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carolinehayter

The 'Rage Moms' Democrats Are Counting On - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ocrats-women-voters-anger.html

pandemic economics US politics moms

shared by carolinehayter on 17 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • As millions of American families face an uncertain start to the school year, the anger of women who find themselves expected to be teacher, caregiver, employee and parent is fueling a political uprising.
  • President Trump’s handling of the pandemic is generating an entirely different sentiment, one not traditionally bestowed upon female voters or mothers.“I am a rage mom,” said Senator Patty Murray, the highest-ranking woman in Senate leadership.
  • With millions of American families facing an uncertain start to the school year, the struggle for child care, education and economic stability is fueling a political uprising, built on the anger of women who find themselves constantly — and indefinitely — expected to be teacher, caregiver, employee and parent.
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  • As the pandemic roars on, voters across America remain deeply angry and worried about the future. But the vocal outrage from women, in particular, is clear on protest lines and in polling data. Women were more likely than men to report having participated in protests over the past two years, and mothers with children in the home were twice as likely as fathers to report participating in a protest, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from June.
  • Now, the rage moms are railing in Facebook groups about school shutdowns and in teacher union meetings about reopening without proper protection from the virus. They’re also packing virtual town halls with frustrations about schools, child care and the lack of leadership.
  • “There’s nobody giving us solutions,
  • Ms. Lopez is exactly the kind of voter Democrats hope will push them to victory in November, and they are aiming to turn that frustration with government inaction into a vote against Mr. Trump.
  • While the anger is loudest on the left, Democrats hope to capitalize on indications that the rage reaches across party lines
  • The broader focus on caregiving issues marks a significant shift in the political climate of even a few months ago, when Senator Elizabeth Warren made child care a centerpiece of her campaign in the Democratic presidential primary
  • At campaign events six months ago, Ms. Warren’s proposals for universal, government-funded child care would elicit nods primarily from mothers in the crowd, she said, followed by quiet conversations in the selfie line with women about their personal struggle balancing work and child care.During a virtual town hall meeting she held last month, however, more than half of the questions from the audience of 70,000 people were about schools, child care and working parents.
  • The pandemic is the spark but the backlash against Mr. Trump has been burning since the day after his inauguration, when millions of women joined protests across the country. Their fire has endured through #MeToo, waves of teachers’ strikes led by predominantly female unions, the outcry against school shootings, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, a movement started largely by female racial justice activists. For the second election cycle in a row, a record-breaking number of female candidates are running for federal office. Mr. Biden’s selection of Ms. Harris was widely seen as a nod to the energy women have given the Democratic Party during the Trump era.
  • “Women are mobilized on a bigger scale than we’ve seen in a generation at least,” said Annelise Orleck, a historian at Dartmouth College who studies women’s political activism. “Women are organizing all across the spectrum.”
  • The activism is diffuse and multiracial, reflecting political battles that working class women have long waged for better health care, schools and child care. In some ways, more affluent suburban women are simply waking up to the untenable choices poorer women and women of color have faced for generations.
  • Last month, the Biden campaign kicked off a “Moms for Biden” group
  • The rebellion by white college-educated women against Mr. Trump helped Democrats win key swing districts in 2018, giving the party control of the House.
  • In recent weeks, support for Mr. Trump has begun to drop among white non-college educated women and older women — two more ideologically moderate groups that bolstered his winning coalition four years ago
  • In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, Mr. Biden leads by 24 points among suburban women and just four points among suburban men, a statistical dead heat.
  • Last month, Mr. Biden announced a sweeping $775 billion caregiving proposal that would cover care for young children, older adults and family members with disabilities.
  • Mr. Biden has repeatedly described caregiving as an economic necessity that deserves sustained support, a marked shift in political rhetoric on a topic that was often seen by politicians as a special interest, not an issue to put at the center of a campaign
  • Parents with minor children make up about one-third of the country’s work force, according to the Brookings Institutions. In 2018, 23.5 million working parents relied upon school and child care programs while they went to work.
  • “For the last 10, 20 years, this has been sidelined and siloed as just a women’s issue,” said Brigid Schulte, who runs the Better Life Lab at New America, a research group. “It’s not and it never has been.”
  • Ms. Richards says Supermajority planned for 800 women to sign up for a recent organizing training it offered. It got 1,800 responses in the first week.
  • “The fact that we do not value child care, that we don’t value early education, this is not something that Covid created — it’s something that Covid exposed,” she said
  • While Democrats have proposed the most ambitious plans to tackle child care, there are some signs that Republicans, too, are facing pressure to address the issue. Last month, the House passed two bills that would provide more than $220 billion in funding for child care centers and tax credits. Each bill had support from more than a dozen Republicans, a notable number in a deeply polarized Congress.
  • “It wasn’t easy for most parents that I’ve talked to. To have no access to child care is crippling,” she said. She hopes the crisis point reached by many families during the pandemic will create political momentum for policies like paid leave, universal early childhood education and universal sick days.
  • “This pandemic has ripped wide an open wound that families have struggled with for a long time.”
rerobinson03

Caregivers Have Witnessed the Coronavirus's Pain. How Will They Vote? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-nursing-homes.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • At the Pennsylvania long-term care facility where Tisheia Frazier works, the coronavirus was a terror. During the most harrowing weeks of the pandemic in April and May, she said, four residents died in a matter of hours, and 70 people in an 180-bed unit died in less than a month.
  • At the height of the pandemic, he sat at his desk, a shield over his face, so frustrated by the government’s handling of the virus and his own organization's bureaucracy that he thought to himself: “I don’t want to do this.”
  • The deaths of almost 40 percent of all Americans killed by the coronavirus have been linked to nursing homes and similar facilities — indoor spaces crowded with vulnerable adults.
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  • In interviews ahead of the election with more than a dozen caregivers in Pennsylvania, one of the country’s most important battleground states, they described how their experiences are shaping their political outlooks. It has hardened some convictions and transformed some caretakers, otherwise apolitical, into activists. It has forced others to reassess their beliefs about American exceptionalism, the role of government in their lives and their industry, and their decision about whom to vote for in November.
  • Nine months ago, I would have told you that I was 100 percent behind Trump,” Mr. Lohoefer, a lifelong Republican, said of the president. “But as a result of Covid, I’m not 100 percent sure where I stand now.”
  • There were struggles to procure personal protective equipment, difficulties with rapid testing, staffing shortages, disagreements between local, state and federal government agencies and new rules piled onto an already heavily regulated industry.
  • stakeholders in every corner of caregiving agree that the pandemic exposed the country’s overburdened health care system, testing the mental, emotional and physical limits of all of the people who work in it.
  • If you don’t see it, you really don’t understand how difficult it is,”
  • In interviews, caregivers as well as patient advocates, medical professionals, facility managers and residents themselves said they had never experienced anything like the first six months of the pandemic.
  • The chaos was so pervasive that it was nearly impossible, everyone said, to separate what was happening from the politics at play. As caretakers endured day after exhausting day, state officials set forth new regulations to govern how nursing homes should work. And President Trump delivered a drumbeat of dangerous claims — mocking masks, praising unproven treatments, speculating about bleach and about the virus disappearing.
  • And top officials at care facilities voiced deep frustration about how the virus response rapidly devolved from a public health issue to a partisan fight.
  • Surveys of Pennsylvania voters show that Mr. Trump’s standing has been damaged in recent months by his administration’s handling of the coronavirus.
  • Four years later, with its 20 electoral votes, Pennsylvania looms as one of the most important swing states in the election. Many of Mr. Trump’s remaining paths to victory require him to win the Keystone State, and to do that, he needs voters like Mr. Lohoefer, the nursing director, in his camp.
  • Mr. Lohoefer voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. But he has been pushed to his limits. He recalled with derision how the government and his corporate office would send sudden, often conflicting mandates during the early days of the pandemic.
  • Over all, he thinks the reaction to the virus was “overkill,” but he also thinks Mr. Trump was wrong to suggest it was “nothing to worry about.”
  • As the virus spread across her facility, Ms. Frazier, the caretaker who witnessed dozens of deaths, said she would see Mr. Trump on television without a mask and grow frustrated. And although she has voted for Republicans and had been a fan of Mr. Trump’s when he was on reality television, she began to blame his cavalier response for her worsening situation at work.
  • Americans, she came to believe, would not act until the virus affected them personally.
  • “If we want to make America great again, then we need to change the political face of our country,”
Javier E

