True story: During Zoom classes, a friend's kid used to move his lips without emitting any sound faking a mic problem in order to not receive questions from his teacher
When I was in high school, we had one BC Calculus teacher for the entire school district. He'd visit each school round-robin and would teach the other schools via video conference. Given that this was 20 years ago, we'd have streaming issues with some frequency. The solution was usually to reboot the streaming machine at the teacher's location.
One day before class when the teacher wasn't at our school, one kid said, "when I cough three times, everyone freeze." About 20 mins into the lecture, he did just that and we all held our positions. The teacher noticed about ten second later, asked us a bunch of times if we could hear him, and then, with exasperation, said, "well looks like they froze up again..."
We had a good laugh for the two mins or so we were down and then continued on. I don't think anyone ever blabbed that we had faked it just for kicks.
My daughter did kindergarten online. I once observed that at least some kid behaviors remain the same online.
The teacher lost connection one day and one of the kids said "she's gone!" and it was immediate chaos, everyone started talking and making noises, one kid was literally screaming the whole time, the kids were drawing on the screen and fighting over who was sharing their screen, everyone was laughing and having a good time until the teacher reconnected. Later my daughter fondly told me about it, but I had already overheard the whole thing from the other room.
In my daughter's school during PE on Zoom one kid always had only the left half of his body showing, everybody thought it's a limitation of his camera or something. Then one day his cat moved his laptop and everybody realized he was moving only the visible part of his body and was playing on his phone in the other hand the whole time.
My kids’ school did it and the results were pretty awful until people pointed out that you have to explicitly tell second graders to make sure they are doing calisthenics in a safe place so they aren’t tripping over school supplies and knocking over lamps, or just flailing their arms into stuff that will hurt them. My kid broke her school-issue iPad on the first day because they didn’t even think to tell the kids to take their headphones off. They just said, “ok, let’s do jumping jacks.” Crash.
Edit: the scariest was when I was getting an early start on some dinner prep and my kid came sprinting through the kitchen in socks while I was going from one side to the other while holding a big knife. They were doing a scavenger hunt and each item would be announced and they’d have 60 seconds to go try to find it. I had to email the teacher about that one and ask them to be cognizant of the safety of what they are asking the kids to do, given that they have no clue what environment each kid is in.
my boomer-aged mother is a PE teacher for K-6th graders in the US. She had to run Zoom PE classes for about six months...it was interesting to watch her learn a new competency.
There are ways to do it, but the fear that she could potentially not be in control of her classroom at ANY MOMENT was something to behold and says something about our education system's focus and beliefs. There was a lot of information from me and my siblings with her on how to do it and options she could pursue to make online PE class engaging...fun times
For a time I taught high school and later college. The key difference between the two jobs is apparent in the interview process. For a high school teaching job, the interviewer wants to know how you will manage the behavior of the students in the room. For a college teaching job, the interviewer wants to know how you will impart your subject matter to the students. Classroom management is easily the most important aspect of K-12 teaching.
If you haven't been at the front of a K12 classroom (and I mean really in front, not the guest lecturer with the teacher in the room to keep things in order), you're not qualified to make that statement. The fact of the matter is that you're with a room full of children. If you can't manage them you can't teach them. Without classroom management, you will fail at everything else. It's easy to forget this when you see a skilled/experienced teacher at the front of the room. They've internalized the management to a level that makes it almost invisible to an onlooker, but it's very much there.
and then black out the webcam (don't turn it off). Then the name shows up in the corner, and nobody will nominate you to speak. Heard this via a church group from a teacher at the International School of Geneva. Seems like word gets around fast!
The teacher could find other ways to test sound. Ask a student to clap their hands, for example (presuming the teacher knows their students are mischievous).
This is similar to another hack I heard: put some clear tape over your camera lens to blur the image. "It looks fine on my end??? I'll just keep my camera off."
TL;DR of that one: she activated a login lock by filling in the wrong password a couple of times.
Zoom support should have been able to see "this account has been locked out due to too many login attempts" though, so that's a bit of a fail. And of course the login error should say as much.
That seems like instead of a joke, it could be a really cool way to actually implement voice chat... just unlink the modem from the call and use a phone.
Yes. Don't get me started. Quite frequently recently I've searched for answers to things and the "smart" answers they give are flat out wrong or dangerous because they misinterpreted a text. I should probably start to keep a list..
Yeah. At this point, social engineering is a hallmark of the Covid generation. In retrospect, Zoom hackery almost seemed like the inevitable outcome. We’ve shared good laughs with our kids over the antics “classmates” pulled because of zoom
Problem with this is mechanically in terms of schooling. You need general education that has to somehow be given, and how do you arrange teaching for the wishes and whims of hundreds of children?
Even in classical one to one mentoring, an element of curriculum is how learning is shaped and comfort zones broken down.
Seems like you're looking for Montessori schooling. I was actually fortunate enough to attend one for ages 3-5. Although I don't have many memories from then specifically, I do remember repeated bordem when I stopped going and was moved to public school. I always wanted to do more hands on activities as I had before, but the closest it ever got was art.
