> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.
For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now.
Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk.
Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.
Most people don't, sure. But anyone who calls themselves a journalist or has gone to j-school sure as hell better. That's literally the point. That's what journalism school teaches, or at least should; Not how to repost crap from other crap. It's simply not an excuse for an organization like the bbc.
I got the impression the "you" in the title refers to journalists, who should have all of the skills you list. Confusing, as he then refers to the reader as "you" at the end, but I'm pretty sure he's berating the professionals and encouraging everyone else to try and do the job they are not.
I agree though, that the general population can't reasonably be expected to do a better job of it than the professionals, so I can't imagine that exhortation having much effect.
Both "you"s are aimed at anyone who shared the fabrication. Journalists shouldn't have reported it uncritically, but everyone who hit the share button is culpable.
There's an old proverb - "Who is more foolish; the fool or the fool who follows him?"
On other hand if you are able to compile "facts" to an article. You should as well be able to verify them from second source. And trivially fast in modern world. I mean if you synthesis information from one or more sources. Being able to verify them from one more source should not be huge leap.
Then again, maybe it is just AI generated. Which really makes future look lot worse.
Their job is journalism, you would hope they have the skills, but not necessarily. The news business is not making much money, and aren’t paying big salaries. You’re not getting world renowned journalists to do a puff piece on a recently deceased celebrity. And even if they don’t use an LLM, they are still putting in the bare minimum effort for work they likely have no pride in.
If you think this is trivial, I suggest watching the video kurzgesagt just did on the topic. It’s much harder than you appreciate and getting massively worse as the days go by due to ai garbage.
You need to be curious to fact check. Anyone can be curious. This is different from "being tall".
OK, if you're reading an (alleged) interview with an actress where she, a nonagenarian talks about her 40s, but it turns out she was in her 30s, gasp.
However, if someone in the news section, keeps calling several US cities a warzone, over and over again, with no evidence, ehh, the hardest part about fact checking this is overcoming any personal biases or prejudices you might have.
> School spending did not decline from 2012 to 2022. In fact, it increased significantly, even after adjusting for inflation, from $14,000 a student to more than $16,000.
Is this average spending per student? If so, then that is just a cover for inequality. Spending a vast amount on educating elite students, and spending hardly enough on the majority.
Other countries with much better education than the US spend less than $16,000 per student, but I imagine they are spending much more equitably. They don’t have one school that is incredible and then another school so broke that teachers and parents have to foot the bill for supplies.
The top elite kids aren't in public schools, so they don't even factor into the equation. Whether there is inequality in spending will depend on the state and whether the funding is local, or redistributive. But if you take California as an example, they do try to make sure money goes to poor students, and it has had no positive effect. California sends mor to Black, Latino, and low income students than white or high income students.
Actually this isn't the whole picture. Because a lot of funding for schools comes from local property taxes, affluent areas tend to have more resources for education than poorer areas, regardless of how they school their kids. And if a lot of higher income students aren't utilizing public school, that's less students to spend the increased money on, which would exacerbate the view when looked at as a national per-student average.
Still, poor students in california do dramatically worse than poor students in mississippi, despite california spending much more. I dove into the data a while back and adjusted for income and race, California schooling is much worse and only looks good because its students are rich
Mississippi cooks the stats by holding the poorest students back. You can probably adjust for this if you have the raw data, but it's something you need to adjust for.
If you didn't let students into the 4th grade until they were 40 inches tall, you'd have taller than average 4th graders, but only because of survivorship bias.
Almost every state will spend the most on inner city kids. You have a ton of commercial tax base for relatively few kids. For example Atlanta Public Schools spends the most per pupil in GA outside of a handful of tiny districts.
most spending-per-student goes to the poorest or most-disabled students, not to the elite students. By definition, elite students are a tiny fraction, so evern if they get overspending, it won't move the average unless they are getting absurd multiples of the median, which they are noy getting.
Private equity hoovers up existing businesses that are mostly well functioning.
