I couldn’t disagree more - the compass bearing for parents ought never be “go with the flow”; that’s akin to “don’t decide, slide”. In both, I hear advocacy for abdicating the highest of responsibilities.
I remember the map “V-TEC paintball” as a forerunner of the DotA and LOL styles - endless waves with you the (battlecruiser | marine | ghost) running around making the difference. HotS, LOL, DotA all seem to trace back to those “paintball” custom maps and the creators who made terrific use of the tools on offer.
Missing in discussions about the US military recruiting problem is a discussion of the shift away from 20 year defined benefit pensions to the “Blended Retirement System.” When such a terrific deal slides off the table, economic incentives shift accordingly.
I disagree, the high 3 wasnt a good system. The difference between 2.0 and 2.5 % is minimal when you can completely lose the whole shebang at anytime for reasons that have nothing to do with your competence at any time between day 1 all the way through day 7304.
Also the vast majority don't get their 20. It's like >80% leaving before 20 yrs.
The bigger contributing factors to declining enlistment are: general lack of support for the military among younger people (the latest round of forever wars didn't exactly help), better options in the civilian world (especially increasing benefits on student loan suppprt), and decreasing physical fitness (the increase in obesity rates directly lowers the available recruitment population).
People have different ideas about life. If you can get a 9-5 job that pays the bills why join the military and be deployed overseas for months on end not being a part of your family?
The civilian sector has the same problem with truck drivers and maritime shipping.
Parent here. In our PTA (parent teacher association) group, someone held forth that we just needed a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020.
Vaccines are widely available for children and adults. I think pondering transitions to virtual class, where students are virtually attending school in the more flippant sense of the word “virtual”, is overweighting risks of the ‘rona and sorely underweighting risks to childrens’ development, to say nothing of the economic toll for parents pulled aside (if they can be, as in this article).
> a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020.
Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future.
It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally).
If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1].
Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative.
My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility.
Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them.
I don't think I disagree. If there was a good time to consider full lockdown, it was at the beginning of the pandemic when little information about it was known. The more we learn about it, the less it seems like a real threat.
But.. things have evolved since then. We have entire WFH movement ( and I am saying this as its proponent ) banking on its staying power ( and most of the old school management hates it ) and we have political people eyeing the power and money that could be tapped just by scaring people.
It is weird. It feels like a lifetime ago that I typed on this very forum something along the lines of:
'we're in this together thing lasted whole two weeks'
Before people die they have to be in the hospital. Hospitalization rates are extremely low considering the infection rate. Death rates are also very low.
This is essentially a flu at this point, even for the unvaccinated. People with 2 shots are as susceptible to omicron infection as the unvaccinated, and once the booster wanes, so will the triple boosted.
Hospitalization rates are down. Number of hospitalizations may be up but the spread is larger than it’s ever been. Omicron is 5x more contagious than the original Covid at levels we’ve never seen before as a society.
Sorry if that was unclear: yes we are saying the same thing, that more children are now in the hospital for covid. I was talking about the rate per 100k children.
In my district we have a lot of teachers that are currently COVID positive with reported symptoms. Relatively mild from most accounts (all vaccinated), but still under the weather. I wouldn't blame any of the individual teachers for calling out - I've called out from my own job for similar symptoms in the past. It's what sick days are for. Of course the system isn't built for this many people to call out sick at once. I think a week or two of virtual "learning" is inevitable in some places, but I don't mind that and I don't think there is a risk of turning into indefinite shut down like what occured in 2020.
Yes, making people work while sick is stupid. Even without covid.
The problem is there's a handful of parents that don't give a fuck and constantly gets the classroom sick. So if you want to abide by that rule your kid misses a ton of school.
Just before the winter break someone sent their kid to school coughing and sneezing. Apparently they were sick enough that the teacher noticed and sent them home within 30 minutes.
It's a complicated problem. I have the luxury of a tech job that lets me work from home, and forgives a couple of distracted days if my toddler's home sick with me.
Not everybody is so lucky.
Lots of people have jobs where they can't just skip out for a few days. Do our bus-drivers, cooks, and teachers have that luxury? Do their jobs allow them to have it? What about surgeons or doctors?
How many days can somebody take off in a row if their kid is sick? 2? 3? A week?
Sometimes, parents have to make a hard choice about whether to send their kids to school with a cough. It's just another harsh reality of the society we live in.
When my kid comes home from daycare and gets us all sick, you can bet that I'm mad at the other parents. But it's also not my place to judge them, because I don't know what they have to juggle.
There are dozens of endemic upper respiratory viruses, including four other coronaviruses. It's probably to our long term advantage to get infected with as many of those as possible when we're young and healthy. While the symptoms may be unpleasant and inconvenient, the resulting cellular immunity gives us some protection when we're old and frail. Short term costs versus long term benefits.
Why wouldn't this be true for older people too? In the case we should encourage everyone to go to work sick.