Another note of interest, my senior class at high school consisted of 4 people whom I attended Montessori with, of those four, three took IB classes and participated in clubs / extracurriculars above the average rate for my school. I can't help but wonder if even just those few years at a young age made a lasting impact.
Heard a story from a secondary school teacher during the second lockdown about one of her students that wouldn't enable the video camera because "it's pay-per-minute on their computer".
And sure enough, in the age of everything-as-a-service, that was just about believable to the teacher.
I feel like we should find these kids and get them out of school where their time is being wasted. Let's get them into some proper practical training that lines up with their interests or hell, just hire them and teach them on the job. In fact, maybe we could do that for....all the kids?
"School is not a place for smart people" - Rich Sanchez
The only thing more delicious than an unironically 'I got a big brain' Rick and Morty quote is when the person making the quote is super confident about how obscure it is.
Because you should immediately mock anyone who might enjoy Rick and Morty and get that happiness feeling when someone recognized the quote from the show they watched which is fairly typical for any film or show someone has watched. Because everyone who watch that show think it's strictly limited to only high IQ individuals and watching, enjoying that show is a clear indicator of higher intelligence.
That quoting Rick and Morty in no way means they think they are intellectually superior or anything remotely to that. It can very well happen that some topic simply makes you remember a quote and you think it's fitting and you are also glad when someone else recognizes where it is from.
I don’t know that quoting cartoons signals “I got a big brain”. It’s fascinating though that people are commenting on the quote. I didn’t think that would resonate.
It is HARD to get the ones who do the worst to work at the level of those who do well.
It is "easy", however, to make everyone suck equally as much at school. At least that is my experience.
I actually got diagnosed with a high IQ, which I got tested for because most classes were boring to me and thus I didn't really do well. As aresult of me not being challenged much if at all back then, I never really learned how to learn.
Thus I slid further and further down with learning until I dropped out.
IMO there should be more separation between kids with high and low abilities at school. Push the "better" ones much harder, while also providing specially trained teachers to the "worse" ones. Don't try to get everyone to the same level.
Dad, is that you? Seriously, that was my father's experience in school, and hence why I was homeschooled, for which I am eternally grateful. My dad is also an SWE and lurks here, so hi dad!
School is not a place for kids low in trait conscienciousness. This can often mean smart, as it has a correlation with IQ, but mostly it's conscienciousness.
Definitely did stuff like this in school. I was in a honours social studies class, and would consistently say "We're the honours class, there's got to be a better way to teach this" whenever our teacher decided we were just going to take notes for the day. He was always very excited about it, and would come up with huge class exercises to teach the topic. It was really awesome but would end up taking the whole week instead of the one day worth of note taking. We ended up doing about 1/4 of the curriculum that year, and the final was incredibly short.
This wasn't "discovered" by any kid. That observation has been around for a while and its source is people who looked for reasons to discredit the meaningfulness of that test.
Only slightly related. But I went to the bahamas about a month ago. One of the "hooks" they used to make tourists feel comfortable with coming to their resorts was that if you got COVID ( tested positive on the way home test). They would either pay for a hotel and accommodations for a 10 day quarantine or fly you back in a private jet.
All that being said when they administered the covid test on the way back to the US. I'm not even sure they stuck the Q-tip, what should qualify as, in my nose.
Point is, its not just children trying to spoof covid tests.
That's not what "died within 28 days" means; correlation does not imply causation. In fact, the data linked lacks any cause of death; without that column, we should assume these numbers are all cause of death, from respiratory failure to blunt-force trauma.
Interesting how one group (children in school) are trying to fake a positive result while at the same time another group (club and party goers) are faking negative tests.
To be fair given how miserable the education system often makes kids I think it’s a bit harsh describing them as sociopaths for wanting to avoid it.
The fact literal retirees are known to still have occasional nightmares about exams goes to show there’s something deeply psychologically taxing about our schools that I think we’ll look back upon in a hundred year’s time as fairly barbaric, just as we look at corporal punishment in schools of the past as barbarism today.
Some teenagers have to go to pretty absurd lengths to escape the "structure" that has been imposed upon them. I'm sure that's where some of the "sociopathy" comes from. In my experience, though, adults are much less cooperative or agreeable in just about every scenario when compared to youngsters when it comes to not getting their way.
tl;dr: The test can only be spoofed if it isn't conducted properly, by not doing the step with the buffer solution [1] [2]. You may even be able to unspoof the test by applying the buffer solution after the fact.
> Fact check: Coca-Cola does not cause a positive COVID-19 test
I find it very difficult to agree with that headline. We have lots of proof that putting coke on a covid test makes the test positive. Coca Cola unequivocally causes a positive result.
That's like saying " X vulnerability in our software doesn't actually exist, because if any would-be hackers just followed the rules then they wouldn't be able to exploit the vuln".
"Coca-Cola causes positive COVID-19 test" would be a headline that to many would imply that simply drinking a coke is enough to cause you to get a positive test.
