Look how inadvertently hideous this binder is.
Honestly, that's a great binder and I want three of them.
Maryland's positive rate is still dropping, now at 3.2%, and new cases are also still going down.
In less good news, reviewing my recorded lectures I'm really bothered by how dull my voice sounds, but I can't think of any way to fix that wouldn't sound artificially silly.
I've been chopping up the recordings into shorter segments that are very focused on 1 topic each, so at least the students won't have to listen to me for an hour at a time.
Yes, Maryland seems to be showing that it stays at a low rate if everyone wears a mask everywhere except restaurants and gyms, and there are no large indoor gatherings. And it doesn't go away because restaurants and gyms are open.
It's too bad that in most of the places where schools could open without immediately infecting everyone, they aren't opening because Trump and Betsy DeVos demanding that schools open no matter how unsafe they are leads people to do the opposite. It could have been a comparative advantage.
Took a golf lesson in NH and the instructor not only didn't wear a mask he got right in your face to correct grip and swing. But the positivity rate for the county we're in is essentially 0- the population is only 32k and they're had a total of 17 positive tests the entire pandemic so they go weeks with no positives. If anything we were a bigger risk to him.
I LIKE MY BINDERS FULL OF WOMEN!
I'm nervous as hell about my upcoming interview. I need to give a presentation, of course. But today it came together for me conceptually after I asked a cow-orker who was at the library to take pictures of the exhibition I curated which always got rave reviews and is one of the best things I ever did. She's a very talented photographer, even with a camera phone and I think I'll be able to put together an impressive presentation.
6: When I golf, the biggest risk is to people standing about fifty yards to my left.
11: No. I'm just really bad. Or was the last time I tried.
In 1996, I bought I compound bow for reasons that now escape me but most have boiled down to "I suddenly had more money than I was used to having." Anyway, I have moved with it three times and never fired it until Saturday. I was able to hit the stack of hay, though I did break one arrow by hitting the roof over the hay.
They just changed the definition of "COVID death" here from "person who has tested positive and subsequently died" to "person who has tested positive and dies within 28 days", which has brought the figures down a lot... my innate pessimist doesn't like it though. Under the old definition we were running just above 50 deaths a day; now we're at about 11 a day (and have already had days with zero reported deaths), and the cumulative total is about 5k lower.
We have officially become Pod People and agreed, with three other families, to hire a teacher (who has accepted the offer) to run a tiny 3rd grade classroom. Now all the truly detailed negotiations begin, but unless something goes horribly wrong, someone else will be paying attention to Mr. 3rd Grade for ~6 hours per weekday starting some time in September. The kid in question, however, is very upset that he might have to spend the day in a mask at a house where he was previously allowed to have playdates without one (this was the one family we had done this with).
Under the old definition we were running just above 50 deaths a day; now we're at about 11 a day (and have already had days with zero reported deaths), and the cumulative total is about 5k lower.
Huh. I have no idea what to make of this. 39 deaths a day seems like a lot for people who happen to have tested positive more than a month prior. I guess it must depend a lot on how many people are being tested.
This just feels wrong to me, but I am aware that math doesn't care about my feelings.
Our public school district is trying to arrange having a quick-test antigen on sight testing thing, with 15 minute turnaround.
Jammies and I had half an ear tuned to the school board meeting last night, so we missed a lot, and may have gotten it wrong. But it sort of sounded like they thought it had 99%/95% for false positives and false negatives.
I need to track this down, because it leaves me concerned that we're shoving snakeoil up our k-12 student noses. Such an accurate test in no way exists, and it would not be quick, and it would not be affordable for a podunk school district in Texas.
My guess is that someone is ramping up regular old antigen testing in an affordable way for school districts, and the only part that got garbled was the accuracy? But I really don't know.
What type of oil is supposed to be used for nostrils?
18.last: I care.
Good luck, Barry! Keep us posted!
18.3: I care about your feelings, pf. Your feelings take two and two and make five.
We have officially become Pod People and agreed, with three other families, to hire a teacher (who has accepted the offer) to run a tiny 3rd grade classroom.
We got extraordinarily lucky and found a native Spanish speaker to tutor/facilitate online school for our kids, and one other family, during remote instruction (and possibly longer.)
I heard the good pods have instruction in Mandarin.
Of course if the priority is easy of disinfection, it's hard to do better than a wire monkey.
I have this weird knee jerk reaction against good covid numbers locally, because it muddies the water in terms of whether to send the kids back to school. If the numbers are responses are unremittingly bad, then my decision and clarity is easier. If leadership starts makes good choices and the numbers improve, then I have to hunt for what to do in the gray.
Killing wolves, I guess. I never saw it.
Pitt is reporting only 2 of 450 asymptomatic students tested positive. That's making me feel better about going to get take out at Chipotle more often.
