The digital divide is giving American churches hell
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
My kids can do zoom a few times a day. But what do you do if you’re poor? Or in a troubled home?
You stop going to school. There's a teenager next door who lives in a troubled home and from talking to him it sounds like he hasn't really attended school since the beginning of 2020 because there are no consequences for not showing up in zoom and his single mom is too tired to make sure he's attending his classes or to homeschool him...
You have to experience something to have an opinion on it now?
No, but if you haven't experienced something, your opinion on it should hold less weight.
Even if it did work that way, do you want to be the one to tell a child they’re going to be removed to a foster/group home because their parent wasn’t strict enough / tech savvy enough?
CPS is not perfect, there are many horror stories of sexual abuse in foster homes and other serious issues.
It transcends location, to me it seems like it is generally a poor choice to stick kids in the care of adults who don't really have a bond with them to start with. No matter where you live.
How about children with SEN, who are now deprived of their teaching assistants while learning at home, and need an adult to assist them in their learning for five hours a day?
Then there's bandwidth. I am luckily able to provide computers to my two children, but when myself, my spouse and my kids are all online at the same time, as well as every other person in our estate, there are understandable capacity issues.
What about families that have access to technology, but not the physical space to allow all their children to home school and their parents to work from home simultaneously? How can you attend online lessons when you share a room with a sibling? Or have a baby screaming in the background while you're trying to learn algebra.
I'm not particularly bothered that religious communities are struggling at the moment. I am concerned that a generation of children are missing out on an education that most countries consider a fundamental right, and that the most disadvantaged and disaffected children are suffering the most.
Would it be fair to assume religion doesn’t play a central role in your life? It doesn’t in mine, but I have lots of family to whom it does. And they’re hurting.
Practicing ones’ religion is also a fundamental right. For many, education is equally as important as religion.
I am also not religious but I find this sentiment sad as many of us are in the position to help bridge the digital divide.
My spouse is deeply religious though. She has the freedom to pray every day, read her book and sing her songs. There's no need to have collective worship. No religion stipulates this as a requirement. Collective worship is only important with regards to collecting money from a congregation. It's a money making scheme, not a religious prerogative.
My sons, however, needs teachers to educate them. My wife can school them in any faith she desires, but I want someone with a knowledge of Shakespeare, Geometry or Classics to be teaching my children.
There is probably at least a billion people on earth who disagree with you.
Curious if you were raised in American Evangelical Protestant Christianity? It sounds like the kind of thing I hear often from exvangelicals.
> Collective worship is only important with regards to collecting money from a congregation. It's a money making scheme, not a religious prerogative.
Those tv preachers who have gotten filthy rich probably disagree with the necessity for corporate worship to make money. They’re probably seeing the covid lockdowns as a great way to make even more money.
I do strongly agree with you in teaching our children about Shakespeare, geometry, and classics though. We might have different motivations for doing so, but I’m glad to see that even a non-religious person sees a necessity for those things.
This is not true in Islam (the religion of my home country) nor in Christianity. Worship within a community is a critical aspect to the practice of both of those religions. It's necessary for supporting each other, socializing children, etc.
This is off topic, but lack of sufficient bandwidth is only due to government sponsored monopolies such as Verizon and Comcast. There is no reason fiber can’t be extended everywhere. Somehow, the great US of A can get water, gas, sewer, and electrical utilities to a vast majority of homes, but not fiber internet.
Therefore, I don’t think one should accept lack of bandwidth as “acceptable”. It’s only a political consequence of lobbying by entrenched interests. The municipalities that have cleared this political hurdle enjoy access to plentiful bandwidth.
I would be surprised if water and sewer serve a 'vast' majority of homes. Lots of rural and semi-rural homes have wells and septic. Same thing with gas, but more so, rural might have propane tanks; but many homes have all electric, some have electric and heating oil, etc.
But that wasn't really your point. The vast majority of homes (in the US) have electricity, and some phone service, why don't they have fiber?
It's because it costs a lot of money to construct, and there won't be many customers to amortize the costs over. I've got a recent quote to install municipal fiber of about $30k to do 6000 feet of aerial fiber on the right-of-way to get to the pole at the corner of my lot; then about another $20k to get 600 feet from the pole to my building. (Might be able to do better on site with a contractor, will see about quotes on that). The monthly service charge is a little more than local incumbents, but it's not quite apples to apples because the speeds are different and the fiber option has better quality of service and time to repair.