If they fail, we suffer as those businesses we depend upon fail and disappear. Everything from big national chains to your local doctors office can be destroyed in this way.
But if private equity succeeds, we also suffer.
Private equity is… private. Normal people have our savings invested in public markets. We can’t easily invest in private equity, and we shouldn’t because it’s too risky.
But imagine a world where every strong business goes private and only failing businesses are public. The wealthy take everything private so they don’t have to share the wealth.
IMO any business over a certain size should be forced to be public and no option to go private again.
> Private equity hoovers up existing businesses that are mostly well functioning.
There's many flavors of private equity, but the predatory ones tend to buy businesses that are slowly failing, and turn them into something that hits a brick wall and completely fails.
If it was a mostly well functioning business with good prospects, likely the current ownership would be less interested in selling or a sale to similar ownership could be made.
Dental clinics owned by a dentist sell to a new dentist all the time. If they're being sold to PE firms, it's because the business of being a dentist is changing and not in a good way. Dental insurance is a hassle and doesn't pay well, finding customers can be hard without accepting insurance, hiring staff is hard (at least in my area), young dentists may not have the capital to buy out retirees, new equipment is expensive but patients like being wowed.
> Private equity is… private. Normal people have our savings invested in public markets. We can’t easily invest in private equity, and we shouldn’t because it’s too risky.
Financial entities you rely on (pension funds, insurance companies, and universities among others) invest, and you may be getting access yourself thanks to Trump!
> IMO any business over a certain size should be forced to be public and no option to go private again.
What on earth is the rationale for this policy? If you build a successful company, you're required by law to give up control?
Your tiny indirect share of the PE firm's profits will not match your direct loss of service as a customer and/or loss of compensation as an employee. Contrary to popular myth, wealth does not trickle down in any meaningful way. In an unregulated capitalist system, wealth flows toward the centers of wealth, just as surely as gravity pulls toward the centers of mass.
I don't think there is a valid rationale for this.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of armchair spectators that don't understand how the economy actually functions; and they've got brigades that go after people that do actually know who speak out (based on certain keywords).
As a result, its totally not worth talking about since the point of no return has largely already come and gone and we're stuck in a hysteresis trap.
People don't see how the things we are seeing today were predictable outcomes given choices made at the money-printer level (i.e. Fed/Private Banking).
No deposit requirement, is no reserve money-printing. It always fails, but I'm sure someone will say... but this time will be different. Needless to say, any discussion on economics is basically flame bait these days with a lot of delusional people on both sides of the aisle.
> But imagine a world where every strong business goes private and only failing businesses are public.
That's the opposite of what happens with PE. PE firms don't buy fairly priced, well run businesses. They (typically) buy underpriced, poorly performing but cash flow heavy businesses that would benefit from leveraging up and making operations more lean.
Think about it, if a business is fairly priced and well run, PE firms have no incentive to buy it because where do they generate returns?
I don't like PE firms but there's no doubt that they force businesses to operate better, and ultimately that benefits people like you and me who have retirement savings, because PE firms aren't getting their money out of thin air.
Or they can do things like buy VMWare, gut the support/engineering/sales staff, hound and threaten their install base, and ultimatley profit greatly by stripping down and destroying a perfectly healthy if relatively late stage business.
How does private equity businesses operating better improve our retirement savings? Wont they just improve the PE fund performance and benefit only the investors ?I am genuinely curious as its very difficult to find public information on how they actually function
Read Matt Levine's newsletter, it's a VERY simple business model built on financial engineering (it's rare they do something "novel"). But broadly, if you've got money in any sort of mutual fund, pension or retirement asset, the people managing your money WILL have some sort of allocation into PE funds. Even if you own a stock standard ETF like SPDR, PE funds like KKR are publicly listed.
>I don't like PE firms but there's no doubt that they force businesses to operate better, and ultimately that benefits people like you and me...