They should buy a bag of tests and some soft drinks from their company and their competitors and just publish a page where they show that: Some soft drinks might break some tests making the results worthless.
It's not a positive result (that implies the person has covid) it's that it damages the test. Like shorting the circuit of an electronic pregnancy test...
>Absorbed on the red pad are antibodies that bind to the Covid-19 virus. They are also attached to gold nanoparticles (tiny particles of gold actually appear red), which allow us to see where the antibodies are on the device.
> The downside to this is that it deprives their classmates
Assume probability of false positive is 1%. If you are tested weekly, there is a 41% chance you'll falsely test positive at least once in a year. If you are tested every workday, 93% chance. This is assuming there is no malfeasance.
If you assume a false positive probability of 5%, the probabilities go up to 93% and 100%.
The negative effects of false positives are the same whether kids are using soda or something else is causing them. At some point, the costs have to be weighed against the benefits.
Here is a false positive/false negative simulator I put together last year (thrice silently banned -- so I stopped trying to do more after restoring it one last time) helps you explore what happens with various scenarios of infection rates and false positive/negative probabilities.
Linking to the discussion to provide context for the app:
Part of the reason it took so long to roll out these lateral flow tests is that it was hard to find ones with an acceptably low false positive rate - it needed to be well below 1% for exactly the reason you outline. (Apparently PHE estimates it at less than 1 in 1000: https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2021/03/30/covid-19-... )
Even when the rate of Covid infections in the UK was much lower than it currently is, retesting of people using PCR suggested that the large majority of positives were in fact true positives, at least amongst the adults retested. It's possible that the story is different for kids, but on the other hand they're not vaccinated in the UK whereas many adults are...
That seems like a good way to miss infections (and get people back to work, which is probably the point).
The tests seem to have a high false-negative rate. Assuming independence and 25% FN rate, a second test will miss an additional 20% of infections of all people tested.
Same at my kids school. Whenever they have a positive antibody test, they just do it again.
I think that the antibody tests are sketchy in the first place, but if they don't even stick to the protocol and don't follow up positive antibody tests with PCR tests, it's almost pointless.
This made me literally LOL. You will NEVER be able to make all children happy with going to school. Attempting it is almost a fool's errand. Even in nice posh schools, there will still be kids unhappy. It's just human nature.
... which is a childish reaction from what is seemingly an adult person.
Yes globally school systems need a massive rehaul, anybody can name easily 10 things that would improve schools for everyone, probably any school. No we shouldn't give up just because its hard and we already went through it.
Its one of the fuckin' most important things for human civilization, if not the #1 item long term. We don't need to strive for perfection, practically all major improvements would be worth it.
Is it one of these Montessori-like schools? This is actually a century-old thing.
Yes, it has some advantages, but most of them come from the admission process and high budget. The main problem I see is that you are in a bubble, not like the other kids. It makes it difficult to reintegrate the regular school system if you ever need to. Obviously not a problem for Elon Musk kids, but it may be for middle class children.
It is very much like the Montessori schools, albeit a different curriculum than any I've seen. I would have been fine being in a bubble. In the school system I went through, I was in a ditch. I would ace all the tests but fail my classes for lack of interest and not seeing any benefit to what I was being taught. I am very stubborn and strong willed. This had no real impact on my life beyond being a waste of time. Again, just my preference. I would have loved being in a school like Elon created but that is just my personal preference based on how I know I learn. I see the current school system as a low quality baby sitter.
If I was in a bubble of self-motivated learners, I think that would have been awesome, because most public schools are run like a prison. I got into so much trouble just from being bored...
I never heard of this and went in with an open mind.
> One study conducted by California State University at Sacramento researchers outlined numerous theories and ideas prevalent throughout Waldorf curricula that were patently pseudoscientific and steeped in magical thinking.
You could try to improve the system. A big issue is that a lot of teachers are not able to transfer the knowledge to childen or they don't have enough patience. In the faculty i had around 5 professors from around 100 who had enough patience and the skill to transfer the knowledge to other people. The other were either geniuses (they know everything, you are stoopid) or just doing their job.
This is true, however, of nearly all human pursuits. You will never eliminate all poverty, you will never eliminate all racism, you will never reach a point where everyone says the climate is just fine, you will never make everyone healthy or safe enough.
Your options are to "literally LOL" and consider making progress to be a "fool's errand," or you can recognize that eliminating these problems may be impossible but making significant progress is not.
> The downside to this is that it deprives their classmates as entire bubbles get sent home I think.
It would have been the job of governments to actually govern, by transforming schools to work digitally. Just look at Denmark - their schools have been digitalized for over two decades (https://www.aktiv-online.de/news/digitale-schule-in-daenemar...). All they had to do was tell the kids to stay home and that's it. No deprivation, no negative effects.
The complete inaction (how many schools have bought and installed air purifiers vs. how many parliaments?) and incompetence that has been shown towards children all over the Western world in the coronavirus crisis is utterly utterly inexcusable.
> All they had to do was tell the kids to stay home and that's it. No deprivation, no negative effects.
