The Republican war on school teachers has taken a predictable toll:
Rural school districts in Texas are switching to four-day weeks this fall due to lack of staff. Florida is asking veterans with no teaching background to enter classrooms. Arizona is allowing college students to step in and instruct children.
The teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels — and school officials everywhere are scrambling to ensure that, as students return to classrooms, someone will be there to educate them.
“I have never seen it this bad,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, said of the teacher shortage. “Right now it’s number one on the list of issues that are concerning school districts … necessity is the mother of invention, and hard-pressed districts are going to have to come up with some solutions.”
This is the price of the Republican war on teachers and 40 years of tax cut jeebus. They get paid shit and half the country calls them pedophiles and lie about them teaching things like crt. The Republican party has crowds of mouthbreathers showing up at board of education meetings threatening teachers over mask mandates and telling the truth about the civil war. Then, to top it all off, they have to pay for their own supplies and have gofundme’s for basic shit while having to worry about getting shot up because y’all are gun nuts leaving your ar-15’s lying around for your weirdo fucking kid to shoot up the school. And who with any fucking level of education wants to live in the middle of bumfuck Texas surrounded my a bunch of racist bigots?
You’re going to see this in a lot of fields. Nursing, social work, teaching- all the service trades that women typically dominate which are completely underpaid and undervalued because before, they would work for less money because they were passionate and loved what they are doing. But now that the Republican party has made them all props in a culture war while paying them even less, they are no longer willing to do a job that literally could get them killed.
***
In other news my computer is fixed so I can get back to posting. Expensive fucking summer- 2500 in car repairs and a bunch on the computer and then I had to get new glasses because I am an old and my prescription changed. I went to the strip district today and finally got my own personal experience with the price gouging going on. I went to Wholey’s and didn’t even buy the cheapest fish they had. Prices were through the roof. I picked up some smoked pork neckbones to go with the 500lbs of pinto beans I had in my pantry, so I am excited about that. Also got some peaches at the orchard- the prices there had risen a little, but not much.
War For Ukraine Day 162: Where Exactly Does Amnesty International Think Ukraine Should Be Defending Itself?
Mai Naem mobile
What did you need to get done for your car? I have a CRV as well and at this point I am really disappointed in the vehicle. The A/C is less than optimal. Try driving in the summer in Arizona with an underpowered A/C unit. Dealer says there’s. nothing wrong with it. They’ve replaced the a/c motor and some other item twice..also refilled the freon all under warranty but this crap shouldn’t be happening in the first place. In other news, today i filled gas for under $4/gallon…the first time in several months.
Patricia Kayden
Looks like Republicans are systematically destroying public education in red states. This will not end well but Trump did say that he loved the poorly educated.
Chetan Murthy
@Patricia Kayden: Anybody who’s good enough to be a good teacher, is also good enough to get a much-better-paying job in the private sector. [the generic “you”, not any particular person, to be sure] You wanna keep those people as teachers. So you’d better pay them enough they don’t need to take second jobs (like they have to in OK and probably elsewhere) and you’d better not shit down their necks every chance you get. Sigh.
mrmoshpotato
‘I never thought leopards would eat MY and MY CHILDREN’S faces,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.
The Rethuglican party can all go fuck themselves with the rustiest of pitchforks, and then be unable to even get a tetanus shot, much less an annual checkup.
Fuck them for fucking themselves, their own children, and this country.
Chetan Murthy
@mrmoshpotato: Maybe it’s different today, but …. parents in those rural Texas school districts don’t care too much if their kids get educated or not. All that matters is the day-care services. At least, that’s what it was like when I was a kid.
Mike in NC
Republicans gave up on public schools back in the 1950s when they couldn’t demand that everybody had to accept their Southern Baptist ideology .
mrmoshpotato
@Chetan Murthy: Congrats to them.
sanjeevs
Speculators Exit Agricultural Markets, Intensifying Crop Selloff – WSJ
May be some better news coming on inflation. Gas prices falling too.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team
Orchard peaches sound amazing. Anyone else’s mouth have a little reaction from eating peaches sometimes? Still worth it tho, esp when they’re cold.
Going in for kidney stone treatment trmw, 3-4 hrs they said. Don’t tell me how painful it is, I know that and it’s universally the first thing every one of my friends says when I tell them.
Wish me luck for a smooth easy recovery!
Redshift
Our county public school system has 98% of teaching positions filled for the coming year. Some of the reasons are that they’ve been raising pay (helped by a Democratic legislature), there are programs to help teachers afford to live in the county, and the all-Democratic school board hasn’t knuckled under to the wingnut screamers at school board meetings (knowing the public will back them up.)
It helps that we’re one of the wealthier counties around, but only because that’s combined with people who care about community, not just “I got mine.”
mrmoshpotato
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team: Painless and easy recovery from your time at the hospital.
Never had any reaction to peaches than mmmmmm.
Redshift
@Mike in NC:
And their segregationist ideology. It’s not widely known that the “school choice” movement, but to mention pushing for public funding of religious schools, had its origins in opposing integration.
Chetan Murthy
@mrmoshpotato:
dooonut peaches. dooonut peaches.