A Toxic Work World - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-toxic-work-world.html

work workplace toxic caring economy employment culture

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • FOR many Americans, life has become all competition all the time. Workers across the socioeconomic spectrum, from hotel housekeepers to surgeons, have stories about toiling 12- to 16-hour days (often without overtime pay) and experiencing anxiety attacks and exhaustion. Public health experts have begun talking about stress as an epidemic.
  • The people who can compete and succeed in this culture are an ever-narrower slice of American society: largely young people who are healthy, and wealthy enough not to have to care for family members
  • An individual company can of course favor these individuals, as health insurers once did, and then pass them off to other businesses when they become parents or need to tend to their own parents. But this model of winning at all costs reinforces a distinctive American pathology of not making room for caregiving.
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  • many women who started out with all the ambition in the world find themselves in a place they never expected to be. They do not choose to leave their jobs; they are shut out by the refusal of their bosses to make it possible for them to fit their family life and their work life together. In her book “Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home,” the sociologist Pamela Stone calls this a “forced choice.” “Denial of requests to work part time, layoffs or relocations,” she writes, will push even the most ambitious woman out of the work force.
  • The problem is even more acute for the 42 million women in America on the brink of poverty. Not showing up for work because a child has an ear infection, schools close for a snow day, or an elderly parent must go to the doctor puts their jobs at risk, and losing their jobs means that they can no longer care properly for their children — some 28 million — and other relatives who depend on them.
  • This looks like a “women’s problem,” but it’s not. It’s a work problem — the problem of an antiquated and broken system.
  • there’s good news. Men are also beginning to ask for and take paternity leave and to take lead parent roles. According to a continuing study by the Families and Work Institute, only a third of employed millennial men think that couples should take on traditional gender roles
  • we cannot do this alone, as individuals trying to make our lives work and as workers and bosses trying to make room for care. Some other company can always keep prices down by demanding more, burning out its employees and casting them aside when they are done
  • To be fully competitive as a country, we are going to have to emulate other industrialized countries and build an infrastructure of care. We used to have one; it was called women at home.
  • To support care just as we support competition, we will need some combination of the following: high-quality and affordable child care and elder care; paid family and medical leave for women and men; a right to request part-time or flexible work; investment in early education comparable to our investment in elementary and secondary education; comprehensive job protection for pregnant workers; higher wages and training for paid caregivers; community support structures to allow elders to live at home longer; and reform of elementary and secondary school schedules to meet the needs of a digital rather than an agricultural economy.
  • Change in our individual workplaces and in our broader politics also depends on culture change: fundamental shifts in the way we think, talk and confer prestige. If we really valued care, we would not regard time out for caregiving — for your children, parents, spouse, sibling or any other member of your extended or constructed family — as a black hole on a résumé.
tsainten

Opinion | This Is Why Nursing Homes Failed So Badly - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-nursing-homes.html

crisis Pandemic US

shared by tsainten on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Eight months into the pandemic, Brendan House, a nursing home in Kalispell, Mont., had not had a single resident test positive for the coronavirus.
  • The numbers of those testing positive in the surrounding community went up by a factor of 100 compared with in the summer. At Brendan House, one positive case “turned into 10, then 50. Before you know it, we had 54 people in our long-term area who were Covid-positive and only three residents who were not positive,” a certified nursing assistant told me.
  • A few weeks in, though it was too late to contain the spread, the home decided to put all Covid-19 patients on the same floor.
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  • They were moved into an unfamiliar setting, their belongings whittled down to a few pieces of clothing and mementos thrown in a plastic bag; a new set of masked nurses came in and out of their rooms. Only a handful of residents had cellphones, so Danielle used her own to help residents use FaceTime with family members and friends.
  • “Nursing homes are really little hospitals, yet they’re not staffed like it. If you asked an I.C.U. nurse to take care of 15 people, she’d laugh at you, but that’s essentially what we have,” Chris Laxton, the executive director of AMDA, the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine, told me.
  • At the same time, many of these caregivers “are making $12 or $13 an hour,”
  • workers probably helped spread the virus from facility to facility, home to home.
  • Under President Trump, C.M.S. had already cut monetary fines for facilities with health and safety violations. Now it called off regular inspections in favor of a narrow, superficial infection-control survey. It also allowed for “temporary nursing assistants” with little training to fill in for certified aides.
  • But if now is not the time, when, and under what conditions, should nursing homes and assisted-living facilities be held accountable for the welfare of their residents and workers?
  • Factor in the risk of getting sick and dying, and retention, let alone recruitment, becomes far more difficult. In 2020, direct caregiving may have been the most dangerous job in America.
  • Joe Biden is about the age of the average nursing home resident. Over the summer, he announced a $775 billion proposal to provide care for children, seniors and people with disabilities. The plan, though notional at this point, would eliminate the 800,000-person waiting list for long-term care under Medicaid and pay for 150,000 new community health workers for seniors. It could also help transform millions of low-wage, high-turnover, often transient gigs into stable careers.
  • C.M.S. must ensure that the $264 billion paid by Medicaid and Medicare to long-term-care providers actually goes to caregiving, instead of shiny new buildings or executive pay.
  • To improve residents’ quality of life, the government should mandate that long-term-care facilities have appropriate staffing.
  • In addition, Mr. Biden must reverse Mr. Trump’s laissez-faire approach to this sector. Both C.M.S. and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should be given the resources they need to inspect, investigate and fine providers for health and workplace violations. The incoming administration must also strengthen workers’ rights to organize and protest unsafe conditions under the National Labor Relations Act, as it has already promised to do.
  • “There are jobs that offer $45 per hour to do Covid testing,” she said. As if to nudge her out the door, her nursing home was recently purchased by a large corporation, nullifying the union contract, and management reneged on the promise of holiday bonuses.
aidenborst

