> So your telling me that churches are value for money?
Incredible value for money - 90% of the services provided by our local church are staffed by unpaid volunteers who go above and beyond.
151 karma · joined March 9, 2020
Incredible value for money - 90% of the services provided by our local church are staffed by unpaid volunteers who go above and beyond.
I think it depends on the country - a lot of countries are labelling any deaths with COVID symptoms as COVID (even though the symptoms are common to other illnesses like the flu).
In these countries it will likely be an overestimate.
> In Slovakia, the total mortality this year is lower than in the comparable period during previous years.
Yes, COVID has been fairly benign in a lot of countries and a massive killer of the old in others.
You can measure it. For example you can look at excess mortality in the UK and then look at what fraction of that excess mortality is directly attributed to COVID.
Lots of people are doing this kind of data analysis on twitter.
Of course the guesswork comes in when you try to imagine how people would have acted without a lockdown.
Without lockdown would people still have gone for non-essential medical checkups for example?
When Australia went into the first lockdown they had essentially no community transmission.
It is unclear that the lockdowns had any impact at all.
Now that there is significant community transmission in Melbourne we can see if the second lockdown is effective.
As long as we are comparing with what people actually do when there is a lockdown.
This is what makes the data analysis so difficult - perhaps in some areas people actually followed lockdown rules - where I live basically nobody did.
Yet on paper we had similar lockdowns.
> Wouldn't this cause them to not do regular health checkups, etc. as well?
It doesn’t seem so - but it’s hard to know for sure because you are comparing different cultures and demographics.
Swedes kept going to routine checkups whereas Californians didn’t - but was that caused by the lockdowns or differences in culture?
Like I said in 12-18 months the data will be a lot clearer.
> [citation needed]
Follow Michael Levitt on Twitter - https://mobile.twitter.com/MLevitt_NP2013
> Comparing Sweden to the US is misleading
Yes, and so is comparing Sweden and Denmark - but you were happy to do that.
Latest excess deaths show Sweden is doing better than the European average - https://mobile.twitter.com/MLevitt_NP2013/status/12838142549...
> Well, there it is. The age of the people dying is only relevant if you don't care about the elderly. You should be ashamed of yourself. Grow a conscience.
Nonsense - a 5 year old dying is completely different from an 80 year old dying.
That doesn’t mean I don’t care about the elderly.
> Lockdowns protect the old.
That’s not clear.
NYC for example has had a ruinous number of deaths in nursing homes.
Maybe you meant “Lockdowns are intended to protect the old”?
In places with much lighter lockdowns (or no lockdowns at all) we still had significant social distancing. It turns out most people don’t want to catch a deadly disease.
So we are comparing strict lockdowns compared with sensible social distancing - not with doing nothing.
There are strong arguments to be made, and we will have to see how they play out over the next 12-18 months, that strict lockdowns actually resulted in more deaths because the fear they induced stopped people from doing regular health checkups etc.
> The death rate in Sweden has now risen significantly higher than many other countries in Europe, reaching more than 22 per 100,000 people
There is endless misinformation being put out over COVID.
Comparing the other Nordic countries to Sweden is misleading because it was on a different trajectory before any lockdowns were implemented.
Note if you compare Sweden to the US it’s around half of the US rate per 100,000 despite lack of lockdowns.
Now the nice thing about Sweden is they have open data and accurate reporting of data - and so you can dive in and see that their total deaths haven’t changed significantly compared to prior years.
They have had ~100 excess deaths/week - and if you remove the older population (>65) then it’s basically 0 excess deaths/week.
It will be interesting next year to see if (as typically happens with the flu) we see significantly fewer total deaths - which would indicate for those 100/week excess deaths this year the total life lost per death was 1 year. But that’s just my speculation for now.
Edit: A clear trend is emerging that a countries deaths come down to two factors:
1) Ability to properly protect the old
See the failures in Italy and NYC as examples.
2) The overall health of your young population
See for example Singapore where the majority of infections were in young healthy men - and their corresponding tiny 26 deaths for ~45000 positive cases.
It sounds like the parent thought the dev wouldn’t fit in with the other team members and so didn’t hire him.
> The other is a poorly specified scenario where a black person does not fit in?
It’s hard to fit in when you are a small minority.
