Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items matching "loss" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
33More

The Dress Promised Me Something the Doctors Couldn't - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thing-the-doctors-couldnt.html
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Dress Promised Me Something the Doctors Couldn’t
  • My obsessive online shopping wasn’t really about the clothes.
  • I said to my friend, “I want you to bury me in this dress,” which I found funny because I thought I was dying. And then I thought it wasn’t funny at all.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Even if the doctors couldn’t pin down what was going on with me, I was so alarmed by my symptoms and the doctors’ gravest guesses that I felt anxious about whether or not I would have a future.
  • What was certain is that I was shrinking. Rapidly, uncontrollably.
  • My clothes hung loose at the waist and sloughed off my shoulders as if they belonged to a stranger, so I bought a stranger’s dress. Kate Spade, $348 retail.
  • I found it for $50 at an online designer consignment store while on hold with the hospital; a nurse was checking on the results of my bone marrow biopsy.
  • Online shopping was the sort of thing one might do if she were on hold with her cable company, not awaiting a possible blood cancer diagnosis.
  • I filled my cart with a cobalt dress, a blush silk blouse, a slinky skirt.
  • On paper, the doctors said, it looked like it could be lymphoma. The symptoms were classic: fever, night sweats, weight loss.
  • A biopsy of my enlarged lymph node showed it to be benign.
  • Two weeks earlier, a doctor had taken a surgical drill to my hip and hollowed out my bones with a syringe fit for a large horse. “Painful” was a deficient descriptor.
  • “I just don’t know what else to do,” my doctor said.
  • I sat still while my insides turned over. A cold sweat crept across my face. I closed my eyes, shook my head and returned to my shopping cart. I was not going to dwell.
  • No — I was going to shop. I was going to shop until I could think of nothing else. I punched in my credit card number and bought the Kate Spade.
  • Then I rushed to my closet, threw open the double doors and began rifling through Target impulse buys and ill-fitting hand-me-down
  • we’ll have to keep looking
  • I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do illness anymore. I could only do this.
  • I spun around in it, watching the hem rise and fall. Something about it made me feel less like a haggard patient and more like the kind of woman who went to cocktail parties dripping with perfume and family money.
  • Over the next few months, I made it my mission to build a new wardrobe from scratch. The process demanded every moment of my free time, every spare thought
  • We both knew it was impractical. The clothes were expensive and high maintenance, most of them over-the-top fancy for my modest life in nonprofit communications.
  • But they felt vital. I told myself I was overdue for some frivolity, that I deserved to treat myself.
  • For my next doctor’s appointment, I picked out a Valentino pencil skirt that fit snugly against my new, withered body.
  • I hurled the clothes into boxes and garbage bags. They smelled like the hospital, all burned coffee and antiseptic. I didn’t want them. I didn’t even want to look at them. I wanted silk. I wanted velvet.
  • “Can I see you again in six weeks? We can repeat blood work then and come up with a timeline for scans. Does that sound like an OK plan?”
  • “Just that I live here,” I said, gesturing at my body. “I have to live here.”
  • That night I ran my fingers through my hair, and a clump of blond strands fell loose into my palm. “It’s just stress,” I told my cat. I brushed my hands together, letting my hair fall into the trash, and returned to my shopping list.
  • Each one had lived a life before me. Now I held onto them in the dim light of my bedroom like tangible hope.
  • We’re forced to find hope in what we used to mock: God, the afterlife, miracles, hemp oil. Healing, by any means. Healing, against all odds.
  • After every appointment, after every failed attempt to name my illness, I would prop myself in bed, choose new dresses and think of all the places I would wear them.
  • The clothes promised me something the doctors, as they continue to search for a diagnosis, still can’t: an uncomplicated future. And I promised a future to the clothes.
  • This was their life after life. And they deserved that, didn’t they?
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 21
     
    This is an extremely moving and well written article. It discusses mental reactions and decisions of a woman facing an unrecognized illness.
25More

For Some Teens, It's Been a Year of Anxiety and Trips to the E.R. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...virus-mental-health-teens.html
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • For Some Teens, It’s Been a Year of Anxiety and Trips to the E.R.
  • During the pandemic, suicidal thinking is up. And families find that hospitals can’t handle adolescents in crisis.
  • stability didn’t last.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • “The social isolation since then, over all this time, it just got to him,”
  • “This is a charming, funny kid, also sensitive and anxious,” she said. “He couldn’t find a job; he couldn’t really go out. And he started using marijuana again, and Xanax.”
  • The teenager’s frustration finally boiled over this month, when he deliberately cut himself.
  • The doctors sent him home, she said, “with no support, no therapy, nothing.”
  • Surveys and statistics show that for young people who are anxious by nature, or feeling emotionally fragile already, the pandemic and its isolation have pushed them to the brink
  • Rates of suicidal thinking and behavior are up by 25 percent or more from similar periods in 2019, according to a just-published analysis of surveys of young patients coming into the emergency room.
  • For these teenagers, there aren’t many places to turn.
  • Finally, when a crisis hits, many of these teenagers end up in the local emergency department — the one place desperate families so often go for help.
  • “This is a national crisis we’re facing,”
  • For the young people coming undone, however, pandemic life presents unusual challenges, pediatricians say
  • “What parents and children are consistently reporting is an increase in all symptoms — a child who was a little anxious before the pandemic became very anxious over this past year,”
  • “This giant boy, crying — it’s terrible to see.” The young man has had panic attacks, twice followed by a blackout. During one, he fell and injured his face.
  • These young people do not necessarily qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis, nor are they “traumatized” in the strict sense of having had a life-threatening experience (or the perception of one).
  • Rather, they are trying to manage an interruption in their
  • The result is grief, but grief without a name or a specific cause, an experience some psychologists call “ambiguous loss.”
  • “Everything that used to be familiar and give structure to their lives, and predictability, and normalcy, is gone,” said Sharon Young, a therapist in Hendersonville. “Kids need all these things even more than adults do, and it’s hard for them to feel emotionally safe when they’re no longer there.”
  • Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, has an emergency department that is a decent size for a pediatric hospital, with capacity for 62 children or adolescents
  • “This was huge problem pre-pandemic,” said Dr. David Axelson, chief of psychiatry and behavioral health at the hospital. “We were seeing a rise in emergency department visits for mental health problems in kids, specifically for suicidal thinking and self-harm. Our emergency department was overwhelmed with it, having to board kids on the medical unit while waiting for psych beds.”
  • “We have to say no,” Dr. Axelson said.
  • Like many other parents, she is now looking after an unstable child and wondering where to go next. A drug rehab program may be needed, as well as regular therapy.
  • “Covid has put our system under a microscope in terms of the things that don’t work,”
  • “We had a shaky system of care in pediatric mental health prior to this pandemic, and now we have all these added stressors on it, all these kids coming in for pandemic-related issues. Hospitals everywhere are scrambling to adjust.”
15More