I think electric construction costs are higher than that, but you don't sell a house with no electric service, and it's hard to sell a lot without a plan for service. But either way, it's a hard sell to say for $50k you can get what you have, but a little bit better, and if you built it for the neighborhood, it would be less per house, maybe $30k per house because a lot of the cost is undergrounding to each building... but people wouldn't likely pay that for a little better.
Many sources I searched for say only around 20% of US homes use septic, so I presume the others are connected to sewer systems.
https://www.epa.gov/septic/septic-systems-overview
>It's because it costs a lot of money to construct, and there won't be many customers to amortize the costs over.
It does cost a lot to money to construct, but I highly doubt it's anywhere close to $30k per house for the vast majority of Americans. There are far more people living in urban/suburban environments than rural, and I don't see why it would need to be undergrounded.
The reason the incumbents won't do it is because they already know they are the only option for people for internet. They can charge $50 to $200 per month for shitty internet, and people don't have a choice, so why would they bother investing in infrastructure upgrades. Plus they can sell cable TV on top of internet to double dip, when there is no reason for cable TV to exist anymore.
That's roughly the hookup cost to go from the end of the street to the house in a basic suburban neighborhood.
In the rural parts of the country, just getting power from the poles on the street to a house (with no digging) can cost tens of thousands because the setback are so far. A standard suburban house might have a 20-30ft setback, while a rural home might be 100-200ft from the road.
You also have to deal with properties that are tandem, with narrow strips on the side that allow for extra long driveways that are, in effect, their own roads. Basically a person builds a house on five acres of land, 150ft from the road, then later they sell the land behind them and a house is built some 300+ft further back from their house, with a long driveway servicing the home. This house could easily be 800+ ft from the main road. And this is not rare in the country.
Those houses may only make up 20% of the population, but they are going to make up a very large portion of the costs. A street might have an eighth of the houses per mile with 10x longer setbacks for each house. Plus, travel costs are not insignificant once you start working two+ miles out from a "major" metro.
Verizon and Comcast are not "government sponsored monopolies" (which are illegal under the 1992 Cable Act). And you overlook the fact the U.S. has tremendous difficult building infrastructure of all kinds, not just fiber: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/6/the-american-co....
Water, sewer, gas, electric, etc., infrastructure was either built long ago, before costs exploded, or has been rolled into the very high county infrastructure fees that are common across the U.S. For the most part people don't notice those costs, because they're rolled into the price of new housing, but they run to tens of thousands of dollars. My subdivision did not have public water/sewer when built in the 1920s.[1] However, the county came in and built that infrastructure a few years ago, charging every house $30,000 to be hooked up. If state and local governments were willing to impose those kinds of costs to build fiber, we could have widespread fiber in the U.S. as well.
[1] My house doesn't have gas either. We rely on oil and propane tanks for heating/cooking. However, we have had fiber since 2006, a decade before we got public sewer/water! Thanks to Verizon... I actually had another fiber line installed, from Comcast...
You don't need a computer, you can use your phone, though kids should get their own computer before a smartphone.
Do they need computers? zoom/teams/webex all work on phones/tablets.
My perspective: French, cosy western suburb of Paris, 1GB fiber, computers. Children in excellent schools, with excellent results.
Comes COVID. After the first week where the French education was frantically trying to find a way for courses to be held (they bought in 2019 and earlier "platforms" that were supposed to provide "online teaching" and which failed so miserably that there should be some penal investigations), teachers started to find solutions themselves. Zoom, some French platforms, mail etc.
When our president announced that schools were closed, you could hear a huge yell in all households (including mine) and I let the children celebrate a day or two. And then I ensured that they were working.
I would say that the efficiency was about 1/3 of the one they had at school. They are very good pupils so this will not have any adverse effect - but for parents that cannot turn into all-knowing teachers in a day, this is very difficult.
We saw plenty of children that simply stopped attending the courses. We also saw many teachers that simply stopped showing up.
There is already (at least in France) a large gap in the ability of children to get a good education. Schools are at least trying to narrow it down. With COVID the efforts are vain and there could be huge repercussions for the children.
This also goes the other way round. Last year "end of high-school exam" (baccalauréat) is said to have been given for free. This is not fair to other years, and the pupils that got it may be seen as "the nes that got it for free, so they are nto as good as the others".
I am so happy that my children want to learn on their own and that I do not have to constantly be behind their backs, but this is partly (a big part) the result of the schools they go to, that instill this approach. Others may not be so happy.
This is a key point, many parents simply can't teach material say 10 up because it's been 20-30 years since they did that material or they are not academically minded in the first place.
My partner and I have split it between us as much as we can, I take the math, science and history, she takes English and the other subjects - that mostly works but that's because I am as many of us on here are a geek.
