Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows • Hacker News Board

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#121

Post by gman83 » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 12:56 PM UTC

drnonsense42 wrote: post #101

teknopaul wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kidless workers do have some more tax burden. If you presume that taxes are wisely spent, and some of it on education, equal tax payments result in unequal benefit. Not complaining, Just explaining. I live in a country that has decent, tax funded, public education; I understand you may not. But as a kidless tax payer, I fully support decent public education paid for with my tax contributions. I don't think tax should…

That’s only one limited side of it. The very limited tax contribution you’re making towards their education pays off in spades for you. When you’re old, they’re fully funding your social security, providing you with healthcare, keeping you alive militarily for a long time after you have any practical value to society (well, it’s true). If they were not, and only people with children only could take advantage of the r…

Not only that, imagine living in a country with terrible public education. I'm sure crime rates and other similar indicators would be way up. Not exactly a fantastic place to live.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#122

Post by ramijames » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 12:56 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #113

ramijames wrote: post #39

The last two years have been some of the worst of my life.

Why?

Small kids. Non-stop work. No help from parents or the government. In my country if you're a freelancer, you got zero pandemic-related stipends. Has ended in divorce. Traumatized kids. I'm an emotional wreck, but I try to hide it and soldier on. There's only so much people can take before they give up.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#123

Post by lr4444lr » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 12:57 PM UTC

tallanvor wrote: post #114

stef25 wrote: post #26

Right before the first lockdown I started a new high stress job and for several months our two toddlers weren't allowed to attend school. During the first few weeks we tried to make it "fun", I'd start working around 4-5AM , alternating morning and evening shifts of work / toddlers with my partner. Then colleagues started complaining "wtf this guy's playing with his kids in the park at 2PM" and I got really bad feedb…

> And IMHO if you weren't at home with toddlers you didn't experience true suffering. You're entitled to your opinion, but the lockdowns affected everyone differently. I know parents who thrived with their toddlers, but they didn't have the same issues at work where people were complaining about when they were working. But I also know people who's marriages ended due to longstanding issues that were magnified by bein…

> I know parents who thrived with their toddlers,

With both spouses expected to continue full time working, and no child care coming in? Politely, I doubt it.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#124

Post by black_13 » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 12:59 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#125

Post by lr4444lr » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 12:59 PM UTC

darthrupert wrote: post #36

I'm more and more convinced that people who don't have kids should have double the tax burden compared to parents, at least for the first 5-10 years. The stress is unimaginable, and then some people have the gall to complain when parents try to do it well. Appalling behaviour. I would not tolerate such complaints as a manager, but thankfully I have never met such attitude in my life.

There is already the EITC, and you get deductions for them as dependents. As a parent, I don't feel a need to punish the childless. Money != time or stress.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#126

Post by atchoo » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 1:00 PM UTC

dazc wrote: post #81

moritonal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on "I found that ensuring he always has a supply at home has helped with this too"? I guess you mean that when they'd go out to a pub or bar they'd spend too much, which means that social pressure of embarrassment and bar-staff weren't effective controls. Did the extra money spent add to the pressure? What I'm curious at is that makes it sound like they're somewhat controlled within their home, or ju…

He would buy his drink daily, not always from the same place and not at the same time. So some days he'd buy a bottle of cider, other days a bottle or two of wine, a bottle of spirit, etc. In other words, his alcohol consumption was erratic and the fact he had to go out and buy it everyday sometimes led to unintended outcomes such as mixing with the kinds of people with similar issues, having small accidents, being r…

Hmm. How much experience do you have with alcoholics? To me this sounds very naive. I have seen various forms of well meaning enablement that follow this exact pattern. The drinker still buys drink for themselves on top of their "ration" while maintaining a facade of moderation for the one buying them drink. If someone is meeting them a couple of times a week, then they plan bigger binges around those visits.

I have had the pleasure of clearing out the private stashes behind the washing machine or garages full of hidden empties despite the claims of a gullible enabler about the progress being made. 1l of 5% is barely going to wet the whistle of a dependent drinker making me less inclined to believe this is a unicorn case of magical moderation. If there is one thing that happens very early in problem drinking, it's all the fucking lies about drinking.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#127

Post by patwolf » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 1:03 PM UTC

The stat from the article that blows my mind is that over 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in a 12-month period. The CDC categorizes it with "accidents", so it's easy to overlook when looking at leading causes of death in the US.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#128

Post by wincy » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 1:08 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #117

BoxOfRain wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I once worked at a place where someone was fired because his number of commits was lower than the other developers. He was a brilliant developer and always got his work done. But apparently his commits were too small (he liked to lump a lot of things into commits, instead of several smaller ones). Bloody hell, I can't imagine how dysfunctional other things must have been if this was allowed to happen without someone…

Yeah, that right there is getting gold in the Olympics for "measuring the wrong thing".

My work tried measuring commits and PRs briefly as a metric. At the time I was doing a bunch of semi-automatic upgrading of repos with some tools is written for a substantial number of our micro services. So I looked about 300x more productive than the second most productive employee because I was batching hundreds of PRs using our GitHub API.

It prompted the IT guy who was supposed to set up and demo the tool to higher ups come over and show it to me, we had a pretty good laugh. I like to think the absurdity of my numbers is what caused the idea to be scrapped.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#129

Post by datavirtue » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 1:10 PM UTC

willcipriano wrote: post #73

stef25 wrote: post #26

Right before the first lockdown I started a new high stress job and for several months our two toddlers weren't allowed to attend school. During the first few weeks we tried to make it "fun", I'd start working around 4-5AM , alternating morning and evening shifts of work / toddlers with my partner. Then colleagues started complaining "wtf this guy's playing with his kids in the park at 2PM" and I got really bad feedb…

I only have one kid, but similar situation for me. I learned something about jobs during this time. The effort and stress involved is not proportional to the pay. Some jobs are just hell and you can go next door and make the same thing in a pleasant environment. I ended up taking about half my skills off my resume. I'm no longer a full stack dev, I'm a backend engineer. I removed the stuff about DevOps and project/pr…

Yeah, I dialed back significantly and found that everyone was still super impressed. I approach everything gently and only work a few hours a day now to keep my energy and creativity up.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#130

Post by psychlops » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 1:13 PM UTC

I notice that "the pandemic" is quickly found as the root cause and no analysis at all is done to identify if the response to the pandemic is to be implicated as well.

I'd wager that waking up one day and discovering that one's job is not essential might be stressful. Being forbidden from going to the beaches and parks might have contributed. The stress of learned helplessness from countless bureaucratic decisions later proven baseless could be analyzed as well.