UncleEbeneezer
@Mike in NC: Also too, Integration.
John Cole
@Mai Naem mobile: Some after market thing to deal with my alignment which could not be properly done for the last few months, new brakes (first time I have replaced them in 90k miles), and new tires because the alignment had caused them to wear unevenly.
Sally
“hard pressed districts are going to have to come up with some solutions” – probably not including better wages and conditions. Just lower the bar, so that the grade 4 teacher can at least read at the grade 5 level.
cain
@Patricia Kayden: They will be completely be out of the economy except for those who can afford private school. This will be bad for the non-whites who need an education. I suppose many will try to leave and go elsewhere if they can.
CaseyL
@Mai Naem mobile: I hate to say it, because I love Hondas, but Honda is notorious for lousy AC units. Even when they work “properly,” they’re underpowered.
(I had to give up my sweet 95 Accord Wagon because the AC died and it would have cost more than the car was worth to get the AC replaced. Because, just to add insult to injury, you have to practically dismantle the front end to get at the unit.)
Fake Irishman
@Chetan Murthy:
Oddly enough, rural Texas areas have traditionally been pretty strong for public education funding as recently as the early 2010s. When charter folks started pushing their wares in the early 2000s, a large number of Republican office seekers backing them got dumped in GOP primaries in 2006. It seems quaint now, but there really were a lot of pro public school GOPers then.
cain
@Sally: Those parents are going to be pissed. I feel sorry for those kids – they are likely losing opportunities. Stuck in an echo chamber where they’ll end up blaming minorities and liberals – no doubt, they’ll be hanging at a diner so the NYT can come over and talk to them about why they are economically anxious.
AxelFoley
@Patricia Kayden:
Exactly. This is what Republicans want–for the masses to be uneducated. For this reason, I wish these teachers wouldn’t quit. I understand their reasons for quitting, but we can’t let the GOP do this shit. Teachers and boards of education need to fight back against this bullshit.
HumboldtBlue
Yup, they keep fucking with women and I can only hope they about to find lout.
cain
@CaseyL: I love my Subaru – it’s the official car of the northwest, but it’s also built in Lafayette, IN my home town :) Best of both worlds! I haven’t had to do anything but get it serviced since I’ve had it. It’s about 9 years old now.
mrmoshpotato
@Chetan Murthy: Peach donuts?
Citizen Alan
@Mike in NC: Incorrect, as stated. In the 1950’s. the Southern Baptists were all still racist Democrats. They didn’t become Republicans until the Carter administration said your SBC bible college couldn’t be tax exempt if you barred black kids from attending.
cain
@AxelFoley: There needs to be a general teacher strike across the nation – let’s see how they feel when their kid has to stay home because no school and the parents have to figure out how to handle that situation.
It’s a good time to make them feel the pain.
Chetan Murthy
@mrmoshpotato: “donut peaches”. Aka “saturn peaches”. flat, squashed things. usually on the small side. Incredibly fragrant and tasty. Really like nothing else.
Fake Irishman
I feel ya Cole. Had a large tree fall on my property (fortunately on the vacant lot next door). Cost $2700 to remove. Fortunately we’re lucky enough to have savings that we can afford it. I’m just bummed that I lost my wonderfully productive orange tree in the Texas freeze last year and now the big elm. The crappy invasive tallow, of course, is still growing rapidly.
I’m thinking of planting a Willow tree close to my house. Does everyone here think that’s a good idea? /s
Fake Irishman
@HumboldtBlue:
You are already seeing it in nursing. (And have been for a while now, even pre pandemic. It’s one reason why nurses salaries have been steadily going up for decades, at least RNs.)
mrmoshpotato
@Chetan Murthy: I see.
Kent
That is true. We lived in TX from 2003 to 2016 and I taught there from 2007 to 2016. During the George W Bush era there was a lot of support for public education and the schools were pretty decently resourced. Teacher pay was for shit, but the schools usually passed their levies and had decent facilities. Hurts me to say this but in some ways Bush was a better education president than Obama who basically just neglected it and turned things over to the billionaire charter school fraudsters.
That all changed with Tom DeLay and the mid-term redistricting they did to gerrymander the whole fucking state and run out every reasonable Dem and reasonable Republican in exchange for all the feral cannibals who rode in within all those safe GOP districts. Then politics just shifted to catering to the furthest right of the electorate in order to win primaries and everything went into a complete tailspin and we are now at the Gilead part of the evolution.
The other problem is that in the past generation so many rural towns have evolved demographically so that it is all sour old MAGA white folks living there who’s kids have long since left along with new Hispanic migrants who do all the work but don’t have the political power or clout to actually affect things like education policy. Because a lot of them are not citizens. So you have angry old rural white people refusing to fund education for the brown immigrants who are filling their schools.
HumboldtBlue
@Fake Irishman:
It’s been a rural issue for years now. Former Humboldt State, now Cal Poly Humboldt, dropped its nursing program a ways back despite it being successful at recruiting, training and preparing nurses for full-time employment.
The nursing program has been restored, and that’s certainly needed in a region where healthcare can be scarce to non-existent.
