Avram in MD

Always_Ask_Questions,

“authorities dared to inconvenience your lifestyle”

Oooh, you’re teaching a masterclass in gaslighting and emotional invalidation. If you think the pandemic response was merely an inconvenience for most people, then the only person who thinks we reside on the same planet is Avi Loeb over at Harvard.

Yserbius123,

“There are problems in every frum community. Most of them admit it and have long discussions regarding how to fix them.”

This is entirely and sadly untrue. N0mesorah has been criticizing your fictitious descriptions of Lakewood, and I’m here to call out your equally fictitious descriptions of MO communities.

“But there are communities that have very blatant open issues that are so big they affect people outside those communities.”

Whatever.

“And people are screaming at them to fix it, but they adamantly refuse to acknowledge that there’s even an issue.”

Hmm, maybe “people” can take a break from bashing “Lakewood” and have some long discussions regarding how to fix this. Maybe “Lakewood” people don’t like being hated on and misrepresented. Maybe they see your community’s so-called “solutions” and don’t like them, or don’t see them as solutions at all. Maybe they don’t see things in your community as wonderfully as you make them out to be, and they don’t like the hypocrisy of “people” wagging a finger at them while their own house burns. Maybe they even have young musmachim coming into your community offering Torah learning to disaffected young people, because they realize that we’re all Jews.

ujm,

“If driving customs are based on local minhagim, how is anyone not from the area to know what the local driving customs are”

There’s no way to know, and it’s almost impossible for a driver in an unfamiliar area to completely “go with the flow” and not cause any annoyance. But there are some broad generalizations that can be made:
1. Nowhere else in the US is driving quite like it is in the NYC metro. So NYers should in general when outside of the NYC metro should give extra space between their vehicle than others (perceived as aggressive), try to avoid changing lanes into tight spaces (perceived as cutting off), avoid quick maneuvers like fast and sudden U-turns (perceived as scary), and accept the fact that OOTers have a slightly slower reaction speed to light changes (they’re not intentionally trying to harm you).
2. Driving is a bit more NY-like inside big Northern cities and parts of South FL (DC, Baltimore, Philly, Boston, Chicago, Miami), but less so in bigger Southern cities (Orlando, Atlanta, St. Louis).
3. For OOT drivers going into NYC, stay alert and even-keeled, and say some tehillim. Short honks are more like communication than rudeness (hey I’m here, ooh guess what the light’s green!). And pedestrians in NYC can chew off metal bumpers.

Always_Ask_Questions,

“it is interesting why frumer Yidden drive similar to other MY-ers”

You already answered your question above: “You are supposed to follow local minhagim“. Based on your story, a failure to do so results in a good loud honking.

“One trick my kids and I are using is counting how much hesed you do during a trip, letting people inside the lane, make a hard turn, etc. If you remember about it, you can consistently do it at least 2-3 times per trip. “

So why not do this in a black hat and make a kiddush Hashem?

Note that the nuances of driving are complex. For example, when at a 4-way stop, it’s first come first go. If you decide to be Mr. Gracious Chosid Shoteh and let others go ahead of you, it causes frustration, as you are doing something the other drivers do not expect, which increases uncertainty (uhh why aren’t you going fella?). Safe driving requires a high level of decisiveness, so your movements are predictable. Also, if you allow kol haolam kulo to merge in front of you, that’s fine for you, but who permitted you to sentence the driver behind you to a delay?

I understand what you’re saying and I agree, I really do. I also try to let people in if I see them signalling, etc. But outside of flagrant rudeness (bad gestures or yelling, sustained honking, dangerous maneuvers that force you to take evasive action), it’s probably better for the blood pressure to work on assuming the other driver wasn’t deliberately trying to be rude than to declare him a boor. Many times when I’ve “cut someone off”, it wasn’t deliberate, and if I had a two-way radio, I’d say “oops, sorry about that.”

Always_Ask_Questions,

“when someone in a black 👒 cuts me off on th street, I point it out to the kids that this is hopefully just an am Haaretz in a hat and they shouldn’t think that talmidei chachomim drive like that.”