I think that kids are absolutely deprived of beneficial social interactions when they are sent to be schooled at home versus in-person. Schooling is not solely about academic achievement. Source: I have a 10 and 12 year old who lived this on and off for the last 16 months.
Thought about another way: if there truly was no negative effect, why isn't the education being done 100% remotely in normal conditions? Why have such expensive buildings and transportation needs if there's no benefit?
> Why have such expensive buildings and transportation needs if there's no benefit?
Because modern capitalism demands that children be kept at school for most of the day - in Germany we call the trend "Ganztagsschule"/"whole day school" - so that both parents can be exploited.
Decades ago, school days were far shorter and there were no such things as school lunches simply because 99% of children had a parent at home able to feed them. When children were sick, they were kept at home instead of spreading their germs at school.
We need to get working hours and wages under control. 20 hours of work a week should be more than enough, given the massive automation gains over the last decades.
If 20 hours a week is enough to live "normally", I think you'll find a whole lot of people choosing to work 50 hours per week to get to retirement in 10 years instead of 45. (At which point, the income provided by 20 hours/week will not have anywhere near the purchasing power that might allow it to be "enough" because so many households will have adults working a total of 50-100 hours per week, which will tend to out-compete households working only 20 or 40 hours per week.).
First, I would consider mandatory education a socialist policy, not a capitalist one. It's completely against the concept of a free market.
I would say it's the result of politics, namely a good part of 2nd wave feminism (but not all) and the destruction of family as an institution.
Broken families dependant on welfare are golden for any centralised power who needs votes every 5 years.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure big businesses (who are in bed with the government) benefited plenty from having twice the workforce. More competition in the workplace, lower wages. AND you sound progressive, because you're giving women the privilege of being able to work like your husband.
But there is nothing capitalistic about big businesses profiting from centralised political propaganda. That's the opposite of capitalism.
Automation won't be enough to reduce the number of hours, you need to change people's minds: we don't need a technical solution to work less, we need a social, political one.
EDIT: I didn't realise you support Antifa in your bio (I really don't, couldn't be further away from supporting political violence), which is surprising given we actually agree on the premise, which is that people are working too much and we left government puppets growing our children instead of doing it ourselves.
The worse thing is: every person contracting the virus can develop a mutation that escapes vaccines - and children can spread it to their parents and grandparents.
You never had children I assume? Just look at your coworkers how often they fall sick because of some nasty flu or other bug their children caught in kindergarten or school.
And your "Wuhan coronavirus" naming ... the only people I've heard who call the virus by that name or its similar "China virus" are right-wingers and corona / vaccine deniers.
Why highlight the very small, early study with Half of the kids who contract Covid19 suffer from "long covid"?
The next paragraph in your link gives 14.5%:
The UK Office for National Statistics's latest report
estimates that 12.9 per cent of UK children aged 2 to 11,
and 14.5 per cent of children aged 12 to 16, still have
symptoms five weeks after their first infection. Almost
500,000 UK children have tested positive for covid-19
since March 2020.
Most medical bodies say it normally takes a few days or
weeks to recover from covid-19, and that most will make a
full recovery within 12 weeks.
> Half of the kids who contract Covid19 suffer from "long covid"
I don't doubt that there's some likely some fairly common short-medium term health impacts from a nasty flu that's relatively new and unknown. But I strongly wonder how much of these supposed "long-covid" symptoms may be wounds that are partially self-inflicted by society. I believe that natural (and already quite bad) activity patterns have been altered negatively since Covid started and this may have a wide-scale health impact that the establishment doesn't care about. These symptoms may partially stem from basically keeping people locked up inside for months, the media feeding them constant scare stories and stressing them out (stress can prevent good sleep and has many other negative health effects), people eating garbage food because there's not as much else to do, people not getting as much sun (Vitamin D exposure) and exercise as they should be getting, the depressions coming from the unnatural social life we've been forced to endure (covering faces, only communicating via video chats), etc.
> And your "Wuhan coronavirus" naming ... the only people I've heard who call the virus by that name or its similar "China virus" are right-wingers and corona / vaccine deniers.
May I ask what does an idealogical compliance check add to the conversation?
> I don't doubt that there's some likely some fairly common short-medium term health impacts from a nasty flu that's relatively new and unknown. But I strongly wonder how much of these supposed "long-covid" symptoms may be wounds that are partially self-inflicted by society.
Activity patterns will no doubt have had some negative impact, but they are not even close to accounting for long-covid symptoms. A change in activity doesn't account for a sudden inability to breathe properly, fatigue so severe that walking is difficult, inflamed hearts, or many of the myriad of other symptoms that long-covid sufferers have reported.
> But I strongly wonder how much of these supposed "long-covid" symptoms may be wounds that are partially self-inflicted by society.
Better political action - e.g. following basic science by mandating and enforcing masks, enforcing actual lockdowns, making tests and sick days accessible, supporting poor people who don't have a realistic choice between working sick and not having something to eat, and now that there's vaccines available making them mandatory - would have saved a lot of these wounds!
