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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

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Re: No Way to Grow Up

#221

Post by yupper32 »

shmel wrote: post #199
yupper32 wrote: post #99

Honest question: At what point do we give up? I'm in the Bay Area and it'll be coming up on 2 years soon of what basically amounts to a social shut down. -- Many social groups are just not getting together anymore, including most of mine. -- Concerts, sporting events, parties of most sizes, crowded bars/clubs just seem off the table at this point. -- Masks for the majority of it, which makes gym going and working out…

The answer is simple: it will stop when people decide it is over. Only non-compliance on massive scale will solve this. Science clearly said that Covid will be with us forever. We know that vaccines didn't stop the spread in even a single country. There is nothing else to wait. Take back your freedom now.

Yeah see this is why we can't have a real conversation about this. Every time I bring up this topic I'm bombarded with "ThEy'Re tAkInG YoUr FreEdOm!!" and "VaCcInEs DoN'T EvEn WorK" type people.

I'm not part of that group.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#222

Post by runako »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #117
runako wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of talk about this in parent's groups on FB. Basically, parents all want their kids in school as daycare. Schools have logistics problems due to students/teachers/support staff/bus drivers/etc. being sick. I think if some parents could enlist the police to drag sick teachers to school, they would do that. In my area, schools are combining classes across grade levels because teachers are sick but parents…

The parents don't create that pressure though. Americans use school as childcare because we don't have adequate childcare. People don't have leave, paid or otherwise, to take care of their children at home, but they must go to work anyway. This is a labor issue, not an "individuals are mean" problem.

Granted, but it’s not a “schools run poorly” issue as it is frequently positioned in the Covid era.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#223

Post by aidenn0 »

bsder wrote: post #175
WalterBright wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The schools are funded with rivers of cash. It's simply squandered. More money won't help (that's been tried many times). To make schools safe is simple - hold classes outside. It won't work everywhere everytime, but it can work enough. It'll work fine in California, Arizona, Seattle most of the time, etc.

> The schools are funded with rivers of cash. It's simply squandered. More money won't help (that's been tried many times). Sigh. This simply isn't true. I'm no fan of the Gates Foundation as I think they helicopter in, muck everything up, and then leave picking up the pieces to the locals after they leave again. However, their transparency was at least useful. If you want effective education in younger students, it…

As of 2018, 16 states in the US spend over $15K per student[1]. The US average is either nearly 13k[1] in 2018 or over 14k[2] in 2017.

Only 3 countries in the OECD spend $15k or more[2].

1: https://ncses.nsf.gov/indicators/states/indicator/public-sch...

2: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#224

Post by xwdv »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #90
xwdv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is obvious what will happen. The education system will crumble, inequality will grow, and to make up for having a poorly educated work force we will adopt more automation or AI-assisted tasks with very structured workflows to reduce cognitive requirements. Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences, presumably with other elite children. This will allow some ch…

I was with you until you got to the... breeding... thing.

Humans breed like any other animal, not sure why people take offense to pointing out biological processes. Mates get selected based on environmental factors and fitness, and increasingly, social status. In the future, rich girls still won’t marry poor boys.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#225

Post by bko »

_jal wrote: post #54
superfrank wrote: post #18

I'm not sure I like this article. They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim. For example the article says > Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. But when you go to the study they link, it says > Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults in the UK found no diffe…

There appears to be a weird blind-spot when discussing COVID outcomes - anything short of death appears to be discounted or ignored. So hospital issues, long COVID, etc. just don't exist, so catching it either didn't matter or you're dead. On a planet where that was true, that sort of reasoning would make sense. (As it does if you're trying to encourage other people to ignore risks.) What I don't understand is why so…

The reason people care about death is that its a clear signal and would likely scale linearly with the harm covid is doing to society.

For instance, more positive tests could be due to testing. Hospitalizations are affected by different policies. I don't even know how you would measure long covid.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#226

Post by WalterBright »

cjaybo wrote: post #171
WalterBright wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you take useless classes? Colleges give students great leeway in course selection.

I'm sure you've heard of prerequisites, but maybe you haven't encountered any questionable requirements in the classes you took at the schools you attended? Personally, I had to take classes like "Ancient Eastern Civilizations" while pursuing a degree in Audio Production. So while the term "useless" is a bit strong, I understand where they're coming from.

Caltech had a requirement for classes in social studies. This was a rather broad category, and included things like language, history, and even accounting. So there wasn't any reason for me to select a useless class.

There were specific required classes that I didn't like, but they weren't useless.

Prerequisites, of course, prevent one from wasting the professor's time from unprepared students.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#227

Post by chmod600 »

It seems like this is a case where science doesn't tell the whole story. The pro-science stance is very numbers-focused, but ignores hard-to-quantify things that really do matter.

People see their kids suffering. Masks do have a cost. Millions of years of evolution say that facial expressions are really important, especially for adolescents. Fear has a cost. And quality of life matters.

Everyone knows this. Even the most pro-lockdown politicians are seen enjoying ordinary life among people. The ones who can't escape are the kids, because the adults tell them what to do 24/7 and punish them instantly when out of compliance.

It doesn't help that we label people who happen to see the real costs to children as some kind of science deniers. You don't have to deny science to realize that other things also matter.

[Edited for clarity.]

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#228

Post by disambiguation »

tehjoker wrote: post #37

I wonder how all those kids with long covid will view decisions to physically disable them potentially for life so the state could force their parents to work. I wonder how kids mental health copes with the idea that adults will intentionally expose them and others to a deadly disease with no mitigations to make money.

FFS man, less than 1k kids (0-17) have ever died from covid.

Get in line behind gun violence, vehicle accidents, and drowning at the beach.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#229

Post by tdeck »

ajmurmann wrote: post #83
superfrank wrote: post #18

I'm not sure I like this article. They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim. For example the article says > Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. But when you go to the study they link, it says > Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults in the UK found no diffe…

"For the past two years, large parts of American society have decided harming children was an unavoidable side effect of Covid-19." This sentence also implied that there had been consensus about what the trade-off is which I don't think everyone would agree with. I definitely know some parents who are afraid if their children returning to badly ventilated classrooms

Also parents are the caretakers of children. If they're sick or incapacitated or die, that's going to have a negative impact on children. As will having a greater number of essential workers becoming sick or dying.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#230

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #34

When I was a kid there was a big earthquake where I lived and my life was disrupted for a few weeks. Many decades later I still have latent trauma from that incident. Children involved in situations like accidents, wars, disasters and abuse need years and sometimes lifelong therapy to deal with it. We are kidding ourselves if we think that the long list of behavioral changes we are starting to see in kids is simply a…

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