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I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

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Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#591

Post by discardedrefuse »

lvl100 wrote: post #508
discardedrefuse wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kids have been getting robbed of a proper education since well before the pandemic arrived. Holding them back a year is just going to create a generation of delayed adults that will ripple through the economy in ways we can't even imagine. But lets try: Shifting average graduation age to 18-19 * Drop out rate: TO THE MOON! * Shit pay "high school" jobs no one wants: Now for adults! * Wages don't just stagnate b…

Grades are arbitrary. Plenty of kids start a year late sometimes on purpose by parents to give them a leg up. Particularly for grades 8-12, in school education is vital. You seem very concerned about the economy.

> Plenty of kids start a year late sometimes on purpose by parents to give them a leg up

Don't be ridiculous. The amount of parents that do this is practically non-existent.

> Particularly for grades 8-12, in school education is vital.

I disagree. I've worked in a top 5 largest school district for over 22 years. Under normal circumstances a handful of kids graduate high school with trigonometry under their belt, some with only algebra, and some in between (its the same for science). There's plenty of wiggle room in there. Colleges already offer remedial classes for kids that need it and its unfair to the students that managed to succeed even in this environment.

> You seem very concerned about the economy.

I shouldn't have used the word economy (as that tends to translate directly to "the stock market"). I really meant its bad for labor (but good for the companies that exploit labor).

Let me re-iterate my most important point: If everyone is held back, the dropout rate will be catastrophic for years to come.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#592

Post by BigRedDog1669 »

khazhoux wrote: post #419
tartoran wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, unless you consider a trailer a home but then where do you draw the line? One could go as far as considering a tent as a home but come on, we all know what we mean by home. A trailer is just a trailer.

A trailer is a permanent structure with bedrooms, living room and kitchen, bathroom, which can receive mail. Yes, they’re small. No, they’re probably not anyone’s preferred option. But they’re still homes.

They aren't really that small when compared to apartments in cities. Often much larger actually.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#593

Post by LodeOfCode »

yarky wrote: post #529
labster wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone in June 2020 was too busy assuming the best case scenario to plan for disruption. I never really understood the human capacity for self-delusion until 2020. I knew we’d have two years of lockdowns in February 2020, unless we lucked into a drug that treated it (despite not having a drug for SARS-CoV-1). Even the logistics for distributing a vaccine is hard, and takes months to set up. I have no idea how peopl…

> I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily. Isn’t this the natural response to the unknown? Denial? I guess not everyone likes Bayes’ theorem!

Even with Bayes' theorem, if your prior is zero, you can ignore any evidence - no matter how strong - that doesn't absolutely require the hypothesis to be true.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#594

Post by akomtu »

chasd00 wrote: post #410
cultofmetatron wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Well to be fair vulnerable populations are not the center of the universe either.

Topologically, we are a sphere: its center is everywhere and its boundary is nowhere.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#595

Post by sofixa »

native_samples wrote: post #199
sofixa wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should compare apples to apples. Not all societies are alike, and there are huge variances in population density, temperatures, style of living, etc. between different countries ( e.g. places where people share food and ear with their hands vs places where most people live alone in houses vs places where whole extended families share the same house, etc. etc.). Sweden fared drastically worse than its neighbours w…

The "neighbour" argument is DOA and has been from the start. There are no meaningful differences between Sweden and other countries except in its government response - Scandinavians aren't aliens and thus nobody was claiming they were incomparable back at the start. Instead it was headlines like "Sweden is a cautionary tale to the world". The idea that you aren't allowed to compare them only appeared once Sweden prov…

Of course there are differences. Do you know that in France used to kiss on the cheek when meeting, including strangers? And many continued well into the pandemic because "it's just the Chinese and Italians, we're better than them". Population density, age distribution, patterns of living matter. Ignoring then all to fit your preconceived notion that all countries were equally at risk from Covid is just.. wrong.

And btw not only did Sweden's strategy result in multiple times the death rate of its neighbours, it also resulted in a similar economic downturn. So it was all for very little.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#596

Post by watersb »

darth_avocado wrote: post #328
autarch wrote: post #268

Freddie de Boer just wrote something on his Substack about this - https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/many-kids-dont-have-a-w... The quick takeaway is that school is that for the most vulnerable kids, school is about a lot more than education. Taking school away from those kids can be much more damaging than many people realize. It seems to me like that right strategy would be to just say something like: We encourag…

It will be year 3 of covid and this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators. There is no perfect way to open schools, that much is certain after looking at other countries. But looking at the state of things, it doesn’t even seem like people are trying. Japan has students come in on alternate days, so that the school can operate at 50% capa…

Our school district (in the USA) used much the same method as you describe for Japan: alternating days, 50% capacity, etc. Then the State Borad of Education mandated all schools closed.

