outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

isn't this the Baltimore/Maryland/fuck Larry Hogan politics thread?

i am mad at larry hogan every day of my life

not getting vaccines to mostly Black Baltimoreans for a disease that's killing them at higher rates than everyone else is...tantamount to genocide. maybe not in intention, but in effect.

xp sing it!

FUCK YOU YOU STUPID RICH HAM

OBVS YOU'RE NEVER GETTING ELECTED WITH THAT FACE; MIGHT AS WELL TRY TO DO THE JOB YOU ACTUALLY HAVE

(elected president, i mean)

and if they're not at the ivys then we're screwed. i don't mean to say we should fund the ivys better or that we particularly need this insight to tell us that public schools are in trouble.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, February 25, 2021 7:21 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

they are at Yale and Harvard, where the uber-wealthy kleptocrats graduated from. other ivies do have considerably inferior endowments.

my modest proposal for American universities: dissolve all the private ones, redistribute Yale and Harvard's endowments to four public universities.

university of the north, the east, the south, and the west

i guess there might have to be more than four for logistical reasons whatever whatever

great plains oblast university

many xps
ime the biggest impact on school budgets from rich parents isnt the pta but booster orgs (athletics, band, etc). plus just regular degular private spending on camps, tutors, private lessons, etc. skews things even more.

great plains oblast university

― superdeep borehole (harbl), Thursday, February 25, 2021 7:37 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol yes

when i was in grad school (in America) my smartest peers all went to McGill, which was a legit school you could actually flunk out of and didn't have to pay through the nose for. unlike my "prestigious" college which felt like our parents were all paying for our ability to say we went there.

my dad wanted me to go to mcgill but i didn't apply because i wouldn't follow my dad's advice when i was 16, maybe i could have been canadian oh well

they are at Yale and Harvard, where the uber-wealthy kleptocrats graduated from. other ivies do have considerably inferior endowments.

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 25, 2021 7:32 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the ivy i had in mind, the worst-resourced university i have ever taught at, was columbia, which admittedly doesn't dominate the elite to the same extent as harvard/yale. so maybe things could be bad at columbia and word wouldn't reach people who could change things if they want to. but ... well, obama went there?! (being rhetorical. i know why this doesn't happen. but honestly!)

Obama isn’t endowment rich (well, maybe he is now)...that’s like, Rockefeller shit. Harvard has an endowment the size of like 500 other schools’ endowments. It’s absurd.

Harvard has 41.9 bill

Yale has 31.1 bill

Columbia is chronically ill run; I think they probably suck at fundraising. But Harvard turns out more wealthy people that want to make sure their kids are set up for life than anywhere else

many xps
ime the biggest impact on school budgets from rich parents isnt the pta but booster orgs (athletics, band, etc). plus just regular degular private spending on camps, tutors, private lessons, etc. skews things even more.

― class project pat (m bison), Thursday, February 25, 2021 7:37 PM (fifty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ie wealth

cool thanks

Obama isn’t endowment rich (well, maybe he is now)...that’s like, Rockefeller shit. Harvard has an endowment the size of like 500 other schools’ endowments. It’s absurd.

I think Columbia’s chronic ill run-ness just becomes part of the larger backdrop of things Americans don’t notice. And is less emblematic of American decline than American public schools, to be fair.

Fair. I have very limited experience. Psyched to learn about public schools next year.

When I was considering Columbia for undergrad, a lot of people told me I’d have a lot of trouble registering for courses because it’s chronically ill run, and that was part of why I didn’t go. Some of those people went to Columbia, but they were pretty blasé about it.

I do think it’s part of the problem with how privatized everything is in America—there are so many private institutions it’s hard to form any overarching conclusions from them. And there are too many private colleges to be economically sustainable.

It’s almost like they should all be shut down and their resources redistributed

When I was considering Columbia for undergrad, a lot of people told me I’d have a lot of trouble registering for courses because it’s chronically ill run, and that was part of why I didn’t go. Some of those people went to Columbia, but they were pretty blasé about it.

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 25, 2021 8:51 PM (thirteen minutes ago

Having PTSD flashbacks to phone court registration at my large state u.

Phone course registration.

just dropping in to tell horseshoe how much I appreciate her ranting ITT

Having PTSD flashbacks to phone court registration at my large state u.

Phone registration would have been an improvement! When I started college, we had to go stand in the armory for hours on end in various lines to try to get into different courses. It was bonkers and so stressful.

