These seeds were sowed when cities cashed in on commercial real estate, pushing residential zoning further and further out of the city. Wake up call: nobody wants to spend longer than they have to on an unpaid, unpredictable commute into the city anymore. So while these downtown businesses are getting 1/3 of the foot traffic that they used to, all the supermarkets and shops a few miles down the road are raking it in.
I used to get the bus to work about 10 years ago because parking in the city became so expensive (I stopped long before Covid hit).
The thing I don't miss is that I got sick every single Winter. All it takes is one inconsiderate person to not cover their mouth and everyone is getting ill. And it happened all the time.
I had a commute time that ranged between one and two hours over that stretch as I'd lived in a couple of different places, but that wasn't even extreme. I knew people with 2+ hour commutes each way which they did for years on end.
I understand there are a lot of people who need a place to work away from their home, but who is going to voluntarily return to an office when they don't need to just to prop up your portfolio and obsolete businesses? Why should they?
It's like the argument that people should support local businesses instead of buying from Amazon. If Amazon is cheaper and more convenient, why would someone buy anything elsewhere? (It's not like those businesses are going to help with your rent or food costs).
I've had funny conversations about why I still wear a good n95 on public transit (planes included). My right-leaning and remarkably well educated parents are incredulous.
A few years ago I thought personal masking didn't really matter. Wow, I was wrong! And not catching bs colds from weirdos on the bus or the grocery store makes it worth it.
Most everyone I knew when I worked in a grocery store basically never got sick, including my dad. He’s get sick once every 4-5 years maybe. People would call in sick, but it would be to miss a day.
Working in a grocery store, especially as a cashier, can be unpleasant to disgusting at times, especially when cash was a bit more common. I think you’re around everything all the time that your immune system tends to beef up a bit.
Conversely, the kids are getting hammered in winter time the last few years after covid after not getting sick between 2020-mid 2021.
I’m not so sure that humans evolved to avoid illness, despite how unpleasant it is.
This comment is an indirect appeal to nature: protecting yourself from exposure to pathogens is better than low level exposure if your intention is to not fall ill. I've seen a number of ill-looking grocery store employees (coughing, sneezing, sniffling, the works) before, during and "after" COVID.
Wearing masks does not compromise one's immune system: it just shields you from exposure to respiratory bugs. Kids are getting hammered because people have relaxed on wearing masks, so they are now more exposed than before.
They might be right about the actual plane ride because the filtration systems on modern (read 20 years old or newer) are really good. Public busses tend to be a disaster for air filtration though, especially in winter when no windows are open. I wish there was some better research/more accessible research on this.
Even if the plane's filtration is good, if the person 3 feet away from you is coughing it's not going to be that good. I'd rather rely on the combination of filtration & a mask. Defense in depth.
Day to day i'm not religious about masking, but for things like public transportation, airplanes, etc I try to always have face protection on.
Pressurized airplanes have air changes per hour in the 12-16 range. That's above the ASHRAE recommended 6-12 air changes per hour for places that may contain viruses. (Obviously, ASHRAE isn't the CDC or healthcare organization directly, but they do know a few things about standards setting for HVAC.) Excellent filtration isn't as relevant when the average air molecule is in the aircraft for only 5-10 minutes.
The studied COVID outbreaks on planes show that this still isn't sufficient. I'm also pretty sure I got sick from the kid sitting directly behind me on the plane when I got influenza.
You can site all the statistics and propaganda in the world about plane ventilation. It clearly isn't enough to prevent viral spread (I don't care about air changes per hour or cfm or anything else, the only endpoint worth discussing is viral spread--I give precisely zero fucks about how fast the air is moving around). I'm using n95s on planes from here on out.
anecdotally, this is marketing bs / wishful thinking.
I've been on a handful of flights in the last 2 years where the air system didn't work at all, and others where the climate control system was otherwise failing (80°F). This is accentuated by stale air when you embark and disembark when the aux generators aren't providing power.