Unlike NZ, the US can’t control its borders - as decades of uncontrolled illegal immigration has shown us.
First - our lockdowns were mostly unenforced (except against businesses).
Bars were closed but house parties raged.
Second - Sweden didn’t do lockdowns and yet people did practice social distancing.
Unfortunately they seem part of the “normal” teen experience.
You are saying you wouldn’t hire them because they wouldn’t fit into your work culture right?
Or are you saying you wouldn’t hire them because you don’t like their beliefs?
So do I and so do the vast majority of people who want less immigration.
> and rejecting them for that is not "McCarthyism".
To be fair to the parent - it would be if you tried to make sure they weren’t hired anywhere.
You were making a biased and snap judgement about a candidate - but that happens a lot in the interview process - same as if you rejected an African American candidate because you didn’t think they would fit in.
What would you do if one of your existing employees was found to have that kind of twitter account?
A lot of people are becoming less liberal - your liberal bubble might be trending in the same direction.
Yes.
Why can’t he have an opposing view from you on immigration?
I was on a visa and could still see the h1b program was being abused.
We often have less than ideal experiences with other cultural groups. That’s normal.
Is your work culture toxic because of your visa holders?
Would you refuse to hire feminist women because you had a mostly male team?
Why would that be a factor at all?
There are high rates of social isolation, social anxiety, and depression among school kids.
Close to 10% of teens have an anxiety disorder etc.
What would be interesting to know is are the home schooled rates significantly higher?
No. The parent commenter clearly mentioned “Never heard of this Unschool term”.
The parent commenter then went on to talk about their experience with a different topic - essentially lack of schooling.
Just because the names sound related doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
I’m not sure what you are expecting?
Most subjects I can learn well enough to teach and help out but there are some I don’t have any talent for.
I’m saying the cost to cover those gaps is minimal and it is easy and effective.
I understand the ~$70/week I paid tutors is unaffordable for some - but it’s also a lot less than the $10k+/year my state spends per kid.
And it’s 1:1 or 1:2 tuition instead of 1:30.
Why not? And why would you have to?
I got my kids an English tutor and an Arts tutor once a week to help where I couldn’t.
College students are always looking for work so it didn’t cost a lot.
These days the amount of subject material on YouTube would allow your kids to self learn most subjects once they have the maturity required.
For example for drawing look at what self-taught artists are putting out with just an entry level Wacom tablet.
The exceptions would probably be language (speaking) and topics like carpentry which are very practical.
> But life is short and any art takes long to learn to sufficient depth that you can solve dynamic complex problems.
In the time I spent playing DOTA my brother learned Chinese AND learned enough about programming to get his first programming gig paying about $80k/year.
While it can take a long time, even a lifetime, to master a field you can get to a competent level surprisingly quickly.
Do you have another reason a developer 10x better than her peers isn’t promoted to senior, to principal, etc?
The pressure on management to hire diverse candidates has increased 100 fold over the past decade.
Since when was hiring about innate abilities?
> if you hire based on what people already did, not what you assess they can do in the future
That’s literally how the majority of tech companies both hire and promote.
Good luck getting a promotion at Google (for example) based on potential.
So either your organisation is horribly sexist by not promoting these women or you are horribly sexist and think they are better because they are women.
The average westerner walks around in clothing made by incredibly desperate people living in poverty who work long hours in horrible conditions.
Practice and performance are not the same thing. The mindset is entirely different.
Imagine a world where devs are told by their managers to stop working on a task when it’s clear that the task is not improving their skills.
It doesn’t happen because as a software dev every day is game day.
Instead they will get asked to solve the same kind of problem umpteenth times.
I’ve had to leave top tech companies just to get an opportunity to improve.
Boxing isn’t a good example because it’s a combat sport which means there is far more training than competing.
When I played football the ratio was close to 1:1 - games played to hours trained and something like 150-200:1 for when I was boxing.
> trains a total of 4-5 hours daily, at most
You are making the parents point for them.
The average software developer would get closer to 2-3 hours a week of their work time dedicated to improving their skills.
Practice:Performance is highly skewed towards performance for work.
There is an abundance of skilled workers who don’t care about this boycott. I personally know quite a few skilled devs who think Zuckerberg taking a stand is a reason to work for Facebook.
There is no trust to allow anything resembling a reasonable line.