Is Ringing in the Ears a Symptom of Coronavirus? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vid-symptoms-ears-ringing.html
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • When the Noise Never Stops: Coping With the Challenges of Tinnitus
  • Researchers are just beginning to untangle how Covid might be linked to a ringing in the ears. Here’s what we know.
  • Experts are beginning to learn how it may be linked to Covid
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • the heart palpitations, headaches, stomach troubles, numbness and weakness in her hands and feet — the most frustrating one is the tinnitus, a condition that can cause sufferers to hear phantom ringing, buzzing, whistling, chirping or other sounds.
  • “It makes it hard to concentrate, it makes it hard to hold conversations with others, it makes it almost impossible to lie down and go to sleep. It’s maddening, and you can’t fully understand it unless you experience it yourself.
  • the most common cause of chronic tinnitus is age
  • As the hair cells inside your inner ear become damaged over time, she said, they may no longer send sound waves to your brain, so your brain tries to recreate them on their own, which is what might cause the ringing.
  • But experts have long known that some viruses can temporarily cause hearing loss or ringing in the ears, too. When the body fights an infection, the overall inflammation from the virus can damage the nerves or hair cells in the ear, Dr. Cosetti said.
  • “I was so depressed and scared I’d never get better,” Ms. Suarez said. “I speak and talk for a living — how was I going to be able to have a conversation with a client or present in court if it constantly sounded like bells were exploding on my left side?”
  • Tinnitus has been linked to several mental health conditions, including anxiety and depression, and mostly in women. “It can be particularly challenging for many people initially because it’s something they have absolutely no control over,”
  • “For most people with tinnitus, the worst time is the first six to nine months after it begins,” Dr. Tyler said. “After that, most people adjust and learn to live with it, especially if they’re given the right treatments.”
  • If you are diagnosed with Covid-19 and you experience tinnitus that lasts for more than two days, tell your doctor right away.
  • If your tinnitus persists after you’ve recovered from the virus, make an appointment with an ear, nose and throat doctor, who can check for blockages in your ear
  • If no blockage exists, you might be sent to an audiologist to check your hearing.
  • “It’s always there and with me all the time — I can never escape it,” she said, adding that she has to take sedatives now to fall asleep. “I have days when I don’t know if I can handle this anymore. But I have to go on being hopeful.”
28More

'I Cry on Tuesdays and Fridays' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-mental-health.html
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • ‘I Cry on Tuesdays and Fridays’
  • Moms are still primal screaming their hearts out.
  • Michelle Pasos, 46, describes herself as someone who has “always been extremely healthy.”
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • That is until the pandemic, when she ended up in the emergency room because she had a bad reaction to a drug prescribed to bring down her elevated blood pressure.
  • when the hospital gave her the option of going home and monitoring herself, or staying an extra night, she chose to stay. It was the first time she had felt calm in a year.
  • Primal Scream phone line
  • explored the emotional and economic pressures on a generation of moms,
  • hough there is additional federal support to families, more Americans are vaccinated every day and job loss is not quite as dire as it was in the early days of the pandemic, unemployment claims remain higher than they were in previous economic crises
  • And moms are still not OK.
  • “Despite the increased labor force participation of mothers, mothers are still having a really hard time,”
  • Despite their return to the labor force, they are not having much relief at home, and by that I mean, many children are still home-schooling.
  • She added that the burden of remote school has fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of mothers
  • Almost every mother I have spoken to during the pandemic, no matter what their financial and family circumstances, has expressed guilt about complaining
  • Lower-income parents have already been hit harder by unemployment than their higher-income and college-educated counterparts.
  • “More than parental status or gender, education has been most decisive in who has lost jobs during the pandemic,”
  • “Now it’s like 76 percent of moms and 94 percent of dads with college degrees,” he said. This suggests that where families could afford for one parent to step back from work to deal with domestic labor, mothers were bearing the brunt.
  • While I can list these labor market statistics all day, the emotional impact of Covid-19 is ongoing, devastating and harder to quantify.
  • “I cry on Tuesdays and Fridays. Sometimes I have an extra bonus day, like on this Monday,”
  • when she called into the Primal Scream line
  • Why Tuesdays and Fridays? On Tuesdays, her husband has a lot of meetings, and her day isn’t light either, so even though she is trading off baby care, it’s “really high octane all day.”
  • It’s a matter of having kept things nominally together all week, and then you have this big letdown,”
  • She said she has felt “terrified” for two years, after being anxious during her pregnancy as well, because she wanted her daughter so badly.
  • “I must have buckets of cortisol,”
  • Research has shown that in states where children received only remote instruction during the pandemic, mothers’ labor force participation has been lower than in those where children attended school in person.
  • But mothers shouldn’t have to slap on a Pollyanna smile.
  • , there was already a gender gap in caregiving before the pandemic, and moms were more likely than dads to step back from paid work to fill any family needs.
  • The past year has only exacerbated the difficulties caregivers face in the United States.
  • We can acknowledge that things could be worse, but at the same time honor the fact that our circumstances are still so far from good.
26More