Surely there are nicer things you can tell your kids. NYC driving is a completely different world than OOT driving. My grandfather would drive very differently in NY compared to OOT. I asked him about this, and he said, “this is my OOT driving, and this is my NY driving!” Perhaps your talmid chacham fellow motorist had little experience with OOT driving minhagim and thought you had fallen asleep due to your 0.5 second delay and lackluster effort on the gas pedal. Maybe you can provide a service to the Jewish people by producing informational pamphlets about OOT driving. Some suggested titles: “Thanks for the honking heads up, but I am aware the light turned green a second ago, let me finish this email”, “Here in Podunkville personal space means 1 car in a lane at a time”, or “If you make me brake I’ll be sad”.

“I can’t though plant this thought into other drivers’ heads”

You have made my argument for me! You must put on a black hat and jacket, and drive super slow in the left lane, allowing everyone in, waving and smiling. Change those perceptions!

Always_Ask_Questions,

“So – for us – wearing a black hat means dressing like a Talmid Chacham, Slobodka Rosh Yeshiva, etc – and the requirement is to behave accordingly, which is a tall order, and we both humbly do not pretend.”

This is a cop-out. Dress the part then strive to live it. When I’m in the grocery store in a white shirt and black pants, the only people who might confuse me for a rabbi are non-Jews or non-frum Jews. And if they call me rabbi I can correct them. And if they don’t call me rabbi, who cares? They don’t need me to pasken complicated shailos for them, they need a smile, hello, and occasionally to know what aisle the graham crackers are in.

huju,

“I am too tired to fully respond to your comment, so for now, I will say that you have have completely missed the point. Plastic bags are not proper clothing for anyone.”

He did not miss your point. He was asking a question on a statement you made that happens to be incorrect. I have spoken to several hatters who told me that many black felt hats will indeed be damaged by rain and must be protected. Some hats, such as Borsalinos, are claimed to be water resistant. I get from the context that you don’t like plastic bags on the hats, but rather than advising people to damage their hats in order to satisfy your sartorial sensibilities, you could have recommended other means, such as a specially designed raincoat (shaynecoat) or a rain hat, and people would not have “missed the point.”

DovidBT,

“Can tefillin that’s kept in a car get damaged due to hot temperatures during the daytime?”

Most definitely. Heat is one of the worst things for tefillin.

“Does placing them in an insulated container avoid or reduce the problem?”

It can, if the insulation is sufficient to keep the temperature inside the container down.

“If an ice pack is also in the container, will that make it worse by causing condensation?”

An ice pack might be a good idea, but the tefillin should be contained in a waterproof bag so the ice pack stays separate.

Dr. Pepper,

Thanks for those details. I didn’t understand previously how parts of the ACA were favoring large companies at the expense of smaller, and I concur with AAQ’s take as well.

“25% of all claims being preventable amounts to hundreds of billions of Dollars. That’s huge. I see that number sky rocketing if all health care becomes free- people will take more risks knowing that it won’t financially cost them anything”

I do think the study cast too wide of a net when defining “preventable”, but yes human behavior does add to the cost. Projects meant for humans should take human behavior into account. If someone built a stairway that had constant bottlenecks, and they complained and said “if only the crowds did this this and that things would move swiftly!” I’m going to blame the stairway builder for poor design before I blame the people for being people.

“yet that teacher is making $100,000 and you take a teacher from a nearby Yeshiva with the same years of experience, training and certification who’s pulling in $50,000 a year”

In my state (one of the most politically “blue” in the US), the median income of a public school teacher is around $58,000 a year. The 90th percentile (meaning only 10% of teachers make this amount or more) is around $82,000 a year.

“This may not sound like a big deal to you”

Actually, it does.

Dr. Pepper,

“they created a system that was mathematically guaranteed to fail and the states need to follow it.”

We’re over a decade into the ACA, are we still on a trajectory to fail? What does the failure look like?