Kent
Actually I think you are referring to Coit v. Green which stripped seg academies of their tax exempt status. That was decided in 1971 during the height of the Nixon Administration.
Kent
No, what they ACTUALLY want is to get their hands on the trillions of dollars spent for public education in this country and siphon it off or direct it towards funding their own private academies. Upscale private prep schools for the country club Republicans and evangelical religious schools for the downscale evangelical Republicans. Private voucher programs, charter schools, etc. That way THEIR kids will all be educated/indoctrinated to be good little oligarchs or fundamentalists as the case may be on the taxpayer’s dime. And to hell with all the brown kids who make up the majority of public education students in this country. They can look out for themselves.
The model is actually Latin America. Go visit any Latin American country including the wealthy ones like Chile and Argentina. You will find that public schools are in shambles and only the poorest kids attend them. Everyone else sends their kids to private schools of which there is a complete array from simple/modest all the way up to extravagantly posh academies for the wealthy. My wife is Chilean and grew up in Santiago. This is where she went to school, which is at the top end of the spectrum and as good as any high-end private school in the US: https://www.scollege.cl/en/
guachi
I’ve been following the Teachers subreddit and this has been brewing for months and months. That it finally made The Washington Post should tell you the problem is past the point of being solvable by many school districts. A combination of weak administration that won’t stand up for their teachers and insane parents have caught teachers in the middle and many are just quitting.
frosty
@John Cole: We had to replace all four tires in our Jeep Grand Cherokee in the last two years. If you get a flat with AWD (and now 4WD I found out) and the tread depth is a little to far out of matching, you have to scrap three perfectly good tires.
Argghh!
PS It’s my wife’s ride, not mine. I would never buy another one of these AWD/4WD vehicles if it was my choice.
Another Scott
@sanjeevs: Relatedly, … TheInformation.com:
(Seems to be paywalled after that snippet.)
Shocking!!1 [ womp, womp ]
(via https://daringfireball.net/ )
Cheers,
Scott.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team
@mrmoshpotato: that’s a good reaction! And thank you 🙏🏻
James E Powell
I’ve been teaching in Los Angeles since 2005 and speaking for myself and every teacher I’ve ever known, we don’t give a shit what Republicans and dickheads like Jonathan Chait say about us. We really don’t. We care about our salaries and the resources available to teach.
In all these years, the #1 reason almost the only reason people leave is the pay is too low. This is particularly acute in the early years when student loan payments are quite the burden.
I don’t know how it is in other places, but before 2008 and the austerity wave that followed, we had resources for a lot of cool stuff. Almost none of that has come back.
I could go on for hours about this stuff, but I will leave it with this: people say all kinds of wonderful things, but when it comes down to making it happen & paying for it, they really don’t give a shit about the education of other people’s children.
Kattails
@AxelFoley: A friend of my sister told the story of going down south to teach in the late 60’s/ early 70’s. She was arrested for teaching black children under the age of eight to read. Why? Because it’s much harder to learn to read as you get that little bit older. And if you were illiterate, you were not allowed to vote.
FastEdD
I taught public school for 34 years and retired when I just didn’t love it any more. Some creative solutions I’ve heard are school districts providing housing for teachers. Communities for young families starting the profession. Student loan forgiveness if you stay in teaching for a couple years. I had student teachers in my room who were amazed that we had to pay for practically everything out of our own pockets, materials for kids, even whiteboard pens. In 34 years I never had an air conditioner or a computer that worked in my room. The crazy thing was that they wouldn’t even let you bring your own. I kept sending kids to the office on make believe errands because the principal’s office had AC. We had a saying at our union: the teachers’ working conditions are the kids’ learning conditions. Republicans don’t care about either one.
prostratedragon
@Kent: And the beginning of the exodus was back in 1968 when Nixon began the Southern strategy just as Dixiecrats were looking for a new home in the wake of the civil rights legislation supported by LBJ.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I begin my 23rd year of teaching next month. Elementary level. I would never encourage my little one to become a teacher. Teaching sucks in so many ways but it is also rewarding once in a blue moon. Plus we get more than 2 weeks vacation each year.
Kattails
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team: best of luck for a smooth and easy treatment and recovery!
Kent
@FastEdD: Sorry to hear how much it sucked where you taught. I currently teach in a relatively affluent district in SW Washington where teachers are reasonably paid and we have decent resources. All teachers have good Dell laptops, for example, and every teacher’s desk is built with a big LDC monitor and docking station so that you can walk into any classroom in the school, plug your laptop into the hub and have instant access to all your stuff plus seamless connection to the big flatscreen TV and a nice monitor and keyboard to use so you don’t even have to open your laptop.
What it also means is that you can never really leave your work behind because all your stuff is accessible 24/7. I still enjoy it but will walk away the moment my wife burns out working as a physician and decides to walk away from medicine. She is about 100x more burnt out than I am after the pandemic. Once our kids are safely through college (or mostly through) we will be done.
Jackie
@mrmoshpotato: When I eat peaches freshly picked from the tree, the fuzz irritates my mouth. Totally worth it, though. Fresh picked and washed causes no problems. It’s being patient enough to wash the fuzz off first is the problem.
