playing.
A parent from the other team was sitting in our group and disapproved loudly of the timeout and the forced bathroom match, she almost certainly was the one who complained.
I have a 3 year old. She hates going to bet and was having a tantrum for a while last night. She’s smart and figured out we will take her out of the bedroom if she says she has to pee pee. After 4 times of playing around in the bathroom and only one time actually using it she finally went to bed after asking me to adjust the covers 30 times.
All of this is normal kid stuff. What kind of parent is so spiteful they will call child services on an opposing teams parents?
It was a NJ/NY tournament with a lot of rivalry and prestige for the winners.
Some parents get very, ridiculously caught up in the excitement of their kids' sports, and a very small number go too far. I have seen parents fighting in the stands at 10U football games (10 and under). I have heard parents screaming at coaches threatening to sue them. I have seen parents mocking and degrading the opposing team's kids. I have seen parents encouraging taunts and chants from the crowd to throw off a pitcher or a quarter back. I've seen a nasty, abusive man ejected from a high school building entirely for cursing and screaming at opposing kids. And of course we had CPS called on us.
It's only a very small percentage, but they really ruin the experience for everyone.
It's even less serious stuff than this that has me thinking kids' involvement in those leagues isn't net-positive. But I'm sure there are more positive experiences than negative. And I'd probably think differently if I was super competitive or more sports-oriented.
Small keyboard + autocorrect is just stupid. I have the same issue, and I still regularly miss typos even though I try to QC before posting. Either that or mini-strokes.
At least this was funny and easy to understand, sometimes I’m careless and it’s such complete gibberish if I come back to the comment an hour later I don’t understand what I wanted to write.
Not sure about STT (TTS is reading out articles, etc) but when it comes to autocorrect, Google seems worse. Any time a seeming typo starts getting common, I nearly always recognize it as an Android thing. Maybe Apple's autocorrect doesn't try to change your words, but Google constantly does. Just a few weeks ago the big one was changing `lets` to `let's`, to the point that I changed my wording and just used `allows` to avoid making corrections. I will see a number of posts on Reddit and occasionally here on HN with this mistake. It seems to have stopped for me around last week, but I expect a different common word will be butchered soon.
This is an N=1 story. There are 7-8 billion people on earth, 300 some million in the US, I forget how many in Europe (you can measure Europe, EU, NATO, and get different results and different cultures). With that many people there will always be someone doing something unbelievable stupid, and hackernews is large enough that you are likely to hear about it.
Be careful that you don't try to extrapolate a few N=1 stories into how normal people act.
I don’t share this concern about over-estimating this bad behavior. Yes, normal people don’t do this. But there are a lot of people who take advantage of other people, leverage authority (their own, or others), and even tell themselves that they’re doing the right thing. That’s not super uncommon. And true scammers aren’t super rare.
It makes you wonder what the appropriate level of cynicism is though. I assume you mean N=1 in an order of magnitude sense. But one person saw these kids and phoned it in. A cop returns the kids home with a warning. 3 more cops show up the next day and arrests the man only (but both parents should be negligent should they not???) and then some social workers appear.
How many people heard about this and decided to waste time and resources either wilfully or unwittingly, and is that a reflection of the state law enforcement and social services?
Many (most?) states have mandatory reporting laws. People in certain positions (doctors, teachers, social workers, etc.) are required to report even an inkling of suspected abuse. I'm sure multiple people in the chain knew this was nonsense but none was willing to put their own career and/or freedom on the line for it.
Sorry, this sounds so absurd you can't just leave us hanging to guess what was specifically claimed ;)
In a similar vein, in my family we had a complaint to social care worker that our Grandma (who was immobile in a bed and without verbal contact because of terminal Alzheimer) was improperly taken care of. But as my mom is a nurse who did all the feeding, cleaning 2x a day and installed anti bedsore mattress, no fucking way.
We know 99% that the complaint was from one of the people in the family, as almost nobody else knew or cared what was going on.