“I got to see lots of this stuff first hand during the year that I worked in the ACA and it was pathetic to think that someone actually thought it would work. Most of the stuff is too complicated to discuss here”

Try us. I want to know what you saw, and can handle some complexity and ask follow-up questions if I don’t understand. I don’t find the appeal to authority argument to be convincing.

“take a look at the Risk Corridor 2014 payments catastrophe to begin getting an idea. (In short, despite promising that it’ll be paid out at 100% it was paid out at only 12.6% and many companies were shut down because of that.)”

As far as I’m aware, the risk corridor payments only existed in the first couple of years of the ACA to stabilize the markets and prevent companies from jacking up premiums in response to the uncertainty. Is that not the case? I agree that the initial rollout of the ACA was a debacle (except apparently in Connecticut).

“Public Schools (the ones that I’m referring to) are a huge disaster as they waste hundreds of billions of Dollars and have little to nothing to show for it.”

Exhibit A: NYC. Maskim.

“I believe that the same will be true if the healthcare system turns into a single payer system. In short- I was referring to the hundreds of billions of Dollars that will be wasted- regardless of who pays for it or how it’s paid.”

Do you see Medicare as a big pile of waste?

“I consider a huge salary to include those who work for unions and are getting paid much more than they would be getting if they were paid the going rate- especially the public-school teachers that have nothing to show for it.”

What’s the going rate for a teacher?

“Regardless of who is at blame, who caused it, weather you believe it or not or the amount spent on each age group- the point is that hundreds of billions of Dollars is wasted every year on preventable claims. That number needs to come down before a single payer system can work.”

A Lancet study using 84 supposedly preventable risk factors determined that preventable illness accounted for just over a quarter of the health costs in the U.S. That is indeed very high, but how does it make a single payer system impossible? Medicare already fields perhaps the majority of these costs, as things like heart disease, diabetes, emphysema, and cancer tend to strike more frequently later in life. These are the heavy hitters in healthcare costs, not Billy Bob having to go back to the doctor because he didn’t finish his entire 5 day course of antibiotics.

Now, I sound like I am advocating strongly for a government run single payer health insurance in the U.S. In reality, I am really not sure that I’d support one. But not because of the costs. I worry more about coercion, reduced options, and a UK NHS style breakdowns of service.

Dr. Pepper,

“you’re advocating for the US Government, who failed miserably at the ACA, to be in charge of a single payer system. You need to explain why you think the same US Government could successfully run something of a much larger magnitude.”

So the US Government does not “run” the ACA. The ACA is a conglomeration of laws that primarily expanded eligibility for Medicaid, forbade insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and mandated individuals to have medical insurance coverage. You might be thinking of the disastrous rollout of the online individual insurance marketplaces. Agreed that was truly bad. The blame can be spread around (some states set up their own awful exchanges, others relied on the Federal Government’s), but it was a failure to coordinate resources, share knowledge, and test systems before going live. A slight limmud zechus is that these state and Federal agencies had not put something together like that before, whereas Medicare has been a humming beast for decades.

“I mentioned a few times that a single payer system will turn into a calamity the size of the public school disaster.”

Public schools are not a single payer entity. The majority of their governance comes from the local and state levels of government.

“All this while the teachers (some of them who have no business being around children but are protected by the powerful unions) are bringing in huge salaries.”

I’d hate to see what you consider a meager salary.

“With a single payer free health care for all, you’re going to have people who don’t take care of their (or their kids’) health, don’t follow doctors directions and end up costing the system billions of Dollars in unnecessary expenses while clogging up doctors’ offices, hospitals and emergency rooms.”

…

“As mentioned previously, Medicare works because it’s for a more responsible part of the population”

So blaming the citizenry for the sorry state of affairs may feel good (politicians used to not dare try it, but now they love to so long as they can tar their targets with the opposite political affiliation), but it’s just simply not true. Health care expenditures are higher for young children, then drop quite low through early adulthood (with higher expenses for childbearing women), and then increase along an exponential curve once you get older. Per HHS statistics, your superior responsible adults aged 65+ accrue an annual average of more than $11,000 per year, vs. near $3000 per year for the horrible no good rotten 18-44 age group (which even includes most of those childbearing women getting harassed into expensive hospital interventions).

n0mesorah,

“But if somebody would just put out alerts without really knowing what is behind them, we absolutely should ding them for not having the clarity of the Star-K’s approach. This is my opinion. You can disagree with me on this scenario as well as the smartphones.”

