Simchat Torah!

Saul DeGraw / October 6, 2015 in Off the Cuff

A little late but Happy Simchat Torah from Ernest Bloch.

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1 Dead in Southwest Emergency Landing

Environment: Individualism vs Collectivism

The Eras of Good Feelings and Their Inevitable End

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State of the Discussion

7 mins ago

to Oscar Gordon

J_A

+ Even when we talk about senior care, how much is life saving as opposed to just the most expedient way to make a person [. . .]

Even when we talk about senior care, how much is life saving as opposed to just the most expedient way to make a person comfortable?

And who is to make the decision?
Would you allow someone (not your next of kin, and sometimes not even them) to decide that your life is just not worth the cost of saving it, the most you are worth paying is just making you comfortable until you expire?

+ Last night, we had a VR night at my boss's house and we had two rigs set up. His rig was designed for people who [. . .]

Last night, we had a VR night at my boss's house and we had two rigs set up. His rig was designed for people who wanted to spin around 360 degrees and walk around a 5x5 square in the middle of the living room. My rig was set up for people who wanted to sit and play Skyrim. I saved two games for people to explore. One was an area right before a fight with 5-6 "little" spiders the size of a tire and one great big spider the size of a VW bug. The other was a peaceful area without any monsters/creature next to a lake, in the middle of the night, and there were lightning bugs flying around and if you looked up, you could see the aurora borealis and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

While Steam's "the lab" is a great game for people just dipping their toes into VR for the first time, people who want to say "I've dipped my toes... now I want to see what this thing can *REALLY* do!" need to play Skyrim.

Chip Daniels

+ What would a functioning health care market even look like? You can't choose to enter or exit the marketplace, you can't decide if you do or [. . .]

What would a functioning health care market even look like?

You can't choose to enter or exit the marketplace, you can't decide if you do or don't want the product, you have no control over what product you want.

Again, the vast majority of anyone' health care will occur in those last couple years when you are unable to work, and yet need critical amounts of healthcare far beyond any individual's ability to pay.

There isn't any market to be created here because there aren't any choices.

+ This is not a "challenging" piece. It's just ridiculous propaganda. You've lost me as a reader; Fox News has just as much concern for the [. . .]

This is not a "challenging" piece. It's just ridiculous propaganda. You've lost me as a reader; Fox News has just as much concern for the truth and better production values.

Oscar Gordon

+ This is true for urgent life saving care. But that isn't the only kind of medical care and people can & do behave as [. . .]

This is true for urgent life saving care. But that isn't the only kind of medical care and people can & do behave as if a market exists if things aren't critical.

Some people behave that way even when it is about life saving treatment.

Perhaps this is the problem, that we tend to want all medical care to be desperately necessary, when only a certain segment of it is. Even when we talk about senior care, how much is life saving as opposed to just the most expedient way to make a person comfortable?

[View in thread] -

By a thousand cuts.

40 mins ago

jason

+ This: The reporting was thorough, continuous, and in depth. is both right and wrong. There was a lot of reporting on the issue. However, much [. . .]

This:

The reporting was thorough, continuous, and in depth.

is both right and wrong. There was a lot of reporting on the issue. However, much of it was false, and I suspect it was journalists plagiarizing other journalists. Dave Cullen wrote a book titled Columbine in 2009 and in it, he debunked many of the popular stories. (I haven't read the book, but I've heard/read interviews with him and the details stuck with me; it's on my reading list.) The killers weren't unpopular kids--they both had friends, attended parties, etc. They didn't listen to Marilyn Manson. One of them was a sociopath and that was the cause.

[View in thread] -

National School Walkout Day, 19 years after Columbine

53 mins ago

to Michele Kerr

A Teacher

+ Michele Kerr: Of course it is. Your definitions of privilege and systemic racism aren’t shared, and even when they are, solutions aren’t. How is that anything but [. . .]

Michele Kerr:
Of course it is. Your definitions of privilege and systemic racism aren’t shared, and even when they are, solutions aren’t. How is that anything but political?
I have transgender students too, and I don’t care where they pee. It’s not my problem, it’s the administrator’s issue. I hope they resolve it satisfactorily for the student. But yes, saying “you should be allowed to pee in the bathroom you want to” is a political opinion.

First I'll respectfully disagree. The definition of Privilege is pretty well defined in most social science circles now. About the only people I see arguing against that definition are white and themselves the beneficiaries of most privilege. Casually, it is simply the benefit of not being blocked from access by part of your identity. As an able bodied adult, I'm not blocked from access to a store if it lacks a wheel chair ramp. That is one privilege I have. As a white, I am more likely to get an Air BNB request answered. That has been shown in studies.

As to the "where to pee", I think you're misunderstanding. It's not a matter of where he wants to. As a transgender boy, he identifies as boy and should be afforded all of the same basic courtesies we show a boy. Which is to say, use the boy's bathroom to pee.

What frightens me about your answer, though, as a fellow educator is that the hand wave you've made: Of course it's political.

Would you have said that 40 years ago when the idea of a girl taking a science class was also a "political" stance? Would you have stood up for a girl who wanted to study physics but the school said "no, that's a boy's class"? Or would you defer to others and say "It's not my place to say a girl should take science"?

Likewise, would you have sat and deferred comment when asked if those black students sat at the wrong lunch counter? "Segregation? Oh that's a political thing."

What we do now, is what we would have done 50 years ago. Would we take pride in our actions looking back 50 years in the future?

[View in thread] -

When Schools Get Political, What Should Teachers Do?

1 hour ago

to J_A

Dark Matter

+ Health care violates one of the rules of the efficient market mechanism, that there’s a price that the demand is unwilling to pay and [. . .]

Health care violates one of the rules of the efficient market mechanism, that there’s a price that the demand is unwilling to pay and will withdraw from the market.

Food. Water. Shelter. Education.

The alternative to food is different food. The alternative to some doctor should be some other doctor.

The HC market is broken because of regulatory capture, i.e. we basically don't have a market since there are no prices published. We also have issues with 3rd party pays, and some other issues.

[View in thread] -

By a thousand cuts.

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