They do not force businesses to "operate better." They force businesses to operate at a higher EBITDA, purely for their own benefit. Sometimes by chance this results in improvements for the employees or customers, but more often it ultimately results in a worse experience for both and the eventual demise of the business after the PE firm has taken sufficient profit to generate its target returns.
Believe it or not, businesses don't exist to provide you a "good service" they exist to make money. So yes, they do in fact force firms to operate better when they attain a higher EBITDA.
Until the definition of why a business exists changes, you can purely measure a business success over how much money it makes for the owner, legally.
Should that be the case? No, I don't agree. But as it currently stands, that's how things are.
>Believe it or not, businesses don't exist to provide you a "good service" they exist to make money.
This is a common misconception. Businesses actually exist to serve the public interest, which is why some kinds of businesses are illegal. The premise of capitalism isn't that it maximizes individual wealth, but that it maximizes the general welfare of the population.
Only some fringe definitions meet that. Maybe Adam Smith and Stiglitz. I deeply wish more westerners talked about Adam Smith and Stiglitz. But modern definitions of capitalism omit the words people, public, and welfare.
Definition and description do not necessarily include purpose. You could define a hammer very precisely without ever mentioning that its purpose is to drive nails. And since it's in the best interest of capital to minimize the original purpose of capitalism, and capital increasingly dominates public and political discourse, it's not surprising that the public interest angle would be increasingly ignored. But corporations and private property, the cornerstones of capitalism, are both purely creations of government, and both are subject to regulation in the public interest. We just need the political will to do so.
If someone invoices me, and I don’t pay the full amount in a timely manner, what do you think will happen? Late fees, reports to credit bureaus, collections agencies hounding me, maybe even lawsuits?
If insurance companies underpay, doctors should treat that no differently. Don’t appeal through the insurance company itself. Imagine I go to a store and pay less than the full amount at the register, and then the grocery store appeals to ME to decide whether I actually should have paid the correct amount. It’s absurd.
Doctors should treat the insurance companies like anyone else who owes them money and isn’t paying in full on time.
> Recovery is beyond the scope of most small practices.
Seems like a business opportunity. Could probably work very similar to other collections agencies where they either buy the debt for pennies on the dollar or take a percentage of the collected amount.
Yeah, there's an industry of companies that insert themselves between the medical record and the insurance company to upcode claims and get better payments. This article is about the reverse process, where the insurance company looks at the claims and downcodes them to send worse payments.
IMHO, in office care should be more of a time and materials billing than billing based on procedures done. Of course, then the doctors' billing office would aggressively measure time the doctor spent, and the insurance company would suggest the doctor took too long for whatever.
It's much easier to treat it like identity theft where the business's problem becomes the customer's problem to solve. In this case, insurance didn't pay what was required so the patient does. There's already a potential collections agency involved if the patient doesn't pay.
Who do you think is easier to squeeze the money from? A mega-insurance corporation or your sick grandma?
Sending your patient's 'debt' to collections promptly is very unpopular with the patients, and the insurance companies will 100% insist that the patient is responsible.
You'll notice the doctor's office in the article already has a team of billing experts. But instead of working on new claims, they are being forced to relitigate claims they already submitted that weren't accepted.
Insurance companies hold tremendous leverage over care providers, up to and including the power to effectively put them out of business on a whim. Care providers don't like picking fights with insurance companies.
You can look up Dr. Elizabeth Potter on Youtube who publicly details what its like dealing with insurance, and all the ways insurance screws her and her patients. United Health actively threatened and retaliated against her business when she started getting publicity.
The total industry wide profit numbers aren't relevant at all if you're running a small clinic going up against an insurance provider. Heck even if a single clinic made more money than an insurance provider, it would barely matter - the insurance providers have the power to stop covering your practice and kill it, a clinic does not have any such power over insurance providers.
And yet this has absolutely nothing to do with the claim that "Insurance companies hold tremendous leverage over care providers, up to and including the power to effectively put them out of business on a whim.", you're not even engaging with the argument at all.
It doesn't? All the money is going to them, and they're massively larger than the insurers, but it's the insurers with all the leverage? Why isn't more of the money going to the insurers then?
