People start off homeschooling and on the ed boards (like me) and then eventually often are no longer homeschooling for one reason or another, but still belong to the community.

It's just that as an abstract idea, it's nice, the idea that you can walk away from a paradise that depends on one child's (read: one small marginalized population's) extreme suffering. But in reality, you really can't. There's nowhere to go. I have in the past been very extreme about it re: factory farming and I'm still working what I actually think about that, and it's confusing. I wish it were as simple as walking away from Omelas.

UK Le Guin is my favorite author, and this is my favorite of her short stories. (Or was, I haven't thought about it in a while). I've read that she explicitly talked about it as related to the prison problem in the US, which I can see. I think it can be a useful thought exercise for any issue about which you feel strongly; I have thought about it in the past as relates to factory farming. I am not sure what I think now. It's a beautiful story, and a heartrending message, and yet, when applied to most things in the actual world...it's hard to walk away from Omelas. There's nowhere to go that has no suffering. With factory farming in particular (since that's how I've thought of it in applied terms in the past), what it leads to is not just not eating factory farmed animal products - though that is a place to start. but if you keep seeing it as black and white, you can't really eat most farmed food at all, because they rely on fertilizers from factory farmed animals (even the veg.). You can't walk on the sidewalks, or drive a car, or ride a bus (all produced, I've read here and there, with some byproducts of farmed animals). You can't pay your taxes, because those taxes go back to support hog farms. It just becomes complicated. There's no over the mountain to escape to, because all the mountains are occupied. You could maybe go live on a small island in the Pacific that grows all their own food or something? But really, the reason a larger state hasn't taken over that island is partially because of the detente between major world powers, and the might of the West and the US in particular, so nowhere is completely free from complicity in causing suffering. The message I used to take from it was that you had to do the best you could to avoid complicity, and it did lead to a lot of very stringent restrictions on the way I lived. I'm currently reevaluating that and I don't know what I think, nor do I know what the story means anymore. I will say that I used to read Le Guin's blog (she had a blog, of all things, towards the end, and it was generally wonderful) and she once made fun of people who avoided factory farmed animal products in the most ridiculous every-vegetarian-ever-has-heard-this-line way (What about farmed vegetables? How do we know they're not suffering? etc.) I thought it was pretty funny that she and I obviously saw the moral implications of her work so differently.

For the latter of course not because both issues are decided by groupthink Not that I'm saying groupthink is bad, on the contrary I think it's generally societally preservative

Note that the pp didn't say grocery stores

Unlimited When we lived rurally, we had satellite, which was limited after a certain amount. It was also a zillion dollars a month and didn't work when it was raining, snowing, windy, or just a random time when it didn't feel like working.

As far as the likelihood of having it goes, I think I read that something like 96% of people when tested are negative for COVID. Some of these people of course don't have symptoms, have just been exposed, but on the whole it's not like if you have these symptoms you definitely have the novel coronavirus - there are many other things that cause these same symptoms during cold and flu season, namely colds and the flu. They say to worry about fever only above 100.4 but I feel like that really varies person to person.

My sister lives in NYC, in a 1 bedroom apt in Astoria with her husband (and cat), and worked in a yoga studio up until it was closed. The day it closed and she was laid off, she and her husband (sans cat) and their friends went to the friends' family's cabin in NH. They've been there about 10 days I guess? and plan to stay until the end of this coming week. Then, if none of them are sick or have gotten sick, they plan to go stay with family in other states - my sister may come stay here with my mom in suburban Kansas City. I don't 100% love this plan but to be honest, I wouldn't go back to NYC if I were her either. They don't have money (the friends do, though) so it's not like they can just find a VRBO somewhere and wait it out for a month or two - they're living on unemployment and hope. I don't know what they'll do about the cat. I've told them that what I would do is fill up with gas in NH, drive to NYC, stop NOWHERE, pick up the cat while touching nothing unnecessary (which in an apt building in New York is hard of course), sanitize thoroughly when they're back in the car, and then drive here, stopping nowhere until they're well out of the city. She doesn't want to expose my mom, who is 70 but in good health, to anything, but she has to go somewhere. She was waffling about coming here, saying that the virus is here - well, this is true, but there are only maybe 100 official cases locally (in a metro area of 2 million), vs a much higher rate in NYC. I think she's still in the stage of wanting to go somewhere completely safe. Of course there is nowhere like that, and she's young and healthy to boot. Her initial plan when it was clear NYC was going to shut down was to go camp in a tent for 2 months in NH somewhere. so she's progressed at least somewhat. They are hard decisions to make, though.

