Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk • Hacker News Board

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#371

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:27 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #350

dragonwriter wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the votes of people in certain states being more valuable than those in others is also true of the House and Senate. In fact, the inequity in voting power produced by the Electoral College is a direct consequence of that in the structure of the House and Senate, since the latter is apportioned simply (except for DC) by adding the apportionment of House and Senate seats.

I responded to a similar point by not2b downthread. The following are some additional points I didn't make there. To some extent the inequity you describe can be corrected by forcing particular methods for apportionment that can better prevent gerrymandering, and by increasing the size of the House to reduce the difference between the populations of the least and most populous districts. A certain amount of inequity…

> Another point to make is that the main problem with the Senate and the House has nothing to do with the inequity you describe: it is the simple fact that Congress has very low approval ratings but very high incumbent reelection rates. That means members of Congress are effectively never held accountable for bad policy decisions.

Wrong.

Individual members of Congress tend to have high (often overwhelming) approval in their districts (or states for Senators); members generally do a good job of representing the people they are elected by.

Congress as an institution has low approval rates because people dislike what it does in aggregate, not what the people they have a vote in do. If Congress was more effectively representative—which is a matter of apportionment and electoral system—the aggregate approval would be higher.

This is not only analytically obvious, but borne out by actual results of surveys of public approval of representative democratic governments in general and legislative bodies specifically when compared to measures of effective proportionality of representation.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#372

Post by centerthiz99 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:27 PM UTC

hosh wrote: post #201

cool_dude85 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where you're from, but in many places, "society and government" has not failed people the same way it has in the US. Even within the US there are some places where local and state government have performed much better than places like Florida or NYC. That is to say, the problem is not, conceptually, "society and government", but instead, the American society and American government we have today. Don't give…

It's my conclusion that the system has failed as well, and it comes from things that are intrinsic to the system itself. Our civilization and systems are set up for failure. When "success" and "wealth" is determined by how much resources you can extract from the land and people, and how much control over access to those resources, it incentivized centralization and control over basic necessities. This would be food,…

Centralization? In America?

You mean how the tax authority distributes the work to Intuit and HR Block?

How housing is distributed to private owners, financiers, and realtors?

The problems we’re experiencing are due to the opposite of centralization. Arguments against it are ideological conservatism.

Post office was a model of efficiency and distribution for an org that size until the GOP saddled it with debt.

In fact MOST human need centric social services in the US historically did great work on a dime budget.

And consider how much duplication of effort we get instead. Instead of NOAA sharing accurate weather data, we get Accuweather who takes NOAA data and wraps it in story mode for the innumerate masses who still believe in literal human hierarchy dictated from top down.

Utilitarian centralization of needs can and has in recent history, worked fine.

It’s limbic systems riddled with memes of the past, that can’t express motor agency outside a restricted norm that are the problem.

The concepts themselves are just that.

Connect to the mindset of local and you’ll see central shared effort is how local thinks. It’s where those broader ideas of federal centralization grew from!

Centralization can work. What we have is a terrorist political organization fighting against the end of their ideology in the form of Republicans and Democrats who prefer fealty to the past story they know and read about all day. Not the emerging one thanks to shifts in technology and social agency.

Imagine just getting a slip of paper in the mail with taxes owed?

Or not pricing 5 different package carriers?

This uncentralized waste playing ideology whack a mole is infuriating. It’s to prevent the centralized work habits, to enable authoritarian desire to grift on our work and game our agency.

“If the public were allowed to collectively build agencies that were successful, I might not be a rich important person!”

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#373

Post by bazzert » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:28 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #359

seibelj wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters. Parents choose to send their kids there - if the existing public school was so good, why would they send them somewhere else? It's simply about choice, and sending your own kids to the best possible option. No one would ever deny their own children the best possible education available. It's so clearly about administrators and professionals over the n…

Charter schools compete for the same low funding pool, while only accepting well performing non-SPED students, leaving public schools with less money and a harder (& more expensive) student body. This artificially increases Charter School's performance, and artificially lowers Public School's performance. But this isn't an accident, Charter Schools are designed to de-fund public education for political reasons, and w…

>> while only accepting well performing non-SPED students,

Thats not necessarily true, many (certainly here in MA) charter schools use a blind lottery for admissions.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#374

Post by nickff » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:28 PM UTC

vb6sp6 wrote: post #253

nickff wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want an increase in mask supply, you have to either allow the pricing mechanism to do its job, or force people to make masks. Given the (very popular) laws against price gauging, it seems like the only viable option is to force some companies to manufacture more masks. Production capacity is available, but at a higher cost than is currently economical. All that being said, your second point seems correct to me…

> seems like the only viable option is to force some companies to manufacture more masks This doesn't have to be complicated: We can subsidize masks.