Do you make this argument in any other scenario? I'm sure all merchants who accept credit cards combined make WAY more than Visa/MC, but I think most would agree Visa has much more leverage over a corner shop that accepts Visa than the other way around.
There are 5 or 6 big insurance companies, maybe 2000 if we count all of the small ones and 400K medical practices. So even by this very simple money=leverage argument, each individual practice has far less money than the insurance company they are dealing with. So if more money = more leverage then these same numbers prove the opposite claim.
So its probably fair to say that the picture isn't as simple as money=leverage.
If a medical practice and an insurance company get into a dispute and one of them decides to not work together, the practice loses say 1/5th-1/10th of its customers, the insurance company loses 1/100000th of its revenue. I call that leverage.
Care providers also likely spend much more time and labor on making that money than the insurance providers spend making their end, though I only have anecdotal evidence of this through my involvement in healthcare providers’ practices as an MSP.
It depends on the size of the provider organization. In some areas there has been a lot of provider consolidation driven by the need to gain more negotiating power with commercial payers. So we end up with only a few large integrated delivery systems dominating certain regional markets.
Doctors have extensive contracts with insurance companies, and often have employees dedicated to billing. I wouldn't make assumptions here, other than "downcoding" is probably just subtle enough to not be worth it to fight.
I'm 90% certain that submitting claims to an insurer subjects doctors to resolving any disputes via an appeal followed by an arbitration process, and that the right to sue or handle the debt in the regular way is severely attenuated.
So what should happen when Docs lie about what procedures they did? Because it happens quite frequently and for some reason is always left out of these discussions.
I live in NL. I pay 130 euros a month for my health insurance, and a max of 375 yearly on deductibles should I accrue some costs. The only reason I pay 130 is because I earn above a certain number, otherwise it's discounted and even free at a certain level (and I opted into the more expensive tier to also have dental coverage). In my case, my employer even pays for my insurance so in reality I don't even pay anything monthly (that's rare here though).
I recently did an in-depth sleep study, got a CPAP machine prescribed to me, free replacement filters and replacement tubes + mask for it whenever I need them. I also got xrays and CT scans because of a foot injury around the same time. I also got comprehensive blood tests done.
None of it cost me a penny other than the ~100 euros a month, the doctors and GPs are paid well, the quality of care I received was exceptional, and in the worst case scenario possible I would've only paid 375 euros max.
My mother in law has osteoporosis and a number of other chronic illnesses, so she has to see specialists quite often. The quality of care she receives is similarly excellent to the one I received, and due to her disability her healthcare is partially covered as well.
It's not perfect of course, but it sure does beat all the horror stories you often hear coming from across the pond of people ending up in lifelong medical debt should, God forbid, something happen to them that they realistically have no control over. So I'm sorry, but I don't buy that the for-profit fucked up system you guys have going on over there is the best of the lot, especially if you're an average Joe and not someone from SV earning obscene amounts.
"Healthcare that isn't for profit" doesn't mean just a national health insurance. Just that as a random citizen you are shielded from seeing all the same issues underneath. The pharma companies, test providers, equipment makers and personnel are all making profits. I bet the total amount paid is higher that 130 euros a month. There's profit all through the system, so claims that healthcare should not be for profit are silly.
Now, what happens is that the profits have to be kept in check, either via price controls or sufficient competition. It's not hard to argue that the choices made in the US are quite suboptimal, but it's far more of a regulatory problem than purely a matter of people making money. If nobody makes money, there's no healthcare.
Not to mention EU pharma makes 50-70% [1] of their money from the US, an unregulated market. I'd challenge them to shut down that 800USD/shot revenue stream and still give subsidised insulin locally and remain profitable. Hint: they can't. Their shareholders would shut them down in a week. Good luck manufacturing the next new drug then.
Profit is what's left after everyone is paid for their work. No profit doesn't mean nobody gets paid - it means nobody's trying to simultaneously maximize revenue and minimize costs just so they can pay themselves the difference.
