If a child or a teacher at a school caught covid, the entire class was fully quarantined for a minimum of 14 days and two negative covid tests were necessary for anyone in that class to return. Classes were kept fully isolated from one another, and children had to wear masks in class for a significant part of the year.
No teacher at our school (~600 children) caught covid, and only 3 classes were closed.
What I'm getting at is: it was fully possible to open up schools, provided you have a government and a population that is willing to accept restrictions in other areas. _It's a choice to close schools and demand that indoor restaurant dining stay open_.
My children (Quebec) were in class all of last year, except for a 10 day period in January - the tail end of a local lockdown at the height of the third wave.
Infection rates were certainly higher due to schools opening, but other decisions - and a population that was mostly tolerant of restrictions - mitigated that. We wore masks, we limited contact and we stayed home to the extent possible. As a result, schools were able to stay open.
We've decided to solve that problem by consuming very nearly the entire residential power consumption of Canada, a country of 38 million people.
We've done this with a network that can process 400k transactions per day (at $20/transaction in fees), as compared to visa, which does 150 million per day.
You don't know how hard it is, as a parent, to make the call to medicate your six year old child.
Here are some of the things that went through my own mind:
- Maybe he'll outgrow it (he's fairly severe ADHD, but we went through a long process of hoping that it was just a maturity-level thing)
- Paper after article after paper sent by well-meaning family members about how ADHD is over-diagnosed. Doubt.
- Side-effects (obviously, first thing every parent thinks about)? How severe will they be in my child?
- Ritalin + suicide [0].
- If we medicate him at six, _will he ever learn the tools to manage ADHD without meds_? He'll potentially spend his entire childhood on meds.
- If we don't medicate him, and he's consistently labelled a 'problem child' in his class, how will that affect his self-esteem as he grows up? How will it affect his feelings about school and work?
- If we don't medicate him, and he struggles and falls behind his classmates in his schoolwork (which, even in Grade 1, he was - significantly), are we holding him back? He's a super smart kid, he just can't focus.
- If we medicate him, and it doesn't work (we have to try multiple meds), how will it affect his self-esteem to be constantly visiting psychiatrists, pediatricians, etc. A thing I've noticed: doctors have zero problems talking overly-candidly in front of my kid about his failings, as though he's not there.
- We were literally told by a doctor that once you get on the medication train, 99% of parents don't get off until at least mid-high school. Am I comfortable with that?
After that long thought process (and so much more), we put him on medication. We're going very slowly in ramping up the dosage, but he's already caught up to his classmates in school, and he seems happier. I don't know if we've done the right thing, but I do know: it's not as clear-cut right/wrong as you make it out to be.
It's not about removing human agency. It's about nudging the aggregate views of a whole population, ever so slightly. Determine what works, reinforce that, repeat algorithmically.
He's making the point that Facebook has the ability to apply machine-learning-like reinforcement algorithms to whole populations.
You or I, individually, still have agency. Large populations have inertia - they're slow to move - but I'm not sure they have real defense against this kind of manipulation. I guess the real defense here is a diversity of sources (but we all know people who get all of their news from [fox | cnn | facebook | whatever]).
He goes on to defend his work at Google, arguing that they're similar on the surface, but Facebook is truly dangerous where Google is not.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Google is quite a bit more distributed across products and platforms, so Facebook has a simpler loop centered around the newsfeed. That said, Google can track a user's behaviour across nearly every website on the internet.
Facebook can run these "reinforcement learning on a global scale" experiments through its newsfeed. Google, it seems to me, can run them across the web as a whole.
> However, don't forget that when a baby is left unsupervised and is submerged in a pool for 15 minutes, it's called neglect.
Whoa there, slow down.
Kids are quick. One moment, your three kids are happily watching Finding Dory on the tv, while you're making dinner. The next, only two are: the third has quietly wandered off.
Unless you know the particulars, be very careful about tossing around words like 'neglect'.
We removed the youtube app from our iPad, because our 4 year old was starting to get too deep into these.
There's a lot of great stuff on Youtube for kids (genuinely, whole-heartedly, terrific stuff; I was amazed), but there's also a lot of very, very weird and sexualized and violent content. Targeted at young children. And unfortunately, the 'recommended' sidebar is a little bit too eager in sending kids down those paths.
I see some comments comparing it to 'video games ruining society' and 'violent cartoons'. No, it is not at all the same thing. I have no problem handing the ipad to my son and allowing him to select a show on Netflix. Youtube crossed my 'wtf creepy' threshold a few too many times.
However, the Volt is basically just a hybrid with a bigger battery. By 2011, hybrids were pretty common, so being nervous about the tech wasn't as much of an issue. That's the point I'm trying to make: for most people, $30k is a pretty big investment. New tech is a risk, and awards like COTY go a long way to overcoming consumer resistance to that risk.
It's possible, though, that Tesla has done enough to prove out electric cars. Tesla won COTY as well.
Car of the year, when you're talking about normal internal combustion cars, doesn't really matter that much. When you start talking about new (and, for $30000, scary) tech like electrics and hybrids 10-12 years ago, it makes a big impact on purchasing decisions.
