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Jehannum
Puts the "pro" in procrastination
It's been really frustrating watching my kids struggle not with the material, but the constraints of the medium and the lack of socialization.
They're both doing really poorly where they should easily outpace.
no, i get it man, shit sucks. Noones saying zoom school works in any way. Theres no scenario where we win across the board, you're trading mental health for physical health functionally.
And imagine how it is for the kid that lives in the bronx with 5 siblings, and is lucky if they have one computer at home. There is going to be vast societal fallout in low-income families that just didnt have internet or computer to begin with, so functionally their kids just dont get to go to school, even shitty zoom school.
surprisingly, my son has been thriving with school from home (grade 9). His marks are all way up. They only focus on one class at a time, which has been super helpful for an ADHD kid, and he's less timid to message the teacher than he would be asking in person. Socially it hasn't been great, but the kids going to in-person to class have had to adjust from in-person, to modified online and back and forth. His has been stable.
If i were king of the world, or at least the US for a day, I would just shut the whole damn country down for 2 months. Freeze all mortgages and leases so the businesses dont keep having to pay out, without income coming in. Vaccinate all the essential workers (grocery, medical, etc), Set up a rationing ticket system if you have to like in WWII.
Of course this is a zero'th-order concept thats fraught with all kinds of peril, but drastic immediate action.
Of course this is a zero'th-order concept thats fraught with all kinds of peril, but drastic immediate action.
Jehannum
Puts the "pro" in procrastination
There was a really decent proposal that would have worked for my school district that came from the wrong person (politically).
The kids stay in small cohorts and do half their courses one semester (doubling the class length), then switch over and stay in the small cohorts and do the other half of their courses the next semester.
That would have been fine, provided the teachers stayed socially distant.
I'm not saying that it's tenable _right now_ to go all the way back to 2019, but certainly there are hybrid alternatives that keep contact low-ish, and yet allow the kids to get out from behind screens.
Jehannum
Puts the "pro" in procrastination
It also certainly doesn't address the fact that my Governor's red/green/yellow system basically makes every metro area "red" (no schools open, no indoor dining, 25% capacity at retail stores, no public gatherings, etc) until we're at 100% vaccination rates.
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it would only work in a dictatorship where you could realistically shoot people breaking the rules.
people are too selfish about "mah rights"
i dont have much sympathy for restaurants and stores. Delivery and ecommerce. Adapt or die. Have the govt assist by freezing lease payments.
Jehannum
Puts the "pro" in procrastination
That's well and good, except for the fact that unless you're a fed here, you're a retail worker, and retail workers are getting fucked but hard by that.
Jehannum
Puts the "pro" in procrastination
...and all the big-box stores around here aren't even counting for attendance anymore, which means that the red/yellow/green restrictions are basically all for show.
service industry people are suffering the most, I think. Wait staff, barbers/hairstylists, etc - all shut down here. Hard to transition that stuff at the moment
i obviously am talking out of my ass, but I would think there can be jobs for all those people doing shelf pulls, gathering orders, and delivering those orders for retail. Restaurants might take a bigger hit as i dont know all the servers could be delivery people
Jehannum
Puts the "pro" in procrastination
pushing people back into the gig economy of instacart and uber eats isn't tenable when there's no social safety net.
I'm not gonna go all "the cure can't be worse than the disease", but there's certainly more of a compromise that can be handled at the local and county level based on the risk people are willing to assume rather than all-encompassing health orders based on strategies from other states with much, much higher population density in metropolitan areas than exist here.
gig economy has its own problems, lots of them. I wouldnt advocate for that, id say properly salary or hourly based roles, just as they had in their non-covid store positiions
This is somewhat anecdotal, but there have been absolutely zero superspreading events in our county, which is one of the largest school systems in the country. For reasons that I haven't seen backed up by science yet, spread rates are extremely low.
That stuff doesn't just happen with the magic hand...
We were *just* listening to a podcast with Andrew Yang about an hour ago talking about all the manufacturing jobs that automation killed. According to him, these are the facts:
* 4M were put out of work
* 50% of them never returned to the workforce
* A huge number of them ended up going on disability
* Not working = depression, alcoholism, opiate addiction, etc
* The Federal retooling programs statistically work for between 0-15% of people
* Almost no one qualifies for these reeducation programs
So as it turns out, factory workers can't just go back to school to be software engineers to manage the automation.
Man, I really hate the idea of UBI, but fuck does he make some great arguments. Alaska is somewhat of a goodexample. Yes, COL is high and alcohol/drug abuse is rampant, but imho that might be more to do with being so isolated. My biggest concern was inflation, which he instantly addressed as a fallacy.
Dudes running to be mayor of NYC. If he could make UBI work there, it would work anywhere.
The point of UBI is not to give someone a slush fund that allows them to laze around and do nothing all day. Its to give them a reasonable base, such that they dont have to work two jobs just to survive.