I was particularly irritated because it seemed like an idea that could sustain a great movie, or series of movies, or book - but they left out the interesting details, like (indeed) how the train ran, or the nuances of how the class system worked, or any of it, in favor of (frankly largely unbelievable) scenes of people not acting like people, just for the shock value. It reminded me of another movie I watched (10 minutes of) recently about a guy who has a 10 year old daughter who is presumably the last female left alive (in the UK? not sure) after a female-targeted plague of some kind, which is an interesting idea at least, but within 10 minutes they're in the woods and he's trying to keep other people from figuring out she's a she and yet he has her carrying around a paperback with a girly cover and she can't follow the simplest instruction like stay behind this tree while someone who wants to rape and kill you is trying to find out if you exist. The number of movies/books I read with great premesis that are completely negated by awful storytelling choices really irritates me if you can't tell. 🙂 What I have done today: called the landlord about water that won't work (fun), bought water at the local grocery store (surprisingly civilized, lots of sanitizer for coming in and for leaving), bought groceries, eaten pumpkin pie, worked (from home), read too many Pokemon books to an obsessed 5 year old.

I also mistakenly watched this movie oh, maybe 6 months ago, and it was not good. It was gratuitously, stupidly cynical and gory, imo. Like, just because you are doing fiction doesn't mean that you can put whatever you want in there and claim it makes sense or is appropriate. Just ugh, that movie irritated me. By about halfway through, I was thinking well, I'm going to keep watching because maybe just maybe they'll resolve it in a way that redeems it, and by the end I just wanted them to blow up the whole damned train.

You stella It was in feb

Hey Mercy I tried to send you a message but it says you're not receiving them. I don't want to be pushy but if you are open to one please let me know.

And you haven't read it and if you do and don't want to reply I totally understand but I just wanted to check.

Mercy, I logged in for the first time in forever to respond to this for you. I am not religious and I don't share your views about marriage so my perspective may not be useful to you, but I would just ask how your husband's headship extends to other decisions about your personal healthcare or what you put in your body? If you felt like you should see a doctor for say a lump in your breast and the doctor said it's cancer, here are the treatment options from conservative to aggressive, would you expect your husband to have a stronger voice than you in choosing the course of treatment? If you decided to start drinking coffee, would you expect to need to consult him about that? Sometimes it is helpful to separate the aspects of the issue and see if you would feel and think the same way in other similar situations.

Even backwoods rural communities, small towns in the middle of nowhere in the midwest/south, ime have decent police forces who have seen it all (ish) before and know how to protect her and how to deescalate dangerous situations and get things back in order. They're not going to say, oh no ma'am, we can't do anything, it's normal enough to lock your wife out of the house with no pants, just go back home.

she doesn't have to give specifics to the police at this time, she just has to say hi, I need the number to the closest 2-3 shelters.

call the police, they will tell her the number of local shelters. The shelter is designed for this exact situation and they will help her with legal paperwork, temporary food and shelter, etc. If she knows no one, the shelter is the place to start. The local one may be full but will give you references for another one.

How do I change my password, or at least my login? I can't find it in searching this forum or in going through my account settings.

Right, that's part of it too. I'm primarily concerned, to be completely frank, about my chances in my own community. For those purposes, the numbers out of Wuhan are not as relevant at this time (although they do suggest something about what happens if it gets out of control, even in a place with fewer Asians, lower smoking rates, and somewhat less popultion density).