I bought my 2005 Prius largely based on the car of the year recommendation on the 2004 Prius (among other research, sure). That recommendation helped validate that I wasn't buying an experiment - people who know cars thought this was a great buy.
I'm so not surprised by the comments here, so far.
The core points here are good ones:
- In a fundamentally emotional argument, you 'win' with empathy, not by beating people over the head with the same (very reasonable) arguments they've heard a hundred times.
- Vaccines are certainly effective, they are the correct choice, but there are also absolutely legitimate reasons to distrust the medical and scientific arguments (as pointed out in the article, both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once). That's something that has to be addressed and overcome, and not just with numbers.
The problem with against-the-flow is that it's unexpected to cars that are making a right turn.
The other day, I was coming out of an alley, turning right on to a one way street. I'm turning right, so I expect all road traffic to be coming from my left. That's the direction I'm focused on in making my right turn.
Now, I always check to the right, but I never really expect to see anything. When I did actually see a cyclist zinging up from my right, it kind of gave me an adrenaline jolt. He was never in any danger, my car was fully stopped and never moved: but it was so unexpected to see him there, that i kind of went "oh god, I almost ran him over".
Point is: if safety is your concern, then probably the safest thing you can do is to follow the same laws cars do. Be where a driver expects to see another car.
I actually do. I'm arguing a lot in this thread, but I stopped watching game of thrones around season three. I maybe pirate a movie every 8 or 10 weeks or something? I have young kids and a startup job. :) And I have Netflix (Canadian version, no vpn, so like 1/4 the content as in the US) for when I have some free time. But frankly I do prefer books (again, audible.com is the best)
That said, content distribution is completely broken outside the US, so I'm going to shed exactly one tiny crocodile tear for HBO when I do decide to get back into game of thrones. And I sure as hell won't be paying for it, unless they give me some sane options.
And there's definitely a part of me that is biased to "free is better than not-free," so for sure, that's a part of my decision-making process. But unless the content companies actively work to make it difficult for me to consume their content, I try very hard to inhibit that "i can get it for free" mentality.. Precisely because I do know how hard it can be for artists.
Anyway, thanks for the apology (and sorry for getting a bit defensive there). Cheers.
And one last thing: It is actually quite insulting to be reduced down to 'free is better than having to shell out money'.
No, it's not. I buy books (audible.com is amazing), I buy music, I buy software - all of which are just as easy to pirate.
I go to shows, I buy prints of photographsy that I like, I support artists. I am fully aware of how hard it is as an artist (my wife is an illustrator).
So, please don't reduce me down to "cheap bastard just doesn't want to pay". It's insulting and untrue.
I'm not trying to help HBO at all. Seriously, not. Couldn't care less about HBO. And you're right, I don't want to pay for it, not when it's priced like that and the distribution mechanisms in Canada are so broken.
But look: all of these American companies look at Canada, Australia, the UK, etc and go "you know what, we're just going to focus on the US." <Sorry, that content is not available in your region>.
That's so amazingly frustrating. So, yes, I honestly do hope that HBO sees the international piracy numbers and sorts out its sketchy content deals with Bell Media and launches HBO Go in Canada. Until the TV/Movie industry gets its act together, I'll pirate. (Since music is available to stream in Canada, I don't pirate music. Simple as that.)
As for my job: a) my personal opinion has nothing to do with my company, but b) I'm pretty comfortable with how Wavo empowers musicians and artists. We're a small company, so the fully-realized vision is still a ways off, but fundamentally the goal of Wavo is to help artists. There are no contradictions here.
It's not oppression, you're right. It's way, way smaller than that. My little act of 'defiance' is way smaller than it would be if it were exactly oppression, too.
I'm pirating content. I'm watching something that I want to watch, and at the same time, I'm hoping that my small increment of the 'pirated_copies_of_got' metric causes someone at HBO to go and sort out the way they distribute content outside of the US.
Literally no one else is harmed - because, no, I'm not going to pay the prices they've set. It's just nowhere near worth it. I'll go read a book instead.
Btw, hacking someone else's account is considerably more 'wrong', in my opinion: you're breaching someone's personal info and preventing them from using their account.
Laws aren't all equal. Stealing a car is zero-sum: if I take your car, you no longer have a car, which is a very, very expensive toy.
If I download Game of Thrones, the outcome for every single person in the world except me is exactly the same as it would have been if I had simply gone and read a book instead. HBO gets no money (I'm reading a book), and you still have the ability to watch GoT (I haven't done anything to prevent that).
Sorry, that's not entirely true actually. The outcome is ever so slightly different because I contribute to a metric that content producers do pay attention to: estimated pirated copies of GoT downloaded.
They make decisions based on that (like the launch of HBO go, which is not available in canada), and eventually, my hope is that they'll realize that there is a problem with the way they're selling their content and they'll fix it for everyone.
(Meanwhile, yes, benefit for me: I get to watch GoT).
No teacher at our school (~600 children) caught covid, and only 3 classes were closed.
What I'm getting at is: it was fully possible to open up schools, provided you have a government and a population that is willing to accept restrictions in other areas. _It's a choice to close schools and demand that indoor restaurant dining stay open_.