#Batch 32 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

simdertalia · 3 months ago

Text

✈️ ACNH Airport Set ✈️

57 items | Sims 4, base game compatible, some extra swatches added by me 💗

All the items you'll need to recreate the Airport from ACNH, Dodo Airlines, in your TS4 game. Most items came with only 1 swatch each. Some items I have added extra swatches for. *The Monstera Plant that goes inside the airport has already been made in part 2 of the Paradise Planning set. Everything is always posted with the option of pick & choose, so they are easy to find and one-click download.

The floor for the interior is 12 swatches, like a puzzle, can be put together for any room size.

I do not use DX11 with my game. If you are using DX11, run the DX11 batch fix with Sims 4 Studio before starting your game. For those that have never done it, do not fear for it is very simple and will update any CC in your mods folder that needed it. I know the new DX11 API causes issues having something to do with the walls build items, that I know of. If you do not have Sims 4 Studio, here is a link about how to install it from their official website. (And of course, if you need help please send me a message).

Type “acnh airport" into the search query in build mode to find quickly. You can always find items like this, just begin typing the title and it will appear.

📁 Download all or pick & choose (SFS, No Ads): HERE

📁 Alt Mega Download (still no ads): HERE

📁 Download on Patreon

Will be public on December 4th, 2024 💗 Midnight CET

Happy Simming! ✨ Some of my CC is early access. If you like my work, please consider supporting me (all support helps me with managing my chronic pain/illness & things have been rough as of late):

★ Patreon 🎉 ❤️ |★ Ko-Fi ☕️ ❤️ ★ Instagram📷

Thank you for reblogging ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

@sssvitlanz @maxismatchccworld @mmoutfitters @coffee-cc-finds @itsjessicaccfinds @gamommypeach @stargazer-sims-finds @khelga68 @suricringe @vaporwavesims @mystictrance15 @moonglitchccfinds @xlost-in-wonderlandx @jbthedisabledvet

Other CC Pictured: -Ghost Doll (i accidentally left it there when testing slots lol) -Monstera Plant (this would go opposite of the line of the other 3 plants in the sitting area)

The rest of my CC

#ts4cc #s4cc #sims 4 airport #sims 4 acnh location #sims 4 office #sims 4 desk #sims 4 wall decor #sims 4 plane #sims 4 sign #sims 4 plants #sims 4 gate #sims 4 barrier #sims 4 travel #sims 4 vacation #sims 4 dodo airlines #dodo airlines #ts4acnh #sims 4 maxis match #simdertalia

144 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 6 months ago

Text

I’m not even sure whether I can taste pure Old Bay anymore, because the condiment is infused with so many memories of home. I grew up sprinkling it on everything—blue crabs, sure, but also watermelon, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese—and I can shuffle through decades of pictures from family reunions, county fairs, church picnics, and back porches where the iconic yellow, red, and blue tins keep popping up like someone’s second cousin, not quite front and center yet always in the frame.

If you’re new to Old Bay, get a tin and shake the contents liberally on popcorn or potato chips—a starter dish, from which you can and should expand. You’ll soon find that you can add the condiment to almost anything. One of my favorite dishes that uses Old Bay as an essential ingredient comes via an old family friend. Keith Davis is a Jack-of-all-trades: a fantastic general contractor, but also a church usher, a builder of wheelchair ramps, a Santa Claus when seasonally necessary, and, lately, a food-truck entrepreneur, grilling burgers and deep-frying funnel cakes for every community event and private party in the area. He goes by Mr. Keith; his food truck is known as Fat Boy’s Fixins, named in honor of the man who taught him to grill and whose Santa suit he inherited.

Of all the things Davis serves up, he might be best known for his crab soup, which he makes in ten-gallon batches and lets the local Ruritan Club sell by the pint every fall at the Waterfowl Festival, when somewhere between fourteen thousand and twenty thousand people descend on the Eastern Shore to see the work of hundreds of decoy carvers and local artists, listen to waterfowl-calling contests, and watch demonstrations of dock dogs, raptors, and fly-fishing. Davis is there every year, gossiping with his fellow-volunteers, talking with out-of-towners, and tossing hunks of crab meat into stew pots. Normally you’d have to shell out eight dollars for even just a cup, but here, exclusively for newsletter readers, free of charge, is the best crab soup you’ll ever taste, a shockingly easy, practically pre-made recipe for trying out America’s greatest condiment: Old Bay.