Opinion: President-elect Biden's childcare plan is essential if we want to restart the ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics US crisis Culture policy pandemic pandemic-recovery covid-19 childcare economics caregiving

shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus pandemic has put Americans' strained childcare system into a full-blown crisis. We must recognize that we cannot rebuild our economy without first repairing our fractured family care infrastructure.
  • President-elect Biden's caregiving plan, which calls for universal pre-K, subsidies for low- to moderate-income families, expanded tax credits for families and better pay and benefits to childcare workers, would cost an estimated $775 billion over 10 ten years.
  • But we need to think of this as a stimulus bill, not as a tax burden.
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  • According to the most recently available national data, approximately 35% of children under 6 were in non-parental childcare at least 30 hours a week.
  • We don't yet know what the long-term impact on women's employment and career options will be, but if women struggle to, or are not able to, return to work after Covid-19, it is evident that they and their families will be further harmed financially.
  • Childcare workers are currently among the poorest-paid workers in the country, earning a median income of $11.65 an hour.
  • These naysayers seem to forget that a lot of the federal and state money spent on childcare will go back into the economy.
  • National childcare should be viewed like many of the programs in the New Deal Era of the 1930s, which were used to help pump up a struggling economy.
  • From its earliest days, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed how necessary early care and education are to making America work. Rather than viewing childcare as an unsupportable tax burden, investing in high-quality childcare should be seen as an essential public policy and a necessary part of stimulating our struggling economy.
martinelligi

How Would Joe Biden Fight COVID-19? : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...n-issue-whats-joe-biden-s-plan

biden health pandemic

shared by martinelligi on 28 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Trump's approach to handling the pandemic is clear from his record. His administration has delegated much of the authority for the coronavirus response to states, including testing and contact tracing. He's invested heavily in vaccine development. He signed two coronavirus relief packages and has indicated he'd sign another one after the election.
  • 3. Establish a U.S. public health jobs corps The Biden campaign pledges to "mobilize" 100,000 Americans to work with local organizations around the country to perform contact tracing and other services that would help address unmet needs in populations at high risk for COVID-19.
  • And he'd focus on uniting states around some common practices, says Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician and University of Pennsylvania professor who has briefed Biden on health policy but has no formal campaign position. Instead of "different states doing different things, the goal would be to get all the states singing from the same hymnal," Emanuel says.
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  • 2. Seriously ramp up testing The Biden campaign says the goal is to "ensure that all Americans have access to regular, reliable and free testing." It would work to double the number of drive-through testing sites and invest in "next-generation testing" including home tests and instant tests.
  • 1. Set consistent, evidence-based guidance to stop outbreaks
  • 4. Help people get health insurance Millions of American have lost health insurance during the pandemic. Biden's coronavirus plan proposes to have the federal government cover 100% of the costs of COBRA coverage for the duration of the crisis. "So when people lose their employer-based health insurance, they can stay on that insurance, given the moment we are in and the pandemic," says Stef Feldman, Biden's national policy director.
  • 5. Create a caregiving workforce During the pandemic, Biden says many families are struggling to find affordable care for their children, aging relatives or loved ones with disabilities. "At the same time, professional caregivers have either lost their jobs or continue to work while putting their lives at risk without sufficient pay," his campaign plan notes.
  • 6. Bolster resources for vaccine distribution and PPE production States will need a lot of money to distribute a vaccine and make sure it gets to everyone who wants it. There are complex logistics that will require planning and resources. For instance, states may need freezers to store their vaccines, and given how many people are hesitant to be vaccinated, they will need public education materials and guidance. Currently state governors are asking for more guidance and financial assistance.
malonema1

Work Requirements Won't Improve Medicaid. A Jobs Guarantee Might. - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550301

US politics trump jobs

shared by malonema1 on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration has been signaling for months that it plans to  implement conservative reforms to core federal welfare programs, including by allowing states to have work requirements for Medicaid. So it was no surprise on Thursday when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued guidance for “state efforts to test incentives that make participation in work or other community engagement a requirement for continued Medicaid eligibility.”
  • So far, it’s unclear how widely adopted work requirements will be and how exactly states will implement them under CMS’s new guidance. On Friday, Kentucky was the first state to have its 1115 waiver creating work requirements approved by CMS. On Thursday, Verma noted that nine other states had already submitted waivers asking the federal government to approve incentives or requirements for some Medicaid beneficiaries. In addition to allowing strict job mandates, CMS will also allow requirements for “other community-engagement activities,” including volunteering, job training, and caregiving. (These rules only apply to specific adults; CMS carves out people with disabilities, the elderly, children, and pregnant women.)
  • Yet if states want work requirements to increase the health and self-sufficiency of Medicaid beneficiaries—their stated goal—most available data suggest they’ll fall short. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in 2017, most people on Medicaid who can work do work. Around 60 percent of adult enrollees have a job, and for the most part those who don’t report impediments in their ability to work. Even those who are not officially disabled often attest to having debilitating conditions—like severe back problems—that make full-time jobs difficult or impossible. Others may be in school, work as primary caretakers for loved ones, or may have retired.
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  • If those effects were repeated in Medicaid, it could prove disastrous for the health of the program’s beneficiaries. Especially in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, work requirements could create a new underclass of people ineligible for any health insurance. That includes a large contingent of people with disabilities who don’t qualify for Supplemental Security Income and vulnerable populations like young men with felonies. Caught in a vicious cycle, those people would then be less healthy and less financially secure, and thus less likely to be able to work and make it out of poverty
  • Such a program would have its most drastic effects on wages, productivity, and reducing racial and class-based wealth inequality if it were implemented as a universal program. But it could probably achieve CMS’s goals of long-term health benefits and poverty reduction if it were instituted solely for current Medicaid beneficiaries. If the 4.4 million non-elderly adults who aren’t working; aren’t caregivers, retired, or students; and don’t qualify for disability insurance are used as a floor, providing jobs for them would cost a little more than Lowrey’s total of $158 billion, around 30 percent of Medicaid’s annual budget of over $550 billion. If people who self-report as ill or disabled are excluded from that number, Medicaid would need to pay for a maximum of 880,000 jobs, or $35 billion a year, 6 percent of the annual Medicaid budget.
  • A Medicaid jobs guarantee could serve to amplify both of those roles. It could essentially set a wage floor for Medicaid enrollees, who often work near the bottom of the wage scale and often barely crack the poverty line even while working full-time hours (or more). Integrating Medicaid into bespoke job structures for people with disabilities could provide transportation and rehabilitation, and further increase the accessibility of those positions, thus creating more synergy between health and employment.
  • Similar to how employer-sponsored insurance has become a backbone to the economic growth of the middle class, a jobs guarantee for Medicaid would take the largest health-insurance program in America and transform it into a nexus of anti-poverty policy and health equity. Put more simply: The easiest way to make sure people receive the health benefits of employment could be to employ them.
nrashkind