How old were the planes that this happened on? There has definitely been a dramatic improvement over the years. I remember flying in the 90's and pretty uniformly feeling like I needed at least a good face wash, if not a shower after any flight longer than a half hour. Now this only happens when I am unlucky enough to get stuck on an old aircraft (i.e. the original westjet 737's still get me with this). I swear I saw a paper on this being tested showing particle diffusion on some newer crafter being really impressive for how it kept your particles around you until they were removed and replaced with fresh ones fairly quickly but I can't remember enough to find a link to the study to back this statement up.
These flights were in the last 2 years on a top tier (US though) carrier on domestic flights; 1 was a very regional flight, where , as you post, an older plane might expect it -- but if anything, that any planes in a top tier carrier that markets itself as Covid ready are expected to be bad is typical of how much bs this is.
Yep. I went from being sick roughly one week out of every 1-2 months before covid to only getting sick maybe once a year now that I mask in public places, thoroughly wash my hands with soap every time I arrive somewhere, and occasionally wash my phone. Never going back. This whole "train your immune system" thing is BS. Hygiene is important!
I muse to myself, without a shred of evidence, that masks do "train your immune system". Since they are no where near perfect, pathogens do make it though. However, the "initial viral load" is much smaller, giving your body more time to mount an effective defense. So, I would like to believe you are not neglecting your immune system by masking. Rather, by not overloading it, just being less sick than the unmasked, on average. Who knows, it might even train better this way.
> the likelihood of becoming infected may rise with the size of that "dose."
This is correct.
> So a small dose might still prime the immune system even if you don't get sick.
This does not follow.
If you don't get infected following a small dose, you'll have fought it off with your innane or intrinsic defenses. You won't generate any humoral immunity, form T-cells or B-cells or neutralizing antibodies and won't be any better off for the next round with the virus.
> A few years ago I thought personal masking didn't really matter.
I have always looked at Japan as a mixed bag of things that the entire planet will be doing in 10-100 years (yes, even sex bots and other forms of liberal individualism). I am so glad that at least parts of the west have caught onto the practice of masking up when sick, if there were ever a silver lining from the pandemic.
I'm still looking for a solution to the mask straps biting into my ears on planes, but a few hours of discomfort is still way better than being sick when I get to/back from my destination.
Cut the elastic ear loops off of an old mask and tie it to the elastic on a new mask to bridge the gap between the new mask ear elastics (or use a piece of string) so the pressure is on the back of your head.
If you fly a lot, there are also very likely commercial solutions for this.
A well-fitting elastomeric respirator is comfortable and much cheaper than n95s in the long run, but it will get more looks in public. If you're the kind of person who cares about that, just use 3m Auras.
For flying; try cutting the elastic and then tie both sides together behind your head. May make it a bit more snug on your face (which helps prevent your glasses getting so fogged up) but no back of ear pain at least :}
Brownian motion gets impacted if ions repels (as well as attract) at molecular and atomic level. And like pH, it has ions depending on where across the pH spectrum.
Now if they would construct a hydrostatic test using 5.8 to 6.2 pH aerosolizer, then the data becomes more robust.
> The thing I don't miss is that I got sick every single Winter. All it takes is one inconsiderate person to not cover their mouth and everyone is getting ill. And it happened all the time.
Give it a few years without exposure, and you will have very hard time if you have to get exposed again. I did 2 years for remote work with a single day with long exposure each week, after a few years with low exposure.
I then had a kid, it took at least 3 full years once it got to day care for my immunity to get trained back to normal. Middly sick at least 4 months total per year, strong fever and/or weakness 4-5 times per year.
I'm all for limited exposure to dangerous infections, but for the sake of everyone, we have to keep our immunity active to stay healthy, and this happens by getting sick times to times.
Nah, its just what happens when you have a kid. I was exposed all the time commuting to work on public transit. Once my kid got into preschool I was sick for months at a time.
It's hard to explain the near exponential increase in pathogen exposure when 20+ kids are in a room doing the least hygienic things imaginable for 4-8 hours a day.
I rode the subway every day for years and rarely got sick, but a few weeks of a kid in daycare and it was all coming at me at once.
The running joke among my doctor friends is that pediatricians are immune to disease. Sick like a dog for the first couple years but then they become bullet proof.