Pandemic Social Life, One Year In - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-19-one-year-anniversary.html
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • One Year Together, Apart
  • The pandemic redefined relationships and self-reliance.
  • In the year since the pandemic began, people learned to be together while apart and navigated the pain of feeling apart while together
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Screens, small and large, became crucial links to the rest of the world.
  • In doing so, they rediscovered each other, and experienced the joys of bonding and the suffocation of constant proximity.
  • In some instances, these revelations were not happy ones: lawyers and mediators saw a spike in clients looking to divorce as soon as courts reopened.
  • Engagements and pregnancy announcements seemed to pop up constantly on social media. And there were plenty of weddings.
  • Couples in quarantine learned a lot about their significant others.
  • Inside nursing homes, Covid-19 outbreaks became all too regular, with more than 163,000 residents and workers dying of the virus.
  • In one study, almost one-third of the teens interviewed said they had felt unhappy or depressed.
  • Parents, especially mothers, left the work force quickly and in large numbers in the spring.
  • Those who continued working had to balance the demands of their jobs with domestic chores, child care and online schooling, putting strain on their mental health.
  • Retirees put off plans that had been years in the making, like travel and volunteer work.
  • Young people around the world, cut off from their usual social lives, faced a “mental health pandemic.”
  • Delivery drivers dealt with health risks, theft and assault.
  • Airline workers who weren’t furloughed had to confront passengers who refused to wear masks.
  • hospital staff around the country dealt with the gut-wrenching horrors of a steep surge in cases.
  • Doctors and nurses agonized over putting their families at risk, and dealt with intense burnout and pay cuts.
  • Some said that being characterized as heroes by the public left them little room to express vulnerability.
  • a toll higher than in any other country.
  • The world’s struggle to contain the coronavirus was often compared to a war
  • in this case, the enemy claimed more Americans than World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined
  • Grief and loss defined the last year
  • Funerals and final goodbyes took place over video calls, if at all.
  • a sign that people will soon be finding their way back to each other.
  • If you’re wondering what comes after, we are, too.Are you anxious that things will never be the same? Or are you fearful that we’ll return to “the same” much too quickly? Or maybe there is something seemingly small that you will cherish being able to do?
34More

Revisiting the prophetic work of Neil Postman about the media » MercatorNet - 1 views

mercatornet.com/...68239 postman media analysis social media psychology brain science technology education
shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • The NYU professor was surely prophetic. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned.
  • “We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organised around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.”
  • What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Postman also recognised that technology was changing our mental processes and social habits.
  • Today corporations like Google and Amazon collect data on Internet users based on their browsing history, the things they purchase, and the apps they use
  • Yet all citizens are undergoing this same transformation. Our digital devices undermine social interactions by isolating us,
  • “Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organisations, but have solved very little of importance to most people, and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”
  • “Television has by its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”
  • As a student of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman believed that the medium of information was critical to understanding its social and political effects. Every technology has its own agenda. Postman worried that the very nature of television undermined American democratic institutions.
  • Many Americans tuned in to the presidential debate looking for something substantial and meaty
  • It was simply another manifestation of the incoherence and vitriol of cable news
  • “When, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” warned Postman.
  • Technology Is Never Neutral
  • As for new problems, we have increased addictions (technological and pornographic); increased loneliness, anxiety, and distraction; and inhibited social and intellectual maturation.
  • The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.
  • This is far truer of the Internet and social media, where more than a third of Americans, and almost half of young people, now get their news.
  • with smartphones now ubiquitous, the Internet has replaced television as the “background radiation of the social and intellectual universe.”
  • Is There Any Solution?
  • Reading news or commentary in print, in contrast, requires concentration, patience, and careful reflection, virtues that our digital age vitiates.
  • Politics as Entertainment
  • “How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged,” observed Postman. In the case of politics, television fashions public discourse into yet another form of entertainment
  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial. The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. … They tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them.
  • The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • Such is the case with the way politics is “advertised” to different subsets of the American electorate. The “consumer,” depending on his political leanings, may be manipulated by fears of either an impending white-nationalist, fascist dictatorship, or a radical, woke socialist takeover.
  • This paradigm is aggravated by the hypersiloing of media content, which explains why Americans who read left-leaning media view the Proud Boys as a legitimate, existential threat to national civil order, while those who read right-leaning media believe the real immediate enemies of our nation are Antifa
  • Regardless of whether either of these groups represents a real public menace, the loss of any national consensus over what constitutes objective news means that Americans effectively talk past one another: they use the Proud Boys or Antifa as rhetorical barbs to smear their ideological opponents as extremists.
  • Yet these technologies are far from neutral. They are, rather, “equipped with a program for social change.
  • Postman’s analysis of technology is prophetic and profound. He warned of the trivialising of our media, defined by “broken time and broken attention,” in which “facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” He warned of “a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity.”
  • does Postman offer any solutions to this seemingly uncontrollable technological juggernaut?
  • Postman’s suggestions regarding education are certainly relevant. He unequivocally condemned education that mimics entertainment, and urged a return to learning that is hierarchical, meaning that it first gives students a foundation of essential knowledge before teaching “critical thinking.”
  • Postman also argued that education must avoid a lowest-common-denominator approach in favor of complexity and the perplexing: the latter method elicits in the student a desire to make sense of what perplexes him.
  • Finally, Postman promoted education of vigorous exposition, logic, and rhetoric, all being necessary for citizenship
  • Another course of action is to understand what these media, by their very nature, do to us and to public discourse.
  • We must, as Postman exhorts us, “demystify the data” and dominate our technology, lest it dominate us. We must identify and resist how television, social media, and smartphones manipulate our emotions, infantilise us, and weaken our ability to rebuild what 2020 has ravaged.
9More

