This is (anecdotally) not true for families in the highest income decile (in California). Kids are pushed harder to learn things earlier than when I was growing up. For example, nearly all of my kid's classmates could read before they started kindergarten. All could do basic arithmetic. Now that he's in first grade, most can read chapter books and have a grasp of multiplication. My mom pushed me hard to get me ahead of my peers, but I didn't hit those milestones until a year later. The standards and expectations are extremely high now because it's never been harder to get a spot at a top 20 university—perhaps because a top 20 school is the best chance you can get to maintain your living standards.
I've not seen anything saying all kids are lacking in important skills these days, but rather they all seem (to me) to imply that we're on the way to an even more-stratified society. Smart kids will be just as educated as smart kids used to be - probably even moreso. Dumb kids will fall further and further behind, and the middle range of "kinda smart at a bunch of stuff" will disappear.
With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the stratification of... everything else, really.
Everything is bifurcating now. Haves are having more and more, and have-nots are having less and less. Middle class jobs are disappearing in favor of a mix of 1. low-wage unskilled/service jobs and 2. "elite" jobs for the upper crust. There used to be a place in society for A, B, C, and D students, but now you're either top-college material or you risk being swept into a growing underclass.
> With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the stratification of... everything else, really.
That's one reason that the solution to educational inequalities may not lie in education policy at all, but in tax/economic policy. Maybe the most expedient way to improve education outcomes is to just take a large amount of money from wealthy people and give it to everyone else.
> Maybe the most expedient way to improve education outcomes is to just take a large amount of money from wealthy people and give it to everyone else
Given the evidence in the article, wouldn't it make sense to try simply holding students to standards--the thing that caused the last wave of achievement gain--instead of another novel and divisive policy treatment?
How are they teaching 4 year olds reading and arithmetic? That wasn’t an option in my affluent area in SoCal. Somehow Chinese and some Russian kids can do it, but mine didn’t. Despite my paying $20k/year per child for preschool.
Same way they used to teach it in 1st grade, but 2 years earlier. There's often more of an emphasis on visuals, manipulatives, and songs too, eg. my kid's kindergarten teacher linked us to this song [1] on the first day, and there's dozens of similar resources on YouTube.
A family friend of ours (retired Tesla engineer) taught his 18 month the alphabet. He did it with a bunch of alphabet puzzles [2] and blocks. My 16mo is showing similar interest, but unfortunately I don't have the time to sit down with him, go over each letter, and explain how they go together. He will grab a book (or 5) off the bookshelf, bring it over to me, and say "Read this", though.
For math - my kid had learned the powers of two up through 4096 by kindergarten through playing Snake-2048. My wife and I started introducing addition and subtraction just in ordinary life - we'd say "Okay, if we have 4 strawberries, and you reserve one each for mommy and daddy, how many do you get to eat?"
Now (age 7) he'll quiz me in the car with seemingly random numbers like "What's 177 * 198?", and it's a good opportunity for me to introduce a bunch of mental math tricks like binomial expansions for multiplying numbers near 50 or 100, or prime factorizations. I'll usually turn the questions back on him too, like "Well, that's 200 * 177 - 2 * 177. What's 2 * 177?" and then he's like "I dunno" and then I'll say "What's 2 * 180?" and he says "360" and then I say "Now subtract 2 * 3" and he says "354" and then I'm like "Okay, if 2 * 177 = 354, what's 200 * 177" and he'll say "35,400" (because he already knows the trick for adding zeros) and then I'll say "Subtract 354" and he'll say "35,046" which is the correct answer.
But there's also a big difference between 18 months and 4 years.
There are definitely preschools in Silicon Valley where the kids are reading chapter books by 4. We chose not to send our kids to one (we don't want them to miss out on play and socialization for academics), but we have a few friends that have sent their kids there.
I'm from a blue class family in a non-affluent area and I could already read going into Kindergarten because my mom spent a lot of time reading with me before I got to school. This was 25+ years ago.
Formula is not as nutritious as human breast milk. Bottle feeding leads to long lasting anatomical changes.