It reminds me of something from The Office;
>Dwight K. Schrute: The worst thing you can do for your immune system is to coddle it. They need to fight their own battles. If Sabre really cared about our well-being, they would set up hand de-sanitizing stations. A simple bowl at every juncture filled with dirt, vomit, fecal matter...
Well the immune system does change over development, but still it's a hot take. I don't think it's 100% incorrect, but it is going to vary wildly by the person, their current state, the exact disease, etc. In ways we don't even fully understand yet. It's also wrong to expose others to infection unnecessarily without their consent obviously, even if it would have positive health consequences long term.
But yeah, that quote from The Office is pretty hilarious, thanks for sharing!
> In our PTA (parent teacher association) group, someone held forth that we just needed a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”.
That's all you can do with Omicron. And it's not clear how much you can even do that. We're currently in the "vertical" section of the exponential curve and accelerating.
Omicron appears to be as contagious as chicken pox and that basically infected every child before the vaccine. Omicron is sufficiently infectious that it will solve the anti-vax problem and bring us as close to herd immunity as possible whether we like it or not.
In 30 days, everything will be moot as basically everybody will be vaccinated, have had Covid, or both. All we can do now is cross our fingers and hope that the case fatality rate for Omicron really is significantly less than Delta.
It’s been stated the flu, even with vaccination, is more problematic to this age group than Covid-19. I think restrictions around this age group are a net negative.
There absolutely is. The school system I work(ed) for closes regularly every February because of the increase in numbers in strep and flu. Our attendance gets so low that it's the only thing they can do. Usually we can tell the week before, then they give it Monday and Tuesday and then are out the rest of the week, though sometimes attendance is so low Friday they just cancel the whole week already.
Basically: this is something that already happens for other diseases, as they spread like wildfire in schools. Kids are disgusting (and honestly, some of the teachers are too. I mean, I've seen several not wash hands after taking a dump...)
Teacher absences are forcing hands right now, but even from the student perspective parents seem pretty split on if they want their kids going in, so I'm interested to see how number of absences develops in the next week.
The shitty part is there seems to be 0 compromise in most school districts. A friend's district is staying in person as of now with no accomodations planned for those out sick or not comfortable going in. The whole situation has become bizarrely political so I fear they will not make accomodations even if half the school ends up staying home.
It's especially ridiculous at the high school level where these kids are more than capable of continuing academic progress virtually for a few weeks. Hell even with the teachers out for a week high schoolers could easily be assigned self directed work. Would all of them do it? No, but it sucks for the kids that would be willing to and are instead now forced to sit in person with a substitute teacher doing whatever to kill time.
Meanwhile I recognize some lower income districts where a week or two pause of in person schooling could be a lot more impactful are shutting down. Not much they can do when it comes to sick teachers, but in an ideal world I would get as many teachers/subs as I still could to come in and at least "babysit" for the parents that need it.
It has been stated, but last time I checked it was lie. The flu kills more people of you compare all flu deaths in all categories and add estimated flu deaths (not just confirmed).
The best data summary I’ve seen [1] suggests that COVID-19 IFR for kids is 0.01% or less which is in line with the COVID-19 stats you cite. The same data summary [1] suggests that flu IFR for kids is probably the same order of magnitude but not “vastly less”.
I think COVID-19 vs. flu has gotten way too much press though and it’s worth noting that IFR in kids is low for both relative to IFR in adults. What I would really want to learn more about are the long-term effects of disease and how that varies by age. We know a bit about that for flu or polio or RSV but not so much for COVID-19 because it’s still so new.
Alternately: sounds like the point about adversarial relations stands; a more collaborative culture prioritizing the success of the business (the collective interest) might have yielded a less expensive reboot.
If American businesses wanted a collaborative culture then they would share the rewards. As it stands for most work in the US you make the same amount of money whether or not you make the company succeed. The businesses could easily rectify this by including stock as part of compensation so that incentives have aligned.
Tech has realized this and as an industry hands out a good amount of shares of the business to employees. I can’t really empathize with businesses who cry for the need for labor to care about the success of the business but refuse to hand out anything but the minimum of rewards
S/UI/clothing; your argument suggests the move to add color to fabric doesn’t make sense because it is simply fashion and has aught to do with the interface presented by a shirt. I think the parent comment nails it on subjectivity; the form of a thing is as much a part as its function. The luxury goods industry attests as much.
A functional tool can still look nice, but the function is still more important than the looks, otherwise it's just useless bling (the fashion industry is the perfect example though, they need to sell new stuff each year without actually changing anything important, all they can really do is change pointless details).
It's removing all buttoned and zippered pants from your store one year and replacing them with spandex one year, then coming back in 5 years and removing all spandex in favor of buttons and zippers.
i generally decide my own clothing. and... if I choose UI X... I would like to keep using it. At some point, I have to adopt someone else's ideas of 'good UI' in order to keep using a computer for 'every day' stuff. At some point, my online banking forces an upgrade, and that means 'new UI', whether I like it or not. I can keep wearing 70s flares and still go in and use a local bank if I chose to.