The differences in coronavirus-caused interruptions between countries with solid leadership and a societal sense of solidarity (e.g. New Zealand, but also many Asian countries for the better part of the last year) and right-wing populist-led or -influenced countries such as the US, Brazil or most of Europe can't be denied any more.
We all need to hold our politicians accountable for their mismanagement and recklessness if we want a chance at restoring our societies and healing the rift.
> May I ask what does an idealogical compliance check add to the conversation?
Simple: I don't want to engage with right wing people and conspiracy myth spreaders in the meatspace and I want to do the same online.
I don't know if you read or understood my comment, but the self-inflicted wounds I describe such as stress, lack of exercise, bad diets, and other problems associated with "long-covid" may be at least partially due to lockdowns. If this is the case, your prescribed solution may exacerbate the problems. A controlled study on this would be interesting.
> The differences in coronavirus-caused interruptions between countries with solid leadership and a societal sense of solidarity (e.g. New Zealand, but also many Asian countries for the better part of the last year) and right-wing populist-led or -influenced countries such as the US, Brazil or most of Europe can't be denied any more.
Without getting into a full-on political debate about the merits of freedom and a good economy's role in preserving vulnerable peoples' lives, I'd like to point out that Covid's effects in different countries may have more than 1 variable that no leader could have solved.
For instance:
* As a relatively isolated island nation, New Zealand had the luxury to lockdown in a way that relatively few nations have.
* Compared to most of the world and especially Asia, Americans are heavier, which seems likely to negatively impact outcomes from this illness.
* America has large populations of people who suffer from Vitamin D deficiency that seems linked to Covid problems that other countries do not have.
> Simple: I don't want to engage with right wing people and conspiracy myth spreaders in the meatspace and I want to do the same online.
Fair enough. Personally, I believe in diversity and diverse ideas and would be interested in engaging with the left, right, middle, libertarian, communist, you name it. Even authoritarians too.
Another group who use that name are the libertarians who recognise that the Tedros rename to sars2/covid is a Kampfbegriff and refuse to use it out of principle in order to avoid supporting the CCP propaganda efforts. They are politically diametrically opposed to right-wingers and do not deny the existence of virus/disease.
Do you have children ? When there is no teacher ( or the teacher is online) the parent becomes the teacher. Learning from home - at least in Germany - is a mess.
I lost it at the quoted text, haven’t laughed this much in days. Classic HN sentence fragment of middlebrow dismissal with just enough obliviousness to social norms that it might be satire, but with such deadpan delivery you just don’t know. Pure gold.
I'm an American, and he's mostly right, and I'm not offended, because it wasn't nasty and wasn't about me--it was just a harmless, general observation.
What is this world coming to if we can't even discuss regional styles of humor?
Dan, may I suggest that you are taking this job too seriously. You are going to look back in the future and wonder why you spent so much time controlling others' speech on a Web site. You're so concerned about HN's value as a vessel, but so unconcerned with the value of what's inside it. You're a talented Lisper who seems to waste most of his time moderating, playing whack-a-troll and arguing with people about arguing (like me, here). You have more potential than you are fulfilling here, and you could be doing much more important things.
If someone had said it to me in real life, I would have laughed.
On the internet? Well, those are the people who eat Tide Pods...
Ironically, phrasing was a pure product of pre-coffee morning + living in a part of the US where anti-vax comments are a daily occurrence, but it delights me I was responsible for a few smiles. (Including my own, re-reading it)
And truth be told, "hot" emerged from morning fugue, after rejecting infected, live, and potentially hazardous as less accurate.
"Is there then a way to spot a fake positive test? The antibodies (like most proteins) are capable of refolding and regaining their function when they are returned to more favourable conditions. So I tried washing a test that had been dripped with cola with buffer solution, and sure enough the immobilised antibodies at the T-line regained normal function and released the gold particles, revealing the true negative result on the test."
I heard of someone whose parents just didn't give them sweet candies as a child and they never developed the craving. This is just a "I heard of one person ever" but since it's so rare, it's all I have to go on. I wonder if this would be reproducible.
I'm glad my parents weren't like that. I have so many good memories of birthday cakes, sharing treats with my siblings, Hallowe'en, etc... where some sweet thing was a core part of the event.
One of my favorite memories of my Dad is being out with just the two of us and we took a break for a surprise ice cream cone. Having him just to myself for a bit was pretty rare and to sit in a Dairy Queen somewhere for 30 minutes chatting and having ice cream was the absolute best.
On the topic of parents, I’m second generation immigrant. All of my family grew up in other countries, in poverty. None of them have ever developed cavities and such. I’ve never seen my parents ever express any craving for sweets.
I once quit sugar for 6 months. It was harder than quitting alcohol, nicotine or caffeine. My first super-sweet treat after those 6 months was a donut and it almost made me vomit on the first bite. The dopamine rush quickly overwhelmed my physical aversion.
