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Interesting story I feel for the author. However, I think we are prone to hysteria about certain covid symptoms - I and my extended family have all had covid and we can all still smell. A small sample of 10ish people from thanksgiving thru now but these sorts of click bait articles leave many believing covid is commonly very severe (no, even people in their 50s have mild cold symptoms in general) and had a bunch if terrible after effects. I'm mid thirties, over weight and eat ramen noodles for lunch and dinner - I got over covid in a day or two of fever.


Can we just go ahead and admit that the foster program is not superior to the orphanages that it replaced?


I think that in general foster families are better than group homes. The problem is that most children shouldn't be taken away in the first place.


Do you have a lot of personal experience with foster children? Are you speaking from experience?

From my experience, they try to place children with immediate family if at all possible. But I’ve also seen children come from appalling circumstances - with mothers who literally sell or give them to convicted pedophiles, or who witnessed their father attempt to murder their mother in full view of their children. I’m far from thinking the foster care system is perfect, but I’ve seen more than enough to doubt the idea most children should stay with in their homes. I’ve never seen a social worker treat the decision to remove a child from a home flippantly.


I don't have any personal experience with foster children yet.

My partner and I are planning to become foster parents, so I've spent the last two years or so reading a lot about fostering, and we also took a course to prepare us.

My impression is that many cases aren't quite as clear, and it's often hard to say if removing the kids was really the best course of action. I don't think social workers are careless, but they do have to make decisions based on limited information, and they often don't have sufficient alternatives to taking kids away.

But of course, I'm just a random dude commenting on the internet, and maybe I'm wrong. I also live in Austria, so maybe the situation is totally different to the US (the system does work differently). I've also tried to find statistics about foster kids, and it's surprisingly hard to find them.


>The problem is that most children shouldn't be taken away in the first place.

Sure. To be clear though, the state doesn't really take children away for no reason. I'm sure there are isolated incidences, but in general, the kids who end up in the foster care, did not land there because they came from loving stable environments.


Spoken by someone that is hopefully truly ignorant of child welfare.


Everything that I've learned about foster care tells me that removing children from their surroundings is a traumatic event, and should be only a last resort. In many cases, there are a lot of things that can be done instead of just taking kids away.

If there's any research that shows I'm wrong, and that taking troubled kids away from their families is actually the best thing for their development, I'm eager to hear about it.


In many/most jurisdictions, "just taking kids away" is the last straw. If the situation can be remedied with support, periodic social worker visits, and parenting classes, everyone prefers that outcome.

And then the second preferred outcome is finding a caregiver in the extended family.

A distant third is a foster care placement.


Most kids are not taken away from their homes. The exceptions horrible cases.


How do you run A/B to prove this hypothesis?


No. You seem unaware of how bad the old orphanage system was.


https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

No, I've just read a little on the subject.

Obviously comparisons are hard since we dismantled the orphanages in the 50s/early 60s but the best comparisons show orphanages performing favorably. I think people got caught up too much shows and plays about this stuff.


the one (obviously not a statistical sample) person I know who was in an orphanage would remember being beat with a wire brush and disagree.


Does this actually work if you're being paid a salary in USD that wont likely rise with inflation?


Not to be flippant, but it's on you to negotiate better salary terms if that's how you get paid.


Uh, like most people I get around a 5% raise per anum, if inflation is higher than the CPIU estimates I'm treading water, like most people. If you're getting 10% per anum those are very unusual terms even for a high performer


Sure looks like apartheid to me.

The Zionist movement to settle isreal was openly colonialist - many banks and organizations even had 'colonial' in their name before this became unsavory.

In other threads about isreal, you'll see commentors mentioning 'vigour and a sense of pride' this is nationalist pride around a shared identity.

In general, we are pretty (rightly) critical of nationalist colonial regimes. Here we see one that is still in the later stages of colonization and the effects on their subjugated 'others' is hardly surprising.


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