Climate change: Erratic weather slows down the economy -- ScienceDaily - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210208114314.htm
shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Through these seemingly small variations climate change may have strong effects on economic growth.
  • In a new study in Nature Climate Change, they juxtapose observed daily temperature changes with economic data from more than 1,500 regions worldwide over 40 years -- with startling results
  • We have known for a while that changes in annual mean temperature impacts macroeconomic growth," explains lead author Maximilian Kotz from PIK. "Yet now, for the first time, we're also able to show that day-to-day variations in temperature, i.e. short-term variability, has a substantial impact.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • If this variability increases by one degree Celsius, economic growth is reduced on average by 5 percentage-points."
  • "We find that familiarity with temperature variations is important: Economies in Canada or Russia, where average monthly temperature varies by more than 40°C within a year, seem better prepared to cope with daily temperature fluctuations than low-latitude regions such as parts of Latin America or Southeast Asia, where seasonal temperature differences can be as small as 3°C.
  • Furthermore, income protects against losses,
  • Comparing each year's day-to-day temperature variability between 1979 and 2018 with the corresponding regional economic data, the researchers analyzed a total of 29,000 individual observations.
  • "Rapid temperature variability is something completely different than long-term changes," explains Co-Author Anders Levermann from PIK and Columbia University, New York.
  • "The real problem caused by a changing climate are the unexpected impacts, because they are more difficult to adapt to. Farmers and other businesses around the world have started to adapt to climate change. But what if weather becomes simply more erratic and unpredictable? What we have shown is that erratic weather slows down the economy. Policy makers and industry need to take this into account when discussing the real cost of climate change."
11More

Here's How Social Media Affects Your Mental Health | McLean Hospital - 0 views

www.mcleanhospital.org/...s-affecting-your-mental-health
shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The platforms are designed to be addictive and are associated with anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments.
  • According to the Pew Research Center, 69% of adults and 81% of teens in the U.S. use social media.
  • To boost self-esteem and feel a sense of belonging in their social circles, people post content with the hope of receiving positive feedback. Couple that content with the structure of potential future reward, and you get a recipe for constantly checking platforms.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • FOMO—fear of missing out—also plays a role
  • A 2018 British study tied social media use to decreased, disrupted, and delayed sleep, which is associated with depression, memory loss, and poor academic performance.
  • Social media use can affect users’ physical health even more directly. Researchers know the connection between the mind and the gut can turn anxiety and depression into nausea, headaches, muscle tension, and tremors.
  • The earlier teens start using social media, the greater impact the platforms have on mental health. This is especially true for females. While teen males tend to express aggression physically, females do so relationally by excluding others and sharing hurtful comments. Social media increases the opportunity for such harmful interactions.
  • In the past, teens read magazines that contained altered photos of models. Now, these images are one thumb-scroll away at any given time. Apps that provide the user with airbrushing, teeth whitening, and more filters are easy to find and easier to use. It’s not only celebrities who look perfect—it’s everyone.
  • In recent years, plastic surgeons have seen an uptick in requests from patients who want to look like their filtered Snapchat and Instagram photos.
  • A person experiences impostor syndrome when feeling chronic self-doubt and a sense of being exposed as ‘a fraud’ in terms of success and intellect. “Whether it’s another pretty vacation or someone’s bouquet of flowers, my mind went from ‘Why not me?’ to ‘I don’t deserve those things, and I don’t know why,’ and it made me feel awful.”
  • Sperling encourages people to conduct their own behavior experiments by rating their emotions on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the most intensely one could experience an emotion, before and after using social media sites at the same time each day for a week.
25More

