I really grew concerned, during co-vid, of elderly folk in nursing homes or assisted living. Facilities had to prevent visitation of any kind. In the better facilities, staff would try to provide zoom opportunities, but that was often infrequent, to allow all residents the chance. There were grandchildren/great-granchildren some folks never go to see. Ditto, some were left to die alone, aside from nurses. Hospice patients faced the same isolation.
yeah, it really sucks. my mom hasn't seen her granddaughter since she was born. i'm not complaining too loudly (she's still alive, reasonably healthy, etc.) but covid related precautions have put a damper on a lot of things we otherwise would have done.
@leslietownes Right. I was even willing to volunteer, but volunteer programs were cut, as well. A good proportion of non-profits couldn't function in good faith. Heck, even animal shelters were in quarantine, and vets: park and ring us when you are here, and a tech will come to your car to retrieve your pet while you wait in the care for a check-up.
@leslietownes No doubt! They've made out well. And, because of covid, SNAP (food stamps, which no longer exist, rather are accessed through a swipable card) has allowed users to shop on line for delivery of groceries, which was never allowed previously. Of course, they can shop only from those with whom the government has contracted with to honor this.
Medicare and Medicaid have approved virtual and/or telephone consultations with doctors due to the pandemic, and plan to maintain that over time. There have been changes that are here for good, in some respects; I doubt there'll be a "back to normal", if normal means pre-pandemic, in many respects. I do believe that the most severe of restrictions will melt away at some point, but we've learned a lot during the pandemic: some industries will keep or have the option of remote employment, e.g.
One thing that I find repugnant is the "my body, my choice" mantra, co-opted by so many wrt vaccination, are anti-choice when it comes to women and abortion.
it's probably better that i'm not out in public more often. i couldn't handle any of that very well. the fact that people still go on the record with it in front of journalists sickens me.
i wasn't working for any school, just tutoring as a side gig while i worked another job. the guy who referred my wife to me was invited to, and attended, our wedding, some 15 years later.
driving up the prices and ruining everything. i sorta get it although a lot of that journalism is, as you say, clickbait. right wing news sites also love portraying california as a failed state that everyone wants to leave.
texas hates, hates, hates that we have more people and a higher GDP. they also like to pretend alaska doesn't exist. :)
i do get why people find californians annoying, particularly wealthy ones. one of my biggest gripes about facebook, twitter, etc. was a sudden influx of east coast people who were already wealthy into neighborhoods i used to like visiting and living in.
@leslietownes It was portrayed as a housing issue, which is true in other coastal states. But locals aren't happy, given they're already seeing housing prices escalate, in what had never been a problem for them.
@leslietownes Indeed; it seems someone with wealth isn't "somebody" unless they have homes on each coast!
at the same time, i question anybody's right to live anywhere. you read these stories about red staters selling the family farm, so what? boo hoo. if it's inefficient, it goes. it's the american way. you aren't guaranteed to live in the same place all your life. that's what parts of europe are for. nobody acts like it's a tragedy that poor people have to move all the time, which they do. it's a tragedy when it happens to somebody who owns an expensive pickup truck.
that's my sunniest sunday thought in quite a while :D
But it also has led to homelessness. Someone living paycheck to paycheck to barely make ends meet, can't afford to quit their job and move a thousand miles away.
yeah, there's that. again, you tend to see stories about people who resemble the perceived clickbait readership than homeless. although the LA times has done an OK job of covering the housing crisis locally.
one of my wife's colleagues was homeless for a while due to a divorce. she lived in her car. very tough with teaching jobs because they tend to be 'sticky.' you can't just move somewhere else in the middle of the semester.
In Oshkosh, WI, there was a story last spring about a high janitor allowed to park in the High school lot, where he slept. The principal allowed him to use the men's locker room for showers, bathroom (as he had his own set of keys as a janitor). This came about after the death of his wife and child. Students loved the janitor; he loved the engagement. But when students learned he was living in his truck, they raised money normally used for the junior class trip abroad, to secure an apartment
there is a need for more housing, and also a need for some kind of health care system that is not largely tied to employment. sometimes the crisis is not so much people losing a job but losing access to anything other than emergency room. and people stay in horrible jobs that they hate to avoid that, which isn't good.
that's very kind of the students. i never know what to make of stories like that. they naturally make you feel good, but you also wonder, what's going on in our country that this stuff is fairly normal, and many people are one or two paychecks away from something similar.