I remember going through that after basic training and AIT(Ft Sill, Oklahoma- absolute Hell). As a kid/teenager/young adult I was very active in gymnastics, Tae Kwon Do, Tang Soo Do, skateboarding, rollerblading, and I watched what I ate. While in basic I was losing a lot of weight(super fast metabolism) so they shoved sugar/carbs down my throat in basic- made me drink soda, eat burgers, donuts and pizza in the mess hall (also my platoon hated me over it because they weren't allowed to touch any of it, and here I was so full I'm gonna puke and here comes a Drill Sergeant who slides me another donut which I now have to eat). It sucked because I had to run 2x per day as opposed to once a day/every other day, so it felt like I had a lump of cement in my stomach. The side stitches give me chills to this day. Puking while running is not fun, and then what was the point of filling me to bust if I don't get to digest a quarter of it?
Anyway, by the time I got to AIT I was so happy to not have to touch any of it, I didn't. So while my classmates went off-post on weekends and got fat on garbage I went out and had fun, but at well at the mess hall.
By the time I was out of the service (2yrs) I hadn't touched sweets/caffeine/crap in almost that whole time. I remember being able to taste the caffeine in sodas(if you've ever drunk ginseng you probably know what it tastes like), and they felt like straight syrup.
Somewhere along the way I had a girlfriend who got me back into them, and they just became a part of my life again.
Now, here I am, 40, getting rid of them again. But now it's worse because I really enjoy my morning coffee and knowing I will be replacing it with running (which I used to love until the US Army), doesn't help my motivation much.
But yea, quitting sugar and caffeine. Smoking cigarettes wasn't this hard to quit :(
Just for the record, I wasn't saying we can't have nice things and everyone should start to live this way. Not at all. It was just an interesting data point. You do make it sound, though, like sugar is required to have a nice childhood. I don't think you're right and the conclusion that you're happy you got to do all these drugs, I mean, yeah of course you'd not want to live without if you had it. I wouldn't either because I also had it. But might an alternative history not also have been able to be nice? That's what I'm wondering about.
It's one outcome, the other is that the child feels like they've been repressed all their life and go on a sugar binge. I've heard similar stories about kids raised vegetarian discovering bacon and hamburgers for the first time.
I know only one person who was raised vegetarian (most people in Europe are fervent meat eaters) and this didn't happen to my friend at all, but yeah I can totally see that happening to many on a broader population.
My parents didn’t let us drink sweetened sodas except on special occasions, and never Coca-Cola for some reason. It massively helped, to the point that apart from a few high school and college years, I don’t really drink them.
During college I availed myself of all-you-can-drink soda, and pretty much stopped drinking milk. Surprise, surprise the change (coupled with stress) resulted in some pretty serious and frequently recurring GI issues.
Finally isolated the cause (docs were useless), went back on a 1+ glass of milk a day practice, and everything returned to normal.
Since then, I pretty much cut soda out of my diet as well. IMHO, if we're looking at it from a caloric perspective, there are a lot more delicious things to spend 140 calories on.
Grew up in a country where no coca-cola was available. The sweets were given to kids only on special occasions.
Now as an adult I am happily consuming great amount of Coca Cola, however never developed a taste for Americanized supermarket style sweet treats (Oreos, etc. )
For me it was the opposite. Only got exposed to standard candy and chocolate here and there. I still love chocolate, and hate any kind of carbonated drink. It boggles my mind how people manage to drink that stuff voluntarily.
But to each their own. I think this whole guessing the best diet for kids can go any way because it's just one of many factors. Though there are definitely known risk factors, e.g. how drunkenness at a young age greatly increases the risk of alcoholism later on.
My personal experience with that situation is that half the people grow up with no desire to eat sweets and the other half end up with an eating disorder. It’s a gamble, but if you get lucky it’ll pay off with a lifetime of stable blood sugar.
I think it might be all in the how, not in the what.
If you specifically deny your kids sugar and tell them it's the debbil and all that, you're gunning for the disorder when they finally rebel and try the forbidden carbohydrate.
However, if it's just not a thing. You never point it out, you never mention it, you just don't have sugar around, then they're more geared for the dismissal of it.
I only drank coke on special occasions as a kid. When I finally had free reign I went on a coke binge for years and I still enjoy it, though I've limited the amount I consume. Given we're keyed towards enjoying sweet I don't think denying kids soda would mean they hate it on first contact - I'd imagine it'd be like kids who did get exposed to it - some hate it, some love it.
My 3 year old hates sweets. Ice-cream, cakes and chocolates/candy are a hard no. So much so that he cried once my wife tricked him into tasting ice-cream. OTOH he loves ripe sweet tasting fruits so it is not aversion to sweet taste.We'll see how long this lasts...
I've known many a parent that has tried this. However, the wheels fall off the bus as soon as the kid enters public schooling. The only parents that I've know to be successful are ones that home schooled their kids.
There's also a doesn't-like vs doesn't-like-the-quantity question. I could easily eat a whole chocolate bar in one go some time ago. Since then I reduced my sugar intake a lot. Now I feel like one row is overwhelming - 1-2 pieces is just fine.