I hate to hijack a thread--even an open-ish one--but I have to get this off my chest:
I feel like discourse around the 19th Amendment has gone completely off the rails. We've gone from (very necessary) reminders that many non-white American women were unable to vote after its passage (and also that many suffragettes kind of sucked, as did and do most white people) to... whatever this crap is. This very long, detailed article keeps dancing around the disenfranchisement of Blacks, as if it weren't primarily a feature of a certain very distinct set of states--it just keeps saying, The 19th didn't protect Black women from things like poll taxes and grandfather clauses, which were used to suppress Black voting in "many states." Oh really? Many? How many? Any particular theme among these states?
Look, this isn't FuckTheSouth redux--I know that northern states were racist, Oregon was explicitly white supremacist, etc, but at some point just fucking acknowledge the obvious, which is that poll taxes and grandfather clauses were almost exclusively the province of the South, and that Black women who lived in Union states did, in fact, get the vote at the same time white women did. The 19th wasn't like Social Security, designed to specifically avoid benefitting Blacks wherever they might live; it was designed to allow women of all races to have as much franchise as their male peers, which in most of the country (geographically) meant similar voting rights to whites. In 1920, it's true that most Blacks lived in the South (~85%), but by 1940 a large portion didn't, and so many of them were able to vote that they were an important part of FDR's coalition--men and women alike.
I should add, it's not just this article--I've seen a ton of this in the leadup to the centennial, and it's ridiculous. If you can't make your point while straightforwardly acknowledging that literally hundreds of thousands of Black women did get the vote in 1920, maybe your point needs some work.
PS One other annoying tick is that the author keeps treating the inability of noncitizens to vote as racialized injustice, rather than a pretty fucking straightforward way to run a democracy. Obviously rules around citizenship have been racial and exact policies around citizenship are up for debate, but setting the bar for the franchise at citizenship--in a country with birthright citizenship, no less--is pretty goddamn low.
I keep reloading the moderately hypnotic CAISO demand curve. I suspect it's hot outside but haven't been out to check yet. Temps above 90 make us wonder what it's like to have air conditioning; below 90 is tolerable in general. This house is wonderfully designed for passive cooling, another of its ten thousand advantages over our previous rental.
You sound like you're upset Susan B. Anthony is getting our of jail.
Now all the truly detailed negotiations begin, but unless something goes horribly wrong, someone else will be paying attention to Mr. 3rd Grade for ~6 hours per weekday starting some time in September
My wife is on the other end of a similar transaction, because I guess Pod Governess is a job that people now have in our economy.
However, the private school the kids go to hasn't abandoned the idea of live classes yet, so she doesn't know if she has a job until that happens. In the meantime, she is looking elsewhere.
The woman who babysat for us this summer returned to her daycare job and recommended that we use her roommate who "is really struggling" (financially, I understood). Since both of them have childcare experience, I recommended that the roommate advertise herself on a mom's group as a pod tutor. Talked to the roommate the next day and she got several replies within minutes. I told her to charge high.
What if she's struggling to control murderous rage or something?
To 19: antigen testing is fast and cheap, so everything sounds plausible except the accuracy numbers, as you say.
Moby, you can't just project that on everyone.
Surely it's not just me and Moby, though.
Small children give me so much stress.
Alive and well here. Hiking on Thursday -- unfortunately, they're predicting a high of 91 in Yosemite Valley -- much better than the 105-110 we've been suffering on the valley floor, but a bit warm for several miles of hiking. We're considering a last minute change to a trail up higher-- say Taft Point, which is projected for only 79 on Thursday.
We'd been kicking around the idea of a trip to Lassen next month & staying in a bed & breakfast to limit exposure, but that plan is feeling selfish enough that we'll probably nix it. My wife's been talking about how stir crazy she's getting, but she was the one who pointed out exposures to the B&B staff, even if we spent most of our days out in nature. Plus we'd have to miss out on the communal breakfast, which is one of my favorite parts about staying in them.
Professionally, it looks like a lot of solar and energy storage systems are being submitted and installed now. I think that last year's power shutoffs pushed people into ensuring that they've got batteries to run off of for a while when the power goes out. Solar and energy storage are also biased in that they're outdoor work--on the rooftop or installed in garages-- so you can hire the work done and not risk strangers in your home.
Open a bunch of pricey restaurants?
Who doesn't love the cuisine of north-central Indiana?
I always eat at a McDonald's when I'm in that area, just to be safe.
No eviction spike yet, in a rare piece of ambiguously good news. (Milwaukee, as befits the subject of an entire goddamn book called Evicted, is running against the trend.) Sorry if you had flagged this for a FPP, heebie: it's that guy whose work you like.
After all this, close to half the voters in America are looking around and thinking, yeah, I want another four years of this.