Speaking of tax-funded healthcare, did you know that US residents pay more tax towards healthcare than residents of any other country? And in return for that, they don't get any healthcare so they have to pay a second time to buy their healthcare.
> so far all of the other ones have failed horrifically.
Uh, what? Other systems have their problems, but they're varying levels of functional, and the health and life expectancy of the populations in most other developed countries is higher than the US, all the while spending a fraction.
Most other developed countries have a mix of public and private insurance and/or delivery, with the better run systems being better rationalized in dealing with costs and having an actual market where it makes sense to form one (eg you can't practically shop around for ER care, but you can for elective or planable services). The French system is held in high regards in particular (though it isn't really replicatable due to their unique civil service setup).
how about copying the exact thing that works in literally almost every other country in the world
What do you mean failed horrifically? Yes, some countries have long queues. That's because there are actually people getting served. That's just the latency/throughput tradeoff being tilted farther towards throughput - which is what you want, and it's not like people who come in with heart attacks don't get to skip the queue. In America, people get heart attacks and just choose to die so their family won't get bankrupted by an ambulance ride.
Are you possibly getting this information (that healthcare is a horrific failure in every other country) from propaganda sources, instead of information sources?
I have no problem with it being for profit. The issue is the alignment of interests and the thumb on the scales by government and vested interests. If health insurance worked like car insurance I think we'd be in a better state.
Vets are really the most amazing doctors and I hate to see what is happening to their industry. Hopefully in exchange for dealing with the bullshit of human health care, at least maybe the money is getting a little better for them (a lot of them are just criminally underpaid).
Most people do not profit off their labor. 2/3rds of people are living paycheck to paycheck, which means that they are being paid approximately the same amount that their labor costs to produce. That makes their wages an exchange of equal value, and thus not profitable.
> which means that they are being paid approximately the same amount that their labor costs to produce
No, "living paycheck to paycheck" means you're spending everything you get each month. There can be all sorts of reasons for that.
> That makes their wages an exchange of equal value, and thus not profitable.
This is true for all profit. If you lend me money and profit off the interest, we've decided between us that the time value of that money is worth that interest, and so it's an exchange of equal value.
If a business makes $50,000 in revenue, and has $50,000 in costs, we don't say that business turned a profit. If a person makes $50,000 in revenue, but has $50,000 in costs, we tax them as if they profited $50,000.
A reasonable wage or salary isn’t usually considered “profit” in a legal sense. This is why nonprofits can still pay employees. Any money that is left over after costs (including wages/salaries) needs to be reinvested, spent on the organizational mission, or held for future use, not distributed through dividends or other distributions as in a for-profit enterprise.
Have you spent much time looking inside non profits? A lot of hospitals in the US are non profits. Some are part of non profit universities too. This in no way leads to superior cost controls, or those universities being cheap. What it does mean is that they get some significant tax advantages (for instance, no property taxes), and that there's fewer optimization incentives. When you limit yourself to the US definition of a non profit company, it doesn't make care better or cheaper.
The IRS has some guidelines that they use to decide what is “reasonable” but they don’t give out whatever actual formula or process they use to determine this. It’s supposed to be based on industry averages (more or less) but in reality it’s hard to determine what exactly that means. Generally you are “safe” paying in an industry average range, but if outside that range you need legal and accounting support to back up your own assessment.
> you are “safe” paying in an industry average range, but if outside that range you need legal and accounting support to back up your own assessment
What? The IRS doesn’t regulate wages. They just care about getting their money. If I pay you $10bn a year to yell at my cat, the IRS is fine so long as I pay payroll and you income taxes.
Similarly as an S Corp (maybe other corp types too) then officers must take at or above a reasonable wage/salary to limit the tax advantage: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/fs-08-25.pdf
This is intended to prevent people from, for instance, setting up a “nonprofit” where they just funnel all gains into their pocket while gaining all the other tax benefits of being a nonprofit. You can’t overpay people, you can’t engage in transactions where you intentionally overpay a supplier for materials/services and then they compensate you for the extra amount, etc.
