Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 714 posts

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#261

Post by Talanes »

zepto wrote: post #137
Talanes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern society is just the result of countless generations of the human tendency to quantify. We just have so many things quantified now that our problems tend to be more "using the wrong quantifications" rather than "not having the right quantifications."

> Modern society is just the result of countless generations of the human tendency to quantify. Is it? I see no evidence to justify this statement at all. Care to show some? The vast majority of how society is organized seems to eschew quantification in favor of descriptive qualification. Most laws, and governance, for example are formed that way. The use of metrics in governance has been dramatically increasing as o…

Descriptive qualification is a necessary stepping stone to qualification though, so of course society built on it first. Something must be described and defined before it can be counted. Modernity emerges from humanity first; influences it second.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#262

Post by School-Cotton »

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #62

I agree that adults have failed kids during the pandemic, but the agenda that this article is pushing is deeply, deeply flawed. The consequences the pandemic is having on kids is not due to schools being closed, it's due to kids growing up in the middle of a society collapsing under the weight of a pandemic. To argue that we shouldn't have closed schools, or should have made things more normal for the kids is to say…

> kids growing up in the middle of a society collapsing under the weight of a pandemic

Society is collapsing under the weight of our reaction to the pandemic, not under the weight of a pandemic itself.

There is no reason why a pandemic that kills fewer than 1% of people would cause anything to collapse. (That's about how many people die every year anyway, of normal causes).

> Fair would have been for everyone to do their part

The current variant spreading like wildfire in the US came from South Africa (or maybe Botswana). The previous one came from India. The original one came from China. Even if we had 100% compliance in the US with whatever measures you want, it wouldn't stop covid, unless we could somehow force everybody in the world to do the same thing, which is impossible.

Nobody has ever satisfyingly explained to me how this meme of "if everybody did the right thing it would all be over by now" makes any sense. Australia, New Zealand, and China are not back to normal yet.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#263

Post by quadrifoliate »

nsxwolf wrote: post #115
wayoutthere wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t the kids getting sick, it’s the adults teaching them getting sick and dying. We’ve treated teachers like shit for so long that many are just saying “nope, not dying for a job” because they can go make more money doing literally anything else. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel even before Covid. If kids education were really a priority, the right time to invest was 20 years ago. The system ha…

This sentiment seems strange in 2022. Vaccines for teachers have been widely available for almost a year now.

> Vaccines for teachers have been widely available for almost a year now.

You appear to have missed the news around the Omicron variant being much better at vaccine evasion than Delta. You can't compare the situation a year ago with the one now, which is unique and unprecedented, just like the pandemic was initially.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#264

Post by [deleted] »

runako wrote: post #17

I personally know healthy people not in the "old" age groups who have permanent nerve damage from mild cases of unvaccinated (pre-vaccine) Covid. We have known from the beginning that Covid sometimes causes nerve and/or brain damage (sensory loss) that may be permanent. As I am not a virologist any more than the author of this piece, I am not comfortable making blanket pronouncements like this from TFA: > For the pas…

[deleted]

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#265

Post by School-Cotton »

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…

> Sigh. This simply isn't true.

Yes it is. Compare per-student education spending in the US to any other country.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#266

Post by mupuff1234 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #196
btown wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article actually says it's 233% increase in chance of death for people younger than 65, which is even scarier: > For people younger than 65 who were hospitalized with COVID-19, the risk of death in the 12 months after the infection was 233% higher than it was for people who did not have the disease, results published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine have shown. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fme…

Thanks for the correction! My mistake - but I would argue it's WAY less scary. Chance of death is already high when you're 80 (4%). An extra 133% is 5.32% chance of death. If you're 16 is 0.02%. An extra 133% is a rounding error.

But if that extra 133% risk is kept throughout your lifetime then back to being scary :/

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#267

Post by kelseyfrog »

nradov wrote: post #244
tdeck wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is that relevant? The parents will all inevitably be exposed eventually. It doesn't matter whether the exposure happens through one of their children or someone else.

It doesn't matter how. It matters when.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#268

Post by ianbicking »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #253
ianbicking wrote: post #239

I'd love to see an emotionless cost-benefit analysis of different approaches to handling schools in the pandemic. I suspect the cost of closed schools far exceeds what we intuitively think, since it's not just the educational loss now, it's the cost of future mitigations due to the problems we're causing, and a large cost of lost productivity by parents. How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each da…

First, let's learn to account for emotional, mental, spiritual costs. Then we can talk about the productivity hit.

Those are all important too, but I think these different indicators all point in the same direction: that we should be putting a lot more effort into keeping schools open

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#269

Post by galaxyLogic »

CountDrewku wrote: post #134
_jal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can say the opposite about the other side as well... Anything short of eradication (which is impossible) means nonstop lockdowns, masking, vaccine mandates and making the unvaccinated pariahs. What I don't understand is why you would shut down schools and enforce silly unhelpful mask mandates on them when the science shows children do not spread the disease in any meaningful way and are not badly affected by it.…

You make several strong claims in your post:

1. Shutting down schools does not help prevent the spread

2. Mask-mandates do not help (prevent the spread)

3. Science shows children don't spread the disease in any meaningful way

4. Children are not badly affected

5. Mask-mandates are "silly"

Can you give us links to data that shows each of your five (5) claims to be correct?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#270

Post by fundad »

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #62

I agree that adults have failed kids during the pandemic, but the agenda that this article is pushing is deeply, deeply flawed. The consequences the pandemic is having on kids is not due to schools being closed, it's due to kids growing up in the middle of a society collapsing under the weight of a pandemic. To argue that we shouldn't have closed schools, or should have made things more normal for the kids is to say…

I read articles like this that are so naive about the symptoms of societal collapse and think "some people have absolutely no idea what the coming decades are going to be like"
Post reply on HN