It's just amazing.
50: Yup. I've been boggling about this ever since Hillary only won by a couple million votes.
Hey, whats the going hourly rate for Pod Governance in fancy places like California and Massachusetts?
I was kind of wondering that. Wife works in a very well paying district but kind of curious what she could get as an experienced math teacher and curriculum coordinator. Not that she'd do it for moral and logistical reasons.
I'm sure you intended to include us in the collective 'fancy places'.
I heard other people say $10/kid/hour. But, uh, that's really expensive.
$1200/month? That's the price of cheap daycare around here, although older kids should be cheaper.
(because we are doing 3 hours a day, so it is accurate.)
(The part about it being cheap daycare is not accurate. Cheap daycare is $400-$500 around here.)
I believe the children are our future. Hold them choose and let the parents pay.
I used the $10/kid/hour but assumed six hours/day.
I've been helping my oldest with Khan algebra but there's stuff I'm pretty sure I never learned so it's a total pain in the ass. The polynomial remainder theorem?
Cheap daycare is $400-$500 around here.
A week?
I've also been teaching him AP Chem which he seems to intuitively understand and is also great because 1. I know every last bit of that and 2. I can show him how there are computer programs that do all that stuff for you (draw and check structures, calculate MW, chemical names to structures and vice versa) which I have on my laptop. Also since he took physics last year and was working on molecular weight vs exact mass I pulled out some data I had gotten that day and was able to explain how a mass spectrometer works.
We didn't have software, so I learned by counting from 1 to mole.
I don't have the slightest memory of how much day care was.
we're paying $20/hour.
Yeah, that's what my wife is asking. I think she should have asked $25.
We'd been kicking around the idea of a trip to Lassen next month
You tent camp at all? The Domingo Springs campground is right at the spring origin. Close to Lassen, and if you walk a mile and a half or so down Domingo Creek you'll hit the Feather River. There's a nice swimming hole on the river.
There's a couple dozen cabin sites around there, occupation is infrequent, not uncommon to have that creek walk and swimming hole area to yourself.
69: I think we're underpaying for the skillset we located.
Well, there are a whole lot of good skillsets on the market right now. I'm paying my nephew $20 an hour to sling code. I pay my niece $33, but she's in management.
This AOC NBC thing is unbelievable. I don't know what they can do to fix it, but people really do need to be fired.
It really is awful. They want a "Dems in disarray!" story so badly they're just going to make things up.
Now, a well-run political party with a consistent message would have all it's candidates saying the same thing, like the Republicans going from Trump to Loomer all reading from the same book.
Mr. and Mrs. Mallard latest victims of the pandemic.
(Is Make Way for Ducklings widely known outside the Northeast?)
Today is the first day since March that my wife and I have both gone to work at our offices. Her first day back was Monday, but I worked from home that day. It was odd how different working from home alone was. My wife's mere presence apparently deterred me from going down to the kitchen every 15 minutes or so to check out possible snacks.
re: daycare
We paid something like 2000 USD a month when xelA was really small. The price dropped as he got older, though, as the regulations allow for more children per carer. I think it dropped to about 800-900 USD, but that was for 4, not 5 days a week.
When I had two in daycare at the same time, I was paying something around $1800/month, but that was also more than a decade ago.
We offered our pod-teacher an $80k rate for the school year (ten months), with an option to discontinue after five months if, somehow, going back to in-person public school makes sense. No benefits, though. So it'll work out to about $2000/family/month. It's possible we'll get a fifth kid, which would help a bit.
Does $80k rate mean $80k/12= $6667 per month and paying for 10 months, or $80k for the 10 months ($8k/month)?
76: Yes, and that is comically horrible and on-brand for 2020. (I suppose the rewrite also needs a scene where the police officer drags a black couple from their car and arrests them for not stopping fast enough for the ducklings.) One Morning in Maine is a legitimately great picture book.
It is day 3 of distance learning across the Bay Area, and obviously the next card in the deck was going to be "wildfire smoke makes play outside impossible." But really, if the fire season is going to be as bad as it looks, it's nice that the schools have their shelter-in-place programs deployed already. Less nice for the families who signed up for outdoor learning pods with wifi hotspots.
Any opinions on whether I should uncover the valve on my pollution mask if I need to wander out into the pollution?
That's midrange in our district (page 57) although as noted no benefits or pension service credits.
Are you setting up as an employer and dealing with taxes or is the teacher acting as an independent contractor? I'm not even sure what's allowed or required, especially since teachers usually pay into state pension not social security.
We're setting up as an employer and dealing with taxes (and worker's comp, UI, etc.). One of the families involved did the related paperwork for a complicated nanny-share arrangement for a few years, and they think they're on top of it, and I'm trusting them.