Kent
I have 15 years of teaching HS science under my belt. It is my second career after working 15+ years as a marine fisheries biologist in Alaska and Seattle mostly. This past year was actually a really good year. Kids were glad to be back in school. I taught mostly chemistry to mostly juniors which is the sweet spot for HS. One of my more enjoyable years of teaching.
I agree to a point, but what a lot of teachers don’t actually understand is how much MOST jobs actually suck. It ain’t just teaching. What I advise students who want to teach is that they should get a normal degree like a BA in Biology and then pick up the teaching credentials on the side. Rather than just getting a BA in education. That way they have more options should they choose to go in a different direction.
sanjeevs
@Another Scott: LOL we need a metaverse bailout
prostratedragon
@Kent: Been that way in South America for a long time. Back in the oil lamp era when I was in elementary school there were a few middling income families from Argentina and such countries who were there expressly so the children could get good education at that level at free public schools, after which they went back for university which was free or low cost for those lucky enough to be able to prepare. Gives the society that nice Potemkin sheen, for a little while at least.
FastEdD
@Kent: The working conditions were awful, but most of the kids were wonderful. That’s what sucks us in I guess. I do volunteer work for JPL and asked a couple kids to help me yesterday. They immediately said, “Sure, count me in!” I’ve been retired for 14 years and they will still do things just because their old teacher asked them. They are in their 30’s with kids of their own, but they still love doing engineering stuff. Awesome kids! I was fortunate to do what I loved and get out while I could.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team
@Kattails: thank you very much, I appreciate it!
LeftCoastYankee
@Mike in NC:
Fixed it for you.
FastEdD
@Kent: Yep, we get summer off, but we aren’t paid for it! True, most other jobs suck too, but many teachers know that because they need two jobs to survive. A colleague of mine was a science teacher who would shake his head when we were stressed. He said, “I used to land on a carrier at night when I was out of fuel. I had one attempt. That’s stress!” It is good advice not to get an education degree and get a normal one. I wish I had done that.
Chetan Murthy
@FastEdD:
The thing that always boggled my mind, was that you work full days, but then you have all that grading, lesson plans, etc, to do at home. For which time you’re not getting paid. And then you get paid shit wages for the time you’re in the school, too. It all seems madness.
Grey Michael
@Mike in NC: Don’t forget Brown vs Board of Education too.
Sorry, didn’t see the other commenters got there first. Didn’t mean to dog pile.
Old Dan and Little Ann
@Kent: My wife has her Masters in History. She took extra courses to become a teacher upon graduating. 20+ years later of teaching Global Studies and AP Gov later she loves it. I worked 2 jobs and summers forever. No longer. I paid my dues. I do feel badly for the newbies. That was me starting in 99. Oi.
HumboldtBlue
Teachers, yeah?
Youse make me smile.
Jay
@frosty:
5 tires, rotated. The spare has almost the same wear as the flat.
if you get another flat, often you can find a 50%-75% used tire to match by phoning around.
(driven 4wd and AWD since 1981, as it’s often needed for here and there).
piratedan
@LeftCoastYankee: i would have said 1850, because that appears to be their ideal benchmark, POC were property and women were chattel, but to be honest its really getting difficult to feel like there’s any common bonds with these people and their mindset and their insistence on not only maintaining it, but perpetuating it and imposing it on everyone else.
Kent
Yep. I worked on crab boats in the Bering Sea when I was young. That is brutal work compared to teaching. There are endless hassles to teaching of course. And I feel for those who have to be the primary breadwinner on a teacher’s salary. But if you are married and have two equivalent salaries and live in a blue state that pays teachers it isn’t bad.
Both of my brothers do blue collar work and they don’t want to hear me whine. My wife has an 80 hour a week grind as a physician and endless stress. So I try not to wine about the stupid frustrations that come with teaching.
frosty
@Jay:
This typically happens on the road; hard to phone around and find a used tire when you’re due in another town in a couple of days. But it’s good advice and I’ll give it a shot when we get a chance.
Jay
@frosty:
that’s what regularly rotating the spare is for, plus you get 20% more milage out of a set of tires,
you just have to remember when you get a flat that can’t be repaired, to put the word out ( make, “style”, size, tread wear), what you are looking for. Most tire shops don’t toss good-ish tires with more than 40% tire left. It allows them to collect the deposit for a tire, plus a resale, so up to $100 profit on something that would other wise get recycled ( allegedly) or go to the dump.
Citizen Alan
@Kent:
Nope. The Bob Jones University case came at the end of that decade. It’s it’s what provoked all the evangelical leaders who all had their own Bible college grifts to band together and form the moral majority. And while they were at it, comma embrace a hardcore Anti-abortion position so they could peel the catholics off from the democratic coalition.
sab
@Mike in NC: Back then those people weren’t Republicans. They were Dixiecrats.
The South didn’t suck economically necause Sherman marched to the sea ( waht, 90 miles in Georgia.) The South sucked economically everywjere, because of choices they made on how to run their society.
Others moved down there in the 1970s and 1980s and things started to change necause the choices changed ( like support edication and economic development.)