You can look at the research confirming these uncomfortable and inconvenient truths.
Whooaa! You're going to give people whiplash with how quickly you're changing what's being discussed. Men are perfectly capable of reading to kids! That you use things men are perfectly able to do, rather than the things they're not, as justification for why women should not be in the workplace makes me think you're not nearly so loathe to utter it as you say.
Relitigating what's always been said seem like a waste of everyone's time, especially when you're already going to ignore the context in which you're having a discussion.
Breastfeeding generally stops at age 2 (or earlier). Your contention is that literacy is significantly affected by whether the mom or the dad is taking care of the child at age 2 and below?
Not just literacy but everything is significantly affected by the care rendered from 0 to 4. My concern was broader: the children’s and society’s future.
By your own admission, a father cannot alone provide care for an infant. And if there are siblings then the critical time period will stretch - perhaps to 3 or 4 years.
Apparently the eldest would be reading chapter books by then, according to other comments in this thread. But I do not understand it.
It is a bitter choice. For mothers to have a life outside of motherhood it is the children who are deprived.
Fathers can't care for an infant alone? Damn shame that every single child with a mother who died in child birth never survived to adulthood. Damn shame. Also, just so tragic that a gay couple will never know the joy of raise a child from infancy. Pete Buttigieg has a hell of a fine imitation of an infant.
Cmon what you are saying is 100% false. Men are 100% capable of caring for infants and toddlers. Formula exists and there has been no large scale study that has shown a significant long term impact for formula usage. All benefits of breastfeeding are minor or unable to be separated from characteristics of the mother.
Women entering the workforce is not the death of child achievement. It is not even parents having time since there was only an extremely narrow window where the one parent household was a thing and it wasn't even the majority of the population. Income has always correlated with achievement and wealthy parents pay money for their child's enrichment not particularly engage with the children themselves. There are kindergarteners at my kid's school in tutoring to get them ahead. These kids are not even behind. That's not the mother spending time on their kid that's boosting the test scores in my district. It's wealth.
There are plenty of studies. Formula is convenient but it is deficient. If it were such a perfect replacement, why do parents go to such length as breast feed, pump, or get donor milk?
I take it as an insult as a guy! Theres nothing in my gender that precludes me from being as good at housekeeping (cleaning, cooking). Unscientific drivel!
My mom taught me math by playing cards with me, and taught me reading by reading me books. It has nothing to do with money. I grew in a house that had a giant hole in the floor, lead paint, and asbestos tiles in North Carolina at that time. My mom is a high school graduate from New Jersey, my parents were late 20s and made barely any money in the 1980s.
"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
This seems a bit hyperbolic. In the mid to late 2000s, only 5 of the 15 close grad student friends I had at Caltech didn't get a tenure track position somewhere. Four of the five work in tech, and the fifth is a government electrical engineer. 4/5 were homegrown, the fifth is an immigrant, and all ten tenure track (now mostly tenured) profs are immigrants.
Forgotten by some, maybe, but there are many Iranian-American and Armenian-American families with medlar trees in their suburban LA yards. It is sold at Paradise Nursery in Chatsworth.
While "nespole" is apparently sometimes called "Japanese Medlar" in English, they are more usually called "Loquat" (Eriobotrya japonica): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loquat
You might mistake them in a black-and-white photo, but otherwise are easily distinguished. Neither is well known in most of the US, but the loquat is commonly grown in California yards while the medlar is a true rarity here.
> Reportedly the leadership of SpaceX manages him like he's a medieval boy king
A family friend who works closely with Elon at SpaceX puts it like, "you have to make him believe that your technical conclusions and recommendations are actually his to have any hope of traction." Otherwise, even if you're proven right years later when Elon's strategy fails, he will hold you to task for, "not convincing him hard enough."
Thanks for the question. It's still the one I wrote 6 months ago. That said, it is likely that the translation layer will change to the GPT-3/GPT-4 ecosystem. But at this point, it's too early to switch. I believe there is a strong need to prove that this app WILL actually solve a real problem before the transition to happen.
