I have wondered what is even the point of pretending that much homeschooling is going to happen. I mean, if we're in an emergency that justifies shuttering the world's economy and cutting everyone off from their physical support networks, why can't kids just take a few months off of school? I see the value of trying to provide a service that keeps the kids occupied so they're less likely to freak out from boredom and want to hang out on with each other on playgrounds, but why pretend like it has to be super enriching?
It's like you aren't even paranoid about local school districts being wasteful of your precious tax dollars and don't spend all your time convinced teachers are lazy and have no idea what they're doing.
Our schools are only sending out review work to be done at home but have no plans to do online courses and can't have kids work on new material. This is because to do distance learning they need to have plans to accommodate ISPs and special ed classes. I don't know if they're working to get those in place or if they've just given up on curriculum for the rest of the year. I nonchalantly told my kids in the car that schools were just going to make everyone repeat their grade and the look of panic on their faces was awesome.
Re cooking, the place we're staying has an amazing country farmhouse kitchen and it makes cooking super fun. Big open space, large gas stove and oven, cast iron pans, butcher block counters. We're not going shopping at all though so not much fresh produce in anything.
I was getting 3 SunBasket meals a week and have upped it to 5 to minimize trips to the Grocery Store. I am about to go to Trader Joe's to buy some more soap and some eggs.
Our school district is sending home worksheets and hoping for the best. The Calabat is ridiculously easy to manage -- he loves learning and asks to do his homework and I don't actually have to teach him anything -- but according to a candid conversation with his teacher, this is not true of all of his classmates (and this is the gifted program kids) so I really wonder how they're going to handle this if we're out for more than two weeks.
as requested! https://twitter.com/PhMarliere/status/1241735069196341248?s=19
completely with tia on "homeschooling" what a bunch of bollocks. for the little ones, heaps of unstructured imaginative play & for the olders whatever catches their personal obsessive interest. for all some age appropriate structured household pitching in, helping with cooking, keeping house clean and pleasant for all. do some family puzzles together, or something that anyone can hook into randomly, and in the evenings (re)watch soothing mindless tv to keep overwhelming dread at bay. speaking of which what the hell are we going to do when we run out of morse????
I love the walrus whistling video. I also loved Mat Johnson's tweet-response which was something like, "Man, I'm so high that looks like a walrus whistling".
Maybe you had to be there. Anyway he's my recommendation for a humorous Twitter follow
6.2 If ever there was a time to try deschooling it's now. Saw a great thread about that, to wit, if you want to teach your kids about English lit read them this or that, history, talk to them about this or that and watch a documentary or two. And another one that was just like, let your kids fuck around and play videogames all day.
I personally have no qualms about unschooling the crap out of these kids. My qualms are around sabotaging their teachers, who may be required to grade the kids based on work returned, and may be dinged if their class tanks.
I know the district has said things about how special education, etc will be worked out on a case by case basis. And they're going to great lengths to get kids internet access and chrome books, and barring that, printing shit out for them. So it seems like people are very worried about teh kids and teh free time in really annoying ways.
It's also possible that our kids will be basically self-motivated - I'm not too worried about the big kids. The little kids will need some help reading instructions and finding websites, etc.
HOLY FUCK.
Ambulance at the corner of [X] and [Y]. Someone threw a woman out of a car and she was laying in the street with a broken leg. Please avoid the area if you can until further notice.
From our neighborhood FB group. It's from a day or two ago but I just now saw it.
Just saw description for first coronavirus-themed and -constrained professional porn video. Gamma, the monopolistic Dutch octopus of production and distribution, has shut down its studios and is working on stopgap.
Theme of video: sex addict figuring out what to do now.
15: Presumably seeing how many times they can orgasm while singing Happy Birthday to themselves twice.
I have been wondering/worrying a lot lately about the economics and logistics of sex work, a subject about which I know very little. My impression is that it's hard to make money on video these days, which sucks, because if ever there were a spike in demand...
NYC has free advice. "You are your safest sex partner."
Also troubled by death rates in FL/GA/LA. Spring break/Mardi Gras?
Sorry, heebie, I'm torpedoing your happy thread.
Does it count as upbeat if Rand Paul has got it?
A bit of "things will eventually start to get normal again" sanity restoration since this is the upbeat thread:
Earlier I saw someone who was (I don't know why) looking at traffic patterns in major metropolitan areas around the world. In several Asian countries that were the first hit, morning and evening rush hour traffic has returned to pre-outbreak levels.