I don't know that many of my friends would understand well enough to teach their kids.
I am very, very lucky with this - some friends called me during the school lockdown to help them because they were completely overwhelmed. As you said their last contact with some of the topics was 30 years ago and they left them behind with relief.
I also love history, so I had patrince to check what they learned in history. Geography was much harder :)
My older son (high school) told me once that he cannot imagine how pupils that do not have really well educated parents can manage in this situation here everyone is basically on their own to learn.
This has gotten him into space and half his non-school related youtube use has been to watch documentaries on space topics - I think learning that you can teach yourself is a crucial lesson that modern schools don't typically emphasise enough - our daily walks have gone from discussions about fortnite to discussions about exo-planets and what their surfaces might be like through to neutron stars and black holes - I'm incredibly proud of his progress, I knew he was bright (he kills it at maths) but I hadn't really realised how bright until I had to teach him.
Next weekend I think we'll watch Interstellar since it covers many of the things he's been asking about and the visuals are engaging enough to hold the attention of a 10yo.
I watched with my children (the youngest one must have been around the age of yours) the movie Apollo 13 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13_(film)). I fast forwarded the first 1/3rd of the movie (the introduction and romantic part that was really boring IMHO) and started when the preparation actually started.
They loved it, and I loved it too - mostly for the extraordinary capacities of these people to calculate/engineer such solutions on the fly in 1970. This is the second time I was watching it and was biting my nails up to the elbow again :)
He could be interested, especially if you pause from time to time to explain what is going on.
I love France.
> This also goes the other way round. Last year "end of high-school exam" (baccalauréat) is said to have been given for free. This is not fair to other years, and the pupils that got it may be seen as "the nes that got it for free, so they are nto as good as the others".
Does it really matter? If it's used to judge peers all mostly from the same year it doesn't matter too much one year was an outlier.
Right before COVID France went though a complete reorganization of the final high school exam. It was a mess when it was announced, and then an uber-mess when everything was changed.
It was supposed to be a year of "testing" but it ended up being a year of free diploma. Teachers are ready to be much more stringent next near and the ones who will pass are already starting to protest.
Universities also said that they would take that exam (the one last year) with less interest - despite having people who worked hard. Another thing is that the marks were supposed to be weighted by the final exam, so pupils were planning accordingly. Finally no more weight and the plans fell short.
Anyway, it is a mass and will be for a few more years probably.
I'd like to hear my local leaders say: "Our community has gotten COVID under control, let's let the kids go back to school."
The schools and education authority are providing people with laptops but there are supply problems for obvious reasons at the moment.
Building better communities is the answer.
Pretty much anyone who was against homeschooling could have told you that yes, home-based education was always biased for the people who had enough resources to compensate for the ineffectiveness of that teaching method, and relied on the children also being intelligent self-starters too. Now that it is more or less forced, or forced "radio schooling" in a way, we are seeing people become suspiciously quiet about the matter.
I am not encountering that sentiment outside of HN. Then again, HN is has also unusually strong sub-community of homeschoolers.
But many other types of people learn better in a structured environment.
And CS is not taught purely by giving you problem set that you try alone. A lot of effort goes into trying to attract children by gamified programming systems or by nice graphics, into exercises that are actually age appropriate and so on.
There is self learning, but there are massive parts of it that are not self learning. And the self learning part is not even the thing that makes programming special. People self learning is not something that only programmers would do.
It's a policy thought up by rich folks, in huge family houses, with good family relations, and inflicted on the rest of us.
I live alone.
I cannot - not will not, but simply cannot - follow rules that mean I have social contact once every week and spend the rest of the time in complete isolation.
A 100% probability of a mental breakdown is far worse than an 0.5% probability of death to me, shrug.
Crushing it in a month was only possible if a controlled, highly acute spread was permitted through a completely isolated low-risk tier.
Lockdowns prevented a more acute spread, and thus increased the duration of the pandemic period, delaying endemic equilibrium.
I followed the rules until it became clear that I was becoming psychotic as a result of extreme isolation and about to snap and hurt myself and others.
To avoid a 100% suicide rate, I will take a 10% death rate. If you're interested in convincing me why I should sacrifice myself for your benefit, I'm all ears.
Hyperbolic, 'holier-than-thou' messaging doesn't address the problem.
Lockdowns were designed to cause, and have caused, the most acute spread to occur in the most marginalized populations, instead of the lowest risk populations.
It has played out precisely as Ioannidis, Gupta, Katz, Baral, and nearly every other decent and compassionate expert warned, from the beginning.