One single intelligence agency? And what if the Germans are interested in gaining better understanding of Viktor Orban? Or if the Italians want to know just how far Germany will really go to help them financially? An intelligence agency is a means of acquiring answers to intelligence needs - I'm not sure Europe is of one mind with regard to what questions merit answering.
The EU is an economic and political union. It might not be complete or perfect, but integration has been happening decade by decade. We now have a single currency, a unified supreme court, a single charter of citizen rights, freedom of movement and a single market. A lot of younger people feel European, there is such a thing as an European identity. Each one of these things was considered impossible at a certain point. It is a slow and hard process but it is happening.
I find that the English-speaking media is particularly keen on repeating the mantra that "the EU is collapsing". I've witnessed this all my life. It became more intense now with Brexit, but the UK was not ever a real member. It opted out and demanded exceptions for everything. Unfortunately, the EU had to be built around the UK, not with it. There was also a shift in attitude with the current administration in the US, which sees the EU as an adversary instead of as a friend. So I would take anything I read in English about the EU with a pinch of salt...
> the UK was not ever a real member. It opted out and demanded exceptions for everything. Unfortunately, the EU had to be built around the UK, not with it.
There's a tendency among hardcore europhiles to blame the nasty british for all questioning of the European ideal, as though if it weren't for perfidious albion Europe would be of one mind.
This completely ignores both the deep euroscepticism felt by many people across the EU(which European countries tend to just ignore instead of being so hasty like Britain as to actually have a referendum - and if a referendum must be held, just have it again and again until you get the right answer...) and also ignores that other countries have differing opinions to France and Germany too.
> There's a tendency among hardcore europhiles to blame the nasty british for all questioning of the European ideal, as though if it weren't for perfidious albion Europe would be of one mind.
Perhaps, but that was not what I said at all. What I said is that the UK always chose to not participate in the project, and that the project went on without it. Now, with Brexit, the UK government is openly hostile towards the EU. This is just a fact. Another fact is that the EU was able to maintain a united political front when faced with Brexit (which posed -- and was meant to pose -- an existential threat to the EU). So the reports of EU's death may be premature, as the cliché goes...
> This completely ignores both the deep euroscepticism felt by many people across the EU
Well, I haven't. On the contrary, I said that it is a very hard and incomplete project, and that it was considered impossible by a lot of people every step of the way. I also mentioned that it is among the younger generations that a European identity is growing. Not established, but growing.
> and also ignores that other countries have differing opinions to France and Germany too
Well, I ignored none of that. You just assumed it.
What I think is undeniable is that there are vested interests in the collapse of the EU. The EU is composed of many small countries, that could be much more easily pushed around if not acting as bloc. Naturally, those who would indeed like to push Europe around dislike the EU. With the stance of the current US administration and of the post-Brexit UK government, it just so happens that in the current year of 2020, a lot of people with such vested interests write in English.
Just yesterday the EU announced a massive stimulus, to be repaid over 30 years, perhaps partially by EU-wide taxes. What makes you way they are heading away from more integration?
Because the “integration” never existed and it failed the populations when they needed it more. Also, unrelated ex. Search what happened to peripheral economies when Germany wanted to sell Siemens trains to China.
Europe is not a country and the ones that insist it to be are high society politicians who like to pretend they are above the populace.
It's certainly not a single country right now, but the direction over the last few decades has definitely been more towards a union than away from it.
Let's not forget that it took even the USA several centuries and a civil war to get to a mostly unified country. Even then there are vast differences in culture between states. If (say) California and Texas wouldn't have been part of the USA right now, I doubt they'd choose to merge into it.
Europe "exists" for thousands of years, most modern country identities and cultures exist for very little less than that ( mine is almost 900 years ).
Compared to Europe, the US is as homogeneous as it can be. Of course it's heterogeneous but at a regional and sometimes city area level with different customs and traditions imported from other countries and "americanized"
The strength of Europe is their independent countries and diverse cultures and every time an enterprising young fella had grandiose ideas it always ends with an absolute bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions.
Generally speaking the ones that want a "fully integrated" Europe are:
1 - Politicians with a manager mentality who like to get frisky with concepts such as "economies of scale", "standardization", "efficiency", etc. Yet they don't know anything of what a society is.
2 - The usual crème-de-la-crème "citizens of the World" who in reality are just old-money rich ignorant "kids" who can't even fathom what an existence of a real "normal" person is.
3 - People from other parts of the World who think Europe is a country
4 - Competing superpowers who root for the destruction of Europe and know very well that their only hope is for it to implode.
“If you’re being blackmailed...” does sound like a matter for legal redress, but it ought not suffice as a guard against a company backed by Alphabet’s resources taking action. While your argument is technically sound, the consequences of inaction by YouTube can exit the sterile world of bits and bytes and bring real pain.