11 mind-blowing facts about the US economy | Markets Insider - 1 views

markets.businessinsider.com/...conomy-facts-2019-4-1028101291
shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • For more than a century, the United States has been the world's economic powerhouse.
  • The US is on the verge of its longest economic expansion on record
  • Last May, the US economy's streak of more than eight years of economic growth became the nation's second longest on record. It's been a slow climb following the Great Recession, but it's growth nonetheless.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • But the US also just hit a record 13 straight years without 3% real GDP growth
  • While the US has had a record period of economic expansion, it's not setting the world on fire. It's been a record 13 straight years without reaching 3% real gross domestic product growth. The US has come close, hitting 2.9% growth in 2018, but America hasn't hit a real GDP growth of 3% since 2005, when it grew 3.5%
  • The decade-long expansion has generated 20 million jobs
  • With economic growth stretching the past decade, key figures continue to get better. A 3.4% year-over-year wage growth is the strongest in more than a decade, a good sign as stagnant wages have kept the US middle class at bay
  • Still, the jobless rate fell to 3.8%
  • Sleep deprivation costs the US economy billions of dollars
  • More than a third of the US adult population doesn't get enough sleep, and that costs the US $411 billion through the loss of 1.2 million work days each year.
  • The lack of sleep can come from a variety of factors, whether it's overworking, poor health habits, or even the horrid blue light from electronics
  • About $100,000 separates the middle class from the upper class
  • The sports industry is worth nearly $75 billion
  • Generation Z might spend as much as $143 billion next year
  • Generation Z, the population born between 1997 and 2012, will make up 40% of US consumers by next year.
  • The average car part crosses into Mexico and Canada eight times in production
  • Mexico is the top trade partner, with the US exporting $21.9 billion worth of products to its southern neighbor and importing $27.7 billion, making up 14.8% of all US trade. Canada, meanwhile, makes up 13.8% of US trade as it imports $22.6 billion worth of American goods and sends in $23.4 billion
  • If California were a country, it would have the fifth highest GDP in the world
  • With a gross domestic product of $2.747 trillion, California would only trail Germany, Japan, China, and the US as a whole.
  • The US spends more on defense than the next seven nations combined
  • That $610 billion is good for 15% of all federal spending
  • The US national debt is at an all-time high
  • In February, US government debt hit an all-time high of $22 trillion
  • In 2011, 51% of Americans were considered middle class, and that number grew slightly to 52% in 2016
  • A sports-industry report back in 2015 predicted the market in North America would be worth more than $73.5 billion by this year.
40More

Why Study History? (1985) | AHA - 0 views

www.historians.org/...why-study-history-(1985) history study historiography learning teaching education
shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past
  • Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.
  • Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends!
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • Collective memory is similar, though its loss does not immediately paralyze everyday private activity. But ignorance of history-that is, absent or defective collective memory-does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsider
  • Often it is enough for experts to know about outsiders, if their advice is listened to. But democratic citizenship and effective participation in the determination of public policy require citizens to share a collective memory, organized into historical knowledge and belief
  • This value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that
  • in fact, institutions that govern a great deal of our everyday behavior took shape hundreds or even thousands of years ago
  • Only an acquaintance with the entire human adventure on earth allows us to understand these dimensions of contemporary reality.
  • it follows that study of history is essential for every young person.
  • Collective memory is quite the same. Historians are always at work reinterpreting the past, asking new questions, searching new sources and finding new meanings in old documents in order to bring the perspective of new knowledge and experience to bear on the task of understanding the past.
  • what we know and believe about history is always changing. In other words, our collective, codified memory alters with time just as personal memories do, and for the same reasons.
  • skeptics are likely to conclude that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?
  • what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that happens will fit?
  • What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities, and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of?
  • Then, surely, the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that constitutes the actual, adult world.
  • Memory is not something fixed and forever. As time passes, remembered personal experiences take on new meanings.
  • Early in this century, teachers and academic administrators pretty well agreed that two sorts of history courses were needed: a survey of the national history of the United States and a survey of European history.
  • Memory, indeed, makes us human. History, our collective memory, carefully codified and critically revised, makes us social, sharing ideas and ideals with others so as to form all sorts of different human groups
  • The varieties of history are enormous; facts and probabilities about the past are far too numerous for anyone to comprehend them all. Every sort of human group has its own histor
  • Where to start? How bring some sort of order to the enormous variety of things known and believed about the past?
  • Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore oversimplify reality, especially human reality.
  • This second course was often broadened into a survey of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s
  • But by the 1960s and 1970s these courses were becoming outdated, left behind by the rise of new kinds social and quantitative history, especially the history of women, of Blacks, and of other formerly overlooked groups within the borders of the United States, and of peoples emerging from colonial status in the world beyond our borders.
  • much harder to combine old with new to make an inclusive, judiciously balanced (and far less novel) introductory course for high school or college students.
  • But abandoning the effort to present a meaningful portrait of the entire national and civilizational past destroyed the original justification for requiring students to study history
  • Competing subjects abounded, and no one could or would decide what mattered most and should take precedence. As this happened, studying history became only one among many possible ways of spending time in school.
  • The costs of this change are now becoming apparent, and many concerned persons agree that returning to a more structured curriculum, in which history ought to play a prominent part, is imperative.
  • three levels of generality seem likely to have the greatest importance for ordinary people.
  • First is family, local, neighborhood history
  • Second is national history, because that is where political power is concentrated in our time.
  • Last is global history, because intensified communications make encounters with all the other peoples of the earth increasingly important.
  • Other pasts are certainly worth attention, but are better studied in the context of a prior acquaintance with personal-local, national, and global history. That is because these three levels are the ones that affect most powerfully what all other groups and segments of society actually do.
  • National history that leaves out Blacks and women and other minorities is no longer acceptable; but American history that leaves out the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is not acceptable either. What is needed is a vision of the whole, warts and all.
  • the study of history does not lead to exact prediction of future events. Though it fosters practical wisdom, knowledge of the past does not permit anyone to know exactly what is going to happen
  • Consequently, the lessons of history, though supremely valuable when wisely formulated, become grossly misleading when oversimplifiers try to transfer them mechanically from one age to another, or from one place to another.
  • Predictable fixity is simply not the human way of behaving. Probabilities and possibilities-together with a few complete surprises-are what we live with and must learn to expect.
  • Second, as acquaintance with the past expands, delight in knowing more and more can and often does become an end in itself.
  • On the other hand, studying alien religious beliefs, strange customs, diverse family patterns and vanished social structures shows how differently various human groups have tried to cop
  • Broadening our humanity and extending our sensibilities by recognizing sameness and difference throughout the recorded past is therefore an important reason for studying history, and especially the history of peoples far away and long ago
  • For we can only know ourselves by knowing how we resemble and how we differ from others. Acquaintance with the human past is the only way to such self knowledge.
10More