Quarantine: How to prepare to isolate due to possible coronavirus infection - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • It's a scenario all too many of us are facing -- or will soon face.
  • You or a loved one has a mild fever, body aches, the start of a nagging, dry cough. Food doesn't taste good nor smell as it once did. Maybe you have shortness of breath or struggle to breath deeply.
  • The rest of us with symptoms but no additional known risk factors will also certainly be told to stay home, rest and drink plenty of fluids, all while keeping a close eye on how we feel.
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  • Preparation is the key to a good plan.
  • Hopefully, you've been following standard hygiene practices. These are behaviors we should be doing daily, automatically, to protect ourselves from germs, colds and flu:
  • Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands; cough and sneeze into elbows or tissues that you immediately throw away, and regularly wash, wash, wash those hands with warm water and lots of soapy bubbles.
  • Parents and guardians should plan well in advance by setting up a structure in which all kids and potential caregivers know their roles and expectations, said pediatrician Dr. Tanya Altmann, Editor-in-Chief of the American Academy of Pediatrics' book "Caring for Your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age 5 and The Wonder Years."
  • A working thermometer to monitor fever, which is considered to be 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 degrees Celsius), and a method to clean it, such as Isopropyl alcohol.
  • Fever reducing medications, such as acetaminophen.
  • Regular soap and 70% alcohol-based hand sanitizer (antibacterial soap isn't necessary if you wash properly, and that way you won't will contribute to the world's growing antibiotic-resistant superbugs).
  • Tissues to cover sneezes and coughs. But there's really no need to hoard toilet paper -- this is a respiratory disease.
  • Regular cleaning supplies, kitchen cleaning gloves and trash can liners.
  • Disinfectant cleaning supplies -- the CDC suggests picking from a list that meets the virus-fighting standards of the US Environmental Protection Agency, but says you can also make your own version by using 1/3 cup unexpired bleach per gallon of water or 4 teaspoons bleach per quart of water. Never mix bleach with ammonia or any other cleanser -- it produces toxic gases.
  • If you live alone, that's not difficult. Your challenge is to monitor your symptoms and care for yourself when you're not feeling well. Be sure to have a plan in place to deliver food and medications, and find someone who can be responsible for virtually checking in on you on a regular basis.
  • The rest of the family should practice isolation as well, Radesky added.
  • If you are running short on face masks, or don't have any because of hoarding, try to protect the caregiver as best you can, the CDC says.
  • Altmann stresses maximizing isolation and protective actions.
  • "You can have a healthy person leave the sick one food and drinks at the door, and then go wash their hands," Altmann explained. "Wear gloves to pick up the empty plates, take them back to the kitchen and wash them in hot water with soap, or preferably with a dishwasher, and wash your hands again."
  • One last, very important thing: Call 911 immediately if you or your loved ones have any of these symptoms: increased or sudden difficulty breathing or shortness of breath; a persistent pain or pressure in the chest; and any sign of oxygen deprivation, such as new confusion, bluish lips or face, or you can't arouse the sick person.
  • To be clear: Everyone in the house needs to isolate themselves from the outside world as much as possible.
dytonka

Scientists Endorse Joe - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...c-american-endorses-joe-biden1

Biden 2020Election Politics

shared by dytonka on 29 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • We’ve never backed a presidential candidate in our 175-year history—until now
  • Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science.
  • But Trump and his vice president flouted local mask rules, making it a point not to wear masks themselves in public appearances.
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  • Biden has a family and caregiving initiative, recognizing this as key to a sustained public health and economic recovery. His plans include increased salaries for child care workers and construction of new facilities for children because the inability to afford quality care keeps workers out of the economy and places enormous strains on families.
Javier E

Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Full Essay (Pts I & II) » Cybo... - 0 views

thesocietypages.org/...friendship-full-essay-pts-i-ii

friendship devolution social media social culture

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.
  • the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.
  • I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.
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  • In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder.
  • We’re busy people; we like the idea of making one announcement on Facebook and being done with it, rather than having to repeat the same story over and over again to different friends individually. We also like not always having to think about which friends might like which stories or songs; we like the idea of sharing with all of our friends at once, and then letting them sort out amongst themselves who is and isn’t interested. Though social media can create burdensome expectations to keep up with strong ties, weak ties, and everyone in between, social media platforms can also be very efficient. Using the same moment of friendship-labor to tend multiple friendships at once kills more birds with fewer stones.
  • sometimes we like the devolution of friendship. When we have to ‘pull’ friendship-content instead of receiving it in a ‘push’, we can pick and choose which content items to pull. We can ignore the baby pictures, or the pet pictures, or the sushi pictures—whatever it is our friends post that we only pretend to care about
  • Within devolved friendship interactions, it takes less effort to be polite while secretly waiting for someone to please just stop talking.
  • While I won’t go so far as to say they’re definitely ‘problems,’ there are two major things about devolved friendship that I think are worth noting. The first is the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor, and the second is the depersonalization of friendship-labor.
  • Through social media, “sharing with friends” is rationalized to the point of relentless efficiency. The current apex of such rationalization is frictionless sharing: we no longer need to perform the labor of telling our individual friends about what we read online, or of copy-pasting links and emailing them to “the list,” or of clicking a button for one-step posting of links on our Facebook walls. With frictionless sharing, all we have to do is look, or listen; what we’ve read or watched or listened to is then “shared” or “scrobbled” to our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever other online profiles. Whether we share content actively or passively, however, we feel as though we’ve done our half of the friendship-labor by ‘pushing’ the information to our walls, streams, and tumblelogs. It’s then up to our friends to perform their halves of the friendship-labor by ‘pulling’ the information we share from those platforms.
  • The second thing worth noting is that devolved friendship is also depersonalized friendship.
  • Personal interaction doesn’t just happen on Spotify, and since I was hoping Spotify would be the New Porch, I initially found Spotify to be somewhat lonely-making. It’s the mutual awareness of presence that gives companionate silence its warmth, whether in person or across distance. The silence within Spotify’s many sounds, on the other hand, felt more like being on the outside looking in. This isn’t to say that Spotify can’t be social in a more personal way; once I started sending tracks to my friends, a few of them started sending tracks in return. But it took a lot more work to get to that point, which gets back to the devolution of friendship (as I explain below).
  • I’ve been thinking since, however, on what it means to view our friends as “generalized others.” I may now feel like less of like “creepy stalker” when I click on a song in someone’s Spotify feed, but I don’t exactly feel ‘shared with’ either. Far as I know, I’ve never been SpotiVaguebooked (or SubSpotified?); I have no reason to think anyone is speaking to me personally as they listen to music, or as they choose not to disable scrobbling (if they make that choice consciously at all). I may have been granted the opportunity to view something, but it doesn’t follow that what I’m viewing has anything to do with me unless I choose to make it about me. Devolved friendship means it’s not up to us to interact with our friends personally; instead it’s now up to our friends to make our generalized broadcasts personal.
  • When we consider the lopsided rationalization of ‘sharing’ and ‘shared with,’ as well as the depersonalization of frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, what becomes clear is this: the social media deck is stacked in such a way as to make being ‘a self’ easier and more rewarding than being ‘a friend.’
  • It’s easy to share, to broadcast, to put our selves and our tastes and our identity performances out into the world for others to consume; what feedback and friendship we get in return comes in response to comparatively little effort and investment from us. It takes a lot more work, however, to do the consumption, to sift through everything all (or even just some) of our friends produce, to do the work of connecting to our friends’ generalized broadcasts so that we can convert their depersonalized shares into meaningful friendship-labor.
  • We may be prosumers of social media, but the reward structures of social media sites encourage us to place greater emphasis on our roles as share-producers—even though many of us probably spend more time consuming shared content than producing it. There’s a reason for this, of course; the content we produce (for free) is what fuels every last ‘Web 2.0’ machine, and its attendant self-centered sociality is the linchpin of the peculiarly Silicon Valley concept of “Social” (something Nathan Jurgenson and I discuss together in greater detail here). It’s not super-rewarding to be one of ten people who “like” your friend’s shared link, but it can feel rewarding to get 10 “likes” on something you’ve shared—even if you have hundreds or thousands of ‘friends.’ Sharing is easy; dealing with all that shared content is hard.
  • t I wonder sometimes if the shifts in expectation that accompany devolved friendship don’t migrate across platforms and contexts in ways we don’t always see or acknowledge. Social media affects how we see the world—and how we feel about being seen in the world—even when we’re not engaged directly with social media websites. It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that the affordances of social media platforms might also affect how we see friendship and our obligations as friends most generally.
Javier E

