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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

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the administrators What throws me about all this is that their entire job, the reason they draw a paycheck in the first place, their raisin d'oatmeal, is to keep things running smoothly when the unexpected happens. Now going into year three and they've managed to do fuck all to create solutions. Which is, y'know, their JOB. Generally they've just made problems worse by sticking their noses into things. What the hel…

That seems backwards. My perspective is that we pay them to do the most routine, absolute bare minimum.

If they stick to the routine and bare minimum, pretty soon they’ll be replaced by robots and software.

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

#652
post #88

Everyone in the north, take vitamin D and vitamin C. It help fight every respiratory infection Source: medcram, Dr in pulmonary diseases

I wanted to tell people to take zinc as well (it has a small positive effect only if taken ahead of time) but unfortunately many brands aren't actually bioavailable and just give you the worst nausea you've ever had.

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

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not moving the goal post. I agree that criminalization of leaving home for the unvaccinated gets more appealing by the day. But I also don't know that vaccines actually end it at this point.

Why - they aren't a threat to anyone. There's no real difference in transmissibility. Unless you think the vaccines don't work, in which case, why do you even care.

I've seen /r/HermanCainAward/ - of course they're a threat, they'll post "own the lib" memes on your Facebook page. And it's a bummer when you have to support their widow.

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

#654
post #152
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…

Other ideas as I struggle to understand the current state of affairs: maybe the vaccine is really effective at preventing transmission, but only for some period, say 1 month to 6 months after vaccination? Maybe people in Canada received their vaccines between January and June of 2021, so maybe with boosters every 6 months, transmission would be under control?

That's more or less it. Also

- it might be that two shots 6 months apart are more effective. i.e. skipping the 2nd shot in the 3 shot series would be fine.

- it might be that a nasal vaccine would be more effective than an injected one. We just don't have one of those yet.

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

#655
post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why they say Bayesians can’t be atheists by definition. At least that’s how all atheists in my stats 101 class starting calling themselves agnostic. Another way to put it I learnt in a finance class : financial models behave alright, the problem comes from our lack of imagination, i.e. assigning a null probability to a future event :/

Bayesians are atheists, they just happen to believe in Roko's Basilisk, which obviously is nothing like a reinvention of the devil. Remember not to think of it since we can't prove it won't torture an infinite number of clones of you forever!

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

There, I just sent another 50 souls to rationalist hell.

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

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's around 50M K-12 students in public schools. That's roughly $4k per student over the course of about 18 months, at the time the article was written. Subtract six months for summers, if you like; that's still ~360 days, for about $11/student/day. It's not nothing, but a single rapid test costs more than that.

Rapid testing every student wouldn’t be necessary to open the schools.

The continual testing and quarantining of healthy students and staff is what keeps schools from being able to reliably stay open.

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

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the administrators What throws me about all this is that their entire job, the reason they draw a paycheck in the first place, their raisin d'oatmeal, is to keep things running smoothly when the unexpected happens. Now going into year three and they've managed to do fuck all to create solutions. Which is, y'know, their JOB. Generally they've just made problems worse by sticking their noses into things. What the hel…

I had a spouse in public school administration (until she burned out during the pandemic) and a parent who is still a public school teacher, so I have a little extra empathy - these people are just people. Some of them have just started a new role and didn't get to learn the basics before plunging into a pandemic. Some of them were a couple years from retirement and had been hoping to coast without any big changes. S…

I think folks that work in the corporate world, particularly those in tech, engineering, manufacturing, etc, can easily underestimate how different and challenging it is to run a school in the current era of American public education. You have vocal and powerful groups and sub-groups of parents, students, teachers, unions, higher ed and the state all pulling in different directions. The feedback loops are long, the data is extremely noisy, there are very few factors you can control for and the cost of fucking it up is very high.

It's a pretty tricky job that is largely thankless and the pay is pretty mediocre. I just looked up what a local principal, whom i feel is actually a pretty excellent leader, makes. He's got a masters degree, has 15 years at this district, runs a building of 1200 students, has ~50 directs reporting to him and made $97k last year.

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

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not aware of this funding logic but how does this even work? Like in COVID, all students were remote, but finding never stopped. And last I checked, if my kid doesn’t go to school for a week, school funding doesn’t get impacted. I mean coming in on alternate days doesn’t mean you’re not learning, you can still do online classes on that day.

In most states funding is related to attendance somehow, I think the details vary. At one time I think there was a thought that districts would take truancy and absences more seriously instead of ignore it if there was an impact to the bottom line.

There are also a multitude of programs throughout k-12, particularly in high school, where the student spends part of their day outside of the district. I think this just helps ensure that the state isn't paying twice for the same student when the external program is also state funded. (It also helps to remove any weird financial incentives to get the kids out of the building)

In my area I think this is where the vast majority of the district income variance comes from, and it is known about and largely planned for before the year even starts.

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

#659
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what you say is just plain wrong. - Masking is highly effective and just a bit inconvenient. - Lockdowns are extremely effective just very expensive. - Vaccines are very effective even against transmission. - Nobody is aiming for 0 Covid anymore (except some Australians and China I guess), but getting through the winter wave without too many fellow citizens dead should be something we spend some effort on. Co…

"Lockdowns" delay spread - well, actually they just force essential workers to get sick first - but what's the point of delaying it? You'll just get it once you open up again. (Somewhat good right now because we're waiting for more antivirals/clearing out winter flu cases, but still not worth the cost.) China is still trying it but I expect that to fail in a few weeks. Australia has given up on it. The real question…

Delaying saves lives because:

- More time to vaccinate.

- Better treatment in hospitals which aren't under stress

- More time to develop pharmaceutical treatments against severe cases.

(I am not advocating for a lockdown. There are much more nuanced options.)

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

#660
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It perfectly illustrates how there are two types of quarantine lockdowns-- the kind enforced by the government or policy, and the defacto kind that happens organically when too many people are sick or afraid of getting sick. There's a false belief out there in this debate that if we don't have an enforced lockdown, we won't get a defacto one.

That's true, but we also shouldn't characterize this as a defacto one. Insane quarantine regulations basically prevent teachers from coming to school at all if they have even been in contact with anyone who later tested positive, whether or not they are sick, test negative, or have 3 shots. If we saw this same situation sans government regulations then we could conclude it was organically spawned, but that isn't the…

Those “insane regulations” are not at play though, if you read OP. They hand out COVID tests and send home the kids who are positive.
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