Then the Republicans decided to develop their Southern strategy and slowly reversed all those changes. It is now infecting most of the country. The Midwest used to be known for excellent public schools. Now we are trying to compete with Mississippi on low taxes and low spending on everything: public: schools, higher education, infrastructure, etc.
The Thin Black Duke
Bottom line, this isn’t substainable. What happens to America when all the smart people are silenced, exiled or killed? Praying won’t make climate change go away.
leeleeFL
@The Thin Black Duke: Sad to say this, but I think we might not be able to reverse course on climate change. A very educated woman was chattering to me tonight about how it’s hotter than hell, worse every year. What the hell, she asks! When I say the climate is reacting to our neglect and abuse, I get a blank stare and a shoulder shrug…like what can you do? I wanted to cry, but what’s the point?
And yes, all jobs do suck, but the ones you thought could change the world suck more, because you figure out at least half the world doesn’t want to save the other half. Humans generally suck, and finding that out is soul-killing.
Glory b
Remember, being a teacher has been a classic way for black people to enter the middle class. Of course, we can’t have THAT.
I also believe I read somewhere that in Florida, those veterans won’t even need to have bachelor’s degrees. So you can have someone with a high school education teaching your kids but they’re a veteran, so it’s OK. (Snark)
germy shoemangler
Persistent Low Wages Linked to Faster Memory Decline in Later Life
WereBear
@germy shoemangler: Of course. Stress is what burns anyone out. With poverty, it never ends.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Smart girls used to become teachers or nurses because they had few other choices. And those jobs are underpaid specifically because they’re predominantly female.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team: May things go well and the memory disappear along with the stones.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Another Scott: That can’t be real. It sounds like adults who took some kids game and played it with real money.
SFAW
John –
One quibble: nurses are not generally underpaid these days. Social workers and teachers, yeah, but nurses do OK. [Mrs. SFAW is a nurse, and her salary is pretty good. (And, no, it’s not anecdata.) Of course, probably not as good as a hospital administrator’s is, but still …]
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: The AC was the first really expensive thing that really died in my Honda Fit, after about a decade of heavy use. When it needed major repairs because I’d left it sitting unused too long through the early COVID pandemic, I decided to just replace it in part because the air conditioning was dead too.
brantl
@Chetan Murthy: Peeeeach dooonuts, Peeeeach dooonuts!
brantl
That’s probably grade 3 level, in reality.
Matt McIrvin
@Glory b: The first black person I ever had any extended interaction with was my first-grade teacher, the wonderful Miss Watkins (she got married and changed her name not long after). The neighborhood was very white and rather culturally Southern in those days, I remember a lot of kids just… not liking her for reasons I couldn’t fathom, and I’ve often wondered since what that must have been like for her.
artem1s
Teacher education is another victim in the GQP war on public education. Why would anyone want a degree in K-12 given the working conditions and shitty pay that would barely cover their rent and student loan payments? And most of the jobs are in pre-school (day care) and religious schools that pay even less and aren’t unionized. In addition universities have been under funding and scaling back their teacher’s ed programs since the early 80’s. Religious schools are a lot more lax about credentialing so why have master’s and continuing ed programs? Add the boomer generation all reaching retirement age in the same decade. It’s no wonder there is a shortage even without the daily threat of massacre by gun nut or pandemic.
Ken
Except for the adage about “they aren’t making any more of it”, which I imagine means it’s not a perfect parallel to investing in actual acreage.
jeffreyw
@Fake Irishman:
The willow tree was problematic but the stump has been quite useful.
Frankensteinbeck
Hiring unqualified teachers is not going to go well, and I don’t mean just providing poor education. Teaching is a skill, and not something any random person can do. There are going to be scandals and disasters, and lots of them. Also the replacements quitting in droves mid-semester when they find out the job is not the cake walk Republican mythology told them it is.
Oh, right. In case you didn’t know, a major conservative belief is that teachers have a really easy job. That’s another dog about to catch the car.
@Another Scott:
Metaverse was never going to happen. It’s one of the stupidest ideas to come out of buzzword culture. A super-rich dipshit (Bezos, I think it was?) thought he could wave his hand and make science fiction movies reality, replacing web pages with fabulous neon and shiny metal virtual reality. His employees weren’t allowed to tell him there is no market and the technology doesn’t exist. His rich stupid dipshit executive friends leaped on board because they think he’s a genius.
But there’s no market, and the tech doesn’t exist.
I’m a little sorry Metaverse won’t get far enough for the executives to find out what happens when regular people start using any social platform. Oh, that would have been hilarious.
@leeleeFL:
I can give you at least a little cheer: Climate change activism IS working. We used to be on pace for a 4-5 degree increase. It’s down to 1.5. Policy changes and green tech have had a major effect. More is probably on the way. We only hear the doomsayers and the Republicans, but we can make a big difference and put a brake on things getting worse.