@leslietownes For me, I see a glimmer of hope among the youth and there efforts. But I think they are also effective in letting folks know that not every homeless person is a drug-addicted drunk. They depict the humanity in folks, in the midst of a shaming nation.
a lot of people are 'addicted' to the narrative of structural societal problems being symptoms of individual faults and failures. it is easier than thinking about what policies may have led to them. just find someone to blame and call the problem solved.
More and more people seemingly agree to "the right to healthcare" ... but gloss over the "right to safe haven", a roof over their heads, a place to stay warm, etc.
@leslietownes Indeed. And the GOP maintains such narratives: blame hardships on those suffering through them.
there was a guy who often parked his van in front of our old house that was pretty clearly living in his van. nice guy. having a safe place to park is a huge part of living in a car.
they love that. and yet somehow nothing is ever their fault.
although i definitely would have called the police if the guy had been a jerk. i'm not that nice of a person.
a guy was having an episode in CVS the other day. incoherent yelling about genocide. nice mental health infrastructure we have in this country. roughly, staff at drugstores, librarians, etc. and eventually police.
what a completely stupid system, or rather an absence of a system.
@leslietownes exactly. And so many situations where police are called, unable to recognize or even consider, there might be a melt-down in progress. In Milwaukee, after such an incident, all police dispatched to a scene where the caller says "they're not making sense," or "talking to rack of clothes," etc., have had crisis counseling training, and are accompanied by masters' level mental health staff.
But there is always a risk, particularly when a man with a gun is having a meltdown, or is suicidal, or uses their gun to threaten another, ultimately seeking suicide by cop. And domestic abuse calls/warrants, etc., are among the most dangerous for cops responding.
There are rogue cops, no doubt, often in rogue departments; but the general public expects them to uphold the law, be peace-keeper, be mental health experts, etc., etc.,; like the general public holds teachers responsible for being child abuse detectors, social workers, supervisors before and after school, plus teach students....
yeah, teachers are also supposed to like that. if you aren't willing to perform an enormous amount of unrelated work for free, maybe it's not your 'calling' and not for you.
i've had only good interactions with the LBPD but there are more than a few bad apples in the sheriff's department. LA being a large place it's sometimes not clear where you are and whose jurisdiction you are under. but you ask around and anyone can tell you where you're likely to be pulled over for no reason.
some of it is definitely that. there are some cities in LA notorious for that, where because of how the city is defined it might not even have residents, just commercial property, and hence have a very limited tax base. some of it is also just being jerks. no profit is made on an unconstitutional stop and search that results in nothing, but they still do it.
cities in LA county, i should say. LA is the only city in LA. :)
I think all police and sheriff departments need to include vetting for warning flags and other means to help sort out those with a deep desire to have power over others; the armed forces, as well. Or who hope they will gain respect that comes with a badge or uniform. And over time, there is no doubt a certain degree of cynicism, and overgeneralizations about certain racial groups.
@leslietownes I've tried to make sense of how Derek Chauvin got to the place where he ended up. And it was not the first time he was overly aggressive in the same manner, to other "suspects".
for some it really does come down to an 'us vs. them' mentality. it doesn't help that a lot of departments load up on body armor and stuff more suggestive of an occupying force than a group designed to protect and serve.
lots of cops in my family. it's not a pleasant job and i sort of get it, but they could certainly do a better job of filtering out the power trippers.
@leslietownes I do wonder though, now that we know former vets, and some who were presently serving active duty, were involved in the Jan.6th insurrection. It's no secret that disgruntled service members/or former members have joined white supremacists etc.
it's a distribution problem. it's not that every cop has a 5% chance of doing really illegal or bad stuff. there's a tiny portion of cops who basically do all of the bad stuff. it tends to come out in the high profile cases, the people involved often have long histories of it. you can't fix things like that by forcing an entire department to go through trainings. the good cops know not to do any of it.