> Lockdowns were designed to cause ... the most acute spread to occur in the most marginalized populations
I didn't say - and do not believe - that they were designed to hurt people. Rather, they were designed in such a way that the modification in acuity is different in different groups. Specifically, lockdowns are not designed to leverage low-risk groups, and are instead designed to leverage privileges which are distributed with profound inequity in society.
And this point is entirely transparent. Look at every supporting document of this concept (none of which existed prior to 2020, by the way). They all, without any exception that has been brought to my attention, presume that the ameliorating effects on the virus are related to staying in homes, reducing human contacts, etc. - things that do not apply to members of our community who are experiencing houselessness, to people who have left college dorms with no place to go other than multigen housing, etc.
They are transparently designed to reduce the acuity of spread by leveraging privileges that these groups don't have. Another way of saying this is that they are designed to cause the most acute spread to occur in these groups.
Consider also that lockdowns - and even the word lockdown - comes from the American prison system. It is part and parcel of the kind of thinking that precipitated the marginalization of these groups in the first place.
I think that capable, reasonable, good people designed this policy, but did so without listening to what the most qualified experts had to say on the subject.
A husband, wife and children living together are surrounded by social contacts at all times.
In the UK, a single person is told that they can select one other person and visit them.
All of their support structures - office chat, therapy, meet ups, the pub, dating, everything else - completely gone and replaced with staring at four walls.
The regulations completely ignore my living situation. In practice it would mean that once a week I end up seeing a friend and the rest of the week I'm totally isolated.
Whether they were explicitly designed to hurt people like me, or whether I just 'fall through the cracks', is mostly irrelevant.
I'm just not doing it because it doesn't work. As I posted above, I tried it and became mentally ill.
It's not a 'hardship' like say, running low on money and having to try to find a job, it's an active legislative attack on my wellbeing and basically all of the escape hatches have been closed.
If building regulations in my area required walls to be built out of jelly, I'd still build them with bricks. It's safer, regardless of what some bureaucrat says.
I sympathize that you absolutely must have physical, in-person contact to remain sane.
The good news is that there are ways to do this and still be safe. For example, we have two families that we're co-sheltering with, who we know are being as safe as we are.
It's important not to conflate "lack of physical contact" with "complete isolation", because that takes away your agency (and your responsibility, since you've expressed a preference for putting others at risk) to improve your situation by being more social in safe ways — online gaming, virtual book clubs, drop-in ambient video calls with co-workers, socially-distanced hiking with friends, etc.
Also, we all need help sometimes! Online therapy can be great.
"For example, we have two families that we're co-sheltering with"
Right, so you're not alone, and these rules don't result in you having 0 social interaction most days.
If I hadn't had the in-person, real contact that I do with friends and family, breaking so-called "rules" to do so, I would have gone postal. Full psychotic break. I was very close, and I am still very close.
> you've expressed a preference for putting others at risk
I don't have a preference for putting others at risk at all; I don't think you realise how offensive a statement that is.
Coronavirus is not the only thing that exists in the universe; for you it may be the #1 most important factor because your other needs are taken care of, that's fine, it's not for everyone.
These policies put me at risk. Telling me to look at screens as a substitute for human interaction puts me at risk. Not just me, but my friends and family, a year in everyone is going mental.
I am preventing myself from losing control of my mind, which would put myself and others at far more risk than even SARS 1 would have.
I'm happy that you have at least some in-person contact with friends and family, and hope you can keep doing that.
Best of luck, friend!
I'll keep that in mind when I'm not able to keep it in mind.
Glad you're having a nice time of it.
If you are hurting from lack of in-person church activity, it’s not the religious aspect you are missing; it’s either the social or communal aspects, or both.
Christianity was originally an entirely private and non-public, non-mass-congregation form of worship. Small gatherings, maybe, but only for instructional purposes, guidance purposes, or other activities; certainly no weekly mass assemblages involving hundreds or thousands.
This doesn’t mean that church gatherings don’t have positive effects. Humans are an extremely social species and most of us need extensive community interaction of some form to promote mental health. It’s just that by highlighting the religion itself, you’re just misattributing those positive effects to the wrong source.
This post says "13 hours ago" but when I do an HN search for it, it says 1 day ago.
I also recall reading many of the comments way earlier than the postrd date/time being shown.
Is this an HN bug? Or am I going crazy?
As an aside, the comments of Ars make me appreciate discussion here. I've rarely seen a place so bigoted and hate-filled as Ars comment threads on a /regular/ basis.