HOAs have their downsides, but I do really appreciate one of my CC&Rs: in my ~4 square mile city, we are not allowed to have exterior lights apart from ones to illuminate driveways and patios. Moreover, there are no street lights in the entire city.
It's an oasis of uncorrupted night in the unlikeliest of places: Los Angeles. You can see city lights from certain vantage points, but in most places it is pitch black. Living here feels like perpetual camping. It is wonderful, and it would be stressful for me to return to living in a place with perpetual illumination.
Yikes. Street lighting is one of the most important safety improvements, especially for people walking, as most pedestrian deaths due to drivers occur at night.
Of course, if we weren't so dependent on cars to do literally everything this wouldn't be the case, and we could safely get rid of a lot of street lighting.
Similarly, the installation of public lightening by Colbert in the XVIIIth in Paris, lowered criminality by an order of magnitude.
It also enabled women rights, since, with the ability to somewhat walk securely at night or in the early morning, comes the ability to go to the factory and work somewhere else than in the house.
We’ll need more and more of those studies as we switch off those lights to save energy. If it was possible to VC-fund them, that’s where I would put most if my money.
I appreciate how important it was in the past, but in the era of inexpensive and powerful LED flashlights, streetlights do seem rather redundant and wasteful.
I was under the impressions that street lights promote safety by reducing chances of person to person crime. It’s harder to hide in the shadows and get away without people seeing you with streetlights. So a handheld flashlight doesn’t solve that problem.
The problem is that extremely powerful lights, as many cities are tending to more and more, can actually create more blind spots and makes it harder for our eyes to adjust to those dark spots. If cities adopted more, weaker, warmer lights we'd likely see much less damage to the ecosystem AND increased safety
In typical night conditions, a single Nichia 219-series LED at full drive would temporarily flash-blind someone with just a quarter of a second of exposure.
I know some people think this is a silly question but the answer is, in my experience, yes. That's both in urban and exurban environments, in my experience.
Not usually, but sometimes cars drive too close to the edge of the road, and the road has no sidewalk.
And despite good advice (or simply due to a momentary circumstance), some people walk at night with dark clothing. You can turn a corner a hit a person very easily if they are in any half of your side of the street.
Street lights can also aggravate the problem of safety. Unfortunately most cities seem to believe that more lumens = more safety. But often times this creates more stark dark spots and makes it harder for our eyes to adjust to them
What would really improve safety the most is having more, warmer, weaker lights. One city in the UK ended up taking down their streetlights after some attacks and replacing them with christmas lights strewn across some city trees.
Not only did it look nicer, end up costing less, and was less damaging to the local ecosystem, but it also likely made the area much safer
Another approach is to have personal lighting. I regularly attend an event in one of the darker parts of Colorado where it's considered common courtesy to have a glowy something or other attached to you. There can be collisions even between pedestrians. Nobody gets hurt but it's awkward when it happens so you start to appreciate the extra cues.
I have a family member in Sedona, AZ. There are no street lights there except for a single state highway, and private always-on outdoor lighting is legally restricted to being low, dim, and shaded.
It's pleasant, and I find driving at night there easier because headlights provide more contrast when not everything is illuminated.
I'm just up the road in Flagstaff and the dark skies are absolutely one of my favorite parts of living here. Darkness is an underrated addition to quality of life.
Whereas I find nothing pleasant about my night-time drives through the suburbs of Bellevue. I spend the entire drive paranoid that someone's going to cross the street, and that I won't even see them until they are right in front of me.
Rain, darkness, tree cover, incredibly bright oncoming headlights, poor street lighting, and enough-of-a-walking-culture-that-people-might-be-walking-at-night is a great combination.
I came here to say the same as the sibling comment. Why not slow down? That is what happens in my city: residents drive slowly because they don't want to hit a neighbor.
It depends. If there's a full moon out, I often walk without a light. It's wonderful. Otherwise, I use a headlamp.
> Doesn't this cause issues?