I think how I see the scenario is closer to when laypeople forward on or talk about the Star-K alerts they received, not laypeople developing the alerts themselves. I don’t think, for example, that the technology asifa a number of years ago was done haphazardly.

“The fellow responded, the longer I keep you here the better. Because when you leave beis medrash, you”ll be looking at your smartphone”

Was this fellow a teenager or young adult? What he did sounds immature, or more likely in jest.

“What bothers me is that a lot of people think that there is some truth to the retort.”

I don’t think so, especially in the mature adult world.

“It still seems like it is presented backwards to Yeshiva Bachurim”

This seems like a salient point.

Always_Ask_Questions,

“Our times seems to be the first in history where [some] Jews are claiming that their mesorah is to be willfully ignorant.”

This is motzi shem ra.

n0mesorah,

“I think that saying, I got rid of my smartphone is only half of a success story. I got rid of my phone and am smore available for my family, I got rid of my phone and am learning more, I got rid of my phone and my davening improved, is something I can get behind.”

Ooh, I think maybe we’ve distilled the discussion down to the fundamental disagreement. I think if someone gives up their smartphone or puts safeguards onto it because of Hashem – i.e., out of a desire to avoid sinning, that in itself is a tremendous accomplishment. A single Jew standing up to the armies of the tech companies who are besieging his home, and winning against them all. I don’t think I’m exaggerating – in pirkei avos we learn אֵיזֶהוּ גִבּוֹר, הַכּוֹבֵשׁ אֶת יִצְרוֹ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: טוֹב אֶֽרֶךְ אַפַּֽיִם מִגִּבּוֹר, וּמוֹשֵׁל בְּרוּחוֹ מִלֹּכֵד עִיר! Of course we should never rest on our laurels, and should put the newfound free time away from the devices into proper use, but that’s a separate discussion.

“But the populism of the movement is just emphasizing getting rid of the smartphone.”

I’m still not clear on what “the movement” is, but so what? Should we ding the kashrus alerts from the Star-K because they only tell us to avoid mislabeled product X and don’t also exhort us to learn more and spend quality time with our children? I think it’s a double standard you’re applying to “the movement” because you don’t like their message.

anonymous Jew,

“AAQ, whatever respect I had for you is gone. Mental health is no joke, and, because of attitudes like yours, people can be reluctant to get help for themselves or a child.”

I’m not 100% sure if he was joking or not, I mean, he wrote something in a joking way but he may have been serious with his point. I know someone who had a certain type of recurring hear arrhythmia that was misdiagnosed as panic/anxiety attacks (she was usually panicking when the events occurred – because they were scary! and were back to a tachycardic normal sinus rhythm by the time she was seen), until one day when her heart was clocking north of 230bpm and would not slow down, the paramedics got leads on her and a strip showing the arrhythmia. While managing the condition, she found that some foods could trigger the arrhythmia.

Yserbius123,

“In the communities that essentially tell children that if they can’t learn for 10 hours a day and do nothing else for most of their lives that they are failures, kids who can’t do that often act out.”

Ooooh, if we’re just gonna make stuff up about other Jews, can I join too? I thought we were trying to have an honest debate, but we could have such fun instead!

“And we wonder why there is so much teen violence.”

lolol teen violence only exists in Lakewood and is the fault of those horrible anti-vaxxers. I think you’ve hit all the high notes on the people you hate. Do you feel better now? Or should we blame the national debt, ozone hole, decline of morality, and growing old on them too?

n0mesorah,

“They were told things like your not coming on time to seder so we are giving your chavrusa away. Unless you sign the paper.”