How COVID-19 Attacks The Brain And May, In Severe Cases, Cause Lasting Damage : Shots -... - 2 views

www.npr.org/...n-and-may-cause-lasting-damage Covid-19 brain
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Early in the pandemic, people with COVID-19 began reporting an odd symptom: the loss of smell and taste.
  • Their fears proved well-founded — though the damage may come from the body and brain's response to the virus rather than the virus itself.
  • Many patients who are hospitalized for COVID-19 are discharged with symptoms such as those associated with a brain injury. These include "forgetfulness that impairs their ability to function,"
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • For many affected patients, brain function improves as they recover. But some are likely to face long-term disability,
  • The injuries resembled those from a series of tiny strokes occurring in many different areas of the brain,
  • To understand other, less obvious mechanisms, though, scientists needed brain tissue from patients with COVID-19 who died.
  • "What we found was that the very small blood vessels in the brain were leaking,"
  • Some patients also suffer brain damage when their lungs can no longer provide enough oxygen.
  • What's more, the inflammation and leaky blood vessels associated with all these symptoms may make a person's brain more vulnerable to another type of damage."We know that those are important in Alzheimer's disease and we're seeing them play a key role here in COVID-19,"
  • Researchers will assess patients' "behavior, their memory, their overall function" at six-month intervals, she says.
56More

How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...societal-collapse.html collapse civilization decline history crisis politics economics culture complexity
shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988
  • It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.
  • His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”
  • ...53 more annotations...
  • He writes with disarming composure about the factors that have led to the disintegration of empires and the abandonment of cities and about the mechanism that, in his view, makes it nearly certain that all states that rise will one day fall
  • societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.
  • Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk
  • even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he worried, it could begin before the year was over.
  • Plato, in “The Republic,” compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they adopt the trappings of civilization.
  • that theory, which became the heart of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems
  • All history since then has been “characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.”
  • Eventually, societies we would recognize as similar to our own would emerge, “large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all.”
  • Something more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which would itself require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.
  • Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits.
  • Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.
  • This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity — the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural symbiosis of the San Juan Basin — begin to dwindle, Tainter writes, societies “become vulnerable to collapse.”
  • haven’t countless societies weathered military defeats, invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?
  • Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.
  • Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture.
  • A disaster — even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social unrest or a rapidly changing climate — can, in Tainter’s view, never be enough by itself to cause collapse
  • The only precedent Tainter could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population of Europe by as much as 60 percent.
  • Whether any existing society is close to collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing returns.
  • The United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these days. But how far along are we?
  • Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps. The first, dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all explanations
  • The second is more interested in the particulars of the societies they study
  • Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the usefulness of the very concept of collapse — she was an editor of a 2010 volume titled “Questioning Collapse” — but admits to being “very, very worried” about the lack, in the United States, of the “nimbleness” that crises require of governments.
  • We’re too vested and tied to places.” Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to more equitably distribute resources, “at some point the whole thing blows. It has to.”
  • In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,
  • Inequality and “popular immiseration” have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd
  • Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the sturdiest-seeming systems. “Very severe events, while not terribly likely, are quite possible,” he says. When he emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter into its constituent parts. “But it did.”
  • Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once.
  • Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”
  • In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter makes a point that echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”
  • If it happens, he says, it would be “the worst catastrophe in history.”
  • The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.
  • A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.
  • If we sink “into a severe recession or a depression,” Tainter says, “then it will probably cascade. It will simply reinforce itself.”
  • Tainter tells me, he has seen “a definite uptick” in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit
  • Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.
  • He writes of visions of “bloated bureaucracies” becoming the basis of “entire political careers.” Arms races, he observes, presented a “classic example” of spiraling complexity that provides “no tangible benefit for much of the population” and “usually no competitive advantage” either.
  • It is hard not to read the book through the lens of the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.
  • The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share that “must be allocated to legitimization or coercion.
  • And so it was: As U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 — the government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers.
  • “As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”
  • The overall picture drawn by Tainter’s work is a tragic one. It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping
  • Complexity is “insidious,” in Tainter’s words. “It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the time.” And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you got there.
  • Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by some combination of the two
  • if you pay attention to people’s lived experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.
  • Tainter’s understanding of societies as problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals
  • Plantation slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of them counts as “society”?
  • Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars.
  • If societies are not in fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an all-or-nothing game.
  • Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered — in the hold of a slave ship, say, or on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations faraway — and survived.
  • The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems
  • the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present.
  • If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.
  • When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.
4More

"Immune to Evidence": How Dangerous Coronavirus Conspiracies Spread - ProPublica - 0 views

www.propublica.org/...oronavirus-conspiracies-spread psychology science research knowledge brain science language bias social media technology education
shared by kaylynfreeman on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Conspiratorial videos and websites about COVID-19 are going viral. Here’s how one of the authors of “The Conspiracy Theory Handbook” says you can fight back. One big takeaway: Focus your efforts on people who can hear evidence and think rationally.
  • Conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic seem to be proliferating, and some may even be taking root. So I asked Lewandowsky to share how he identifies and understands them, and what we can do to sort through the confusion. The interview has been condensed for clarity and length.
  • A conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is discussed at length on the internet by people who are not bona fide journalists or government officials or whistleblowers in an organization or investigative committees of regulators. They’re completely independent sources, individuals who self-nominate and put themselves forward as being in possession of the truth. In principle, that could be true. But then if you look at the way these people think and talk and communicate, you discover their cognition is different from what I would call conventional cognition.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Some people find comfort in resorting to a conspiracy theory whenever they have a sense of a loss of control or they’re confronted with a major adverse event that no one has control over. So every time there’s a mass shooting in the U.S., I can guarantee you ahead of time that there will be a conspiracy theory about it.
21More