One is the Loneliest Number - NYTimes.com - 0 views

douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/...one-is-the-loneliest-number

aging social consequences children

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • In a world where children are born later and less frequently, and where the two trends intertwine, the life cycle inevitably gets lonelier. Your grandparents are less likely to be involved with your upbringing when you’re young, you’re less likely to have multiple siblings (or even a single brother or sister) to be your companions in childhood and your constants in adulthood, your own children are less likely to have aunts and uncles and cousins and your parents are more likely to pass away (or decline into senescence) before you’re fully established as a grown-up in your own right.
  • There are economic costs to this atomization, just as Shulevitz suggests: Weaker support networks when people are young and struggling, fewer kids to share the burden of an aging relative, and so on. But the emotional costs seem larger — not just the impact of a parent’s early passing, but the non-impact of the relationships you never get to form, because your grandparents are too old and your siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles don’t exist at all.
  • If families do not guarantee happiness, the relationships they create and cultivate nonetheless tend to be richer, more primal, and more permanent than purely voluntary forms of human community.
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  • Families are the most natural link between the generations, the most natural place to turn for solidarity, intimacy and care, the communities where the mystic chords of memory are easiest to strike and most likely to vibrate, resonate, and echo
  • it is not that with bigger families life is necessarily happier, but instead that it is richer, denser. What happiness we have will be more widely and immediately shared, as with our sorrow.” And likewise with what is lost when families shrink and intergenerational bonds attenuate. The cost should be counted, not in daily pleasures sacrificed or swiped away, but in the deep wells of human experience that a post-familial culture may fill in and cover up.
  • This is why the moral aspect of the case for, well, familialism — the hackles-raising argument I’ve been making that a society that isn’t replacing itself isn’t fulfilling a basic intergenerational obligation— cannot just be set aside in favor of less charged and more technocratic arguments about economic self-interest and social cohesion and public health and the sustainability of public pensions and so forth
  • it is still possible to imagine a world of declining birthrates and more attenuated relationships being more comfortable, in strictly material terms, than the present or the past. Matt Yglesias has been making roughly this case, for instance, painting a portrait of a future where the surplus from technology and automation under-writes leisure pursuits (mostly virtual, I would expect) and social-service support for the many singletons left underemployed and unemployable, and everyone else finds work in the booming, ever-expanding elder-caregiver industry.
  • Measured in terms of G.D.P. per capita and life expectancy, that future doesn’t sound so bad. It’s only when you factor in the loss of various rich and fundamental human goods that you realize that it might actually be barren and depressing and yes, decadent — a lanscape, in Goethe’s evocative phrase, in which humanity has “won” in some sense, triumphing provisionally over the challenges of scarcity and illness, but in the process has turned society “into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else’s humane nurse.”
Javier E

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3806504577181351486558984.html

adolescence teenage brain research development learning experience brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
  • The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again
  • The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.
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  • adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults.
  • What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers
  • In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood
  • The second crucial system in our brains has to do with control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification.
  • This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience.
  • Expertise comes with experience.
  • In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship. Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.
  • In contemporary life, the relationship between these two systems has changed dramatically. Puberty arrives earlier, and the motivational system kicks in earlier too. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups.
  • there is more and more evidence that genes are just the first step in complex developmental sequences, cascades of interactions between organism and environment, and that those developmental processes shape the adult brain. Even small changes in developmental timing can lead to big changes in who we become.
  • The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.
  • Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
  • An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school
  • children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships.
  • Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies.
  • this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.
  • First, experience shapes the brain.
  • the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses
  • Second, development plays a crucial role in explaining human nature
  • Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.
  • Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part.
  • But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised
  • Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship
  • Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, now so common for children whose parents have means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs, with real responsibilities.
  • Javier E on 06 Feb 12
     
    The two brain systems, the increasing gap between them, and the implications for adolescent education.
  • anonymous on 06 Feb 12
     
    "In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship" (Gopnik). Similarly to the way that Marx pointed out the economic shift from hunter-gatherer to farmer to (eventually) capitalist societies, Gopnik underlines the societal shift- especially in teenagers. While I think that some of the changes in teenagers are due to evolution and development (as proven through some of the medical tests mentioned in the article), I think that this issue may relate back to parenting. As the article about French parenting pointed out, it has become a very obvious fact that many (specifically American) parents simply do not have good techniques, and this could effect the way that their child develops and behaves. I also think that another possible explanation to this issue is that there is more expected of teenagers, scholarly, then before; however, as the article mentioned, the real-world experience is lacking. By raising the academic bar higher and higher, it may actually cause more students to, essentially, "burn out" before everything that they have learned can be applied: "What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?" (Gopnik)
Javier E

Inman Twins, Doris Duke Heirs: The Poorest Rich Kids in the World | Culture News | Roll... - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...ich-kids-in-the-world-20130812

