"This is a US teenager". Wouldn't be hard to add that right? We're not all american on the internet.
This is a teenager
651–660 of 868 posts
Re: This is a teenager
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't shock me that there's anti-US propaganda. It shocks me that people on this site routinely fall for it.
I think it’s more that we routinely see very poor and mentally ill people in the US get zero support? It’s not a great stretch to go from there to assume they don’t have any social security at all. If it’s available but many people cannot or do not know to make use of it, is it really social security? If they do make use of it and it’s still not enough, does that change things?
> I think it’s more that we routinely see very poor and mentally ill people in the US get zero support?
The state of California alone has spent $24,000,000,000 on homelessness in the last 5 years. The government spends about $50,000 per homeless person. See: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-homeles...
You can certainly argue that the support they're being given isn't working, but it's very far from zero support.
Re: This is a teenager
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parenting style is much more likely to not be causative though
Citation, please?
Studies of identical twins raised apart, like MISTRA, show remarkable similarities in life outcomes and big five personality traits. There's a big genetic component, and the time spent with parents is dwarfed by time spent with others once they start school, so the role of parenting style on life outcomes would have to have a significant outsized effect compared to all other life experiences.
If I recall correctly, absent neglect or abuse, parental influence doesn't matter as much as people think.
Re: This is a teenager
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pattern I've noticed is that the poor and the poorly educated have no career expectations from their kids. If the kids with wealthy and/or highly educated parents showed up at home with just one poor grade all hell broke lose. Grounded for 6 months, allowance cuts, no more TV or video games etc One kept his kid at home during the holidays to tutor him himself, screaming 90% of the time. The other parents would lo…
> screaming 90% of the time. Well isn't that just awesome parenting.
I'm not suggesting it is a good idea, it was just to illustrate the difference. He did learn grammar and went to university.
I'm pretty sure he is equally stubborn and hot headed as his dad if not more so. Now that I think about it, he even believes in pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. ha-ha
Re: This is a teenager
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pattern I've noticed is that the poor and the poorly educated have no career expectations from their kids. If the kids with wealthy and/or highly educated parents showed up at home with just one poor grade all hell broke lose. Grounded for 6 months, allowance cuts, no more TV or video games etc One kept his kid at home during the holidays to tutor him himself, screaming 90% of the time. The other parents would lo…
I hope you're never in a position to make any of these decisions.
Which one(s) and why?
A few months in the factory is nothing compared to your entire life. Stories are no substitutes for experience. Those who go on to get degrees and nice jobs would also benefit from the experience.
Sunday school because if you are sufficiently behind on the material you will never catch up. Never is a long time.
Getting the parents to show up and explain why the grades are bad will force them to consider why that is. I had lots of friends with parents who absolutely loved them but couldn't be any less interested in grades.
I appreciate how anecdotal this all is. How do you see it?
Re: This is a teenager
#656Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is, although it disproportionately affects people who are poor but not broke. If you’re truly broke, there’s Medicaid, if you’re old there’s Medicare, 4% by some form of military healthcare, many people covered by their employers, and so on. 90% of Americans are insured. As a Britisher, obviously I’m in favour of universal healthcare, and I think the US system would benefit from it. But let’s not pretend it’s perf…
> f you’re truly broke, there’s Medicaid Which you still might not qualify for, and may not get even if you do qualify for it ( https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/apr/15/john-ol... ) > 90% of Americans are insured. Which doesn't prevent nearly 40% of americans from being forced to put off needed medical care because of the expense they're still subjected to. ( https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/americans-put-…
Again, with the caveat that I much prefer the British system...
> nearly 40% of americans from being forced to put off needed medical care
Hard to interpret UK NHS waiting-time figures, especially given the political weight given to them, but these[0][1] paint a picture of 6 month to >1 year waiting times.
0: https://www.boa.ac.uk/resource/boa-statement-on-nhs-app-show...
1: https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/news-and-events/media-centre/press-...
> Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy
Medical debt for non-elective treatment feels barbaric, although digging into the figures (2m personal bankruptcies a year, 60% medical) gives 0.3% of the US population declaring medical bankruptcy a year, possibly going up to 1% if you do fancier maths involving households vs people.
Re: This is a teenager
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?) Unwilling to work or temporarily not desperate to stay alive? How many receiving assistance were still working, just doing it less? The only studies on outcomes I recall is that a lot of…
I can’t imagine they were very compelling studies if the only changes they could come up with was “some kids were less hungry”
Someone doesn't understand the effects of food insecurity:
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2021/09/22/food-insecuritys-lo...
Re: This is a teenager
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They cost more in healthcare, crime, and other support systems. Not really sure causality is being poor -> being more expensive Could go the other way, behaviors that make people more expensive -> being poor Different hot take: if we took schooling more seriously this would be less of an issue. Which is on the one hand a government problem, on the other hand a cultural problem (compared to, say, Japan) Just throwin…
Here's a grim example where being poor leads to being more expensive. An $80 tooth extraction would have avoided $250,000 in hospital care costs. https://perspectivesofchange.hms.harvard.edu/node/165
Maybe for healthcare, in a preventative sense like eating a healthy diet.
But for stuff that requires actual care like your counterexample, yeah it's 100% a government problem
Maybe for crime, diet, civic engagement, it's more of an education problem
Re: This is a teenager
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My last job title was Software Engineer II, but really I'm just a generalist that keeps failing upward, and I don't know whether if I were to double-down and specialize more, go deeper, or pivot out completely, I'd be able to do that well; it's a bit of a constant existential crisis. As a generalist that still has the title Software Engineer after over 25 years of experience, I think I am able to empathize. I think…
Well, I have and can do those things, and agree that those are very valuable skills to be proud of. I've just been kind of frontend only in team settings in a professional capacity lately, so it's something I'll be continuing to improve on. Most of my work has been jumping into some crazy existing codebase and figuring out how to understand and contribute to it, so greenfield buildouts are just not something I've rep…
> Most of my work has been jumping into some crazy existing codebase and figuring out how to understand and contribute to it, so greenfield buildouts are just not something I've repped out, and think that's a bit of a weakness.
Without any context of the details of the work, one thing that has helped me is to lookout for scope of improvements beyond on the codebase itself. E.g. is there opportunity to provide a UI to the end-users of the code base. If so, since you have touched the codebase to contribute to it, your suggestion to work on those things to improve end-user's life may get accepted and then you have something relatively greenfield to work on. Doesn't always work out that way but sometimes it might. Another approach is building something on the side that you know will be very useful, even though nobody asked for it - helps you figure out the quick way of doing it (what you mentioned) since these are POCs and you can't repeatedly spend too long on them.
Re: This is a teenager
#660The 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?
Of course they are, but putting the locus of control on external factors disempowers people. "These people didn't do as well as they could have due to poor impulse control" is a better explanation/reason than "these people have poor impulse control because of the environment in which they were raised"; the environment is not the cause of the poor outcomes, the poor impulse control is the cause, and pointing out the cause shows a path to correcting the issue.