I'm not saying profit in that sense. I'm just saying that it's monetary profit all the way down when it comes to paid work. People work for profit. People invest for profit. People bet for profit.
The person you were replying to seemed to be discussing profit in the sense of tax law, not whether or not people should be paid at all. I don’t think anyone here is saying that doctors should not be paid.
I was thinking the same thing. Would it be permissible to bring each underpayment to small claims court as a separate case? If enough doctors did this, it would very quickly be a legal DDoS attack, like we've seen happen with mandatory arbitration.
Most insurances won't publish their fee schedules. So doctors don't know what they will pay. So what they do is bill insanely high knowing the insurance will come back with "Nah, we only cover $X". They'll collect $X, then write off the remainder. Because the fear is not getting the maximum money possible. If the doctor would bill $100 and the insurance pays up to $200, then the doctor "lost" $100.
Regardless of how much it actually cost the doctor to provide the service.
It's also why the "cash price" is usually much cheaper, because it's closer to what it costs the doctor to provide the service.
Ah, but this has also lead to many private practices getting bought by hospital groups, at which point they have superior pricing power. The doctor makes more money, and the insurance company pays more, as it's harder to strongarm a company that owns 8 hospitals than a 3 doctor practice. Either way, the price goes up.
Health plans are legally required to publish their rates and they all comply with this now. You can literally just go to any payer web site and download the MRF. There are occasional data errors but overall the numbers are generally accurate.
Sure but imagine you hire a landscaper and they send you a $40 invoice for $20 of law cutting and $20 of leaf cleanup. You go look outside and see a ton of leafs so you just send them $20.
That's the insurance companies' stance. The work you performed is this and so our agreed upon rate is this.
But in reality, the landscaper bills you for $100, you say you’re only going to pay $90, and then you write them a check for $31.50.
(That’s because you’re a major, well-known insurer and pay an industry high 35%. The guy who mows the Medicare yard might pay 40 cents on the dollar. The person mowing the Medicaid yard has to file 87 forms to get paid his $6.)
but the landscaper has a photo of the clean yard after they finished. They send it to you but you ( as the insurance company) say they need to call a specific time and speak to your 12y/o who is the yard representative of the house.
The 12 y/o say ‘no you stink’ and hangs up. Then you send the landscaper a letter saying ‘sorry your peer to peer was denied’
( I know this is exaggerating a bit and made to sound funny but it mostly works like that in healthcare )
My problem is I can’t do 1. If I could do just 1 I feel like I could slowly work my way up to 2, 5, 10, 100, whatever. Starting at 0 trying to get to 1 feels insurmountable.
I have tried all kinds of advice from the Internet. I tried doing pushups against the wall or on my knees. I kept that up for quite awhile, but still never got close to doing 1 real normal push-up correctly. I don’t have the discipline to keep going when it takes that long to get any results.
Hold yourself in the top of the push up position then as slowly as you can drop into the lower position with your chest on the floor. The slower the better. When you’re on the floor, reset and go again.
Do 10 in the morning and 10 at night for 2 weeks and I guarantee you will be able to do at least one real push up.
Maybe try doing curls with 3/5 pound weights instead! Or standing shoulder presses. Do that for a few weeks and then return to pushups. At that point you'll be strong enough to do 1. And then as you say, 1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 5, and 5 becomes 100. I couldn't do more than 15 in a row on January 1. On August 16 I did 525 in 2.5 hours (I know this because it is in my Google Sheet).
If you can do 3+ knee pushups then you should be able to just about do 1 normal pushup. Surely if you progress to 10+ knee pushups you can do at least 1-2 normal ones.
Maybe you are not eating enough protein to grow your muscles when doing the knee pushups.