Immune systems don't weaken from a lack of exposure. It's not a muscle that needs to be worked out. Besides which, your immune system is pretty much constantly at work with relatively benign foreign tissue regardless of whether you're wearing a mask or not.
Some things like the uptick in RSV can be explained by children being initially exposed to RSV a bit later than usual, but for your average adult that's not really relevant.
I think this is based on a misinterpretation of the hygiene hypothesis... exposure to germs helps when you're a child yourself but not after becoming an adult (AFAIA). This is supported by https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/05/all-social-...
I understand I have no authority on the subject, but, aren't we well aware that immunity wears off at different rates depending on the strain ? A lot of sickness only affect the children, and once for their lifetime, but there is at least covid for we know the immunity wears off. Surely there are many others.
edit: I suspect the article only states that life long immunity does not wears off. I don't challenge that at all.
This isn't really as simple as a linear decrease in immunity though - certain tools that your immune system uses like antibodies decrease over time but other tools like T-cell responses are long lasting. Thinking of it in terms of an acute response where you're very strongly protected and a persistent response where you have a slower but still effective protection is a better model.
That's one of those sciencey articles that is only technically correct within a specific context, otherwise why are elderly people advised to get the flu vaccine every year?
There is no scientific basis for this assumption (the idea that you rake in immunity "debt" by not getting sick, leading to worse symptoms /when/ you get sick).
It's not "immunity debt" but rather that immunity for seasonal diseases is not permanent - you lose it if you don't use it, basically, with "refresh period" about the same length as the disease cycle.
I don't have citations handy, it's just something I've seen mentioned here and there some months ago, as a possible explanation why after 2 years of lockdowns, many more people seem to catch the common seasonal diseases.
It seems plausible that the immune system requires stressors to function well, and the absence of stressors may reduce immune system "strength". Selye's general adaptation syndrome seems applicable here as a first approximation. Muscles atrophy from disuse. Why not also immune systems?
The immune system is never dormant. It is constantly engaged. We don't live in a sterile environment, don't eat perfect sterile food, don't breathe perfect air, etc. There are multiple aspects to our immune system, and a lot of them are being stressed daily.
I went to work every day when my kids were small and taught roomsful of college students. I still got poisoned by my little vectors who were a magnet for every virus in the Metro DC area.
> we have to keep our immunity active to stay healthy, and this happens by getting sick times to times
Is going to the grocery store, out to dinner, having friends/family over not enough exposure? Genuinely curious about the science if you need to be around kids (directly or indirectly via co-workers) to build or maintain a "strong immune system".
If anything I'd expect the lack of activity to cause your immune system to be hyper-aware and you'd get less sick. Trade-off is allergies and autoimmune disease.
>If anything I'd expect the lack of activity to cause your immune system to be hyper-aware and you'd get less sick
That's not really how it works afaik. The immune system can only respond quickly and effectively to the things it knows. If you spend 3 years outside society and you come back, your system will be 3 years behind on disease evolution. When you finally do get exposed, you'll have a much stronger immune response because it's an unknown threat.
Compare this to a immune system that has also never seen the latest variant, but has seen the one before -- it'll be much more effective at recognizing and fighting the threat early, and the person might not even notice they were exposed.
> The immune system can only respond quickly and effectively to the things it knows.
Is that true? I'm not sure. Another question is what does it mean to be "known". I'd get a cold or a flu every year. At what point has the virus mutated sufficiently so that I don't have an effective immune response? This is also a great point to get vaccines. Best of both worlds.
>At what point has the virus mutated sufficiently so that I don't have an effective immune response?
I don't think anybody really knows, this is an active area of research. What is known is that, the more similar a virus is to something you already had, the more likely your immune system is to be able to respond quickly enough that you don't show any symptoms and don't even realize you were exposed. And if you do show symptoms, it'll be more likely that they will be much milder than for somebody who wasn't exposed previously to something similar.
I mention the kid only because it was the the main change to sickness exposure. I suspect public transport and office work would have been enough.
Given what we could read about covid, exposure is a combination of length and probability of sharing air with sick people. Public transport is a short exposure with many people, evening with friend, long exposure, but less people. Kid: well for all the sickness they have bad immunity for, and the long length of exposure, you have good chances ti get something that you never had or have no immunity for anymore.