How the brain remembers right place, right time: Studies could lead to new ways to enha... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201208163021.htm
shared by margogramiak on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • how the brain encodes time and place into memories.
  • how the brain encodes time and place into memories.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      This is something we talked about in class... the brain isn't reliable when it comes to this.
  • What the team found was exciting: Not only did they identify a robust population of time cells, but the firing of these cells predicted how well individuals were able to link words together in time (a phenomenon called temporal clustering). Finally, these cells appear to exhibit phase precession in humans, as predicted.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      That's super interesting. I can see why this would be helpful research
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • hippocampus,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      Familiar, I think we talked about in class/read about
  • Electrodes implanted in these patients' brains help their surgeons precisely identify the seizure foci and also provide valuable information on the brain's inner workings, Lega says.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      Wow, that's pretty cool.
  • new treatments to combat memory loss from conditions such as traumatic brain injury or Alzheimer's disease.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      That would be amazing
  • In addition, while rats are actively exploring an environment, place cells are further organized into "mini-sequences" that represent a virtual sweep of locations ahead of the rat. These radar-like sweeps happen roughly 8-10 times per second and are thought to be a brain mechanism for predicting immediately upcoming events or outcomes.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      Wow. I think how this article is putting super complex ideas into words that are easier to understand.
  • it was unclear how the hippocampus was able to produce such sequences.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      I'm sure there will be specific research on this eventually
  • hocolate milk
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      why chocolate milk I wonder...
  • However, taking a closer look at the data, the researchers found something new: As the rats moved through these spaces, their neurons not only exhibited forward, predictive mini-sequences, but also backward, retrospective mini-sequences. The forward and backward sequences alternated with each other, each taking only a few dozen milliseconds to complete.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      How can information like his be applied to treating dementia though?
  • "In the past few decades, there's been an explosion in new findings about memory,"
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      That's great
7More

Analysis: TV news is realigning, with Fox's ratings sagging and CNN's soaring - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by mshilling1 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Furthermore, a big chunk of Fox's base audience was demoralized by Trump's loss in November and disheartened by the pro-Trump riot last week. Fox's average viewership levels are about 20% lower than they were before the election, even though overall TV news viewership is elevated due to the current combination of crises.
  • Fox sources say that some viewers have sampled Newsmax, yes, but many have just chosen to turn off the news altogether. They're watching Hallmark, HGTV or Netflix instead.
  • "Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information'
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • But for the conservative media ecosystem, just what should be affirmed has suddenly become an existential question."
  • Confusion is certainly apparent among many conservative media producers and commentators -- trying to find their footing as the story of the Capitol assault, and the President's reaction, keeps getting worse."
  • Fox is focusing on what it calls "Big Tech censorship" instead, but I strongly suspect that most people want news about the terror threat right now, not Twitter. Frankly, many Fox shows are running away from the news rather than reporting on it.
  • Second: Fox's decision to de-emphasize the news division "in favor of more opinion programming." Third: The opinion shows going "all-in on conspiracies.
10More

India Kicks Off World's Largest COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...ign_n_60033070c5b6ffcab964c9e4 science research covid coronavirus vaccine
shared by cvanderloo on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • India is home to the world’s largest vaccine makers and has one of the biggest immunization programs.
  • Indian authorities hope to give shots to 300 million people
  • “We are launching the world’s biggest vaccination drive and it shows the world our capability,”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • politicians will not be considered a priority group in the first phase of the rollout.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 16 Jan 21
       
      Very different from the US.
  • Shots were given to at least 165,714 people on Saturday
  • But doubts over the effectiveness of the homegrown vaccine have created a hurdle for the ambitious plan. Health experts worry that the government’s approval of the Bharat Biotech vaccine — without concrete data showing its efficacy — could amplify vaccine hesitancy. At least one state health minister has opposed its use.
  • “Right now, we don’t have the option to choose between the vaccines,”
  • In wealthy countries including the United States, Britain, Israel, Canada and Germany, millions of citizens have already been given some measure of protection by vaccines developed with revolutionary speed and quickly authorized for use.
  • Many experts are predicting another year of loss and hardship in places like Iran, India, Mexico and Brazil, which together account for about a quarter of the world’s COVID-19 deaths.
17More

Republicans Wonder How, And If, They Can Pull The Party Back Together : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...n-pull-the-party-back-together
shared by mshilling1 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In a matter of hours on Jan. 6, the Republican Party went from shrugging off its loss of the White House to a party in crisis.
  • making President Trump the first president since Herbert Hoover whose party lost the White House, the House and the Senate in one term.
  • Now, Trump leaves office as the only president to be impeached twice, and the House vote against Trump over the Capitol insurrection marked the most bipartisan impeachment in U.S. history.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • I don't know how you bring these people together.
  • "This isn't their Republican Party anymore," the president's son said. "This is Donald Trump's Republican Party."
  • He thinks the big divide is between authoritarians and those who believe in democracy.
  • It's a fundamental belief in whether or not you want to continue the American experiment.
  • You have a segment of American society that does not accept the election outcome and is going to continue to speak up, is going to continue to agitate. And that's going to make this a very unstable period for months and perhaps even years."
  • That means a long, unstable period not just for the Republican Party, but for the American political system as a whole.
  • Annie says it wasn't that long ago that she could talk politics with her mom without things getting heated. But when the pandemic started, she says their conversations were peppered with conspiracies.
  • And what I found were stories, mostly from family members of people who have gotten wrapped up in political conspiracy theories like QAnon. And many are adult children who say they can't really have a civil conversation with their parents anymore and that it wasn't always this way.
  • It kind of seems normal at first. And then all of a sudden, something will just be out of the blue that just seems so far from anything that could be true.
  • UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: She's spending 16 to 18 hours a day consuming this. CORNISH: And the result of all this is a detachment from the facts.
  • Q's stories range from false notions about COVID to a cabal running the U.S. government to the claim there's a secret world of satanic pedophiles. But what's relevant here is that this culminates in a belief that President Trump is a kind of savior figure, which leads to the next phase for these families - a breakdown.
  • Because these belief systems are not about the information within them, but about the identity and the emotions that are appealed to through them, the only thing that can actually combat them effectively are loving, trusting, emotional connections.
  • Do not mock. Do not use snark. All of the, you know, Twitter posts where people make fun of the crazy QAnon supporters, all that does is further reinforce their sense that they are disrespected and maligned.
  • No. 2 - using scientific evidence, argumentation, etc., that comes through the very institutions that they have been told not to trust, that is going to backfire because now they think that you are the dupe because you trust these institutions, etc.
16More