Pfizer expects to *double* it's weekly US production and deliver 120 million doses just in the next 6 weeks. We have 600 million mRNA doses scheduled by end of July. J&J VRBPAC meeting today. Things can go wrong, but it's time to talk about and act on *new* challenges we'll face.

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) February 26, 2021

there keeps being promising news but doses/week in my county has been flat for like four weeks and it's making me feel crazy to look at the graph

We’re supply constrained. That’s going to change very soon. It takes four months to make a batch and the vaccines were approved 3 months ago. Huge production volume coming online next month.

That said, stay frosty

CDC WARNING: Drop in Covid cases "may be stalling," @CDCDirector Walensky says. Daily infections have gone up for the past 3 days compared to last week.

"We at CDC consider this a very concerning shift in the trajectory . . . Things are tenuous. Now is not the time to relax."

— Sheryl Gay Stolberg (@SherylNYT) February 26, 2021

just dropping in to tell horseshoe how much I appreciate her ranting ITT

― I like signing up to dead sites (sleeve), Friday, February 26, 2021 10:47 AM (fifty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol don't encourage me! but also, thank you!

Nearly 60% of people 75+ have now received at least one shot -- that was 14% 6 weeks ago

there's gonna be severe cultural whiplash in cities everywhere. children killed because they're too close to a strange guy who freaks out after a year in quarantine. full-on bacchanals in public spaces. it's gonna be complicated and weird and that in small part is why people in their 20s and 30s who approach this with "i'll get it whenever" confuse the hell outta me. That's where the numbers are gonna skyrocket next!

The Hague may be more interested in Americans as a whole for hogging global vaccine supply.

and for prosecuting Blind Melon fans

people in their 20s and 30s who approach this with "i'll get it whenever" confuse the hell outta me.

Why does this confuse you when the messaging has been explicitly that these people should not expect to get the vaccine any time soon while we catch up with the older/more vulnerable populations?

Euler: that companies aren't offering how-to on making these vaccines publicly available where governments can produce their own supply is the prosecutable sin imo. america being a glutton, while not worth forgetting is more dog bites man.

jon: as noted in the above tweet, we need to prepare to change the priorities and rules quickly and get ready to start changing that messaging now! I think the "people under 60 can wait" message is analogous to the "the public doesn't need masks" bullshit from the start of this shitshow, smokescreen so people don't riot in the streets. If we're actually going to hit a point in the next month or two where the qualification to get a vaccine is "I want one" the nation needs to start a media tour saying so and start focusing on convincing people they DO want them.

oh forks, I absolutely agree with you! I was just saying I can understand why people might be taking that approach, based on the faulty messaging we've been seeing. I mean, hell, our mayor's weekly updates don't come out and say it explicitly, but the subtext is very much, "if you aren't over 65, just be quiet and wait your turn, we'll tell you when that happens, but don't expect it soon".

right, so the next problem looks to be that demographic is gonna shrug it off as "too early" when it's time to vaccinate and there's gonna be a different sort of preventable outbreak. It's predictable and preventable is what I'm saying and, without fucking trump in office, it might be actionable!

Absolutely, not trying to disagree with you at all! I hope we can clear up this messaging soon, esp when it comes to all the good news about supply!

as a nation, we've had FAKE NEWS as a concept and a practice crammed down our throats so long and so hard that we need some seismic shift to start to broadly put faith in the press again; i am holding out hope that this is what'll do it. "i'm alive because i read about it in the Chicago Sun Times" is a hell of a testimonial.

of course, if the variants somehow become ultrasuperflu and vaccinated people start dying or bill gates' microchip start to make us all crave zunes, it's gonna be time to barricade up the compound. but let's not think that way.

as a separate aside, once the US does fully inoculate its population to the point where we can't talk needles into any more arms, we could have an incredible opportunity with actual political and cultural will behind it to start creating a peace corps style department to inoculate other countries and attempt to regain some scintilla of moral high ground on the international stage

^^ that would be fantastic.

But I'm also mentally preparing myself for them to cut all funding for further virus studies by about, oh, 2023, once this fades into the rearview mirror.

that's certainly the historical precedent. i gotta hope somebody with lobbying clout will recognize that pepsico is also hurt by a mass pandemic and decides now is a good time to get in front of this.

Re:cases increasing for three days, isn't a lot of that likely due to delayed data from Texas/other states impacted by winter storm? There was at least one mention on the Coronavirus Infection Count last week suggesting that officials in TX outright stated their numbers would be artificially low for a few days