@leslietownes Indeed. Good point. Blue Bloods was interesting to watch, from various perspectives, given the different roles of various family members. The bad apples make life more difficult for those who want to serve.
i think about this a lot. some stuff is amenable to general trainings and fixes and other stuff really ought to be just a question of identifying the bad apples and throwing them out.
sexual harassment in the workplace is another thing. we have to do a training on that once every year or two. most people know not to do any of that stuff, and most people who need the advice are responsible for almost all of it, and aren't listening. it's very hard to fight these kinds of problems with a general approach.
but companies prefer general approaches to anything that might single someone out.
@leslietownes But one often sees "eye-rolls" between employees, when yet another "gender sensitivity training comes around, which makes me wonder if they are even effective, or they become an inside joke, like "okay, let's go through the motions, yet again"?
yeah, i think they are largely ineffective, except maybe for limiting some kind of liability on the employer's side. the people who need to listen aren't listening. they don't think it applies to them or they don't care. everyone else finds the stuff boring, or maybe even kind of funny.
after our last one, one of my female colleagues was constantly 'sexually harassing' me by repeating stuff we had seen during the presentation, about how i was dressed, and how things might go better for me at the workplace if i got 'friendlier' with them. it was pure comedy. she only did this for about a week, but that's the spirit the whole thing was taken in.
@leslietownes Indeed; lest a police department, or any business/practice with interactions with the public, and other employees, possibly be investigated and found to lack any training in the areas that are expected, they may become culpable along with a rogue employee.
trainings work for preventing low level stuff that everyone has some chance of doing if they get lazy or forget about it. i don't think sexual harassment is like that.
in academia we had trainings about, like, don't date your students. pardon my french, but no s--t.
and again, the people who most need to hear that aren't listening.
@leslietownes I agree; it is likely the former mayor of New York authorized such workshops for those under him and such. But somehow, the message was lost on him!
politics is particularly bad. like the entertainment industry, there's no real 9-to-5 quality to it, so the line between work and non-work isn't always clear. plus it seems to attract egotistical men.
@leslietownes Indeed. It was weird, because I don't think he thinks he did anything appropriate. To be honest, I can't even tolerate some shows or movies from days of your. Like John Wayne "spanking" Maureen???? in a movie, or,e.g., The Honeymooners, All in the Family. Being in the public eye, Cuomo should have known better than to behave the way he did.
i still find the honeymooners kind of funny but it's definitely a product of a different time. and yeah, i don't think cuomo thinks anything he did was wrong.
some old movies are so outdated as to that kind of thing that they're almost confusing. 'why is the woman acting like an infant? did something happen?' oh, it's just the gender politics of the time.
But, look at Donald Trump, with a history far more extensive than Cuomo, in inappropriateness. I still can't stomach how the GOP and others came down so hard on Clinton with his affair with a staff member, which I have no problem, but conservatives, the protectors of morality, looked the other way, and appealed to God's forgiveness, wrt Trump. And his crimes were likely far more damaging to the future of our nation.
you can't escape the fact that one of the catchphrases of the show was him threatening to beat up his wife, which is unthinkable now, but yeah, it was a loving relationship.
i love lucy was pretty good. when lucy acted dumb it was almost always because she was trying to get something from somebody, and usually succeeding.
But the other point about the honeymooners, and many movies, say with bing crosby; men who aren't terribly attractive are always paired with beautiful women. That happens now when the man feels untouchable with respect to the woman he actually marries, but he's rich, or powerful, or both.
@leslietownes That is true, indeed: she knew how to manipulate, which was an effective skill for a person in that time!
For example, the old Crooner, Tony Bennet, is married to a woman half his age. He now has alzheimer now, sadly. But if he was a retired mailman of his age, there's no way in hell he'd have a wife half his age. It's not that the wife nor Melania are stupid. But like in the House of cards, for some, marriage is contractual.