Mr. Keith’s Crab Soup

1 lb. crab meat (claw meat best) 64-Oz. bottle of Spicy V8 14.5 Oz. chicken broth 32 Oz. water 1 lb. mixed vegetables 1 Tbsp. Montreal Steak seasoning 1 Tbsp. Old Bay

Mix the V8, chicken broth, and water in a pot. Start heating the mixture, then add the vegetables, then the crab meat, and finally the spices. Cook on medium heat until the vegetables start to soften, stirring occasionally “so it doesn’t stick and burn on the bottom of the pot.”

150 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

Text

When private equity destroys your hospital

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 9-10), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

As someone who writes a lot of fiction about corporate crime, I naturally end up spending a lot of time being angry about corporate crime. It's pretty goddamned enraging. But the fiction writer in me is especially upset at how cartoonishly evil the perps are – routinely doing things that I couldn't ever get away with putting in a novel.

Beyond a doubt, the most cartoonishly evil characters are the private equity looters. And the most cartoonishly evil private equity looters are the ones who get involved in health care.

(Buckle up.)

Writing for The American Prospect, Maureen Tcacik details a national scandal: the collapse of PE-backed hospital chain Steward Health, a company that bought and looted hospitals up and down the country, starving them of everything from heart valves to prescription paper, ripping off suppliers, doctors and nurses, and callously exposing patients to deadly risk:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-02-27-scenes-from-bat-cave-steward-health-florida/

Steward occupies a very special place in the private equity looting cycle. Private equity companies arrange themselves on a continuum of indiscriminate depravity. At the start of the continuum are PE funds that buy productive and useful firms (everything from hospitals to car-washes) using "leveraged buyouts." That means that they borrow money to buy the company and use the company itself as collateral: it's like you getting a bank-loan to buy your neighbor's mortgage out from under them, and using your neighbor's house as collateral for that loan.

Once the buyout is done, the PE fund pays itself a "special dividend" (stealing money the business needs to survive) and then starts charging the business a "management fee" for the PE fund's expertise. To pay for all this, the PE bosses start to hack away at the company. Quality declines. So do wages. Prices go up. The company changes suppliers, opting for cheaper alternatives, often stiffing the old company. There are mass layoffs. The remaining employees end up doing three peoples' jobs, for lower wages, with fewer materials of lower quality.

Eventually, that top-feeding PE company finds a more desperate, more ham-fisted PE company to unload the business onto. That middle-feeding company also does a leveraged buyout, pays itself another special dividend, cuts wages, staffing and quality even further. They switch to even worse suppliers and stiff the last batch. Prices go up even higher.

Then – you guessed it – the middle-feeding PE company finds an even more awful PE bottom-feeder to unload the company onto. That bottom feeder does it all again, without even pretending to leave the business in condition to do its job. The company is a shambling zombie at this point, often producing literal garbage in place of the products that made its reputation. Employees' paychecks bounce, or don't show up at all. The company stops bothering to pay the lawyers that have been fending off its creditors. Those lawyers sue the company, too.

That's the kind of PE company Steward Health was, and, as the name suggests, Steward Health is in the business of stripping away the very last residue of value from community hospitals. As you might imagine, this gets pretty fucking ugly.

Steward owns 32 hospitals up and down the country, though its holdings are dwindling as the company walks away from its debt-burdened holdings, after years of neglect that have rendered them unfit for use as health facilities – or for any other purpose. Tcacik's piece offers a snapshot of one such hospital: Florida's Rockledge Regional Medical Center, just eight miles from Cape Canaveral.

Rockledge is a disaster. The fifth floor was, at one point, home to 5,000 bats.

Five.

Thousand.

Bats.

(Rockledge stiffed the exterminators.)

The bats were just the beginning. One of the internal sewage pipes ruptured. Whole sections of the hospital were literally full of shit, oozing out of the walls and ceiling, slopping over medical equipment.

That's an urgent situation for any hospital, but for Rockledge, it's catastrophic, because Rockledge is a hospital without any hospital supplies. Steward has stiffed the companies that supply "heart valves, urology lasers, Impella catheters, cardiac catheterization balloons, slings for lifting heavier patients, blood and urine test reagents, and most recently, prescription paper." Key medical equipment has been repossessed. So have the Pepsi machines. The hospital cafeteria had its supply of cold cuts repossessed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/massachusetts/comments/1agc1j4/comment/kolicqo/

It's not just Steward's nonpayments that reek of impending doom. Its payments also bear the hallmarks of a scam artist on the brink of blowing off the con. The company recently paid off a vendor with five separate checks for $1m, each drawn on "a random hospital in Utah" (Steward recently walked away from its Utah hospitals; its partners there are suing it for stealing $18m on their way out the door).