poverty rich wealth children abuse

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Georgia and Patterson Inman were among the wealthiest kids in America: When they turn 21, the family claims, the twins will inherit a trust fund worth $1 billion. They and their father were the last living heirs to the vast Industrial Age fortune of the Duke family, tobacco tycoons who once controlled the American cigarette market, established Duke University and, through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, continue to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.
  • Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell. And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation. While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances, the children lived like terrified prisoners, kept at bay by a revolving door of some four dozen nannies and caregivers, underfed, undereducated, scarcely noticed except as objects of wrath.
  • As a 13-year-old orphan in 1965 taken in by his aunt Doris Duke, Walker – then called "Skipper" – had romped around her lavish 14,000-square-foot Hawaiian estate without regard for property or propriety, shooting her Christmas ornaments with a dart gun, setting fire to crates of expensive teak and exploding a bomb in her pool. He was hideously spoiled, and stinking rich from three trust funds: one from his father, Walker Inman Sr., heir to an Atlanta cotton fortune and stepson to American Tobacco Company founder "Buck" Duke; one from his mother, Georgia Fagan; the third from his grandmother, Buck's widow Nanaline Duke, who left the bulk of her $45 million estate to her little grandson. Altogether, on Walker's 21st birthday he would inherit a reported $65 million ($500 million in today's dollars), a fortune so vast that Time predicted the boy would rank as "one of the wealthiest men of the late 20th century."
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  • Doris knew nothing about raising children, nor much cared. The witheringly wry, worldly heiress was among the most celebrated women of her day, a six-foot glamour queen hounded by paparazzi, who brushed elbows with every midcentury icon from Jackie Kennedy to Elvis Presley, pronouncing Greta Garbo "boring" and, after dating Errol Flynn, theorizing that bisexual men made the best lovers: "I should know," she declared. "I've done exhausting research on the subject." As a child – and sole inheritor of her father Buck's $100 million fortune – she'd become famous as "the richest little girl in the world." She'd been raised by nannies in a chilly, silent Fifth Avenue mansion, with her parents taking little part in her upbringing; family lore holds that her father, on his deathbed in 1925, told 12-year-old Doris, "Trust no one." Now saddled with her pesky nephew Walker, watching him toss ketchup-covered tampons into her pool, Doris Duke regarded him with pity. He was desperate for love and attention, much like herself as a child. But Doris had her own fabulous life to live, and so she shipped Walker off to boarding school. "We were all too self-centered to be bothered with a problem child," she would later tell her cousin Angier St. George Biddle "Pony" Duke.
  • His grandmother's will had stipulated that if Walker left no heirs, upon his death his trust would be funneled into the Duke Endowment, a $2.8 billion foundation established by Buck Duke that nourishes, among other institutions, Duke University. The idea repulsed Walker: The very name that had given him such unearned bounty also stood for everything he felt he'd been deprived. "He despised Duke!" says longtime friend Mike Todd. "Duke University, Duke Foundation – everything Duke, he hated."
  • At school the twins had trouble connecting with classmates, few of whom were allowed over to the Inmans' mansion a second time after gaping at the guns, the explicit art and sometimes an eyeful of Walker, who preferred to be nude. Other kids went to summer camp, but the Inmans went to Abu Dhabi to bid millions at auctions; to Japan, where their father introduced them to friends who were supposedly yakuza; to Fiji, where Dad praised them as they dined on poisonous puffer fish. There were getaways aboard the Devine Decadence, which was docked in New Zealand. One day toward the end of second grade, when their father had yanked them out of school without warning, they told themselves it was for the best.
  • The past three years have been a struggle for the twins as they've grappled with their past. Before they were able to live with Daisha, they were sent to the Wyoming Behavioral Institute. The twins were suicidal, uncooperative and dangerously underweight. Therapist Jennifer Greenup had never seen such extreme emotional deprivation before. "If even a quarter of what they said happened to them happened, they are severely traumatized children," says Greenup, adding, "Their symptoms are real. Whether it's paranoia, lack of trust or hostility." Eventually the kids were able to move in with Daisha and began bonding, a triumph unto itself. But although they've taken positive steps, Greenup says the scale of their trauma is so great that she can't gauge their progress: "I can't say they're progressing well, because there's nothing to compare it to," she admits.
  • As for the kids' own plans, Patterson seems to hope for a quiet life. "I hope I don't have to live alone. But I actually don't mind. I'll just sit at Greenfield, fishing by my dad's little tomb, just talking about life," he says. "You can't trust anyone," he adds mournfully, repeating the words he learned from his father, which Walker learned from his aunt Doris, which she learned from her father, Buck Duke.
anonymous

Climate change 'impacts women more than men' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...science-environment-43294221

women development global warming change culture climate

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Women are more likely than men to be affected by climate change, studies show.UN figures indicate that 80% of people displaced by climate change are women.Roles as primary caregivers and providers of food and fuel make them more vulnerable when flooding and drought occur.
  • It is not just women in rural areas who are affected. Globally, women are more likely to experience poverty, and to have less socioeconomic power than men. This makes it difficult to recover from disasters which affect infrastructure, jobs and housing.
  • Much as climate change is accelerated by human behaviours, the impact of weather and climate events is influenced by societal structures. Disasters do not affect all people equally.
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  • Another study spanning 20 years noted that catastrophic events lowered women's life expectancy more than men; more women were being killed, or they were being killed younger. In countries where women had greater socioeconomic power, the difference reduced.
  • The UN has highlighted the need for gender sensitive responses to the impacts of climate change, yet the average representation of women in national and global climate negotiating bodies is below 30%.
  • Twenty-five percent of those nominated to participate in the next report are women. "IPCC has been very receptive to this and is actually discussing how they can support women better," explains Liverman."Women are half the world. It's important they participate in all major decisions," "Climate change is not a fight for power," points out Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, "it's a fight for survival."
Javier E

Is a Film About a Transgender Dancer Too 'Dangerous' to Watch? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...x-film-transgender-debate.html

transgender dancer film

shared by Javier E on 06 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • “Girl” sounds like a film that transgender moviegoers might rally around. It depicts a teenage trans girl, Lara, raised by a single father who supports not only her dreams of becoming a ballerina but also her gender confirmation surgery. It’s set in Belgium, so much of Lara’s health care is paid for and her doctor and therapist are encouraging caregivers. And it’s a prize winner that is up for a best foreign-language Golden Globe on Sunday.
  • Yet “Girl,” which has been picked up by Netflix, faces a firestorm, one that pits the director, Lukas Dhont; the trans woman who inspired it, the dancer Nora Monsecour; and the film’s supporters against trans activists and others who consider its scrutiny of a trans character’s body so dangerous that they urge no one to see it
  • “Girl” asks a provocative question: Have we gotten to a place where a film can explore dark aspects of an individual trans character without feeling regressive? No one should have the burden of representing a class of people in a film; real people are complicated. But what happens when a movie is both art and a trigger?
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  • That’s the question behind the two main criticisms of “Girl.” One is that neither Dhont nor his co-writer, Angelo Tissens, nor the young actor who plays Lara, Victor Polster, are transgender
  • The other objection, the one that has prompted foes to label the film “traumatizing” and “sickening,” involves scenes near the end.
  • The outrage has played out ferociously online. The film critic Oliver Whitney wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that “Girl” is the “most dangerous movie about a trans character in years.” Whitney, who identifies as trans masculine, told me that seeing a trans girl mutilating herself suggests “it’s part of her survival, and that’s harmful.” He said he was most upset that the film “sends a damaging message to all audiences, but especially to trans folks suffering from dysphoria who may not have access to medical care or information about medical transitions.”
  • Three trans women who saw the film at a screening in Los Angeles said it was the film’s dark territory that made it compelling. Crystal Stull told me “Girl” was “the closest that cis people in society will ever get to understanding just how bad dysphoria can really get.
  • Ann Thomas, the founder of Transgender Talent, a talent listing service for trans people, chastised the campaign against it.“The message these arrogant trans activists are saying is that Nora doesn’t have the right to tell her story,” said Thomas, who also defended “Girl” in an opinion piece for The Advocate.
  • “We’re worried about harm reduction,” said Elena Rose Vera, the deputy executive director of Trans Lifeline, who has not seen the movie. “We just want to protect our community.”
  • Monsecour told me she hoped the trans community knew that “Girl” was a beginning, not an end.“I have a platform to speak with ‘Girl,’” she said. “Without ‘Girl,’ I wouldn’t have that. There’s a lot of work to do, but I’m confident that more trans people will tell their stories.”
Javier E

