RBOC

• I almost impulse bought a bidet.  But it looks like the $30 version might have too much water pressure and cold water sounds unpleasant.  The $450 version requires some research since it’s a full seat and lid (will it fit our toilet?) and requires electricity (our outlet is across from the toilet instead of behind it).  So in the end I didn’t.
• I did, however, buy $100 worth of bougie low quality toilet paper from who gives a crap.  Look for a review after it gets here!
• I’m pretty sure these are all supply chain anxieties– I don’t want to run out of toilet paper again!  Why not load up on nice (admittedly bad for the environment) tp?  Well, we would *use* it.  We’re more likely to not run low on the bad quality stuff.  And these do have pretty wrappers.
• The dehumidifier we got seems to be working on the formerly musty cupboard.  I don’t think we can stop running it though– there’s probably mold there between the shower and the cabinets just waiting to be activated by moisture.  But we can’t have anybody come in to do anything about it.  Also we think this is probably going to be a demo job.  It would be nice to replace the plasticky gold shower stall, but if we did that the rest of the master bath would look bad.  If we take out the cabinets, we would just replace them with identical cabinets.  I’m not really sure what to do if there’s no way we can get between the two with bleach (and it looks like there isn’t.)  We need to talk to an expert without actually letting an expert into our home.  Not sure what to do.
• Dehumidifiers heat up a room.  The bathroom is super toasty.
• All these “libertarians” complaining that people don’t want to work aren’t actually libertarians because true libertarians KNOW people don’t want to work.  It’s in econ 101.  It’s why people have to get paid.  It’s why we have labor/leisure tradeoff models.  Econ 101 models cannot conceive of a world in which people get value from labor– if we did we would call it leisure!
• The dean came in to talk to us about why students aren’t wearing masks in class.  He was, not surprisingly, unmasked.  Because he believes that people can’t hear him if he has a mask on.  And that it’s ok for the person lecturing to be not wearing a mask if all the students are.  But the students don’t have to wear masks, so…  After my outburst last faculty meeting, everyone else in person (including the chair) put masks on, but only after they’d finished eating lunch.  The secretary did not eat.  She is immunocompromised and should really not have to be in there.  He also noted that our department has had a covid positive professor.  (I don’t know who.)
• We decided on just gifts for the kids for Christmas, but DH’s sister with the 4 kids (the rest of us have 2) is still a little unhappy about this.  We’re not really clear on what the unhappiness is– is it that she wants less stuff or is it that she feels guilty that she’s giving 4 gifts and everybody else is giving 6?  It’s hard to know, especially since this is all second hand (third hand for me through DH) from MIL.  MIL also mentioned that SIL has too many kids books and her bookcases are full… which was that directly to use because we usually get books for the kids?  I don’t know.
• One thing I really don’t like is that she has put up her amazon wishlists for the four kids and both girls (a one year old and a five year old) have make-up kits and toy vacuums and stereotypical girly girl look I’m just like my mommy who has an unequal marriage toys, but both boys have super cool gender neutral toys.  I’m going to let DH deal with this since it’s his family, but I can’t imagine getting things off the girls’ wishlists even if that’s what SIL wants (and maybe the 5 year old wants 4 different make-up kits, but I doubt the 1 year old has given that preference).  There are a couple of books for the older kids still on the wishlist so maybe it’s not a complete moratorium on books.  DH always calls her up and asks if she’s ok with what he’s getting them anyway and she has said no about things they already own.
• Unrelated:  SIL’s husband just got diagnosed with covid.  Really I’m surprised it took them this long.  At least SIL is vaccinated even though the four kids aren’t.  And they let MIL know right before she got to the house to visit them instead of after so MIL was able to turn back around.

Link love

DC1 was exposed to covid in study hall this week.  Fun times.  Oddly the number of cases in the district has dropped dramatically… still high for those of you in sane places but much lower than the first month of school.  I don’t know if this is lack of reporting or if people have been masking/vaccinating/recovered because of how bad it was.  A local college student died of covid which seems to have spurred better behavior, though what a terrible sacrifice.