Britain, dubbed 'plague island', wants tourists to return | CNN Travel - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html UK brexit Britain covid travel
shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Boris Johnson plunged the country into harsh new restrictions, blaming a new variant of the disease that had been spreading in London and the southeast of England since September.
  • Country after country closed their borders to flights from the UK, in a bid to keep the new variant confined to "plague island,"
  • UK travelers are still banned from much of the world -- including EU countries -- because of the homegrown variant.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • In the end, 2020 saw a 76% decline in visitors and an 80% drop.
  • "A lot of our multi-country trips including England used to fly round-trip to London, and now we're looking to see if from a traveler's perspective that will be the most convenient."
  • DaSilva said that potential Brexit complications were on the radar of travelers' concerns last year, but, with a no-deal averted and the pandemic taking center stage, it's no longer an issue for her guests. In fact, three of the top five most searched trips on their website involve Great Britain.
  • "Early on in the pandemic, people were searching for places that had more open green spaces, like New Zealand and Ireland," she says. "But as news of the vaccine came out and people became more confident about trips for this year, England popped back up to the top."
  • And there's one big bonus for those traveling to the UK this year --- the tanking pound.
  • The UK made a great play that it was an international and welcoming destination over the 2012 Olympics, but that message was withdrawn with Brexit. The posturing of the government -- especially the threat to put gunboats in the Channel -- didn't play well with a lot of origin markets," he says.
  • "There may be differences with the import of goods and transmission of services that means London isn't as prosperous as it was."
  • "Suddenly, using the UK as gateway to Europe becomes enormously less attractive. Travelers will have to think about whether it's sensible to come to the UK as part of a European destination. They may wish to look at the UK as a single destination, but that isn't nearly as attractive as the UK being part of a European vacation."
  • "The UK won't be ignored, but it's unlikely to recover as strongly as Europe.
  • About 20% of the Intercontinental's staff left the UK before Brexit, says Ouseph; but while in normal times that would be a crisis, he thinks that Covid-induced job losses will mean hotels can fill these positions for now -- at least, the customer-facing ones. Instead, it's the less visible, but crucial roles, where they'll struggle.
  • Not everyone thinks Brexit will make a big difference to the inbound UK travel industry.
  • Maine -- who hasn't run tours since October -- says that he thinks the vaccine "will get us out of it -- it's a matter of when, not if." And he predicts that "when" could be as early as Easter.
  • "Rolling out the vaccine is the acid test of being a coherent holiday destination, and the UK looks like it's doing a reasonably good job in comparison to everyone else."
7More

Go Ahead. Fantasize. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...go-ahead-fantasize.html
shared by ardenganse on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • It won’t erase the pain of last year, which was compounded for Mr. Johnson by the loss of his job, but the dance floor fantasy is soothing — something to look forward to.
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      I thought that this related to human's need for life to have a purpose. With the pandemic, many have seemingly lost their purpose, and this shows someone using the idea of a purpose as hope.
  • but experts say that fantasizing, forward thinking and using one’s imagination are powerful tools for getting people through difficult times.
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      Again, thinking of life having a purpose gives people hope, as they are uncomfortable without purpose.
  • “Imagining the future — we call this skill prospection — and prospection is subserved by a set of brain circuits that juxtapose time and space and get you imagining things well and beyond the here and now,”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “To always think of imagination as a good thing is a danger. A lot of people can’t imagine good, joyful hopeful things because they are not able to or their lives have had so much difficulty that it feels foolhardy to.”
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      Interesting point about how we as humans believe what we want to. This may relate to our discussions about arguments and how it can be difficult to get someone to change their views.
9More

Opinion | Everyone Knows Memory Fails as You Age. But Everyone Is Wrong. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...age-memory.html
shared by ardenganse on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • This is widely understood to be a classic problem of aging. But as a neuroscientist, I know that the problem is not necessarily age-related.
  • But any distraction — a new thought, someone asking you a question, the telephone ringing — can disrupt short-term memory.
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think this relates to our inability to multitask.
  • The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don’t think, “Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.” They think, “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now” or “I really need to get more than four hours of sleep.”
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think this is very interesting reasoning to some of the stigmas surrounding age and memory loss.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This is not to say that Alzheimer’s- and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction — they are very real — but every lapse of short-term memory doesn’t necessarily indicate a biological disorder.
  • Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience.
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      Another interesting parallel to pattern recognition.
  • Second, older adults have to search through more memories than do younger adults to find the fact or piece of information they’re looking for. Your brain becomes crowded with memories and information.
« First ‹ Previous 121 - 140 of 193 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page