No. I think the main effect is that people finish their walks, bike rides, and so forth before dark. Obviously that's impossible for much of the year for people who work 9 to 5, but given the demographics of this community—small business owners with flexible schedules and retirees—it works for most. In particular, there is one woman from a nearby street who walks past my office window every afternoon: in the winter she walks by at 3, and in the summers she walks by around 6 with her husband.
> getting lost
I don't think this is a realistic concern for those with smart phones. Moreover, the hilly topography and lack of cycles in the road network (barring one) make it very easy to remain oriented.
At night, if there is insufficient moonlight? Yes of course. Street lights only exist in urban areas, if you're walking anywhere else in the world at night, a flashlight seems like a logical choice.
If you have an HOA - you live in an urban area. So I'm not sure what your comment alludes to. If I live in such a place, I expect to be able to walk on sidewalks without a flashlight.
> If I live in such a place, I expect to be able to walk on sidewalks without a flashlight.
We don't have any sidewalks. People either take trails adjacent to roads or walk on the roads themselves. Everyone is aware that pedestrians and equestrians are first class citizens, so residents drive slowly. That's not true for some delivery drivers and domestic workers, but we find the risk-reward tradeoff reasonable enough to have left the lighting provision in our CC&Rs for the last eighty years. Sometimes, expectations are at odds with the realities of what is tolerable in terms of safety, good for local flora and fauna, and pleasurable for ourselves.
> I expect to be able to walk on sidewalks without a flashlight.
There are any number of ways to provide illumination that also mitigates light pollution. This generally means placing metal hats on any external light sources (vertical or horizontal) that effectively pushes the light down and minimizes leakage. The worst offenders in my area are the globular light sources that emit light in all directions.
> Half the month, in really dark places, the moon is sufficient
Came here to say this. Unfortunately, most people in urban environments have no idea. I spent literally decades walking at night in an area with no streetlights. Your eyes adjust to the dark, and anyone who comes along with a flashlight really annoys you.
Edit: I should note, that in all my time doing this, the only time I ever ran into a problem was when a herd of deer came running at me in the darkness. I don’t think a flashlight would have helped.
That's fair. Our only really dangerous snake is a cottonmouth. Even our rattlers and copperheads are mostly nonlethal and nonaggressive.
I was limbing a tree in the pasture, looked down after dropping a limb and a copperhead was just sitting next to my foot. Wasn't ready to strike, just watching me like dudes come out with chainsaws and cut trees next to him on the daily.
It depends on the time of year, the temperature, the area, and the time of night. I used to wander about in the country as a kid by moonlight in certain areas/times/etc, but I knew it was basically safe. Other times it would’ve been literal suicide.
I don’t think any snake is genuinely “aggressive”, but most will bite if you step on them. It’s one of those funny things about moonlight; you can see, but you can’t see detail.
The rattlers around here could fuck you up, particularly if you can't get medical attention within a few hours because you're disabled on the ground alone at night. But fortunately, rattlers rattle (usually) so the snakes actually help people avoid this sort of accident.
Unfortunately, may people kill rattlesnakes when they become aware of them, which is usually after the snake started rattling. So there is now a selective pressure on rattlesnakes to stop rattling. Very misguided.
In my limited experience, streetlights encourage snakes. streetlights bring insects, insects bring birds, birds bring snakes. The snakes are not always under the light but in the trees around the area.
But even with streetlights, you are absolutely right, always bring a torch. Ive seen a snake get stepped on, but fortunately have never done it myself.
When you look at those darkness maps where I live is about as dark as the darkest places in the USA. For us the moon is the real light pollution. Accidentally look at the moon directly and your night vision is shot for a few minutes.
On a more serious note, it’s pretty common for UK roads to lack street lights. Particularly in more rural areas. The majority of my drive home from work is unlit.
I live in a small village with no streetlights, and lovely views of the stars. It is very dark here at night, was a real shock coming from the town, I used to walk around where I was previously, that was not well lit but the amount of ambient light was actually quite high. Very different here.