Let people decide for themselves? Alcohol is unhealthy, so it should be banned. Hamburgers are high fat and environmentally impactful, so those should be banned, too. Let's not forget cigarettes....
Yes people should opt to not consume unhealthy stuff, but how much authoritarianism do you really want?
Banning all of those won't work - remember the Prohibition? - but there's plenty of discouragement things going on, at least on this side of the pond. Alcohol and tobacco are heavily taxed, tobacco can no longer be advertised for, displayed, or be in any kind interesting (bland packaging), and that's after they had to have big warnings about the health risks of smoking. And there's plans to introduce sugar taxes - which I would be more on board with if those taxes were used to subsidize and lower the price of 'good' food / essentials.
Why can’t government just stay out of it? I don’t recall electing a government to be my parents. Government should build roads and have a Navy but why should a government “encourage” healthy behaviors, etc. Are people unable to be adults on their own?
OTOH I'm not sure casting people into the wild to deal, all on their own, with megacorps employing hundreds or thousands dedicated to convincing people to make bad choices is a great idea, either.
I'm not convinced Rugged Individualism and anything like the modern economy are compatible, in any kind of way in which the outcome of trying to have both is pleasant. It may be a "choose one" kind of situation.
The government is great for collective action necessary in situations that resemble the prisoner’s dilemma, where incentives of individual agents lead them to take non-pareto-optimal decisions.
Things like breaking up monopolies, mandating open access to infrastructure, and, yes, countering the effects of companies and advertisers manipulating us and exploiting our weaknesses.
> Let people decide for themselves? Alcohol is unhealthy, so it should be banned.
Our societies socialise the costs of peoples’ bad decisions, so it can’t be 100% laissez-faire. That said, I disagree with the Prohibitionist instinct. Adding a tax that pays for the edge-case costs seems to make the most sense.
I wonder if we'd need to tax the vegetarians for living too long and spending a lot of taxpayer dollars in their extended elderly years. Maybe we should actually subsidize the folks cheeseburgering their way to sudden cardiac death.
For some reason it sometimes seems as if people would rather everybody is responsible for everybody else's bad decisions but never their own. It's crazy, I know.
I would also like to imprison people who stand blocking moving walkways and escalators so I am comfortable with a high degree of authoritarianism as long as it is perfectly aligned with my wants.
Here in the UK a lot of stores no longer sell caffeinated drinks to under 16s (it's not a law, but it's a common practice) so Red Bull et al. are out. I guess such a thing could be extended to sugary soda in general eventually. It's annoying, though, because if I want to buy one, I have to be "challenge 25" checked, but I guess it reduces my consumption as well!
There’s zero evidence whatsoever that caffeine is unhealthy for children. And given what we know about the health benefits in adult, coffee is most likely health promoting for children.
It's not just the caffeine itself - that's one aspect. It's promoting the "use this to not sleep" recurring lifestyle choice, which some kids do come to rely on.
This gets worse with Monster and others pushing the caffeine limits. (I remember a free Monster giveaway at uni - could not sleep for close to 30h - that stuff is not healthy)
Well, that's you. Everyone drank Monster at my uni and I don't think there were any reports of sleep issues. Of course it depends on your existing caffeine tolerance, and I guess most students consume quite a lot of caffeinated beverages, but if it was a common issue for those with low tolerance I'm sure we'd have noticed.
> Several studies identified a strong, positive association between the use of energy drinks and higher odds of health-damaging behaviours, as well as physical health symptoms such as headaches, stomach aches, hyperactivity and insomnia
Banning is different from criminalization. So to make both legal but not easily obtainable seems consistent. Throwing someone in jail for life for possessing a 2-liter of coke seems wrong.
anyone possessing 2-liters of coke is obviously a dealer. I'm all for decriminalizing the travel size cans, but we need party-size felonies for party-size containers.
comparing addictions serves no meaningful purpose. people who want legal drugs still believe in a minimum age. i think that sugar should be seen as addictive as other drugs and the users must be old enough to be able to understand the risk of consuming.
I dunno about banned. Not practical, for one thing. Although... I dunno, I don't see bootlegging being as successful or widespread with soda as it was with alcohol. Regardless, probably not practical.
But the state of things in which unlimited free refills of soda is the norm, 64+oz fountain soda servings are common, and 300+ calories of soda are often added on to "combo meals" for effectively just ¢20-¢30 over the cost of the food as a "sweetener" (ha) to get people to choose a combo over a single item, is clearly not great. Something's out-of-whack.
So all juices and smoothies? many of them have more sugar than Coke....
Even juices without any added sugar will have a ton of sugar in them if they come from sugar rich fruits.
Apple juice is about 10% sugar, I don't know why you're mentioning an improbable number.
And here's the thing: Sugar is not a bad thing per se. It's overconsumption of it that's the issue. I'd rather have someone drink fruit juice than soda, but all in moderation.
I've definitely read that it may play a role in decoupling the taste of sweet with satisfaction. That in turn may lead people to ultimately eat more before feeling satisfied, which is bad.