Nope. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Something seems very off with this description at first blush, and I would love to hear the other side’s perspective of the conversation. Repeatedly coming late to the learning seder harms one’s chavrusa, so giving him away may well be the right call in those circumstances. And tying in some sort of evil smartphone blackmail angle seems like an attempt to whitewash irresponsible behavior.

Yserbius123,

“different hashkafas have different things that put their teens at risk and have to put out different ways of helping them.”

I’m not sure that I agree with this – can you be more specific?

“In many MO communities, teens become too enamored with the dark sides of secular society so they have organizations like NCSY to steer them on the right path. In some communities, however, they close their ears and say “La la la can’t hear you learn more Torah!” instead of addressing the 800 pound gorilla.”

I don’t think this is true or fair. Sometimes NCSY helps a teen connect to Yiddishkeit and steer him away from trouble. Sometimes it does not. Should an outsider to the MO community then conclude from those not helped that the MO community is doing nothing to help these troubled teens? There’s some troubled teens in my community who disrupted a NCSY social party-type event to the point that they were told to leave and (allegedly) police were called. I’ve seen those same teens attending evening youth-focused learning programs offered by a local kollel and not disrupting it. I think the big difference was in the atmosphere – one was a swarm of teens plus 1 or 2 adults there to shout a dvar Torah, and one was a beis medrash with many adults and some teens mixed in attending a shiur. Is the NCSY route really superior to the derided “learn more Torah”? And as Gadolhadorah noted earlier, studies, outlets, and activities are not sufficient to really help the underlying problems these kids are having.

n0mesorah,

“Some people in chinuch dropped their own nuanced hands off approach when it came to yeshiva bachurim and their phones.”

Hands off is not the same thing as nuanced. And in your previous post you wrote essentially the same thing, but attributing it to brainwashing from an overarching anti-technology movement. Maybe the menahel or yeshiva staff decided to give smartphones the boot after witnessing firsthand how disruptive they were, or after parents pulled their kids out because other kids were showing them inappropriate images.

“The fall out -even today- is tremendous. The yeshiva staff did not see anything from the angle of the student body. They were continually at war with some talmidim.”

You can’t really have it both ways – arguing on the one hand that the specter of smartphone addiction is overblown, but then catastrophizing the impact of their removal from the Yeshiva.

“2) The boys that were not committing to permanently giving up their phone, had no one to talk to. Half the yeshiva was put on a pedestal for not having a phone”

Were they banned, or were they not? This makes it seem like they were not banned, but rather those who opted to keep their phones were treated differently?

“and overlooked them for everything.”

What does this mean?

“3) Bachurim had to get rid of their phones within a week. They had to figure out if they should cancel or not. They had to put all their info somewhere else. Some had to figure out new travel arrangements. It disrupted a lot of the routine.”

These are reasonable points. It sounds like the Yeshiva should have been more judicious with the timing of the ban; maybe instituting it bein hazmanim to give students more time to adjust or decide what to do, and providing more resources and support for the logistical impacts of the policy. But these impacts are different than the vague and ominous “fallout” you’re referring to above.

“And it encouraged face to face encounters that were not desirable.”

Please explain.

Always_Ask_Questions,

“It’s the Phone, Stupid: Mobiles and Murder Lena Edlund and Cecilia Machado
NBER Working Paper No. 25883 May 2019
New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago”

Yes, I already mentioned finding this paper above. But it says nothing about smartphone distractions being the potential cause of the link between cell phones and decreasing murder rates. The rates decreased starting in the late 1990s, which was a decade before Steve Jobs walked on stage. The study authors posit that the decreased murder rate was due to cell phones changing the illegal drug economy from street corner dealing to pre-arranged meet-ups, thus reducing the incidence of turf wars. And the Brazil paper seems to refer to a change in the number of phone number digits, not the introduction of cell phones.

Always_Ask_Questions,

“I think it is less understood that the opposite – focusing on miracles and special moments, while denying the logic – and laws – of the world that Hashem created – is equally bad – and is way more widespread in our communities.”

Explain how it is equally bad.