I find a flashlight and a small pocket knife are essential every day carry. It's a quality of life issue for me, I want to be able to examine something at any time of day, plus street lights are intermittent and I walk a lot. I live in Oakland, a major city, but still insist on turning on a flashlight when I cross the street. People don't pay enough attention.
I walk through my neighborhood at night, and some houses have streetside lights, but most do not. I always bring a flashlight but typically don't use it. I do teach my kids they have to be very careful of cars, because they are too short to be seen.
I'm fond of warm, yellow hues for indoor spaces. If I were forced to choose a color for outdoor lighting, I would go for the same. However, white vs. yellow has already played out in some areas: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-09-30-mn-40657-...
why completly ban the exterior lights when restricting the type, direction and power of the lights is enought to qualify for a region to be designated as a IDSR by the International Dark sky Association. For pratical exterior lighting tips approuved by the IDA this page is a good resource : https://en.cieletoilemontmegantic.org/citoyens
I think the LA area’s low street light density is partially because things are so spread out that it wouldn’t be worth it. You probably still have too much light to see things like the Milky Way.
And I gotta say anecdotally, one of my top-10 most stressful driving experiences was trying to navigate Gardena at night, because they not only have few streetlights, but seem to use ineffective reflective strips as well.
It's still LA, where driving is war between the insane, the jerk, and the insane jerk.
And earthquakes, forest fires, fresh water insecurity, neglect of the unhoused, and people who wouldn't get the South Park episode about the pretense of a personal brand.
If I were inclined to rob houses, I would find the challenge and risk of robbing houses here quite interesting. Apart from the fact that all roads in go through manned gates, this is the most republican city in SoCal. In translation: most of us have a lot of guns.
The alternative is gating on soft skills and job experience. Do you really think it's easier for privileged kids to game our industry's admissions tests?
A poor kid would have a much harder time developing soft skills and getting job experience than a rich kid would have passing our admissions tests, which would be worse for social mobility than the status quo. A poor kid with a blue collar dad can't get an internship at his dad's friend's startup. A poor kid didn't go to a high school with a computer science club. A poor kid didn't grow up developing soft skills at a dozen different after school activities.
However, the poor kid can go to college on a Pell Grant (like me), study hard, and at least have a chance to meet the Leetcode bar and gain entry to the middle class.
Chiming in to agree here. Standardized tests + leetcode tests gave me the ability to overcome being a ward of the state and become a software engineer/ then founder of a YC company with zero connections.
Quick aside, in addition to the Pell Grant, there's also for former foster youth the CHAFEE grant (California specific).
truly privileged "kids" ain't going around looking for jobs thorough interviews, they show up as "investors" or are otherwise brought in by their 'connections'...
Granted, but we're talking about upper-middle-class versus poor. Upper-middle-class means you speak the prestige dialect, you know what "business casual" means and you already have the proper outfit, and you have access to the relevant technology at home, not to mention free time to use it.
Does anyone have experience with going to a "school within a school" for "gifted and talented" kids? I was trying to figure out why I don't remember any bullying from my middle school or high school, when it dawned on me that I might have been insulated from it by taking classes exclusively with gifted and talented kids —i.e., kids from stable/whole/educated households. I went to a high school where kids came from a mix of blue collar and lower-earning white collar families; does bullying still happen at public high schools in wealthy areas?
There's a lot of discussion here about how private school kids are insulated from bullying. Does anyone have first-hand experience or hard evidence of this? Based on books and movies about boarding school, it's hard to believe this.
That's me. Grew up in a very middle to perhaps lower-middle-class area and went to more-or-less middling schools. It definitely wasn't 'the mean streets' or anything but very blue collar. I'm certain there were kids living through very real problems at home and in their personal lives all around me. But I was blissfully unaware and disconnected from all that as I was wrapped in the bubble of band and honors/gifted classes and the associated type of kid. A pretty good childhood overall. One time, one 5-minute instance, I was actively, actually bullied, in a very minor and entirely inconsequential way by the football captain jock kind of kid. Took me by surprise, but rattled my cage enough that I still remember it. He went on to play in the NFL, had a short and pretty much unremarkable career as an athlete best I can tell, and now is a construction worker nearby and I saw a headline once that he got arrested for a DUI. I now live in a much nicer neighborhood in a bigger house than he does, and based on the blurb about the DUI, I drive a better car than he does/did. Point is, I can't imagine what it's like to actually be bullied. One tiny thing happened to me in an entirely impersonal and inconsequential way and here I am decades later googling the guy and feeling smug that I came out on top. I would have been crushed by any amount of real bullying.