Also, I think there might actually be some links to type II diabetes, but I'm skeptical of causation on that one. It's not implausible, but fully correcting for people already trying to reduce sugar intake sounds essentially impossible in that case.
As part of improving my health, I came off of drinking sugary sodas a few years back and went sugar free. My dentist remained unimpressed saying that the sugar is only a small part of the story and really it's the acid in soda that will cause me problems. I now drink a lot more water around any soda consumption to mitigate it slightly, but I gotta have some bad habits..
I think this should be normalized. In a lot of threads like this, there's some teetotalers that say all vices are bad and you should stop all of them at once.
But vices are fine, in moderation. Having some soda every once in a while is fine. Drinking it by the gallon every day is problematic. But it's been normalized like that by the companies that produce them.
Back in my day (shush kids, grandpa is talking), we got one, maybe two small glasses of soda and some crisps on a sunday. That was it.
That's news to me. Wikipedia also notes that Aspartame which is the sweetener used in most diet soda, has not been found to be carcinogenic with a bunch of citations.
He's not. Artificial sweeteners are one of the most demonized additives on the planet despite being one of the most studied. Because people are so often looking for a reason to get rid of them.
Even the studies of them being bad for "getting used to sweetness" and thus making people more obese through compensatory over-eating are studies that rely on self-reporting and polling.
When properly controlled, physics works as it always has and you can't magic mass or energy out of thin air.
this article isn't about PCR tests which would be unaffected by children's drinks
yes, we are aware of the filter bubble where people find the WHO's clarification of an existing prior policy as evidence of a PCR test sensitivity issue timed to make Biden in the US look better. there is a website where you can take a peak of various filter bubbles to see how strong the reinforcing information is for any particular rabbit hole. yours just happens to be hilarious. everything is open now, in the US, and you are stuck on that, something that is both inconsequential and will never be revisited. the awareness might seem like activism but it really is the bread and circuses, for you.
I'm saying it doesn't matter, didn't affect support for the US President, unlikely to be related to one country's administration, and actually was not timed with Biden taking office because the circular is about an earlier circular a few weeks earlier which itself was about an earlier circular dating back to September 2020
So spending energy pondering on one of many quantum realities, especially the one where its "timed with the change of administration, rhetorical hmmmmmmmm", is the intellectual isolationism because the only cycle being wasted is your own thought processes.
> Are you really saying that the high cycle counts did not significantly effect the number of cases...?
Whoosh, I'm saying I didn't comment on that at all.
>I'm saying it doesn't matter, didn't affect support for the US President, unlikely to be related to one country's administration, and actually was not timed with Biden taking office because the circular is about an earlier circular a few weeks earlier which itself was about an earlier circular dating back to September 2020
Got it. So you're saying we had enough folks vaccinated in the US to contribute to cases going down as Biden took office, even though by that point vaccine supplies barely existed.
I'm trying to get you to see there's more to it than you want to think, but here you are lecturing as if you've somehow got all the perspective.
Regarding the cases: the spread and reporting always lags, so if the case count had spiked higher by an order of
magnitude suddenly then it is not improbable that it had already saturated a population.
To me, the actual counterpoint to your reality is pretty easy: if PCR testing cycles were altered by the international WHO and member countries and testing services in those countries all mostly followed that guidance, then why did India and that whole region see that huge spike in cases recently, why did Brazil continue its trend? Doesn't that have a more significant factor than whatever happened in December, in the US specifically, or other relevant countries at that point in time? What's the rebuttal, that the WHO changed PCR cycle guidelines again in spring to make India's administration look worse? I'm being facetious, but you tell me as the only way your theory works is if there are no positive test results spikes anywhere following January 2021. The US is doing good because its ICUs are not full and emergency services are not stressed into nonexistence - something which actually happened in LA county where the winter flare up actually occurred - the US isn't open simply because the PCR testing cycles changes could report fewer cases.
> The US is doing good because its ICUs are not full and emergency services are not stressed into nonexistence
Most (>90%) ICUs in the US were never full, and LA county is an anomaly. To your points, shouldn't California have been more prepared for this...? It's almost like the politicians there weren't serving the citizens at all.
Do I need to post every single inconsistency from the last year in order for you to civilly discuss one point I've brought up, or do you want to keep dancing around calling me a conspiracy theorist without actually doing it?
You're using fallacies and I'm trying to open up a dialogue that is pretty rare around these parts. Try and keep up.
>the US isn't open simply because the PCR testing cycles changes could report fewer cases.
The US is open because it is politically expedient. You can have another opinion if you want, but attacking mine and my character blindly is pretty childish.
Keep censoring others, you'll be a good little servant to your tyrants.
California messed up, many places had completely incorrect pandemic mitigations. LA keeping people indoors in dense mixed unit housing was suboptimal.
Which specific point would you like to discuss?
I dont feel the same way you do about this conversation and I thought we were at the point where you reply about the other countries that would have been following PCR cycle guidelines too, unless that was considered a fallacy you were referring to.