This is kinda sad to hear because I think it's more-or-less an immutable fact that, barring disabilities/injuries, anyone can do pushups if they try every day for just a few weeks, and then you'd be off to the races. Actually it feels really good to have that part of your body start to "click"; a bit of a "this is right, I was built to feel strong here" feeling.
I think there's some widespread misconceptions about how "starting" an exercise is supposed to go. The problem is that starting out is nothing like doing them once you can do them. (In no sense am I an expert on this; I just have some intuition about it and have coached some friends through trying pushups when they couldn't.) There is a whole chain of muscles involved in the motion--actually, there are a bunch of different chains, because there are a bunch of different kinds of pushups that use different muscles. The thing that goes wrong is usually that there are some "weak links" in that chain: muscles you've never really used before, and maybe don't even know how to activate. The actual pushup motion, the one you see people do online or whatever, is not really possible until you have these muscles linked up. It's just not going to happen. Maybe you'll eke out one with tremendous effort, but it won't look or feel like the pushups other people do.
Instead the way to start is to do anything at all that feels doable but a bit hard in that position. Yoga positions like down and up dog are great. Staying in a plank for a bit is great. Play around with the arms in different positions. Go down just a little bit but don't stay down. Etc. If you do things like this for 5 minutes a day, just pushing yourself to find things that feel tough each time, I think you will be able to do a proper pushup in 2-3 weeks. The thing to keep in mind is that the goal is to learn how your shoulders, chest, and back work together. For example, instead of putting your elbows out wide and trying to stay up but falling--try narrow elbows and then shove the ground as if are pushing a heavy grocery cart. Or, stay on vertical arms but rock forward and back. Or, stay on your elbows, but lift your feet up on something. Whatever is hard but doable.
(This is all 100% vibes, I don't know anything about anatomy or fitness. But I'm pretty sure it works.)
(Mostly I have coached people on the mindset about starting exercises with regard to climbing and particularly pullups. New climbers tend to not understand that there is just no way they're going to do a whole pullup if they can't do the first quarter second of the pullup, which is the hardest part, due to the awkward angle of your arm and shoulder giving a mechanical advantage particularly when you don't have much lats/scapular muscle. So train that first! They tend to cheat that part instead of working on it and don't understand why they're not making progress.)
> anyone can do pushups if they try every day for just a few weeks
No, they can't, not even close. Fatties need to lose weight first or start with bench presses. It might not even be the matter of strength, the belly is literally in the way.
And if you're a "fatty", play to your strength - the very strong legs you have built up carrying extra weight every day.
If you do leg cardio (walking/treadmill/cycling, etc.) your leg muscle will likely never go away and you can use it to burn off as much fat as you wish. And once that is going on you can add other non-leg exercises.
Exactly. They don’t even question how all this bullying went on for so long without any adults noticing or doing anything about it. For "horrible things, like nonstop" to be going on without anyone noticing or doing anything about it is absurd levels of negligence by the parents, teachers, and administrators. It should never have reached this point.
Bus drivers have to focus on driving safely. Expecting them to maintain bully free interactions among 20+ kids is absurd. Pay for an adult monitor on the bus.
Kids will find ways to harass each other: between classes, lunch times, recess, etc. Schools can probably do more, but I doubt they can fix bullying alone. And certainly not with the resources they're given today.
You know how women often don’t report sexual harassment and assault? It’s because if they do report it, they will suffer further victimization and their chances at any just outcome are too low.
Same thing with bullying in schools. Kids don’t report it because if they do so, they will be opening themselves up to further victimization, and the people they report it to will not take sufficient action to stop it.
All schools need to do is make it safe to report bullying, prioritizing the victim’s safety. Then with a report they don’t need blanket surveillance, they can just do targeted surveillance to verify the reports. Once verified, they should take immediate action to put a permanent stop to it.
I agree with the problem you identify. I was both a bully, and a bullied person at times during my school days. For me the bullying of me brought on the bullying by me, I feel.
I don't see any practical answers in your comment. Recognising schools should "makes it safe to report bullying" is one thing. How though? It seems entirely intractable - you seem to suggest blanket surveillance of all children everywhere?