Can a 'No Excuses' Charter Teach Students to Think for Themselves? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-to-think-for-themselves.html

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Several years ago, Achievement First, a charter school network serving primarily low-income black and Hispanic students, got an unpleasant wake-up call: Its students had done well on tests, but fewer than a third of its high school graduates were earning college degrees on time. That was better than the 14 percent national college completion rate for students from low-income backgrounds, but it was far below the network’s hopes.
  • Was the schools’ highly structured, disciplined approach to behavior and learning giving students the tools they needed to succeed at the next level?
  • “There is a real dilemma confronting ‘no excuses’ charter networks as they shift their instructional model to encourage deeper learning,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of the Bank Street College of Education, said in an email. Their focus on discipline, he said, “can undermine the autonomy and student voice so critical to developing independent thinkers.”
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  • “One said, ‘In college you have to teach yourself more than half the content on your own,’” Ms. Toll said. That is very different from what is required in high school, she said, “and that sort of led to the whole concept of self-directed learning.”
  • For much of the day, each classroom is split in two, with one teacher working more traditionally with half of the students while a second teacher supervises students wearing noise-cancelling headphones and working on their own on laptops.
  • Mr. Cuban said he was particularly impressed with the way that Summit schools asked students to set goals for themselves.
  • But he added that he thought the impact of online teaching tools depended on how they were implemented and that the ultimate test, for both Summit and for Achievement First, would be what happens to college graduation rates.
  • Achievement First’s Greenfield model also emphasizes setting goals. Twice a week students meet with a teacher, referred to as a “goal coach,” to go over their progress in different areas and set goals for the week.
  • the team came to believe that Achievement First students were not sufficiently engaged in school. The expeditions, also borrowed from Summit, are intended to spark passions and inspire long-term ambitions.
  • Twice a week, students participate in what the network calls “circles” — a structure borrowed from the social-emotional curriculum of another charter network, Valor Collegiate Academies, in Nashville.
  • Mr. Samouha said that one of the surprising discoveries in his team’s interviews with alumni who had dropped out of college was that, in some cases, their parents had actually encouraged them to drop out, because they didn’t like seeing them struggle and didn’t know that such difficulties were normal and surmountable. He said the Greenfield team traced that back to the network having not made the parents full partners in their children’s schooling.
  • So in the Greenfield model, parent-teacher conferences are student-led, and attended by the members of a student’s “dream team,” which includes parents or other caregivers, as well as other mentors, like older siblings, pastors, coaches or family friends.
  • “We’re not going to solve this through a weekly parent seminar on challenges your child will face in college,” Mr. Samouha said. “We’re going to solve it by literally building an experience where parents are at the table with teachers and students.”
  • The network’s ultimate goal is to raise its college completion rate to 75 percent, and it says among its more recent classes about half of graduates are on track to finish college.
brickol

Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here's How. - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...-society-analysis-covid-135579

COVID-19 us

shared by brickol on 26 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • For many Americans right now, the scale of the coronavirus crisis calls to mind 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis—events that reshaped society in lasting ways, from how we travel and buy homes, to the level of security and surveillance we’re accustomed to, and even to the language we use.
  • A global, novel virus that keeps us contained in our homes—maybe for months—is already reorienting our relationship to government, to the outside world, even to each other.
  • But crisis moments also present opportunity: more sophisticated and flexible use of technology, less polarization, a revived appreciation for the outdoors and life’s other simple pleasures.
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  • We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky. How quickly that awareness recedes will be different for different people, but it can never vanish completely for anyone who lived through this year
  • The comfort of being in the presence of others might be replaced by a greater comfort with absence, especially with those we don’t know intimately
  • he paradox of online communication will be ratcheted up: It creates more distance, yes, but also more connection, as we communicate more often with people who are physically farther and farther away—and who feel safer to us because of that distance.
  • When all is said and done, perhaps we will recognize their sacrifice as true patriotism, saluting our doctors and nurses, genuflecting and saying, “Thank you for your service,” as we now do for military veterans. We will give them guaranteed health benefits and corporate discounts, and build statues and have holidays for this new class of people who sacrifice their health and their lives for ours. Perhaps, too, we will finally start to understand patriotism more as cultivating the health and life of your community, rather than blowing up someone else’s community. Maybe the de-militarization of American patriotism and love of community will be one of the benefits to come out of this whole awful mess.
  • Plagues drive change. Partly because our government failed us, gay Americans mobilized to build organizations, networks and know-how that changed our place in society and have enduring legacies today. The epidemic also revealed deadly flaws in the health care system, and it awakened us to the need for the protection of marriage—revelations which led to landmark reforms. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some analogous changes in the wake of coronavirus
  • The first is the “common enemy” scenario, in which people begin to look past their differences when faced with a shared external threat.
  • But given our current levels of tension, this scenario suggests that now is the time to begin to promote more constructive patterns in our cultural and political discourse. The time for change is clearly ripening.
  • The COVID-19 crisis could change this in two ways. First, it has already forced people back to accepting that expertise matters. It was easy to sneer at experts until a pandemic arrived, and then people wanted to hear from medical professionals like Anthony Fauci. Second, it may—one might hope—return Americans to a new seriousness, or at least move them back toward the idea that government is a matter for serious people.
  • The coronavirus pandemic marks the end of our romance with market society and hyper-individualism. We could turn toward authoritarianism.
  • Religion in the time of quarantine will challenge conceptions of what it means to minister and to fellowship. But it will also expand the opportunities for those who have no local congregation to sample sermons from afar. Contemplative practices may gain popularity. And maybe—just maybe—the culture war that has branded those who preach about the common good with the epithet “Social Justice Warriors” may ease amid the very present reminder of our interconnected humanity.
  • The second reason is the “political shock wave” scenario. Studies have shown that strong, enduring relational patterns often become more susceptible to change after some type of major shock destabilizes them
  • COVID-19 will sweep away many of the artificial barriers to moving more of our lives online. Not everything can become virtual, of course. But in many areas of our lives, uptake on genuinely useful online tools has been slowed by powerful legacy players, often working in collaboration with overcautious bureaucrats
  • The pandemic will shift the paradigm of where our healthcare delivery takes place. For years, telemedicine has lingered on the sidelines as a cost-controlling, high convenience system. Out of necessity, remote office visits could skyrocket in popularity as traditional-care settings are overwhelmed by the pandemic. There would also be containment-related benefits to this shift; staying home for a video call keeps you out of the transit system, out of the waiting room and, most importantly, away from patients who need critical care.
  • This crisis should unleash widespread political support for Universal Family Care—a single public federal fund that we all contribute to, that we all benefit from, that helps us take care of our families while we work, from child care and elder care to support for people with disabilities and paid family leave. Coronavirus has put a particular national spotlight on unmet needs of the growing older population in our country, and the tens of millions of overstretched family and professional caregivers they rely on. Care is and always has been a shared responsibility. Yet, our policy has never fully supported it. This moment, challenging as it is, should jolt us into changing that.
brookegoodman