This company – which owns 32 hospitals! – has resorted to gambits like sending photos of fake checks to doctors it hasn't paid in months as "proof" that the money was coming (the checks arrived 22 days later).

Steward owes so much money to its employees – $1.66m to just one doctors' group. But the medical staff keep doing their jobs, and are reluctant to speak on the record, thanks to Steward's reputation for vicious retaliation. Those health workers keep showing up to take care of patients, even as the hospital crumbles around them. One clinician told Tcacik: "I watched a bed collapse underneath a [patient] who had just undergone hip surgery."

Rockledge has nine elevators, but only five of them work – the other four have been broken for a year. The hospital's fourth floor has been converted to "a graveyard of broken beds." The sinks are clogged, or filled with foul gunk. There's black mold. Nurses have noted on the maintenance tags that the repair service refuses to attend the hospital until their overdue bills are paid. The fifteen-person on-site maintenance team was cut to just two workers.

Steward is just the latest looting owner of Rockledge. After the Great Financial Crisis, private equity consultants helped sell it to Health Management Associates. The hospital's CEO took home a $10m bonus for that sale and exited; Health Management Associates then quickly became embroiled in a Medicare fraud and kickback scandal. Soon after, Rockledge was passed on to Community Health Systems, who then sold it on to Rockledge.

Steward, meanwhile, was at that time owned by an even bigger private equity giant, Cerberus, which then sold Steward off. That deal was performatively complex and hid all kinds of mischief. Prior to Cerberus's sell-off of Steward, they sold off Steward's real-estate. The buyer was Medical Properties Trust, who gave Cerberus $1.25b for the real-estate: three hospitals in Florida and three more in Ohio. Steward then contracted to operate these hospitals on MPT's behalf, and pay MPT rent for the real-estate.

This complex arrangement was key to siphoning value out of the hospital and to keeping angry creditors at bay – if you can't figure out who owes you money, it's a lot harder to collect on the debt. The scheme was masterminded by Steward founder/CEO Ralph de la Torre. De la Torre is notorious for taking a massive dividend out of the company while it owed $1.4b to its creditors. He bought a $40m yacht with the money.

De la Torre was once feted as a business genius who would "disrupt" healthcare. But as Steward's private jet hops around "Corfu, Santorini, St. Maarten and Antigua" as its hospitals literally crumble, he's becoming less popular. In Massachusetts, politicians have railed against Steward and de la Torre (Governor Healey wants the company to leave the state "as soon as possible").

Florida, by contrast, is much more friendly to Steward. The state Health and Human Services Committee chair Randy Fine is an ardent admirer of hospital privatization and is currently campaigning to sell off the last community hospital in Brevard County. The state inspectors are likewise remarkably tolerant of Steward's little peccadillos. The quasi-governmental agency that inspects hospitals has awarded this shit-and-bat-filled, elevator-free, understaffed rotting hulk "A" grades for quality.

These inspectors jointly represent a mismatched assortment of private and public agencies, dominated by a nonprofit called Leapfrog, the brainchild of Harvard public-health prof Lucian Leape, who founded it in 2000. Leapfrog likes to tout its "transparent" assessment criteria, and Steward are experts at hitting those criteria, spending the exact minimum to tick every box that Leapfrog inspectors use as proxies for overall quality and safety.

This is a pretty great example of Goodhart's Law: "every measurement eventually becomes a target, whereupon it ceases to be a good measurement":

https://xkcd.com/2899/

But despite Steward's increasingly furious creditors and its decaying facilities, the company remains bullish on its ability to continue operations. Medical Properties Trust – the real estate investment trust that is nominally a separate company from Steward – recently hosted a conference call to reassure Wall Street investors that it would be a going concern. When a Bank of America analyst asked MPT's CFO how this could possibly be, given the facility's dire condition and Steward's degraded state, the CFO blithely assured him that the company would get bailouts: "We own hospitals no one wants to see closed."

That's the thing about PE and health-care. The looters who buy out every health-care facility in a region understand that this makes them too big to fail: no matter how dangerous the companies they drain become, local governments will continue to prop them up. Look at dialysis, a market that's been cornered by private equity rollups. Today, if you need this lifesaving therapy, there's a good chance that every accessible facility is owned by a private equity fund that has fired all its qualified staff and ceased sterilizing its needles. Otherwise healthy people who visit these clinics sometimes die due to operator error. But they chug along, because no dialysis clinics is worse that "dialysis clinics where unqualified sadists sometimes kill you with dirty needles":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-dirty-business-of-clean-blood

The bad news is that private equity has thoroughly colonized the entire medical system. They took hospitals, fired the doctors, then took over the doctors' groups that provided outsource staff to the hospital:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

It's illegal for private equity companies to own doctors' practices (doctors have to own these), but they obfuscated the crime with a paper-thin pretext that they got away with despite its obvious bullshittery:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

The financier who decides whether you live or die depends on an algorithm that literally sets a tolerable level of preventable deaths for the patients trapped in the practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

Private equity also took over emergency rooms and boobytrapped them with "surprise billing" – junk fees that ran to thousands of dollars that you had to pay even if the hospital was in network with your insurer. They made billions from this, and spent a many millions from that booty keeping the scam alive with scare ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

The whole health stack is colonized by private equity-backed monopolies. Even your hospital bed!

