461–470 of 714 posts
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Some would say that spending $6 trillion in Ill leave the judgement to you, but it’s pretty obvious that things are not the same today as they were 3 years ago.
I mean why are we counting 2 years when the "left-leaning" party wasn't even in power 1 year ago?
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"For the past two years, large parts of American society have decided harming children was an unavoidable side effect of Covid-19." This sentence also implied that there had been consensus about what the trade-off is which I don't think everyone would agree with. I definitely know some parents who are afraid if their children returning to badly ventilated classrooms
There have been large districts that have been open almost the entire time. The impact between those and other communities where schools have remained closed / virtual for nearly two years is minimal. My nieces went to a lower income Atlanta area public school. In March of 2020 when they switched to virtual leaning my niece was one of 6 children who ever logged in to do virtual assignments... from her entire grade! S…
people don’t realize the level of support an elementary school provides to many children.
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The clinical picture is still evolving. There is much less information than for adults, but here's the first google link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/
> 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…
> 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, you have to look for the data yourself. Media are big businesses in the pocket of bigger business that want adults to go to work and kids to go to school. They will only report issues that are so large and obvious they can't be ignored.
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> Why are parents being expected to teach at all during remote education? Because an enormous amount education is classroom management and behavioral conditioning, neither of which are easy to do remotely. This is sometimes talked about pejoratively. E.g., "so much of school is just babysitting". It's true in content. But the dismissive tone ignores the reality that for a vast majority of children, learning how to st…
I am asking specifically about the teaching parts. A parent doesn't need to be intimately familiar with the curriculum just to manage behavior, which of course is an obvious thing a parent would have to do if the kid is home. In the comment I replied to, it sounded like teachers are basically just giving kids agendas for the day. I know it's a tough life right now and that remote anything with kids is orders of magni…
Also, the behavioral thing is the thing you need a full-time person for. But parents can't teach full time. So the thin you most need a full-timer for is the thing that's impossible to do remotely! Which was kind of OP's whole point.
> In the comment I replied to, it sounded like teachers are basically just giving kids agendas for the day. I know it's a tough life right now and that remote anything with kids is orders of magnitude harder than with adults, but that doesn't sound good.
1. There's a lot more structure to it than that. Not to say it works or it's good, but there is more structure. Kids are often required to log into zoom for face time and so on, but it's at best marginally helpful. There's genuinely no way to manage 20+ little boxes on a screen.
2. More importantly, I don't think that is what OP was saying! They were drawing an important distinction between having a full-time homeschooling teacher and relying on a person in a box who's managing 20 other kids in boxes.
Again, if you accept on face that the behavior management side of teaching and the conveying knowledge side of teaching are basically inseparable, then OP's observation is an important one. Homeschooling can work well; remote schooling through zoom, not so much.
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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?
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So personal anecdote our two year old is behind on speech, we had someone come in to evaluate him and he mentioned that he has been seeing it a lot, citing that because so many people are wearing masks, and the kids weren't spending more time around other people it had created a trend he had noticed.
That reply you replied to got flagged, downvoted, murdered. And it was an extremely tame reply. Is it just me or is the intolerance for dissent ramping up?
It's one of many reasons I find myself using the internet less and less. Even the old forums I used to frequent and have the usual sparring conversations that were fun on the internet have fallen to one side or another, and anything outside the orthodoxy of the forum is treated with absolute hostility, "You are evil for evil's sake, I wish you dead" grade responses. There's no spirit of debate anymore, just a spirit of "Dogpile everyone who thinks differently." From any perspective!
It was a good 25 year run of internet, but I'm pretty much over the place. HN was one of the last sane places and it's been interesting seeing what sort of stuff gets flagged/killed. More and more, it's "That which isn't the groupthink." Which is sad. I'd rather read books from people I disagree with strongly than participate in an echo chamber. At least I'll have to either sharpen my ability to defend my views, or consider points of view I'd not considered before. Even if I decide they're junk, it's useful to understand how people get there and the viewpoints in more depth than shallow internet stuff.
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No doubt some are long term traumatized by this. But a brief look at history shows that such things happening during childhood are normal , not exceptional. If most people need therapy to get back to normal, the human race would have died out. In my grandparents' generation, it was normal for a family to lose a third of their children before adulthood. The US has had devastating epidemics before, like the 1918 flu, a…
> If most people need therapy to get back to normal, the human race would have died out. I don't think "normal" and "human race died out" are the only options. Your grandparents' generation may not have ever had or gotten back to what we'd consider normal today. We always hope to make the world a little better for our kids than it was for generations before. Our kids will grow into adults, and they'll find their norm…
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…
>And what is going to happen? Pass a bill to provide additional support to schools? Actually, a pediatric emergency was just declared [0]. And both Republicans and Democrats passed a $250 Million bill to provide rapid support for children's mental health. A Dr friend described it as "if I'm seeing a child and I'm concerned he/she is suffering from depression, I can be on the phone with one of the top 5 experts in the…
That seems like a less than scalable approach.
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> 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…
Salaries aren’t determined by essential-ness, they’re determined by supply and demand. Obviously a nursing home aid is a lot more “essential” than a FAANG engineer, but the latter is paid substantially more. It sounds flowery and noble to pay people based on how “important” their jobs are to society. But it’s simply no way to run an economy.
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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…