Crypto News: What could go wrong with “family on demand”?

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If you've been to an annual open enrollment fair in the past few years, you may have noticed a new eldercare benefit with the unusual name of Papa. Medicare Advantage and Medicaid health plans offer it, as do a number of large employer-sponsored programs. It's a gig economy version of home assistance, a family-on-demand TaskRabbit for seniors. Customers hire contractors from Papa's network to come to their homes, hang out and chat, do household chores, chauffeur them to doctor appointments—basically anything shy of the most intimate work done by a traditional caregiver, such as bathing people or helping them use the bathroom. Customers are called "papas," the contractors "pals."

Help with shopping was what brought a middle-aged pal named Martin Jermaine Billue Sr. to a 70-year-old woman's house in Duluth, Minnesota, one morning this winter. Billue arrived at 10 a.m. and drove the woman, who gets around using a walker or power wheelchair, to a few stores. When they returned to her home, she began moving the groceries inside, but he didn't offer to help. Instead, he changed clothes and surprised her in a bedroom, holding a knife in one hand and his exposed penis in the other. According to the criminal complaint against Billue, he raped her and then demanded she request that he be sent to her home again. Billue has said the sex was consensual and denied the state's charges of criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping and assault with a dangerous weapon. He's being held on a $200,000 bond pending trial.

Papa Inc., which isn't named as a defendant in the Duluth case but appears throughout the complaint against Billue, said in a statement to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was "deeply saddened" by the incident. "Our CEO has had several conversations with the member and has offered her all the help and support we can," the company wrote. "They speak often and have become quite important in each other's lives." Papa said that it removed the contractor from its platform and that it's conducting an internal review of its trust and safety practices. It also said it has added a two-person manual review of background-check data to its screening process, because the previous system didn't flag Billue's prior conviction for domestic assault. A lawyer for Billue didn't respond to requests for comment.

The incident is an extreme example of a problem the company has encountered with some frequency during its six years in business. Businessweek reviewed more than 1,200 confidential complaint reports logged by Papa over the past four years and found dozens of allegations of sexual harassment and assault, as well as an allegation of unlawful imprisonment, among a broader range of issues including theft and dissatisfaction with the service's quality. The logs show what can happen to both Papa's elderly clients and its contractors when the company offers little training or oversight.

This scenario has played out pretty much as one might expect, with incident records that are by turns infuriating and heartbreaking and cartoonishly absurd. Sometimes the papas are the ones behaving badly. Pals have filed complaints alleging that clients tried to kiss or fondle them, or that their residences were covered in feces or infested with cockroaches or, in one instance, home to an alligator. Other times it's the pals: stealing, harassing, getting naked. In its statement, Papa disputed the suggestion that it's lax on safeguards.

It's easy to see the appeal of a workaround for America's severe shortage of health-care workers and caregivers. Manuela Lopez, a 72-year-old retiree in Grand Rapids, Michigan, calls Papa a "lifesaver." Lopez, a diabetic and amputee, has been using it for about a year to make it to doctors and the supermarket. "I can't just walk out the door," she says. "They help me." As for insurers, Papa got much more interesting about three years ago, when the government began allowing Medicare Advantage plans to pay for services that address social needs.

And yet. "There has to be a vetting and oversight mechanism," says Donald Berwick, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, who now lectures on health-care policy at Harvard Medical School. "This should not be an unregulated, unobserved, unevaluated part of trying to meet the needs of elders."

How will the needs of an aging population be met with current staffing models? Does Papa have a future? For that, you'll have to read all of Priya Anand's incredible investigation. One thing is clear: The current care landscape is a mess, and problems are only going to fester unless they're discussed openly.

Let's say you're a CEO. Your company starts seeing its customer data floating around the internet. What, exactly, is your game plan? That's the subject of Andrew Martin's latest article in Businessweek. Take the case of Last Pass, a service that allows customers to store and manage passwords:

Karim Toubba was a few months into his new job as chief executive officer of LastPass US LP, which allows customers to store and manage passwords, when he learned that his company had been hacked. Two weeks later, in August 2022, he published a blog post saying that while the hackers had stolen some source code and proprietary technical information, there was no evidence that access was given to customer data or encrypted password vaults.
Crisis averted—until the hackers returned, using information stolen in the earlier attack to obtain encrypted usernames and passwords, among other data. That development, revealed in a blog post by Toubba days before Christmas, prompted waves of criticism and a Wired story titled "Yes, It's Time to Ditch LastPass."

Oooph. Toubba now sees his company's communication as a problem, perhaps more so than its response to the actual crime. Experts say there's no one response protocol—each hack, like a snowflake, is different and special—but there are some standard pieces of advice. What are they? And how can you help your company in case of an event like this? Read the whole story here.

The staying power of vinyl has been well-documented—after all the older format outsold CDs in 2022 for the first time since 1987. But one music genre in particular might be taking advantage of vinyl's popularity: jazz. According to Luminate, an industry data provider, jazz accounted for 6% of all vinyl sales last year, while it was a mere .08% of all music streams.

This is good news for labels like Verve, writes Bloomberg's Devin Leonard, the home of Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker. Musicians are now selling records on tour:

"I get to take home a respectable piece of change," says Christian McBride, the jazz bassist and associate artistic director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. As for streaming? "It's a nonfactor in terms of income," he says.

Record execs like Jamie Krents, head of Universal Music Group's Verve and Impulse! record labels aren't ignoring streaming altogether. How could you? He's trying things like:

When it comes to boosting jazz streaming, Krents says one trick is to persuade services to put songs on playlists that are less genre-specific. Sure, he says, you can put Ella on Spotify's Women of Jazz playlist, but why not Late Night Vibes, where she might be heard alongside Alicia Keys and attract new fans?
In some cases, Krents says, it might also make sense for jazz artists to record shorter songs that are more likely to be picked up by the algorithms employed by streaming services. "Jon Batiste has new music coming out this year, and you will absolutely hear that lens applied," he says.

But it's complicated, of course, to try to make jazz fit into a standard format. It's shape-shifting, by definition. In this challenging economic climate though, and a world stuffed with "content," musicians and labels will have to apply all their creativity towards getting their music out in the world, by any means necessary.

40%

That's how many full-time US employees work from home at least part of the week, as "domestic offshoring" sends jobs out of major cities. Read the full story here.

"Either you are running for food, or you are running from becoming food."

Jensen Huang

Nvidia co-founder and CEO

The top boss at the chip design giant told graduating students at the National Taiwan University in Taipei that companies and individuals should get familiar with artificial intelligence or risk losing out.

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