The manufacturer prices would be higher, thus triggering price gouging laws.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by devalgo » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:28 PM UTC

rpiguy wrote: post #163

gremlinsinc wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 800 healthcare workers have died since this began. https://khn.org/news/lost-on-the-frontline-health-care-worke... It takes time and effort to create new ventilators, masks, ppe's, etc... but it takes like 20-30 years to create a new doctor or nurse, they're in limited supply - the more we lose the harder this virus will be to defeat long-term. Likewise the hit to public schools if we lose janitorial, bussing, t…

This is ridiculous fear mongering. There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals. https://datausa.io/profile/naics/hospitals 800/5100000 = .00016 They are therefore three times less likely to die from Covid than the general population. Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open. Twenty times as many children died of the flu last year than from COVID. Deat…

>There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals.

And most of them are wearing full PPE when possible for many hours a day, if anything your numbers point to the effectiveness of masks.

>Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open.

I really don't understand your point of view at all. The US had more cases yesterday than the entire EU combined. We had roughly 1/3 of Germany's total cases over the past 4 months in a single day. How can you actually point to them and think we can do the same things they're doing here in the US?

The US has bungled it's response so badly it boggles the mind. We have by far the most cases and deaths and even on a per capita basis we have by far the most cases and deaths in the developed world and more than most of the developing world. The idea that we should just open up and let potentially thousands of kids, tens of thousands of their parents countless others die so they can sit in a classroom and have a blue haired liberal arts major blather at them for 8 hours a day is simply ridiculous.

>Death rates are not surging in proportion to cases.

Deaths have a 4-6 week lag and are steadily increasing, at the same time a larger fraction of cases are young people(who are less likely to die) flouting the rules and getting infected in large numbers at bars and social events.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by DenisM » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:28 PM UTC

ciarannolan wrote: post #343

DenisM wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The federal government is worse than useless, The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. The only exception to that is the civil rights (Brown v. Board of Education) and it's quite limited in scope. COVID is certainly out of scope. The presidential talk about it is just that - talk. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/08/when-it-comes-educ...

>The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. It's possible that GP was referring to the current federal government in general re: Covid-19, not specifically their jurisdiction over education. And in that sense they're correct: the current leadership in the US is a disaster and "worse than useless".

It's the same deal tho - the federal government has no jurisdiction over the healthcare system either. The Obamacare, if you recall, in large part hinged on a "tax" created just for this purpose because taxation is the purview of the fed, which was a hack.

And even if Trump issued a "mask mandate" on the first day, for example, who is to enforce it? The FBI?

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#377

Post by greesil » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #304

not2b wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this is a consequence of ideologies that have become popular in the US both in politics and in business. Having government direct a mobilization is not acceptable. A mandate that people wear masks is not acceptable. Having manufacturing capacity to make low-value products in large numbers in the US is bad business when poorer countries can do it for less. Having spare inventory is bad, because just-in-time man…

> Now, all of this could be turned around quickly with good leadership that could rally the country behind a cause, but we chose someone who... Were all of these issues nonexistent under prior administrations? Or, as for turning it around, are you asserting that Clinton both could have and would have done so? If so, how do you know this?

Interdimensional cable. You can't prove that I don't have it.

Ask yourself this, could the current administration's response have been better given what was known at the time? If the answer is emphatically yes, then perhaps another person is better suited for the job.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#378

Post by mindslight » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #333

MattGaiser wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even on the outside, it seems like pushing kids back into the classroom is poorly thought out. I can't imagine the shitshow it must seem like on the inside.

The problem is, remote education has been a complete disaster. I know a few teachers. Apparently their students found out that the state was unwilling to hold anyone back a year during the pandemic, they shared this information with each other, and now a substantial amount of them are not doing any work. In some classes, more than half the students are permanently absent! Either their parents don't know, or don't car…

The actual solution is to control the propagation of the virus throughout society, which for the most part still has yet to be done. We're going to continue to have the same poor options we had in March until this is actually done.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#379

Post by aaomidi » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

skrowl wrote: post #221

tathougies wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public schools have failed students, especially minorities. Good

I wish we had decent charter school options where I live. I bet A LOT of parents have this same wish.

Charter schools take funding that was made by the public for the public and decide to do whatever they want from it.

Charter schools are also not required to provide adequate support for children that need extra accommodation.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by Kapura » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #332

Kapura wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's in Colorado. The teachers' union agreed to a pay cut & freeze during the Bush financial crisis; pay had had only started to rise again a few years ago. This is somewhat of a digression, but the extremely low rate of teacher pay (for a job that requires a Master's degree) limits the pool of available teachers greatly. The people taking these jobs typically must have some other way of supporting their family; eit…

> the extremely low rate of teacher pay (for a job that requires a Master's degree) limits the pool of available teachers greatly. Teacher pay is not extremely low. The median teacher salary is usually pretty close to the median salary for the state. Plus they get good benefits, a pension, and much more time off than other jobs. It's a solid middle class life.

ok thank you for explaining my family's lived experience to me, the person whose family's lived experience it is. Maybe later you could swing by and tell me if I'm finding the sun hot or not.