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/05/hillrom/#baxter-international

Then there's residential care. Private equity cornered many regional markets on nursing homes and turned them into slaughterhouses, places where you go to die, not live:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

The palliative care sector is also captured by private equity. PE bosses hire vast teams of fast-talking salespeople who con vulnerable older people into entering an end-of-life system before they are ready to die. Thanks to loose regulation, the nation is filled with fake hospices that can rake in millions from Medicare while denying all care to their patients (hospice patients don't get life-extending medication or procedures, by definition):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

If you survive this long enough, Medicare eventually tells the hospice that you're clearly not dying and you get kicked off their rolls. Now you have to go through the lengthy bureaucratic nightmare of convincing the system – which was previously informed that you were at death's door – that you are actually viable and need to start getting care again (good luck with that).

If that kills you, guess what? Private equity has rolled up funeral homes up and down the country, and they will scam your survivors just as hard as the medical system that killed you did:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/09/high-cost-of-dying/#memento-mori

The PE sector spent more than a trillion dollars over the past decade buying up healthcare companies, and it has trillions more in "dry powder" allocated for further medical acquisitions. Why not? As the CFO of Medical Properties Trust told that Bank of America analyst last week, when you "own hospitals no one wants to see closed." you literally can't fail, no matter how many people you murder.

The PE sector is a reminder that the crimes people commit for money far outstrip the crimes they commit for ideology. Even the most ideological killers are horrified by the murders their profit-motivated colleagues commit.

Last year, Tkacic wrote about the history of IG Farben, the German company that built Monowitz, a private slave-labor camp up the road from Auschwitz to make the materiel it was gouging Hitler's Wehrmacht on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Farben bought the cheapest possible slaves from Auschwitz, preferentially sourcing women and children. These slaves were worked to death at a rate that put Auschwitz's wholesale murder in the shade. Farben's slaves died an average of just three months after starting work at Monowitz. The situation was so abominable, so unconscionable, that the SS officers who provided outsource guard-labor to Monowitz actually wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty.

The Nuremberg trials are famous for the Nazi officers who insisted that they were "just following order" but were nonetheless executed for their crimes. 24 Farben executives were also tried at Nuremberg, where they offered a very different defense: "We had a fiduciary duty to our shareholders to maximize our profits." 19 of the 24 were acquitted on that basis.

PE is committed to an ideology that is far worse than any form of racial animus or other bias. As a sector, it is committed to profit above all other values. As a result, its brutality knows no bounds, no decency, no compassion. Even the worst crimes we commit for hate are nothing compared to the crimes we commit for greed.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/retaliation#charnel-house

#pluralistic #Rockledge Regional Medical Center #private equity #looting #Steward Health #ponzis #maureen tcacik #Medical Properties Trust #Ralph de la Torre #Massachusetts #florida #Cerberus #too big to fail #pe #guillotine watch

342 notes · View notes

funlovinzara · 7 months ago

Note

Sanji with a crush Who is insecure about her pudginess like even Nami, Robin, and the other notice something was off reader? but was really worried Sanji the most was when she refused to eat, so one night when she snuck into the kitchen to get a drink of water He voiced out his worries And even confessed his feelings for her.

(we all have moments like those before and we all need some joy in our lives😊)

Sanji x chubby/pudgy! Reader

I absolutely love this request, i have a bit of pudge on myself and this would be so cute to write! Reader is also fem btw!

Warnings: Eating issues

___________________________

Sanjis pov:

‘Gosh she is the most prettiest gal ever…’ i whispered in my sleep on accident and that stupid moss head threw a pillow at me to shut up, it woke me up instead. I took a look at the clock and it was 5:32 in the morning, i decided to get out of bed and start cooking early. If i didn’t then everyone would be too hungry by morning, and id be behind my usual schedule. I get alot of sleep often anyway, so im not too angered.

