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

471–480 of 714 posts

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#471

Post by jerojero »

lucaspm98 wrote: post #454
honkycat wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mistake you are making is that you think I consider our current administration and democratic leaders remotely competent or aligning with my values. They do not. I agree they are useless on purpose. That is my point.

Then the real question is whether you believe there is any hope or even precedent of efficient government administration and spending. I personally believe not and that government, especially on a broad federal level, will inherently tend to be inefficient, bureaucratic, and corrupt. If so, wouldn't a swing right towards small government be ideal?

It is not possible to remake the USA given its legal structure and most importantly its culture. Federation in the USA is kind of fucked, but how do you fix it?

In reality, anyway, the social, economic and political system works pretty well for business and capital owners. Specially those at the very top. Governments are corrupt because the system is corrupt. The rules of society have been written, and this dates back to the foundation of the country, to benefit elites.

In order to change the rules major dissent is needed, and that will only come in a situation of complete collapse of the political system. I think it will happen, and I actually think things are getting really heated up... but it's not gonna be pretty.

It will be interesting to see what kind of economic, political and social models could be followed. But really, elites will never want to risk their current positions.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#472

Post by notreallyserio »

lucaspm98 wrote: post #459
honkycat wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could you argue we have gone "hard left" exactly? What is an event or piece of legislation that has been passed?

Socially and culturally it's undeniable, it's now completely unacceptable in my professional and social circles to publicly support one of our two political parties. Politically, outside of the obvious 2020 election, there has been unbridled and unprecedented government spending since at least the beginning of the pandemic. Whether it was justified is up for debate, we likely still haven't realized all of the effects…

Well, one of the parties has kind of gone off the rails with support for literal assaults on our democracy. You bet it's unacceptable.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#473

Post by jdminhbg »

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.

> Americans use school as childcare because we don't have adequate childcare

This doesn't make any sense. What would it look like to have "adequate childcare" for third graders? You wake up and decide whether your kid was going to school or child care that day?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#474

Post by [deleted] »

tehjoker wrote: post #463
khazhoux wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The clinical picture is still evolving. There is much less information than for adults We're nearing 300,000,000 cases worldwide. How is it still an open question? Maybe the reason there's "much less information" is simply because kids are not (by and large) getting majorly sick from it. If kids were dying from covid in any significant numbers, I have no doubt I'd be seeing the stories on CNN and everywhere else by…

In the article I posted, one justification given for the paucity of data other than gross cases and deaths is that it's much harder to set up a study due to the issues around consent. > If kids were dying from covid in any significant numbers, I have no doubt I'd be seeing the stories on CNN and everywhere else by now. Well, pediatric admissions are the highest they've ever been. I would not rely on the major media,…

[deleted]

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#475

Post by josephcsible »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #451
xboxnolifes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the distinction is important in any scenario. It's always the disruption. Put another way: if an earthquake happens, but nobody notices except the Richter scale, does it impact anyone? Of course it's not the pandemic term itself, it's the first-, second-, third-order effects of covid and the term pandemic . Zoom school, masks, vaccines, media coverage, political shifts, fights, worrying about family mem…

> worrying about family members getting sick (possibly dying) That was my point. Is what's hurting the kids having to stay home, and have Zoom meetings? Or is it the fact that they're literally living through a catastrophe? The former is nothing compared to the latter.

Most people haven't really been affected by the disease itself, and instead were basically entirely affected by the measures put in place to try to slow its spread.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#476

Post by cycrutchfield »

lucaspm98 wrote: post #461
KittenInABox wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean why are we counting 2 years when the "left-leaning" party wasn't even in power 1 year ago?

Even those on the right were, at least temporarily, willing to accept unprecedented levels of government spending.

The right has not been truly fiscally conservative for decades. Maybe you are the anomalous one, as your party seems to have transitioned to cults of personality lacking any sort of coherent ideology.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#477

Post by BobbyJo »

honkycat wrote: post #465
lucaspm98 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the real question is whether you believe there is any hope or even precedent of efficient government administration and spending. I personally believe not and that government, especially on a broad federal level, will inherently tend to be inefficient, bureaucratic, and corrupt. If so, wouldn't a swing right towards small government be ideal?

Small government. So you are in favor of defunding the military?

Small doesn't mean non-existent. One of the few things even the most extreme anarcho-capitalists believe the government should do is protect it's people from a hostile takeover on behalf of a non-anarcho-capitalist nation.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#478

Post by adolph »

adam_arthur wrote: post #402
quadrifoliate wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed. I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity? If so, does parental productivity also fall drastically during summer when schools have holidays? Stresses by the pandemic itself hav…

In a market based economy, wage is determined by supply and demand. Then, high wages incentivize new people to enter the high wage field, and low wages disincentivize new entrants. This is a societally productive outcome, because labor gets allocated to the most economically beneficial sectors naturally through fluctuations in wages. If we had 10x the number of engineers, wages would drop significantly. Imagine, for…

> In a market based economy, wage is determined by supply and demand.

A 1973 letter to the editor in the journal Science describes the "famous story" about a physicist whose solution to a poultry farm's egg-production problems began with "Postulate a spherical chicken".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#479

Post by rhinoceraptor »

refurb wrote: post #435
honkycat wrote: post #399

And what is going to happen? Pass a bill to provide additional support to schools? Hell, Anything? No. Nothing is ever done. Nothing ever happens except decay. The United States is spinning down its governmental duties. The pendulum will swing right again, and that will be the death blow. They will continue to gut public and infrastructure programs. All 3 branches will finally truly be a jobs program for the upper cl…

This is an impressive rant and makes sense if you ignore the fact that more and more money is being sucked up by the government that seems to be providing less and less in return. I mean San Francisco has a $1.1B budget for homelessness. That's a contribution of almost $1,300 for every man, woman and child resident of SF. And yet the problem is worse, not better. Maybe it's not a money problem but the approach that's…

> That's a contribution of almost $1,300 for every man, woman and child resident of SF

If you are a property owner, then distributing the externalities and barbaric social harm of the insane NIMBYism and zoning laws that artificially protect your property's valuation to the majority renting population makes sense. A few thousand a year is nothing compared to real estate.

And obviously, that amount of money is easily enough to just give the unhoused the housing they need, if it weren't impossible to build affordable housing in the first place.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#480

Post by dogleash »

This article is a confidence trick.

By making it about COVID, the affluent readers of the New York Times can pat themselves on the back as if they weren't failing the youth prior to quarantine measures. Of course they were.

I've seen it. Everyone's seen it; even if they've chosen to believe they haven't. The secondary sources have to water it down like this article if they want to talk about it at all. And the primary sources where it's laid bare are a bit too dirty and undomesticated to mention in polite society. Not as if anyone wants to be caught cavorting with primaries at all these days, lest the blue checks turn their back on it (and you, by association).

Post reply on HN