My experience is that I now use public transport every day and I have two kids, I get sick time to times, but much less than a few years ago.
> The thing I don't miss is that I got sick every single Winter. All it takes is one inconsiderate person to not cover their mouth and everyone is getting ill. And it happened all the time.
When I visited Hong Kong in 2008 I was amazed by how many people wore masks (presumably because they were either feeling sick or were worried about getting sick). It's too bad that post-COVID masks have become associated with authoritarian government overreach in many parts of North America.
Local businesses who buy/grow local, hire local, pay local taxes etc benefit the community in ways that Amazon cannot. Local business also support local events/charities/etc. I think there is a lot of long-term economic benefit in decentralization of money and power, apart from social benefits like increasing trust between citizens. Just my view.
> The thing I don't miss is that I got sick every single Winter.
Everybody is always entitled to their values and preferences of course, but it's really hard to see how a chance of getting sick once a year is a worse outcome than a guarantee of missing out on normal society permanently, particularly when you can do everything about as perfectly as you possibly can and still get sick.
It's similar for me and I still get exposed to people in the non-work part of my life, quite a lot actually, I just don't get two crammed train cars full of people twice a day anymore. I'm not as healthy as during quarantine, but I'm mildly sick-ish right now and I used to get knocked out for a week or so around this time before wfh almost every year and be a lot sicker otherwise, so whatever I'm being exposed to right now my immune system seems to be able to handle. I had a few infections in spring and summer when everyone here finally came out of quarantine, so I guess the post-isolation shock is already behind me.
Besides, if "normal society" means miserable unpaid commutes and cold offices with bad cafeteria food and a lot less time and energy for the things in life that really matter, then I'm quite happy to miss out on that. I'm not living in some kind of self-imposed total isolation, if anything I'm more active outside work these days, and my whole life feels a lot healthier (and that sure helps too)
Europe arguably has better public transportation and shorter commutes. I am still seeing this happening (don't have any data to back my claim, just my experience). If I have to guess here is more about the housing cost being the issue. Buying is prohibitive given the average income and most new units are only for rent. In the last 6 years I spent more than 140k CHF in rent (close to Zurich).
Once remote working has started we said screw that and moved further away from downtown. Now we own a nice apartment with a garden (unthinkable before) and go the city only when required.
> Europe arguably has better public transportation and shorter commutes
Mine (Dublin, Ireland) is still about an hour on the tram (for EUR 2) from where I live, so I'm not saying it's perfect, but my manager, in the Atlanta area, is a two-hour drive away from the office. That and he starting meetings at 6AM (because Dublin) makes me support remote working even more for the ATL teams.
I gladly traded the rich cultural life and world-class restaurants for a walkable city and a house with a small park one gate away from the back yard.
Even considering the occasional invasion of the house by a bunch of screaming little 10 yo's who are my daughter's gang (who lives mostly on the same street).
Carr's "The Big Switch" in reverse. Technology ushering in a decentralization effect. And that's fine. Work at home. Communities buy micro reactors, Starlink ready to go. Low carbon produce that doesn't have chemical shit all over it. Maybe testosterone rates go up, maybe cancer rates go down. Probably a good idea all around.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids[1].
I'm clearly biased as the GP, but I think quoting General Ripper is roughly the appropriate response to someone making a throwaway comment about testosterone rates.
The downvoters know the truth. rbanffy, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, rbanffy, __children's_ice_cream__.
You know when fluoridation first began? Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, rbanffy. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
Living in the Bay Area, I really can't afford to live close to my office. I have to drive to Palo Alto from San Jose (or take the train).
Pre-pandemic, my drive averaged 1hr to the office, and 1.5hrs back. So, I'm wasting 2.5 hrs of my life every day... to do the same exact job I do from home (not to mention cost of gas/car maintenance).
I also get more done at home, because I haven't reduced my hours any, but I don't waste time in the break room grabbing coffee and chatting. I don't know what the overall data is, and if I'm just a productive outlier or if that's a general trend.