Well that's fair. But I hate (HATE) school fundraising, especially public school fundraising. Just live within your budget or put a tax hike up for the vote! Grr. Everything is a money grab in our local PS. On Pajama Day, which they have once a month, you have to bring $1 to school to wear pajamas. They have stuff like that constantly. and get this, and this is totally not a joke, when we have a snow day, they send out an email saying this is the superintendent, today is a snow day, yada yada. and then at the bottom, it says, I kid you not, "This snow day is sponsored by Sonic." or by Bob's Wood Products. or whatever. !!!!!!!!!!!!

because this virus takes quite a long time to go through the whole cycle (onset to death, in fatal cases, is over 20 days), for a while it's hard to say exactly how many people of the ones that still have it will eventually die. so a recovery rate is in some ways more accurate, just because it takes so darned long and we're still in the first month of serious consideration of the thing. On the other hand, there are almost certainly many many many more cases that recover without being counted in the "recovery" stats because they never got sick enough to go to the hospital, just stayed at home and eventually got through it. On the other other hand, there are also certainly a lot of people dying of pneumonia in Wuhan without being counted in either the infected rate or the death rate, so overall numbers are just very hard to come by. This is why on the whole I'm only paying serious attention for now to numbers outside Wuhan and even to some degree outside China; I largely trust the US government to be capable of and responsible for reporting these things accurately. There's not as much data but it's better data.

OP, I have no advice as I gave up on this fight years and years ago and no longer enforce eating at mealtimes at the table. If they're hungry, they eat. If not, they run around destroying the house. But can I just say how reassuring threads like this are. Sometimes when you have a lot of littles, especially when you have one or two with terrible judgment and way too much energy thrown in the mix, you feel like you're the only person in the world raising a pack of wild monkeys instead of normal children.

I don't know whether it is a bioweapon or not, but in a pandemic situation it's much more lethal than the current numbers suggest. Even if you take China's reporting numbers as accurate (which they 100% are not, obviously), you're looking at 20-30% of infections that require serious hospital support, of which 3% or so die with that support. In a situation where you can't put 20% of the infected population in the ICU, the lethality rate is much higher. Obviously infection rates are much higher than currently recorded, but deaths are also presumably much higher (given that crematoriums in Wuhan are going full-out and that no one who dies of pneumonia but hasn't been tested for the virus is recorded as dead because of it). So it is hard to say what the mortality rate is, at all. My dad, incidentally, died of the flu (a flu I think I probably gave him), but it was not recorded as such. He had COPD and developed pneumonia; he'd smoked 2 packs a day since he was a teenager. It was recorded as complications of COPD. That's not wrong, but it doesn't tell the whole story of course. Listening to the US gov't briefing today, I just have to say how amazing I find the state of medical knowledge and technology. This thing showed up new about a month and a half ago, and wasn't on anyone's serious radar until a month ago, and they're already well into the process of developing a vaccine, with a target of human trials in 3 months or so. That's amazing to me.

Formal certification, I dunno. But I can definitely tell you that teaching in a classroom is A. nothing like homeschooling or tutoring and B. very hard. I am very intelligent and very well educated; I am an excellent tutor. I went through 3/4 of a teacher's ed program for high school English and history and I was so bad at it that I literally walked out one day and never came back. For me, classroom management is the barrier to entry, not subject expertise. Maybe both are required to be a great teacher, but I think that without classroom management skills you can't be any kind of teacher at all, regardless of how well you know the subject. Some people probably have an innate knack for classroom management and so don't need a formal certification program, but I think there's probably a fair amount of training necessary for it. I was excellent at the school part of teacher's ed - the part where you make lesson plans and discuss curricula and teaching techniques and the subject matter itself and etc. I would have aced the Praxis. But none of that ever translated at all, except in small groups or individual tutoring, because I couldn't maintain control of a classroom for 3 minutes. 90% of teacher school was stuff I was great at and that I would never in a million years have used, even if I had made it through the program. It was very theoretical and not veyr practical.

To give the situation perspective, we don't have a TV, or kindles, or smartphones, or a video game player. We have two desktops that we use for work all day. So the kids read and read and read and read especially during fall/winter/spring, and so do I. We got so desperate before Christmas that I ordered (and read) all of Newt Gingrich's historical fiction.