Hillary and Bill Clinton sent over 400 pizzas to New York hospitals fighting against co... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

us crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • (CNN)With New York quickly becoming the new epicenter of the coronavirus crisis in the US, healthcare workers in the state have been working nonstop. Knowing that these heroes wouldn't have time to stop and grab a meal, one of New York's most famous couples -- Bill and Hillary Clinton-- stepped in to help.
  • With a note that read, "Thank you for protecting our communities. From Bill and Hillary Clinton," 80 pizzas were delivered Wednesday evening to St. John's Riverside Hospital alone.
  • "When someone is thoughtful enough to bring in food, then our doctors don't have to think about it and it allows them to continue doing their job," Denise Mananas, the hospital's senior director of external affairs said.
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  • "The impromptu pizza party for our frontline caregivers was a tremendous surprise and was greatly appreciated by all," said the hospital's spokeswoman Connie Cornell. "The Clintons have always been good neighbors, and their kindness during a tremendously difficult time for health care workers truly boosted everyone's spirit."
  • On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton wrote a message of support to not just the medical professionals, but all the other workers and employees who are continuing to serve in their essential roles.
Javier E

Trump is handling the coronavirus like a toddler - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-85cb-8670579b863d_story.html

trump toddler pandemic response

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • True, his brand of immature leadership is not the only reason the United States lags behind South Korea in its pandemic response, including testing and containment. Organizational inertia and garden-variety bureaucratic politics matter as well.
  • the Trump White House’s inadequate handling of the outbreak highlights his every toddler-like instinct
  • The most obvious one is his predilection for temper tantrums
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  • Some advisers describe an angry Trump as a whistling teapot that needs to either let off steam or explode. Politico has reported on the myriad triggers for his tantrums: “if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him.”
  • Like a toddler’s, Trump’s temper has flared repeatedly as the pandemic has worsened and the stock market has tanked.
  • For Trump’s staff, crisis management revolves around managing the president’s temper, not managing the actual problem.
  • Anthony Fauci, who’s been running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades, responded: “I know, but what do you want me to do? I mean, seriously . . . let’s get real, what do you want me to do?”
  • Trump’s short, toddler-like attention span has been a problem throughout his administration
  • During the transition, the Obama administration prepared a tabletop exercise to brief the incoming Trump team about how to handle an influenza pandemic. The president-elect did not participate, and a former senior official acknowledged that “to get the president to be focused on something like this would be quite hard.”
  • Toddlers are natural contrarians, who love to test boundaries by pushing back on whatever they’re told. So is Trump. In the first two months of the outbreak, he insisted that the coronavirus would never spread within the United States, despite expert assessments to the contrary. In late February, he said: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.
  • Trump, like most toddlers, also has poor impulse control. Some White House advisers reportedly refer to it as the “shiny-object phenomenon” — his tendency to react to breaking news rather than focusing on more important issues.
  • Much like frazzled preschool teachers, the remaining competent people staffing Trump are clearly past the point of exasperation.
  • During the coronavirus outbreak, Trump’s access to Twitter has exacerbated his impulsiveness.
  • Health experts have reportedly tried to get him to focus beyond the immediate bad news cycles of rising infections and look at the larger picture of “flattening the curve” and preventing a much bigger health disaster, to little avail.
  • One former high-ranking government official told me that a 45-minute meeting with the president was really 45 different one-minute meetings, in which Trump would ask disconnected, rapid-fire questions such as “What do you think of NATO?” and “How big is an aircraft carrier?”
  • Multiple reports confirm that he has grown restless while confined on the White House grounds. He has crashed staff meetings because he does not know what else to do.
  • Trump’s inability to sit still has been on display recently
  • His aides have questioned whether he has the capacity to focus on what will be a months-long emergency.
  • Each time, Trump’s advisers have had to expend precious time and energy to change his mind and soothe his ego rather than focus on the crisis at hand.
  • The final and most disturbing parallel between Trump and a toddler is that, like at a day-care center that doesn’t pay caregivers enough, the staff turnover in this administration has hampered the government’s response
Javier E

How to Prepare for an Automated Future - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-for-an-automated-future.html

automation job economic culture education technology

shared by Javier E on 04 May 17 - No Cached
  • We don’t know how quickly machines will displace people’s jobs, or how many they’ll take, but we know it’s happening — not just to factory workers but also to money managers, dermatologists and retail workers.
  • The logical response seems to be to educate people differently, so they’re prepared to work alongside the robots or do the jobs that machines can’t. But how to do that, and whether training can outpace automation, are open questions.
  • Pew Research Center and Elon University surveyed 1,408 people who work in technology and education to find out if they think new schooling will emerge in the next decade to successfully train workers for the future. Two-thirds said yes; the rest said n
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  • People still need to learn skills, the respondents said, but they will do that continuously over their careers. In school, the most important thing they can learn is how to learn.
  • At universities, “people learn how to approach new things, ask questions and find answers, deal with new situations,”
  • Schools will also need to teach traits that machines can’t yet easily replicate, like creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability and collaboration.
  • these are not necessarily easy to teach.
  • “Many of the ‘skills’ that will be needed are more like personality characteristics, like curiosity, or social skills that require enculturation to take hold,
  • “I have complete faith in the ability to identify job gaps and develop educational tools to address those gaps,” wrote Danah Boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and founder of Data and Society, a research institute. “I have zero confidence in us having the political will to address the socioeconomic factors that are underpinning skill training.”
  • Andrew Walls, managing vice president at Gartner, wrote, “Barring a neuroscience advance that enables us to embed knowledge and skills directly into brain tissue and muscle formation, there will be no quantum leap in our ability to ‘up-skill’ people.
  • many survey respondents said a degree was not enough — or not always the best choice, especially given its price tag.
  • Many of them expect more emphasis on certificates or badges, earned from online courses or workshops, even for college graduates.
  • One potential future, said David Karger, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., would be for faculty at top universities to teach online and for mid-tier universities to “consist entirely of a cadre of teaching assistants who provide support for the students.”
  • Portfolios of work are becoming more important than résumés.
  • “Three-dimensional materials — in essence, job reels that demonstrate expertise — will be the ultimate demonstration of an individual worker’s skills.”
  • Consider it part of your job description to keep learning, many respondents said — learn new skills on the job, take classes, teach yourself new things.
  • Focus on learning how to do tasks that still need humans, said Judith Donath of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society: teaching and caregiving; building and repairing; and researching and evaluating
  • The problem is that not everyone is cut out for independent learning, which takes a lot of drive and discipline.
  • People who are suited for it tend to come from privileged backgrounds, with a good education and supportive parents,
  • “The fact that a high degree of self-direction may be required in the new work force means that existing structures of inequality will be replicated in the future,”
  • “The ‘jobs of the future’ are likely to be performed by robots,” said Nathaniel Borenstein, chief scientist at Mimecast, an email company. “The question isn’t how to train people for nonexistent jobs. It’s how to share the wealth in a world where we don’t need most people to work.”
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