It's not much, but I'll take what I can get, even traffic jams.
22: Mostly it makes me nervous because I'm worried about other senators who might have it and who we need.
22: I was kind of wondering how that was going to affect negotiations for a package. That' one fewer vote on the Republican side. Apparently, they kept the Senate gym open.
He's the one least likely to infect others because everyone hates him so probably no one spends more time with him than they have to.
I was looking for something reassuring like, "Senator Paul was especially vulnerable because, per the directive in The Fountainhead, he puts unwashed silver coins up his butt."
I wonder what the odds of infection are if you're punched in the face by an infected neighbor.
Has anyone created a good quarantine movie list? You've got Twelve Monkeys, Children of Men, The Horseman on the Roof, Outbreak, Contagion, and 28 Days Later.
Other recommendations?
27: Apparently they were all having lunch with him.
(I admit I had forgotten the incident referred to in 29, but I still love the "By the by..." nature of this question out of context.)
Much less likely to impact the senate, apparently Harvey Weinstein has caught it too.
34: Good thing that didn't happen before he was convicted!
"Officials familiar with his situation said it is believed Weinstein was positive for the virus when he entered the state prison system last Wednesday from Rikers Island."
That's going to make it hard for him to follow the standard advice of starting a fight with the biggest guy in the yard to establish cred.
Wow - the Dem-non-approved stimulus bill just failed passage 47-47, party line.
Probably premature to trumpet Democratic congressmembers taking more precautions, but literally 10% of GOP in the Senate unable to vote due to self-isolation is pretty striking.
If the Senate gets so ravaged it's 40 D 20 R, would it comply with existing rules for them to remove Trump? Not sure how thresholds to pass are adjusted. In California a bill can't pass the Senate without 21 of 40 votes, even if a bunch abstain or are absent.
I don't think the Senate will be ravaged that much. People are isolating, not unable to vote.
The Constitution specifies that 51 senators is a quorum. I can imagine there being some kind of Senate rule that would preclude them from running wild if, when they're at 47-47, one of the Republicans hits the head, but maybe there's really only the ability to stall for a bit.
42: It needed 60, plus, you know, the House.
Upbeat stuff. The Cincinnati zoo has been doing meet the animals videos that are pretty good. The first five are linked here (I thought the hippos and Brazilian porcupine ones were very good). I think they are doing them daily at their Facebook feed,
Fiona the hippo there is internet famous.
On lw's Netflix question, I think you could semi-sort of make folders within the system by making separate profiles. I don't know of a cross service way to do this, and I'm not a current subscriber to Netflix anyway.
If anyone would feel better for a daily tweet about the history of polar exploration, I can oblige - see linked URL.
I want a walrus chorus. And a walrus barbershop quartet.
There, I fear, you overestimate my capabilities. I can promise you a penguin listening to bagpipes.
51: As if ajay is the only one who can edit video.
But the existence of a walrus barber shop is logically entailed by the existence of walrus moustaches; further, by extending the methods of the Drake Equation to the known number of walrii and ice floes we can confidently conclude that there must be more than four walrus barber shops. Therefore it is mathematically certain that a walrus barber shop quartet exists, and, by applying Rule 34, we see that it must be recorded somewhere on the Internet.
QED.
[Not technically a walrus biologist but I once wrote a frogger clone only with seals, so my advice is clearly as valid as any so-called epidemiologist's]
I like walruses. If I can't reincarnate as an orca I'd take walrus.
This one time at the swimming pool there was this dude in the pool resting with his back to the end wall, as one does, and I swear he looked exactly like a walrus. Bulk, jowls, mustache, demeanor. Didn't have the tusks but let's not be gender essentialist ok.
The ladies have tusks too! Mea maxima culpa! I guess he was a pup then.
OP: Letterboxd is what you're looking for. And in the US, you don't have to pay for it to get JustWatch integration.
30: Room.
Actually, maybe you don't need to pay in the UK either. The settings interface implied you did, but it's showing me UK services now.
But the existence of a walrus barber shop is logically entailed by the existence of walrus moustaches
Wait what? The existence of a walrus barber shop would be implied by the absence of walrus moustaches. Just as the existence of a tiger-repelling rock is implied by an absence of tigers.
Walrus mustaches there are; walrus beards there aren't.
Well really this depends on the well-kemptedness of said mustaches. Would these walruses be acceptably groomed for a job interview?
