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This is a teenager

pudding.cool

321–330 of 868 posts

Re: This is a teenager

#321
post #50

Kind of cool, but the conclusion was completely backwards. The final line of the study was "So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their kids, it is societies fault.

The point is that, as a society, we should do more to help kids who are having a rough time. Another point is that if you're not thriving as an adult, it could be because of the experiences you had when you were a kid.

I honestly think that the sorts of experiences that break kids are things like parents breaking up, not 'not having the newest toy' or 'not going on vacation'. In the sense that material poverty can cause family stress, I completely agree. I fully support programs to feed kids, provide medical insurance, etc. I even support it for adults. I'm just not sure how any of that at the end of the day is going to fix daddy cheating. Unless you're suggesting a crackdown on prostitution and/or making adultery a crime again (in which case sure! as a social conservative, I'm down)... but good luck getting that passed today!

Re: This is a teenager

#322

The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to. I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary.…

I took these types of surveys in junior high. All my friends did heroin and were prostitutes. (it was funny). I wouldn't trust a survey like that more than toilet paper and tea leaves. The truly horrifying thing is adults thinking the data is real and making decisions.

Re: This is a teenager

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh you have a comprehensive physical model of individual human behavior do you, in particular the decision making process of life-changing choices? I'd love to see the publication.

The future is still a function of the past, even if we lack that function's complete specification.

>The future is still a function of the past

If you don't believe in conscious choice the whole debate is moot anyway.

Re: This is a teenager

#324
post #44

I watched the video. Maybe I am not understanding the visuals, but it looked like the narrator's conclusions do not actually match the data. He is trying to make an argument that poor kids need extra help or they will have a rough life. But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things. Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/1…

They even through in a non-sequitur jab at Trump for good measure. This is what happens when you use ideology to read and interpret data rather than the other way around.

Also, weirdly, it seems that the years following Trump's election, the people in the group did better, made more money, etc. So I'm not clear on how presidents being demeaning to people is relevant. That's not to say it's alright for them to do so, just, seems like a strange interjection when everything else is talking about the data itself.

Re: This is a teenager

#325
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what factual basis can you claim that adverse events are primarily driven by genetics? On the face of it this seems ludicrous. A baby born to a mother living in a high-risk environment but then adopted by a low-risk family would likely do far better in their life than the inverse.

As someone who was on the adoption lists in California, we had to learn that statements like 'On the face of it this seems ludicrous. A baby born to a mother living in a high-risk environment but then adopted by a low-risk family would likely do far better in their life than the inverse.' were false. I don't know if it was right or wrong, but California in its mandated adoption (fostering) training courses thought th…

Do you remember the age ranges of those foster kids?

Re: This is a teenager

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately a solid number of these things would rely on the moral equivalent of slavery. > Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food. No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful. At some point the risk of an employee…

My context is Canada where getting killed at work wouldn't been an issue. In the context I'm speaking about it would likely drive opportunity in low income neighborhoods. Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get groceries. The US is a whole other can of worms, I don't know how to solve those…

> Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get groceries.

I can't imagine anyone in a major US city spending 3 hours. Maybe rurally, but even the so-called 'food deserts' in a big city like LA ... it's just a few miles.

At the end of the day, look... my mother taught in inner-city public schools. I know the problems these kids have. They're given meals and such (and they should be), but that is not going to solve a cheating father, a mother too depressed by said cheating to lift a finger to do anything (and maybe whoring herself out or doing drugs to damp the pain?), and a family that sees the child as a cash bag. I mean what are we possibly to do? You give the food and still the child doesn't get it.

I feel these policies end up failing because the policy makers are from whole families (And are likely extremely socially conservative in their own life) and can't imagine anything so debased.

Re: This is a teenager

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also help if more people that are doing marginal work could receive a wage that they felt secure with. Money is one of the biggest stressors for couples and families.

I don't understand how to practically make this work. There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary. Nobo…

The real issue is that a few people have accumulated a lot of wealth and property, and they use it as a tool to extract even more money. It's basically the late stage capitalism money vacuum hoovering up everything. In the past the only levers we had against this were breaking up firms and enforcing anti-monopoly and preventing capital from even entering certain parts of our economy. We could, for example, ban private equity companies from buying houses and healthcare companies, break up national monopolies into regional companies, and eliminate a lot of the consolidation that has traditionally enhanced the bargaining power of the company owner against the employees.

In the short term it would make a lot of stuff less efficient, but when people talk about "efficiency" they really mean driving costs down and driving income up. So we really don't want an efficient capitalist economy, we want a capitalist economy that is just efficient enough to meet our needs while not being so efficient that a few people can exploit that efficiency and run away with our things.

Re: This is a teenager

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to disbelieve anyone who says they aren't a derivation of their previous person states. That's just physics.

You have like zero molecules left in your body from 10 years ago. If you are worried about physics, the most important consideration is your diet. And are you really a derivation of your state, or of the things that happen to you? The guys who were drafted into war in Vietnam and then got killed there, was there anything about them that would have made a difference to their cruel fate? If we go by this philosophy, th…

>If we go by this philosophy, the most import decisions are when you were born, where, and into what environment.

Isn't that basically the gist of TFA?

Re: This is a teenager

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately a solid number of these things would rely on the moral equivalent of slavery. > Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food. No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful. At some point the risk of an employee…

My context is Canada where getting killed at work wouldn't been an issue. In the context I'm speaking about it would likely drive opportunity in low income neighborhoods. Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get groceries. The US is a whole other can of worms, I don't know how to solve those…

Canada is about to become a 2nd world country. No industry, no ability to own a home, no healthcare [1], only one party, banking restrictions, etc etc,.

1. Healthcare is where you can see a doctor.

Re: This is a teenager

#330

The presentation argues that the adverse experiences cited are outside the individual's control, some of them are and they can have negative effects, i agree, like gun violence or uninterested parents, but others are questionable, like suspensions or being held back in school, which is (in most part) derived directly from the individual's actions. Since the margins in some of the statistics are so small i wonder how…

>derived directly from the individual's actions.

Are you saying that a person's actions aren't influenced by their environment?

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