I'm just waiting for the frequent use of older, not so attractive women, paired with exceedingly attractive men, significantly younger than they are.
my friend's roommate was an actress and basically retired in her early 30s, roughly because she was too old to play someone's girlfriend or wife anymore.
i don't really get really large age gaps in relationships. i guess i get it as some kind of status symbol thing, but i wonder what those people have to talk about.
i can culturally relate to just about anybody within 10 years or so of my own age but beyond that it's a different story.
i used to think crossword puzzles were harder than they actually are, on average. of course some of them can be very difficult, but a lot of it for me was just a lack of familiarity with the form. there's "crosswordese" that pops up over and over even in otherwise well designed puzzles.
oh yeah. competitive scrabble is something else. half of the words pros use are unrecognizable to the average speaker.
i knew a guy who played competitively for a while. he said a lot of it was memorization of long lists of small-letter words. it lets you combine and position for maximum points.
you have to have a certain type of mind to memorize extremely long lists of words for competitive use. there isn't a lot of money in competitive scrabble although he did win some.
chess at least has a fairly well developed tradition of teaching and tutoring. which can be a fallback job option. i don't know that this exists for scrabble.
i googled my friend, a website estimates his career earnings at $20k. divided by the amount of time he poured into it, far less than minimum wage. although if it's fun, it's fun. doesn't have to be about earnings.
i'd be reluctant for my daughter to get too interested in chess because even if you are very competitive, and most aren't, you end up spending an enormous amount of time in windowless rooms with people who are more interested in chess than human beings, and sometimes aren't the best behaved people. which sounds miserable.
@leslietownes Indeed. I've learned a lot more about international chess, from quid. I've played chess off and out throughout my studies, and sponsored a high school team.
someone i went to grad school dabbled in poker for a while. the money was decent, he was tripling his stipend every month, but he had to just grind away at it for hours in dark rooms. and there's smoking and drunk people and if you win too much people try to fight you. i don't think that happens as much in chess.
i haven't played chess in a long time. my freshman year of college, i had a roommate who was very into it. he was clearly a better player than me and i don't think i ever beat him. but he was lazy and i could usually force him into a draw.
@leslietownes No, i don't think so ;D Again, The Queen's Gambit is a nice look into the world of competitive chess. What's interesting, is that the protagonist is a young girl in an orphanage, who evolves into a world class player, likely set in the fifties, with no focus on the fact she was a girl/woman.
he always wanted dramatic stuff to happen and if you just played slow and did anything to complicate the position and not leap at whatever he wanted, he ran out of ideas.
bridge was very popular in the math department when i was in grad school.
it seems to be an interesting game but i have utterly no idea how it is played. i couldn't tell you one thing about it. despite watching people play it, i don't know, dozens of times.
many newspapers used to have a syndicated bridge column. maybe some still do. i used to joke with my wife about it, you'd see all of these words that were individually familiar but made utterly no sense.
So-and-so takes the trick but then East has four trumps, but then West overtakes and tromps a trump. as the kids say, wtf?
@leslietownes That is the lingo, trump cards, and tricks. There are watered-down versions that took hold in WI: Particularly Sheepshead, largely among german immigrants, or geographic pockets, or "hearts" or "spades".
my grandmother born in mississippi played some slightly watered down variant. my new englander grandmother played canasta, which i did learn at one point, and does not involve taking tricks.
@leslietownes My parents played a lot of canasta against each other. I had learned the game, but never went on with it. They played a variety of games, but canasta most of all, keeping a list to record who one, who lost, and each would lead the other at various points.
my wife and i have struggled to find a game we can play together. there are games i always win and games she always wins, and neither one is particularly fun for us.
@leslietownes In that game, spades trump, particular face cards and aces. Unfortunately, in some ways, finding common games all of a group of friends or neighbors know is hard to come by.
maybe we'll just play our daughter until she always wins and then give up.
i designed a board game in fourth grade. it was actually pretty fun, it involved management of two classes of resources (farm animals and feed), exchanges of money, and had opportunities for dishonesty. i forget how it worked and sadly the rules were handwritten and now lost.