Tony G
Absolutely. This trend will only accelerate now that about half the states are making abortion a felony — which, of course, means that suffering a miscarriage in one of those states will trigger a criminal investigation for possible homicide. A few educated women will remain in these states because of extended family ties — but what woman (or what man who cares about women) in a less backward state will choose to take a job and move to a state like Texas or Alabama? These states will become more and more isolated and economically backward. In spite of the stupid rhetoric, I don’t think that there will actually be a secession of states like what was attempted in 1861, but there will be an acceleration in this country of the division between “blue” states with thriving economies and well educated residents — and backward “red state” shit-holes in the south and the midwest.
Soprano2
@Kent: Our city just reassembled the citizen committee that came up with the recommendations for what schools to spend bond money on the last time our city passed a bond issue. I read an article about them touring one of the new schools that was built with that money and two of our older schools; they all said the difference in the facilities was like night and day. The older schools (one is almost 100 years old) had small classrooms and almost no amenities. The newer one, of course, has accommodations for all the latest technology. The last two schools they did were almost complete rebuilds, because frankly it’s often cheaper to tear down and rebuild than to retrofit a building that old. The committee members commented at how small the classrooms in the older schools are compared with the newer school. Plus, older schools weren’t built for air conditioning; we never had air conditioning when I was in school, so we didn’t have anything in the summer.
I’ve got friends who are teachers, so I know they’re going through a lot right now. The past two years have been really hard on them.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck: It wasn’t even a good-looking crack at virtual reality. It was like a worse version of Second Life, which has existed for almost 20 years now and never really made it as a commercial product.
Raoul Paste
All of this
Well said
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck:
I don’t think we’re anywhere near being on pace for 1.5–that’s an aspirational goal that is likely impossible. It got dialed down from an earlier aspirational target of 2C in part because of better recognition of how bad impacts can really be.
The best estimates I’ve seen for our current most-likely path is more like 3C by 2100, thanks to all the decarbonization efforts that have already happened. That is plenty bad, apocalyptic for large chunks of the world, and we should do better. But it’s not the old “business as usual” scenario either.
The best news is that it seems like a low-carbon future without undue suffering to get it is way more technically possible than it looked 20 years ago. It really doesn’t involve a hair-shirt “abandon modern technology and make everyone a peasant farmer” future, and I used to hear a lot of this sort of masochistic moralizing about that.
Starfish
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team: There is something called oral allergy syndrome. Do you think you have that?
Frankensteinbeck
@Matt McIrvin:
While I agree with your main point, I think the Lindens and the $100 million they make a year would be surprised to learn they never made it as a commercial product.
But you’re right it’s a niche product, and Metaverse is worse than it in every way. A lot worse. A LOT worse. Second Life and VRChat already have the entire market for anything like Metaverse, and have done so by accommodating the sex and allowing their players to police griefers in their own areas, two things antithetical to the Metaverse vision.
Because the truth is, the Metaverse vision isn’t VR chat rooms. Bezos thinks he’s going to REPLACE the existing internet with this. Metaverse is meant to have everyone go to an online DMV and grocery store. And nobody wants that. It is truly the stupidest, most delusional buzzword ever.
Starfish
@cain: It will be bad for everyone who has a special needs child. Most of the private schools are not going to accept the more complicated children.
Starfish
@cain: Parents have already felt the pain of school closures during the pandemic. That created worse conditions for teachers because you had the conservative movements to open the schools and remove the masks, which probably led to a lot of COVID.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck:
And that really is because he’s thinking in terms of 1980s-90s cyberpunk science fiction, where this is how the Internet evolved. But the authors wrote that for narrative reasons–a virtual world where people have virtual bodies that have crime-fiction adventures is an easier place to set an exciting story than a world where everyone is typing and looking at words on a screen. It was never a reasonable prediction that you’d do all your online shopping by going into the virtual world and driving your virtual motorcycle to the virtual big-box store where you virtually poke around the aisles for a virtual can of beans.
The natural extension is the way that in so many of these stories, being in virtual reality is mortally dangerous, with some kind of risk of frying your brain or getting stuck there forever. Who would build that on purpose? Nobody, but it makes it way easier to write an adventure story because there are high stakes.
Soprano2
@WereBear: I listened to an interesting Hidden Brain podcast about “decision fatigue”. They talked about how when people are poor and struggling they have to think so much more about every small decision that they develop decision fatigue, which causes people to make worse decisions than they would otherwise make. They said it explains how people can make decisions that from the outside look stupid; they’re so mentally exhausted that they’ve reached their limit, so they do what’s easy and convenient rather than thinking things through. It can happen to anyone; sometimes this summer I’ve felt it was happening to me! So it makes total sense that low wages would be linked to memory decline.
Soprano2
@Dorothy A. Winsor: In going through my mother’s stuff I found certificates for both my grandmother and grandfather to be teachers. Neither of them had a college degree; I think it used to be that you could become a teacher if you graduated from high school and then took a test. My grandmother had some college, but I don’t know if my grandfather did or not.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Soprano2: I went to a Catholic grade school back when the baby boom was straining classrooms and the supply of teachers. The Servite nuns who taught sometimes didn’t have college degrees, but were taking classes every summer to get them. There were 50 kids in that classroom. I sometimes wonder what happened to the ones who needed something extra.