You don’t need surveillance if you have relationships and trust. Bullying is intractable because traditional schooling is essentially and structurally exactly that: the bullying of kids by adults. It’s only logical that it results in the bullying of kids by kids.
Make teachers (and parents) people of trust, not only of arbitrary authority, and you create options to address bullying between kids as well.
Kids understand justice from a very early age. It's one of the things they need out of parenting. But things that go on at school are not entirely within the remit of the parents, because the school is in loco parentis.
You missed the part that says "viewed and listened to hours of video from the bus". The evidence is already available. The problem is that no one was bothering to look at it to check the kids were OK.
Kids will find ways to harass each other: between classes, lunch times, recess, etc.
This is true, but in most countries it doesn't escalate to mass murder. That's specifically a US thing (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...). So while you're right, I don't think it's fair to suggest it's hard to stop this problem or to resign to it being typical kids behaviour. The shooting aspect bucks the global norm.
No there isn't. America has 120 guns per 100 people.
The closest runner-up country, the Falkand Islands, is almost exactly half of that - at 62 guns per 100 people [1]. There's a sharp decline from there.
That said, I've long shared the belief that despite the absurd number of guns in the USA, and how they literally outweigh the population; the average person ought to re-calibrate have more faith in humanity and respect for their access to firearms, because the stats for gun violence are not nearly as high as you'd think if they're that accessible.
Guns per capita isn't a good measure because some people own a lot of guns. Gun owning households is a better way to test how many kids potentially have access to a gun - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_gun... - America is still top at 42%, but the next country is at 37% and there are several above 20%.
This is a generation removed, at this point, but my younger sister and I went to the same small private, "good" Christian high school, and when Columbine happened we both looked at each other, and were like, "yeah, makes sense". Bullying was so endemic at our school that we could identify kids in each class around the both of us whom, had they had arrived with a gun and opened fire, we'd have been shocked, of course, but in no way surprised. Teachers (verbally) ridiculed and bullied students, and turned blind eyes to "high status" students bullying (including violently) odd, or even just poor, kids.
I escaped most of it, personally, because I had sharp enough wits and enough self-confidence to turn ridicule back on most people who went after me that way - I even figured out at one point that if I used big words the PE teacher would leave me alone, lol - and was physically big enough not to be a target otherwise. We didn't complain, though, not even to our parents, because that was just the way things were - why would kids think anything should be otherwise, when authority figures saw it and didn't care, like, at all?
What I didn't do, ever, was stand up for anyone else. It was a survival strategy. I remember reading about Columbine that Dylan Klebold waved one kid out from under his gun because, he said, "you were always nice to me". I didn't bully anyone, and even had friendly conversations with some of the kids who were the most consistent targets, but, had they come to school with a gun, I doubt I'd have passed that test. I can't shake the feeling that had one of them committed violence that the school - and maybe even I, myself - would have deserved it.
The old web isn’t a platform, an aesthetic, or a technology. The old web is people creating and sharing because they are intrinsically motivated. Everything we hate about the current web comes from extrinsic motivations. Good luck removing them.
This is the most succinct critique of the “old web phenomenon” I’ve come across and I reckon can be applied to other issues as well. There doesn’t seem to be a dearth of extrinsic motivators these days, oddly mediated through screens.
Beautifully and succinctly stated, damn. This is like, reading a bunch of philosophy and trying to wrap your head around it and some bored professor casually ELI5’s the topic.
And when they lose all their money it becomes a tax on society.
Lest us not forget the origins of prohibition where women were collectively extremely upset about their husbands constantly going out and spending their salary on drinking instead of actually buying food and etc for the family.
I play low stakes poker occasionally, there is nothing better than a bunch of students sitting at the table :-) As an aside I think poker in casinos is the only game that you have a chance of winning at.
I know quite a few casino addicts. They all understand the math just fine. Some are actually very good at math but still can't stop themselves from betting on a spinning wheel.
For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now.
Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk.
Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.