“At the same time, Einstein’s physics is a significant part of theory that allows for Creation … So, Einstein and other 20th century scientists helped us to finally
win the argument”

Yet Einstein was later than his colleagues to the Big Bang party. He initially introduced the “cosmological constant” (lamda) as a theoretical opposing force to gravitation in 1917 (otherwise, the universe would collapse), and had a hard time letting go of the conception that the universe was static, even as late as 1931. He did think through the evidence and accepted the concept of a dynamic and expanding universe, and was able to drop lambda from his equations, but I think it’s incorrect to suggest that he was trying to prove a creation of the universe through his theories of relativity. Interestingly, lamba has made a comeback with more recent observations that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

n0mesorah,

“I feel the movement as a whole is misguided. It produces a lot of of very public messaging. The main practical purpose of all their media is avoiding technology. There should be more about what is good discipline. Especially when it comes to using our free time.”

I think the so-called “movement as a whole” disagrees with you on this. I think they’d argue that “good discipline” as you define it is tantamount to fighting a forest fire with a water pistol, and that not purchasing a smartphone at all or filtering a smartphone’s content is good discipline. This post was a recapitulation of our discussion, so we’re now going in circles. But re-reading some posts above, I have a couple more comments:

“It is obvious to the phone addict that s/he has way too much screen time.”

I don’t think that this is true. Some people are painfully aware that they spend too much time on their phones, but their attempts to limit screen time are unsuccessful. What would you tell these people? That they’re failures and need to try harder? That advice would probably cause them to become depressed. Others are completely unaware of how much screen time they use, and get shocked when they view the statistics.

Also – smartphone issues and bitul zman issues are not equivalent as you make them out to be. Sure a Venn diagram would feature some overlap (the guy ignoring his kids and tapping on a phone in his living room in 2023 may have been the guy with his nose in the newspaper or watching TV in 1983), but this is not the sole issue with smartphones. And would you seriously contend that smartphones don’t seriously exacerbate the bitul zman issue? 3.5 hours a day on average.

WolfishMusings,

“I ended up fasting most of the day (until about 3:30PM)”

Why?

Always_Ask_Questions,

“Note that google et al personalize your search results based on your history (middah k’neged middah, or they are letting you go where you choose to)…”

They do a lot more than that.

“for some reason, I can’t find all these nasty things people here are saying are out there on Internets – what I search for, I got scientific papers as results. (or you can search scholar google com or books google com to begin with)”

Can you use your helige search prowess to find the paper you’re referencing and give me some keywords to find it?

n0mesorah,

“I know a few kids who gave up their phones and now spend their days looking for drugs, alcohol, or trouble. . But that is not really my point.”

Do you know what motivated them to give up their phones?

“I have come across a whole bunch of people who think it is terribly important for me to get rid of my smartphone without knowing what I do with my time.”

One of my relatives is thoroughly secular, but has the most impressive smartphone discipline I’ve ever seen. She does not check it, but only picks it up when she wants to do something like send a message. Perhaps you are also one of those people with the innate ability to resist the pull. But this is an exception rather than the rule.

I’m also curious about these interactions that you have with the whole bunch of people. Do they accost you and ask if you have a smartphone out of the blue? Do you spend your time with people who don’t like smartphones and pull yours out in front of them? Do you engage in debates with them? I don’t fully understand why smartphones are so front and center.

“When I confront them with what do they do all day, their answer boils down to not having a smartphone.”

Not that they are being polite either, but you are hitting them with whataboutisms, so I imagine they’d get defensive.

“They will openly say, a yeshiva bachur who barely learns but doesn’t have a phone, is better than a serious masmid that has the internet in his pocket.”

They feel an unfiltered smartphone is a spiritual danger, so I’m not surprised by this statement. This may be a clumsy analogy, but how they’re potentially viewing it is: who’s likelier to live a longer life: the guy who sits all day and doesn’t exercise, or the guy who works out 5 days a week, eats a paleo diet, but keeps a rod of plutonium in his pocket?

“My point is that the anti smartphone movement is misguided.”

I wouldn’t judge a “movement” based on some interactions with individuals.