I once wrote a frogger clone only with seals,
Go on, please
The walruses all need to wear straw boaters. I wonder though if it would be bad taste if the conductor leads them using an oosik?
I don't know, would be great if some orchestra conductor tried leading the ensemble by waving a dildo.
I request that there be one walrus who plays nine instruments with different parts of his body while wearing them in a complicated get-up. And there also needs to be one separate animal - maybe a seahorse? - who would never seek the spotlight, but hurries around straightening bowties and licking down unkempt cowlicks.
I fear you have misapprehended our proportions.
I wasn't picturing a racehorse.
I request that there be one walrus who plays nine instruments with different parts of his body
I'm not sure walrus bodies have nine different parts. Eyes, nose, flippers, tail, moustache, and the rest is just a sort of undifferentiated blob.
To you. Walruses have 100 different words for the parts of them eaten by Inuit.
He looks like he may actually have a walrus mustache too.
||
Speaking of upbeat, what did the US Supreme Court do to democracy today? Five opinions:
a. Clarified that courts of appeals must review factual determinations in immigration proceedings for clear error, even when review of the resulting legal determination was waived. Opinion Breyer, whiny concurrence Thomas.
b. Upheld the Kansas approach to the insanity defense, which does not include moral incapacity (the ability to distinguish right from wrong.) Opinion Kagan, joined by 5 conservatives, dissent Breyer.
c. Clarified the burden of proof in race discrimination suits under 42 USC 1981.
d. In a case from the same circuit as (a), clarified again that the court of appeals should review factual determinations for clear error.
e. Repeated the holding on a 1999 case that Congressional abrogation of sovereign immunity for intellectual property infringement suits had no constitutional basis. Maybe we can get one of the IP lawyers to opine on why the Court took this one. The Fourth Circuit ended up at the right place, and the petitioner was pretty clear (at argument, but I assume also in his briefing) that he wanted the 1999 case overruled. There's no circuit split. My theory: Kagan's opinion for the Court and Breyer's concurrence have some fun with the fact that the intellectual property in the case was video of a sunken pirate ship,* so it's not too farfetched to assume that their clerks spent some of the time during consideration whether to recommend cert talking like pirates. Yaaarrr.
* Not just any pirate ship, but Blackbeard's flagship. Having binged watched Black Sails this month underlines the importance of the find.
|>
On a completely unrelated note, Thomas Friedman has made a claim of the lurkers supporting him in email.
Mossy, we have a bullshit legal theory here that you can't sue a state in federal court, unless the state allows it, or Congress has done so, but Congress can only do so when it can point to a provision of the Constitution allowing it.
The Constitution as originally adopted says nothing at all about state's immunity from suit in federal courts -- although it would have been simple to put a short phrase in article III so saying. The very first amendment to the constitution after the Bill of Rights bars federal court jurisdiction over a narrow class of suits against states. How on earth this can stand for the inherent immunity of states from suit, rather than its exact opposite, has never been clarified to my satisfaction. But because conservatism has been simple bad faith for a century and a half, we pretend that you have to look past what is actually written in just this one case. Not any others!
74: it sounds like they are going to be rounding people up and deporting them within a few days because of the "emergency". My blood pressure went through the roof when I heard that. "Emergency" in quotes, because I think that what they're doing risks transmission.
Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence is one of my favorite proofs for the utter bad faith of 'originalism' as a legal philosophy. Given my job, and for my sins, I get cases dismissed under the Eleventh Amendment all the time, but I do wish I couldn't.
What sent my BP through the roof was seeing that ICE put in for PPE twf
I have no idea from 74 if these opinions trend good, bad, or indifferent.
83 Depends on who you are. If you're a state ripping off copyrights you had a good day. If you're mentally unable to distinguish right from wrong, not so good.
What if you are mentally unable to distinguish right from wrong but really, really rich?
Public institutions, like public and academic libraries, who put digital collections online in good faith under fair use are pretty happy with the copyright decision. If they were financially liable for damages, they'd likely redo their risk assessments and take tons of stuff offline.
Also, if you're an immigrant or a criminal defendant in Louisiana, Texas, or Mississippi and your first lawyer missed some thing (including not predicting the future, I think) well then maybe getting a second bite at the apple is a little easier.
returning to the OP - https://twitter.com/lauralexx/status/1238601779773952005?s=19
it is really rather stupendous.