For breakfast i decided to keep it simple and make fluffy pancakes from scratch with syrup, honey and other assorted fruits, i know my loves Nami, Robin and Y/n would love that. Even chopper loves sweets, he would love it too. However for the guys, i knew Luffy, Usopp and that marimo wouldn’t have sweet pancakes for fuel. I made omelets over rice with a big batch of bacon that would satisfy them for the time being, id eat some of that too…BUT i cant salivate while cooking..id save my hunger for when im done!

The moment i finished cooking i could hear a few footsteps coming towards the main area/kitchen. It was Nami, Robin, Y/N and Chopper! Just the people i wanted to see! “Nami-swaann!! Robin-chann!! Y/n-sannn!!” I wave at them before setting up there plates with heart eyes, i made sure to tend to Y/n as well since they were the one i truly have my heart for.

“Wow Sanji this looks really good! Thank you!” Nami took her plate as-well as Robin, who gave me bright smile as a thank you. Y/n took her plate, i thought i could see a flash of disappointment on her face before she just slightly bows with a smile “Thank you, Sanji.”

The rest of the crew came in and of course Luffy almost devoured everything, i hit him on the head and yelled at him. I glance towards y/n and i see shes not eating..but i thought she would have loved that? Am i mistaken?

———

Narrators pov:

Y/n looks at her plate, with the big pancakes sitting in-front of her this would affect her in so many different ways. However she didn’t want to be mean so she takes a bite, it was really really good!! But since you know how this could be unhealthy for you, you push it to the side. But it’s really tempting..the way Sanji made it was out of this world. You were close to taking another bite before a voice snaps you out of your trance

Sanji was behind you, he whispered close to your ear in a soft voice. “Why aren’t you eating? Is everything alright?”

Nami and Robin could clearly see the situation, but they pretended that they didn’t and they continued to listen.

Sanjis voice tickled your ear a bit and you jumped, regaining consciousness. “Oh yeah im fine..can i save this for later, um…my…stomach hurts real bad i think i ate something i was supposed to the other day.”

Sanji looks a little saddened but he nods his head as you walk away to your room. There weren’t too many currents that day so the ship didn’t move so far, you were still on your way to the next island and it was going to take some time. You didn’t eat anything else for the rest of the day, even if Sanji insisted, you would only take a bite. You felt immense guilt for turning down Sanjis cooking even when it was the best you have ever tasted in the whole world.

That night everyone went to bed, you fell onto your bed but you couldn’t sleep somehow. You needed to clear your mind. You tip toed your way outside your room onto the ship and then to the kitchen, you grabbed yourself a glass of cool water and walked to the edge of the ship to star gaze. It was always beautiful on ships, and there was a nice breeze today. You took a sip of your water, and let out a refreshing puff of air. It felt nice to just relax every once in awhile.

However you didn’t know that there were footsteps behind you, and you felt a pair of arms sneak around your waist.

“Y/n, what are you doing up?” Sanji says in a low tone trying not to wake anyone up. You jolt in fear and drop the glass, before it fell on the floor Sanji softly kicked it up with his feet and caught it. “Be more careful…as i was saying, are you okay?”

You’re still in shock before you calm down. “Yeah..”

“I don’t believe you.”

You both stood in silence before he spoke up again. “I have a feeling i know that this is about. You’re worried aren’t you? You’re worried about your body and how different foods will affect your weight? Am i right?”

You nod your head admitting in a bit of shame

“Y/n, i know how you feel. You’re amazing don’t you know that? You don’t have to be ashamed of who you are, if you’re looking for change then i want to help at-least. I want to make sure my crew-mates are the healthiest.” You look at him is surprised, but you didn’t understand why he was telling YOU this.

“But Nami and robin, they don’t have to try hard to be pretty..and you obviously love them so much. So why are you talking to me about this? What do you know so much about me anyway?” You slightly snapped back not meaning to sound harsh, Sanji giving an anxious look in return.

“Im speaking you about this because you’re the one who’s struggling alone and i love you too much to let you suffer.” You both stand in silence..

“What-.”

“I love you.”

He steps closer slowly, step by step he opens his arms wider, then taking you all in by hugging you. You lightly shed tears into his arm while he kisses your forehead. “I love you too, Sanji..”

Oh yeah you and can definitely guarantee Robin heard it all.

————————————————

Oh my gosh body positivity guys. U matter regardless of what u look like!!🌸

#one piece x y/n #one piece x reader #one piece #one piece fluff #vinsmoke sanji x reader #vinsmoke sanji #sanji x reader #black leg sanji #one piece sanji #sanji #op sanji #x chubby reader #body posititivity #body positive #angst?#fluff

185 notes · View notes