No Way to Grow Up • Hacker News Board

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#631

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 3:04 PM UTC

jdminhbg wrote: post #473

giraffe_lady wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#632

Post by crowbahr » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 3:22 PM UTC

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #618

TeeMassive wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/ > The FY21-23 HSH budget leverages $1.2 billion over the next two years in federal, state, and local resources (including Prop C funds). In addition to HSH’s existing commitments

…wait, im seeing in here that they plan to add 4,000 new homes to addresss homelessness. Given the real estate pricing of SF it makes sense it would be expensive as fuck. Why are folks mad at SF govt? They should be mad at landowners for price gouging on rent.

SF rent isn't gouged: SF land prices are gouged by NIMBYs. For the price rent is SF should look like Manhattan. Instead it's more like Boise.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#633

Post by blindmute » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #456

geoduck14 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 7 yo tested positive yesterday, so we kept her and her 5 yo sister home today to "learn from home". I had forgotten how bad learning from home was. My wife stayed home to help them - she spent most of the day trying to get them connected to the various videos to listen to stuff and very little time actually learning

I highly suspect there's room for disruption in at-home education - it's so terrible right now. It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385 ) seems pretty positi…

Students learned with nothing more than books for hundreds of years and were better educated than most people today.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#634

Post by zepto » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 3:31 PM UTC

xboxnolifes wrote: post #200

zepto wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The vast majority of how society is organized seems to eschew quantification in favor of descriptive qualification. > The use of metrics in governance has been dramatically increasing as our methods of quantification have developed, but that is definitely a modern development. These two statements seem slightly contradictory. If quantified metrics in governance has increased as our ability to quantify things has in…

> The only times we don't quantify things is when we cannot.

Just because something has increased recently doesn’t mean there is an inbuilt human tendency for it.

For example the wearing of lounge suits for business is a modern development.

I don’t think you are going to claim that means there was a ‘human tendency’ for lounge suits all along.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#635

Post by mholm » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 3:32 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #118

xwdv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t work very well with young children.

It works for 10-year-olds, and I'd say it works for younger children too. The problem is needing supervision (curiosity leads to doing some very harmful things, and that's not even considering bouts of malice…). If children want to learn, and they can learn, there's no stopping them (except with video games, television, toys, a field, a garden, a paved area, a woodland, the fact that books make a loud noise every tim…

> It works for 10-year-olds

No. It works for some 10-year-olds. Few, even. The school system is not intended to educate a few children, it is intended to educate all the children in the country. Even the poorest and least motivated. You cannot just throw children into a room with an adult and computers and tell them to learn.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#636

Post by zepto » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 3:33 PM UTC

Talanes wrote: post #261

zepto wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So what?

Weaving is a necessary stepping stone to making lounge suits. That doesn’t mean humanity has been destined to wear lounge suits all along.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#637

Post by BobbyJo » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 3:34 PM UTC

_v7gu wrote: post #534

BobbyJo wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, I don't think any sane country will try to invade somewhere where the citizens have recreational nukes.

Nukes don't defend a country without a huge human force supporting and maintaining them.

In addition to that, you need to constantly evolve your delivery vehicles to overcome newly developed defense capabilities.

In even the most bare-bones defense scenario, the needed investment is fairly large, and it depends on how large of an investment adversaries make.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#638

Post by zepto » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 3:35 PM UTC

xboxnolifes wrote: post #184

zepto wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the human tendency to optimise the quantifiable and ignore the unquantified. Are you sure that isn’t just a modern trend now that we are able to quantify so much stuff?

I'm not much of a history buff, but I can't recall a good example of cultures or societal periods with emphasis on optimizing the unquantifiable (Or having no optimization preference at all). The only decent examples that I can think are in laws, and that only seems to be favored because things are difficult to be quantified, not because the unquantifiable was more preferred.

Can you think of a historical period in the distant part where there is evidence of a preference for quantification?

It seem like you are simply assuming that was present.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#639

Post by blindmute » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 3:42 PM UTC

bradlys wrote: post #572

tschwimmer wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some bad news for you: if your child is college bound then they are about to go into another environment that has been profoundly damaged by the pandemic: a college campus. Students at my university are angry and depressed about the fact that they're paying thousands of dollars for glorified university of Phoenix. The college social scene is also obviously heavily disrupted, which is probably an underappreciat…

Terrible advice. Gap year is a waste of time and is reserved for rich kids. You won’t be doing anything meaningful with your life due to COVID anyway. You have no employable skill set. You don’t have money because you’re a broke ass 18 year old. If your idea of fun is breaking your back bussing tables at a restaurant 40 hours a week then feel free to get a degree and do it after. I wouldn’t bother and have seen the e…

You're only stuck at home if you decide to be.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#640

Post by quadrifoliate » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

istjohn wrote: post #555

quadrifoliate wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like work from home isn't working great for you, you should probably go into the office to work. Oh wait, but there are probably safety concerns preventing that. You could also get professional childcare for your children to cover the day, but you probably don't want to pay the amount it costs. I am not sure why you don't have a friend or family member watch the kids for a day; few seem to be able to depend on…

You keep turning the discussion to teachers, but frankly, that's not germain to the initial comment in this thread, which simply stated that the costs of this pandemic to children may be much higher than we realize. No one has even argued for a specific policy like keeping schools open no matter the risks. But you seem unwilling to simply concede that this is an ongoing disaster for kids. I mean, remote learning has…

> You keep turning the discussion to teachers, but frankly, that's not germain [sic] to the initial comment in this thread

Teachers do the the bulk of the work in keeping "schools" going. A majority of the essential employees in schools are teachers, but a very large margin (the next biggest is janitors and other support staff). Perhaps I am overreacting because discussion about this I have heard tends to descend into thinly veiled blame for the teachers. A typical disingenuous comment that I have heard repeated ad nauseam is "Oh, we are not blaming the teachers, we just want schools to be open". Well okay, we can throw open the doors then without enough teachers, and I guess the students can just...teach themselves?

> But you seem unwilling to simply concede that this is an ongoing disaster for kids. I mean, remote learning has been a farce...

Yeah, my statement would certainly be more nuanced than that. I would concede that:

- There is an ongoing pandemic that is a disaster, especially with the model of healthcare that we use in the US

- It has changed the fabric of our society in many ways, including expectations about "going to work" and childcare

- This change has affected children's learning in ways that are unpredictable

What I don't get is the isolation of these unpredictable changes to a simple, easily hurled "schools and learning are a disaster" comment. Society is a disaster right now, and unlikely to go back to normal in a hundred ways.

> it's all our fault because we don't live near retired or underemployed friends or relatives who can take on childcare responsibilities for months on end?

Certainly not, I feel bad for you. I'm just implying that the lack of these is a part of why society (not just "schools") is such a disaster right now. A society with more cohesion that balances responsibility of child rearing across multiple people would have done a much better job.