If I'm ever required to commute again, I 100% view it as a pay decrease.
For a while, I used to commute from Santa Cruz to north San Jose for work. Since then, I absolutely factor my commute into my compensation, and anything more than an hour total commute per day is an additional premium. Factor in how terrible driving has become in the bay area, and I'm of half a mind to begin asking for hazard pay for commuting.
I really love it how even on days where our team is in the office, if just one person can't make it (quite likely) then almost all the meetings are virtual anyway. Sitting in a room together with headphones in zoom meetings! Brilliant. :D
Some conference rooms have good video conferencing facilities, so no headphones in the same room though. But I get your point, it is a pain to commute all the way to be on zoom calls.
Let's say you work from home and make your lunch. Previously you'd buy ready-to-eat lunch. While you still buy ingredients and pay for energy, you don't pay for someone to prepare it and then sell to you, prepare the housing of the eatery and so on. Effectively some GDP was lost. Next, let's say you grow some of your own veggies...
Yes - pre-pandemic, white-collar office parks and big-box retail had already dispersed to the suburbs where I live (Baltimore).
Honestly, remote work allowed us to stay in the city (our preference), if I'd had to keep commuting I don't know if raising my kid would have been workable for us.
Which is funny, because after 2008 it felt like a lot of the bedroom communities / strip malls struggled and went down hill (lack of demand I guess) - and it felt like a whole wave of young people were only wanting to live in the city.
Living in the city is great for young people who have no kids - lots of entertainment options a short walk away. It's noisier/busier/dirtier (EVs will help A LOT with noise and pollution).
Living further out is much nicer when you have kids - more space, more freedom for the kids to move around, more trees for them to climb and places to explore.
I suspect we'll be in that space in about 10 years or so, when being next to a good hospital with excellent geriatric services will be more important than having trees to climb.
> more space, more freedom for the kids to move around, more trees for them to climb and places to explore
Or „nowhere“ as in doing commercialized trendy stuff? Of course, when pop culture is pushing that lifestyle and people are glued to the screens, it ends up as a sad state of affairs.
Honestly, incredibly untrue. Everyone adapts. I grew up in a suburb-y suburb (northern virginia) 4-5 years ago. You bike to the local community center with your friends, you drive once you're 15 back from school, to the movies, to the basketball court. The real benefit is in actually being in proper nature. My backyard had trees, and miles of walking trails, and ponds to fish in just a 5 minute walk from my front door. You can't find that in the middle of NYC. Living in a 'real' suburb is far, far better than living in a city as a tween/teenager.
I grew up in a British suburb. One may not drive in the UK until 17, and the cost of insurance makes that basically impossible for all but the very wealthy. Even with that said they seem better than the suburbs where I live now in the US.
It was frankly so miserable I have resolved never to live in anything even remotely approaching a suburb again - in the UK I’d countenance the idea of living in a village with at least two pubs, but actually live in a city where I can walk to dozens of different events, bars etc every night if I want to and never see a situation where I would accept anything less.
The NYC suburbs are vastly different to suburbs in TX or CA, of course, and many are much more livable simply due to having a train to NYC.
Tween, maybe. It's pretty normalized for families to add [a] car[s] as kids age into driving so in practice affluent 16-year-olds lead pretty independent social lives. And this was the case for my own adolescence back in the early-mid aughts so I imagine now there's both more stuff in the suburbs and more widespread car access for teens.
As an urban father of a three-year-old I'm actually anxious about how much stuff seems to be 21+ or expensive in my city (Baltimore). In principle we're a short electric scooter ride from trendy eateries, coffee shops, theaters, music venues, etc. But my wife is super-scared of crime and traffic so I don't know if this will actually translate into him being more independent than a typical suburban teenager.
Teens live online now. Your youth experience is not the same as that of the youth today. It's generational snobbery to impose a previous generation's preferences on modern youth.
This isn't a response: "living online" is a cultural metaphor for increased use of technology, not a preference w/r/t suburban vs. other living situations.
Last time I checked, teenagers still eat food and socialize in the physical world. It's not a huge reach to understand how suburbs stifle and constrain that (nor has that changed particularly in the last 20 years).
