 the Crain’s newsroom, Ally Marotti reports on the impact of inflation on restaurants in the quick-service and fast-casual categories.
Plus, in this edition of “Where Dave Ate,” David Manilow shares four essential kinds of sandwiches every Chicagoan must try.Cannes Film Festival prize winner for Best Documentary, master filmmaker Patricio GuzmÃ¡n's The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historicalmemory, political trauma, and geography in his native Chile. Focusing on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run the length of the country's Eastern border, at once isolating and magisterial, the Cordillera serves as an enigmatic focal point around which GuzmÃ¡n contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d'Ã©tat.
A lot of my life was lucky.   At least one of my parents always had insurance through their jobs.    With the policies they had,  infants were covered from day 0, and as long as insurance never lapsed (not even one day without health insurance ), if they changed jobs the new insurance would keep coverage.    

I had a friend that got pregnant in high school.  Her daughter aspirated meconium  (inhaled waste in the womb) and suffered brain damage.    The daughter could never get "normal" insurance,  and has been on Medicare  (medicaid?) for 33 or so years.    

My wife was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2995, and Hep C (back then it was unknown,  called'non-A. non-B' hepatitis.     The treatments for both were still mostly experimental at that time,  and wouldn't have been covered even by average insurance.    Thankfully,  we both had what would be a 'platinum' level plan today.    Insurance covered all the treatments,  and cured the Hep C in early trials.   MS required  (I don't know if it still does) weekly injections of interferon at a cost of about $450 per dose,  plus neuro wotk ups about every 6 months.  
If we had lost insurance,  we wouldn't be able to buy insurance to cover that.    

I understand it.  I mean,  insurance is supposed to cover unexpected expenses.    I knew we were on the hook for over $2k every month.    The insurance would be guaranteed to pay that out.    Why would they give us a policy that cost less than that?    That is bad business.    

I'm not sure of all the details on how it did work,  or how it will work.     Each company had their own rules.   Each State had their own rules.    There were several different policies offered by each company.     That means hundreds of possibilities.     I can barely keep track of the Ny/NJ policies that I have had to deal with.   
Pm if you have more questions for me,  or try a new question here or in /r/AskAnAmerican.This year, I thought I’d try something new, and post a Thanksgiving recipe BEFORE Thanksgiving! Isn’t that a great idea? Just you watch, I think it’s gonna catch on around the food blog world. I’m practically a genius.
This has become one of my go-to sides this fall. The idea actually came to me after I made a dinner that involved stuffing acorn squash halves with chipotle chicken (I’ll be back with that recipe before too long) – and I LOVED the flavor combination of the sweet squash and the smokey, spicy chipotles. I often find that acorn and butternut squash can be too sweet for my liking, but the addition of some spice completely turned things around. I tried this mash out shortly thereafter, and my husband and I can’t get enough of it! I think it’ll make a perfect side dish for Thanksgiving – a newer, more interesting take on the traditional sweet potatoes (not that I have anything against brown sugar and marshmallows – I’m not a MONSTER).
Acorn Squash, Sweet Potato, and Chipotle Mash
serves 4 as a side dish
2 medium acorn squashes, halved and seeded
3 medium sweet potatoes, scrubbed and poked with a fork
2 chipotles, minced
1/2 cup plain greek yogurt (2% or full fat – sour cream will also work)
1 T butter
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
olive oil
1.) Preheat your oven to 375°, and line a baking sheet with foil. Lightly spray the inside of the acorn squash with olive oil, and season the flesh with a sprinkle of kosher salt. Place the squash cut side down on the baking sheet, and place the potatoes on the same sheet. Bake for about 45 minutes, or until the squash and potatoes are fork tender (the potatoes might take longer than the squash).
2.) When the squash and sweet potatoes are cooked through, allow them to cool for a couple minutes. Use a spoon to scoop the flesh of each into a medium bowl, and add the chipotles, greek yogurt, butter, salt and pepper. Mash until smooth, and well-combined.
3.) Spread the mash into a baking dish, and pop back into the over for 5-10 minutes, so everything can warm through. Serve hot.
This could certainly be made ahead of time – I’d say up to 2 days in advance. Refrigerate the mash (either in an airtight container, or in the baking dish, covered with plastic wrap), and then reheat in the oven for 20-25 minutes before serving.
I’ve actually found that this makes for a great, quick, weeknight side dish. I throw the squash and sweet potatoes in the oven, and let them bake while I prep the rest of dinner, or work out, or watch some HGTV. Despite needing some baking time, the active prep for this mash is about 5 minutes total! Not too bad, if you ask me. It’s healthy, it’s creamy, it’s a little spicy, and it reheats beautifully – so make a big batch, and use it up throughout the week! You could even spread a little bit on to your post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich, to add a little kick.
How can you not love a holiday that basically REQUIRES elastic-waist pants?
TinaNew IT jobs emerge to target user experience, service delivery
Experts in user experience and IT as a service are becoming critical in the enterprise, especially as the gap narrows between IT and business teams in new IT jobs.
Whether providing application access to its own employees, partners, customers or all of the above, increasingly sensitive to the user experience. Inaccessible or complicated applications will impair productivity and drive users to another platform -- even if the business doesn't approve or support it.
The importance of user experience has sparked a new interest in application performance management. APM isn't a new idea, and IT administrators have a growing stable of monitoring and management tools to watch and report on applications. But the real emphasis on new IT jobs has shifted to preemptive analysis and remediation.
As IT faces more competition from outsourcing and cloud services, businesses realize that in-house IT resources and staff can -- and should -- serve a bigger consulting or services role.
For example, a traditional IT administrator wouldn't know there's a problem with an application until disgruntled users send help desk tickets. The user experience takes a hit, and the damage has already been done. By contrast, new IT jobs, such as an application performance expert or user experience expert, can monitor application performance parameters in real time, receive alerts and take corrective action when performance metrics fall below thresholds. They fix performance problems before users ever notice.
Many application experts can analyze and understand application usage patterns. That insight can go back to developers and guide future application design and configuration to build on those usage patterns or address possible performance bottlenecks. An application performance expert has a basic IT administrator's skill set and often has experience with software development, cloud deployment and help desk services.
New IT jobs reflect importance of user experience
There is a fundamental change in the way businesses perceive and use IT. Traditional IT addresses technical solutions to technical problems. Need to store more data? IT can add disks or deploy a new storage array. But this only handles the how and not the why; traditional IT had little, if any, involvement in the business side of technology. But as the importance of user experience increases, new IT jobs now focus on the deeper questions.
As IT faces more competition from outsourcing and cloud services, businesses realize that in-house IT resources and staff can -- and should -- serve a bigger consulting or services role. The emerging idea is that IT shouldn't just deploy hardware or install applications. Instead, IT should provide services to the business whose value can be measured. This is sometimes referred to as IT as a service (ITaaS). It requires a role, such as an IT services expert, that can bridge the gap between business and technology, and help the business meet its objectives. Success in this role demands a senior IT professional with a solid technical background, along with strong business, sales and marketing knowledge.
Think of ITaaS as an in-house alternative to Software as a Service. When a business uses a cloud-based application, they're buying a deployed application that's ready to go. The role of these new IT jobs is to accomplish all of these background tasks internally to organize, deploy, support and maintain whatever hardware