In our community, most of the parents in town are able to work from home. But its a very strange place, and I would expect worse outcomes most other places.

Even so, serious psychiatric illness is tearing the kids up. The child clinical psychologists and the one remaining psychiatrist in town are double-booked, at least.

It's been its own shade of awful.

I don't think that there could have been a better response from the schools here. It's been very difficult to plan for anything more than six weeks out, and the kids who have returned to school have needed more care. And who is caring for the teachers?

I don't know what the dropout rate would be for high schoolers, but many of these kids are just gone. Across all economic levels (the delicate proxy that we use, money lumped in with social status or prevalent parents' level of education and stuff).

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#597

Post by axby »

iggldiggl wrote: post #496
axby wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: How did a vaccine with a reduction of hospitalizations by a factor of 20 (94%) take us from "shut everything down" to "cases no longer matter"? (Caveat: maybe for omicron it's even less severe?) Edit: specifically, from what I understand the healthcare system can't handle everyone being unvaccinated and getting the virus, it would be overwhelmed by hospitalizations. But with a 20 times reduction in hospitaliza…

> I don't know much about virology but I understand exponential growth. It looks like the cases are doubling every 2 weeks (edit: I guess this might even be a few days? See [0]). In a few months, almost everyone will get it. In the last two week period, won't half the population catch it? In that case, even with 100% vaccination, hospitalizations would still be 1/20 of half the maximum due to COVID. Right? As people…

Thanks, I actually hadn't heard of a logistic growth curve before (it looks like something I somewhat remember from high school chemistry). Can you recommend anything to read about this that apply it to the pandemic? I guess I'm beyond my math skills here. Reading normal news articles, they warn of increasing cases, but I'd like to see some raw numbers. The report they refer to is too complicated for me to understand :(

Specifically I'm wondering what the maximum number of cases in a short period is likely. I ask because I was shocked to hear that the number of ICU beds in a major city of 1M people in Canada was only a few hundred (or maybe that was total hospital beds? I can't remember). So it seems like you need to keep your "hospitalizations per population" number down to less than the ratio of "hospital beds per population".

Certainly I was wrong in saying "everyone will get it" in a few months because of the logistic growth curve, but it looks like a significant portion of the population could still be infected within the same period, even if you remove the 6% (Canada) to 20% (USA) people who have already been infected? And even if everyone is fully vaccinated, can the number of them that end up in hospital come close to the total capacity? It seems like we're already getting close to capacity.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#598

Post by cossatot »

barry-cotter wrote: post #431
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in West Virginia. A LOT of people lived in a trailer - as in they actually owned the trailer and in many cases the land, too (my parents). Why does it make sense to count these people as homeless? And even if you're renting... Why count someone who rents a trailer as homeless but not someone who rents an apartment?

> Why does it make sense to count these people as homeless? It's a social class thing. It's not about having a reliable, warm, dry, safe place to sleep. It's about whether a middle class university graduate's friends would have considered them to have failed at life. Living in a coffin sized apartment with cockroaches everywhere in New York is something they could see themselves doing at some point in their life for…

So the definition of homeless is that it’s ‘not the kind of place a university graduate lives in’? This is absurd.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#599

Post by akomtu »

timbeccue wrote: post #506
jsiaajdsdaa wrote: post #480

>90% of conversations about covid, it has taken over daily life this is what the powers that be want to happen. they want you to live in a state of panic and fear. when i was in school (i am 30 now), i had many severe illnesses like pneumonia twice, shingles, mono, staph. nobody ever gave a shit, and nobody died.

> this is what the powers that be want to happen. they want you to live in a state of panic and fear. Do you think this is a conscious desire? Is it something that our leaders developed after attaining power, or is it a preexisting desire that led them to seek power in the first place? Why do they want people to live in a state of panic and fear?

When people fear, they accept authority. Fearmongering is as old as first societies. An ancient priest sold a lie that unless people did sacrificies in his name, they'd be eaten by the demon. So the priest spreaded rumors about dangers of the demon and took down anyone who spreaded a counter-narrative. Today, "covid" is that omnipresent demon, and once people stop believing the lie, those "priests" will rebrand the demon into something else.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#600

Post by nautilius »

darth_avocado wrote: post #472
bryans wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sweden has kept its schooling open (although it has had covid outbreaks, but the numbers were similar to Finland where the schools were closed). Sweden suffered 1,504 deaths per million, while Finland had 295. To call them "similar" is disinformative, at best.

Not really, you are talking about overall, while the data I was presenting was mostly specific to the topic at hand: School kids. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...

I didn't know school kids lived in a vacuum, I'd have thought most go home to their families after school, where, you may have guessed it, there are other people to be infected.
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