Soprano2
@Frankensteinbeck: There’s a persistent belief among conservatives that teachers are just glorified babysitters, and anyone can be a babysitter! They have no idea what the job actually entails. My father’s whole career was in education; he eventually became a school superintendent. I thought I wanted to be a music teacher until I did my teacher aiding; I decided that if I had to spend a whole day in a classroom with young children I would kill either myself or someone else (J/K, but not really). Luckily that was when I was a sophomore, so I was able to add a business major so I could get a job; not much demand for someone with a degree in general music in 1983 when the unemployment rate was around 10%! So although I’ve never been a teacher I have some idea what they go through from watching and listening to my father when I was younger.
cope
@Jackie: I share your aversion to the fuzz feel in my mouth but work around it by slicing peaches into quarters and chomping down on them flesh side up. Mmmmm…peaches.
Frankensteinbeck
@Matt McIrvin:
EeeeeYUP. He and Musk exactly think they’re making cool science fiction real. They are high on their own supply. But the cybertruck doesn’t fly, Amazon’s household robot isn’t intelligent and doesn’t do chores, and nobody wants to have to go to a virtual store instead of filling out an online form. Their cargo cult sci-fi is just garbage thrown together to fool a stupid boss who won’t listen to ‘no’.
Soprano2
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I had anywhere from 30 to 35 kids in my K-6 classes. One year the 5th grade was going to be 40 (!) kids, so they divided the 5th and 6th grades (I was in 6th grade at that time); they took 15 kids from the 5th and 10 kids from the 6th and made another classroom for us. Guess how they did that – with test scores! For me it was the best year of grade school because we got to fly through the material rather than having to spend a month on long division so all the kids could grasp the concept, plus all my friends were there. The bad thing was that it caused a lasting rift in the two classes; the kids in the regular 5th and 6th classes saw themselves as the “dumb” kids, and us as the “smart” kids. I mean, the school was small enough that everyone already knew who the “smart” kids were, but making it so obvious like that was hurtful.
My husband went to Catholic school in Chicago in the 1950’s; all his teachers were nuns, and I’m sure few of them had college degrees, although I should ask him about that.
Ken
Not according to Futurama.
Starfish
Damn straight. Every time someone is like “Let us build a VR grocery store experience because the technology is cool,” I yell about how absolutely no one wants that mess.
It is bad enough that they are putting advertising televisions in the gas stations and now the grocery stores.
Do you want ads running on the freezer window, so you can’t see what is in there? No. Absolutely not.
Starfish
@Soprano2: Nursing was the same.
Wapiti
@Sally: My grandfather had a teaching certificate since he completed the eighth grade. But that was a while ago.
Matt McIrvin
The fact that in the Metaverse all the avatars are literally chopped off at the waist seems like it should be a satire of some bluenose suit’s concept of virtual reality, rather than the actual product. (The old cyberpunk science fiction DEFINITELY DID NOT have THAT detail.)
Quiltingfool
@Soprano2: My grandmother graduated from high school, which was not easy in NW Arkansas – she and her sister had to leave home to attend high school (they lived in a boarding house). She took an exam, and earned a 1st grade degree. The level of degree indicated the number of students you could teach. First grade meant more students and higher pay. She taught in a one room school.
She didn’t stick with teaching. After marriage and kids, she became the Postmistress at Witt Springs Arkansas. My mother had the post office certificate framed, and it was signed by James Farley, Postmaster General under FDR.
The family moved to Missouri in the 50’s. The farm they bought in west central Missouri was very hilly – kind of like the terrain they left in Arkansas!
Chris T.
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team:
The treatment is no big deal, assuming you mean ultrasound. I had that. The problem was the recovery-from-treatment. 😝
Seriously though, it’s not nearly as bad as the kidney stone.
louc
@Kent: In Chile at least, this was a direct result of Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago gang advising Pinochet. Friedman came up with the idea of private school vouchers and implemented it in Chile. Republicans have been working for at least three decades to get this implemented and got a lot of help from DeVos and the Trump administration.
louc
re: nurses, there’s this great piece out of Bloomberg about how maternity wards are disappearing in huge swaths of rural Texas and its implications in a post-Roe world. One example: Big Bend Hospital’s maternity ward closed regularly because a shortage of staffing. There is no day care and most nurses are women with children, so they’re not willing to move there.
leeleeFL
@Frankensteinbeck: Thanks! I woke up to your note, and it does help! I am in a really down in the dumps phase just now, so I appreciate any good news.
Bill Arnold
US corporate profits in 2021 were the highest (highest profit margins) since 1950[1]. We’ll see how 2022 looked in early 2023, but I don’t expect the magnitude of profit decline that some are predicting.
TL;DR some of the high prices is corporations (and unincorporated small businesses) collectively and proactively protecting their profit margins by raising their prices as much as they can get away with. (Collusion is harder to prove, but coordination can be simply “all my friends and competitors are raising prices so I can get away with it”.)
[1] U.S. companies post their biggest profit growth in decades by jacking up prices during the pandemic (WILL DANIEL, March 31, 2022, Fortune)
Subsole
@SFAW:
If I may ask, is she a traveller or does she work at one facility?