A lot of the biggest bullies at my schools growing up were the richest kids. They might bully about different things, but they were huge bullies.
It seems like a lot of the HN discussion is focused on kids being bullied for being smart, which makes sense given the audience on here. However, other kids get bullied for lots of different reasons.
Chiming in with my anecdote. Took all honors classes throughout high school, so I pretty much never mixed with kids outside of that bubble. Was one of the few Asians in my high school in the small midwestern town, so I'm sure there was potential for bullying. But I wasn't bullied, and I credit some of that to the tiered class system.
This is one reason I'm up in arms about public school districts near me shutting down their gifted programs because they made certain not academically-inclined demographics feel bad about not being represented. So now, kids in my demographic get to feel bad about being bullied.
If I understand you correctly, shutting down gifted programs because they aren’t equitable doesn’t make sense. But if you wanted my advice, you might get further if you made that point without the racism.
The assertion that there are “not academically-inclined demographics” comes from those working to shut down gifted programs. Need we pull out the Smithsonian’s “whiteness” chart again?
I looked up what you’re talking about and the good news is it looks like that chart was pulled with an apology, so you should be able to rest easy now.
This is essentially how "honors" classes worked at my large public high school. If I weren't in the Anime- sorry, I mean, Japanese Culture- Club, I would literally have only seen the same 50ish kids all day out of a class of ~1000.
In freshman and sophomore year I decided that English classes bored me to tears, so I took non-honors English both years. There was zero overlap between that class and the kids I saw the rest of my day in honors classes. Then in junior year when I decided to do IB and was forced to take IB/AP English, suddenly boom yep exact same set of kids.
I'll admit, I enjoyed the experience. Admittedly partly because even half-assed work got me easy A's and glowing appreciation from my teachers (for actually putting in some effort and not being disruptive etc), but also getting to meet lots of different people was fun.
Also good god did I hate English class. So many insufferable books of what I still consider to be terribly little literary merit. I wish we'd been allowed to just read classical literature all year. For one of the book slots we were allowed to choose our own book, and I chose Plato's Republic, which I enjoyed thoroughly. It was the only book from prior to the 20th century that I got to read for class that year as well. At least it got better in senior year when we got to do Shakespeare again.
First I went to an average middle school an I remember many delinquents, but they had something like their own hierarchy independent from grades, so I guess nerds were no threat to their hierarchy, so they didn't care about nerds. Rather nobody cared about nerds to such extent that I didn't even know some animosity to nerds even exists. Standard grades were undefinable either, because ironically delinquents were below any standard, as a consequence nonstandard grades were undefinable either, so I guess separation based on grades was impossible as marginals were too numerous and visible. Then I went to an elite school for gifted kids (elite in terms of academic performance), but I didn't see anyone stereotypically rich there, and I'm not sure that a school for gifted kids is the same as a school for rich kids, I think they have very different goals. There was some kind of internment school for orphans nearby or something like that, so we got some flak from them, funnily I was once stopped by a girl and she tried to seduce me - a tomboy - I blushed, lol.
I was a physics major until I stumbled across the jargon file online. It was an, "aha, my people!" moment. It was already showing its age then—nearly 20 years ago!—but sucked me into CS where I was much happier.
I grew my first giant pumpkin this year. Unfortunately, it's a bit too small for me to sit in—it's only about 500 lbs [1]. I will know for sure next Saturday when I move it to a contest.
I think I'll be able to grow a larger one next year, since I did quite a few things wrong this time. If anyone in Los Angeles (South Bay area) wants into this silly project—whether for growing, escorting with a boat, or even paddling—please get in touch :-)