My parents also played parchisi, which has a board and a pair of dice thrown each time. So there is the element of "the luck of the dice". Their overtime scorecards they kept even out over time.
my fourth grade teacher was really cool, a classic hippie who would do stuff like ask everyone in the class to design a board game and then give us a week to do it. my game was the only one that didn't involve dice or chance.
i was giving a talk once at a math conference and afterward got to talking with someone, and it turned out to be my fourth grade teacher's brother. the world is a small place.
i had really great K-6 instructors. 7-8 were almost uniformly bad. in high school it was mostly well-intentioned people who were doing their best but in retrospect had no idea what to prepare us for.
it's tough to anticipate that stuff. someone raised in the 50s-60s grew up in a different universe than the one we grew up in. i think this trend has accelerated.
7-8 for me was tolerable, but a few teachers long overdue to retire. The highschool I went to was new, the second highschool in my home town, build to accommodate our growing town. It was dedicated to an "open concept/open campus". No required study halls during free time. By one's junior and senior year, if you didn't have class, you could leave campus. I thrived there, with fairly young teachers, virtually all no more than twice my age. But my brother and sister weren't ready for
for minimal structure. I was in an honors track from middle school on, and for the students in the same tract, like me, we flourished in a lot of ways. We all were on track and had the most inspiring and qualified of all teachers; but my sister, who became a flagrant defier of authority, when out of her way to butt heads with vice principles in charge of discipline. It was only in her senior year, when she realized that unless she buckled down, she wouldn't graduate.
I don't mean to intrude on this, but I have mixed feelings for my teachers, some of them were okay, but others were either boring, old time (in the way they did things, and did work. which didn't help.) or they were rude. I do like my high school teachers though, so far.
not intrusion to me. i did have some rude teachers, and it perplexed me. seems like the wrong job to be in for rudeness.
amwhy we had an open campus too although they stopped that after one of the high profile late 90s shootings. in my day people could just wander onto campus, off of campus, nobody cared.
yup. I always thought that some were just past their retirement age or for my 7th grade English teacher, she was in the wrong grade to teach.
@amWhy thanks
The seventh grade teacher expected us to act like high schoolers. which on numerous occasions, she would say something like "they wouldn't let you do that in high school."
i had a teacher who directly compared me to another student, saying that i was doing worse than X person was, out of the blue, in response to what was a reasonable question about the subject matter and not about my performance. completely irrelevant to education and needlessly cruel.
also, weirdly, seeming to be an attempt to provoke hostilities between students. i was cool with that other student so why bring up who has better grades.
also speaking as a lawyer, potentially violative of privacy law.
@leslietownes In one of my classes, I remember have the opportunity to visit a milwaukee school, and attend classes; likewise, students in that school participated for a day at my school. It was quite a shock. Doors to classrooms locked at the start of class; needing a pass to use the bathrooms, what looked like security, in uniforms the only visible folks when one headed to a bathroom.
amWhy i have a feeling i don't need to ask about how you feel about cops on campus. there's quite a lot of that. hopefully nothing that you have to deal with.
i had an elementary school teacher who was extreme about denying access to the bathroom. it can legitimately hurt people's health and create all sorts of accidents if you don't just let them go. another one of life's mysteries why that person wound up in teaching and not, i don't know, working as a prison guard.
@amWhy @leslietownes I do miss my 6th-grade Technical Education class though. Did a lot of fun things like making a bulletproof vest (it had to stop a plastic projectile from traveling something like 60 mph), doing egg drops, making Mag-Lev trains. A lot. My favorite thing though was when we were designing houses on a software designer and I put like 20 gazeebo's down and my teach made a joke out it.
@leslietownes So far, I haven't, save for one time, a student across campus had a meltdown, requiring crisis management and mental health intervention, given no threat to student safety, save for the student who became virtually catatonic. None the less, the entire campus went into lock-down for two hours, until she was taken by ambulence to a mental health facility.
Because of the lock down, it was the talk of the campus for weeks; with an assortment of jokes among students about that student.
But I will likely not recognize the high-school I attended. particularly it's current procedures. It is no longer "open concept", but there are now three highschools in my home town, plus two secondary education charter schools in the school district. Heck, and they just reopened to in face instruction this September.