I ask b/c I will, hopefully, be going into the medical field soonish (though not as a nurse), and I keep hearing that the pay for nurses is kinda not that great, but you can make absolute bank if you’re willing to travel.
From what I can gather, the hospitals are shorting their staff to keep the budget numbers low, then having to turn around and pay through the eyeballs for someone living out of state to come and pick up the slack. Because no one wants to actually work at the hospital for the indicated pay.
So, it must make sense somehow, but it all looks dime-smart and dollar stupid from where I am sitting.
Jill
@Mike in NC: Republicans aren’t shy about wanting to replace public schools with privately run “little gardens for God” in some approximation of Betsy DeVoss’s words. What could go wrong?
Subsole
@Matt McIrvin: Hiro Protagonist would be nodding in agreement right now.
Subsole
@Soprano2: I suspect the reason so many Conservatives think of teaching as glorified babysitting is because that’s generally all they want from the teacher/school. A place to drop their little hellspawn off and not have to think of them during the day.
Subsole
@Starfish: I for one look forward to getting locked out of my bank accounts by feral ransomware because I picked the wrong bag of frozen matrix-peas.
Make a good end to a long, virtual day of standing in line at the virtual CVS getting griefed by adbot cloudnets because my nephew wore a shirt that wasn’t sufficiently infra-chill, so his junior-high classmates pulled every hash from anyone with his surname and wrote some code.
Sounds absolutely wiz, chummer. Jack me in and throw away the key, Johnny Mnemonic.
SFAW
@Subsole:
One facility, a relatively small community hospital in the Boston area
Travelers make double or triple what my wife makes. Were she/we younger, she might consider it. The astronomical traveler pay is pretty much an aftereffect of COVID, and what it did to that job market.
I’d say your first sentence is reasonably accurate, although “shorting” generally means not getting super raises. Had there been no COVID, and no resultant boost (for travelers) — plus the stretched-thin environment of a year or so ago — plenty of people would be pretty happy with what hospitals are paying. Were my wife to go work at a hospital in Boston-proper, she’d probably be making significantly more, so hospital location is also a factor.
I think there was and has been a shortage of nurses, so going forward, it’s probably still a good field. [I realize nursing is not where you’re heading.]
Subsole
@SFAW: That actually makes a lot of sense, thanks for answering.
I can definitely see the complaints being less about the amount of compensation and more about the workload. It would make sense for folks making decent pay to complain about getting shorted on raises if their patient load tripled but the pay stayed the same. That’s not a small thing!
I imagine that dynamic will be pretty universal across the patient-care field. Allied health in general got clobbered by COVID (and the absolute pants-on-head response from TFG, but I ain’t doing that to my blood pressure today…).
mr perfect
@louc: Milt Friedman came to speak at the Vancouver Board of Trade back in 1979 and local media covered him as if the Queen of England had arrived. In his speech Friedman argued the need for welfare was unnecessary and used the example that California’s number one cash crop was marijuana and the growers of were on welfare. He didn’t supply any studies or statistics to support his claim..
mr perfect
@Chetan Murthy: You are correct, pay the teachers more. Here in the Great White North the two most prominent provincial conservative governments in Ontario and Alberta have gone to war against nurses and teachers and not surprisingly both provinces are bleeding nurses. John is also correct in that constant threats and harassment from sects of the public have worn these professionals down where they are choosing different professions. Here in rural BC some idiot poisoned his mother with ivermectin when she got Covid then blamed the hospital for her death.
If it comes to filling those shortages for nurses and teachers, the other solution is to recruit and import candidates from elsewhere, aka immigration. In the current phase of thinking, the USA is screwed there too. Example is our oldest daughter who has an MSc in Molecular Biology with years of experience working with government agricultural research. She was recruited by a R&D company which developed DNA sequencers and she was one of the first to learn and instruct usage of the sequencers. When attempting to get her a working visa to live and work in the USA, she was rejected twice by US Customs and Immigration before finally being accepted six years ago. Now having married 18 months ago and holding down work ever since arriving in America, she can’t get a green card and is struggling to stay. She has no criminal record, no outstanding debt and has never filed for bankruptcy. No divorces, no children and they won’t start a family until she can get her green card. If it happened to be about ahem, intangibles, she is caucasian and heterosexual. Her company’s law firm in Dallas doesn’t appear to be handling the situation well for her. But what does it take to migrate to the USA if she isn’t a suitable candidate?
stinger
OP:
Ohh…. kayyyyyy…
MV Teacher
@Kent:
Yeah, Washington has ok pay for many teachers (if you work contract hours). I couldn’t easily get a job outside of education at the same salary/benefits, for instance. For newer teachers with a BA/BS, that’s still an issue. As a result, Washington has fewer problems with staffing.
A real problem is the workload. You can’t work 50/60 hour weeks and not have problems. Either you find a way to work near your contract hours or you flame out. The problem is that education is based on this free work by teachers…. It also starts to explain why there are staffing issues in certain areas more than others.
Captain C
@FastEdD: Dead thread, I know (open window from last night) but
I am stealing this, with proper (or at least some) attribution. That is spot on.