Scalzi with a reminder not to get complacent about politics.

Interesting thread on one company’s experience with a company-wide vaccine mandate.

This guardian article could have been paid for by the period underpants industry, it’s so convincing.  Has anybody tried these?

It’s common for people to say that nobody on their death bed ever wishes they’d worked more.  I thought this poem (h/t excelsiorbev) was refreshing.  Ha!  Or, maybe he’s talking about how he should have taken more of these moments… that’s one of the things about poetry, there’s often ambiguity.  But I suspect the last line about chickenhawks and the previous line about horse poop may point to the former interpretation.  Not that I believe the farmer has wasted his life, but perhaps if I stop now, I will have wasted mine.  DH’s company did a company-wide meeting and they had to talk about what drives them and most people had some sort of variation of helping people (which makes sense because this is one of those startups that will save lives if they are successful).  I would have said making the world a better place.  Poetry, man.  Thought-provoking.  Introspective.

 

Ask the grumpies: Children’s chapter books for sensitive young readers

Alice asks:

To the best of my knowledge, my kid read her first independently-read word when she was about 2.5. Now, at 5, she’s technically proficient. If we do every-other-word in a new book, she reads them all with some mispronunciations for more complex words. I’ve really struggled and failed to find books for her that she might want to read independently, though. She’s reluctant. The problem is that from an emotional level, she Does Not Want to encounter (a) rule-breaking/bad choices, (b) mean behavior between characters, or (c) things that scare her. She will ask me to stop reading a book to her if the drama level is too high for her. And it seems like all of the books I can find at her technical reading level are too high-drama for her, even things an adult would look at as no big deal. For more than a year, I’ve been reading nonfiction to her at bedtime, along with a couple of beloved Boynton board books. Nonfiction doesn’t bother her, and the Boyntons are meant for a pretty young audience.

I was a voracious reader, but didn’t learn to read until 6 and didn’t fall in love with it until 7. I’ve been worrying that I’m not setting her up to be a big reader because I haven’t found the books she loves yet. I would very much like for her to be someone who enjoys reading, though. A love of reading has brought me so much good, I want the same for her.

High sensitivity is not uncommon among gifted kids.  DC1 and I were/are very similar (DC2 OTOH, delights in books about protagonists behaving badly– during our last poetry unit, one of hir poems is dedicated to Bad Kitty).  I’m still a little traumatized from Matthew dying (spoiler, but not from Bad Kitty).

Non-fiction is great.  DC1 read a ton of it in preschool and early elementary school.  Scholastic was wonderful for increasing our non-fiction library.

For fiction, one thing to look into is older books.  There are a couple of types of older books.  There’s books like Penrod or The Great Brain that are horrific to our 21st century sensibilities in terms of kids casually abusing each other or their pets– you’ll definitely want to avoid those.  But there’s also early-mid 20th century slice-of-life books where nothing bad ever happens and you just don’t get that emotionally engaged with the characters.  So *early* Henry books from Beverly Cleary, but not later Ramona books (where the reader actually identifies with Ramona and her feelings, or, in my case, with Beezus).

The Five Little Peppers are another series of books in this genre.  The first two in particular.  From our adult eyes, bad things seem to happen (and are overcome), but the way it’s written kids don’t really pick up on the problems because of all the “good cheer”.  Similar is All of a Kind Family.  Eleanor Estes has a number of these (here’s Ginger Pye — the Moffats might not work out as I’m vaguely remembering that DC2 loved them and DC1 and I cringed a bit).  IIRC I didn’t have any problem with Betsy-Tacy, but once Tib got added to the mix things got a bit more dramatic (as an adult reading these to DC2, who loved them, there’s a lot of very interesting and pretty modern social commentary on class, religion, and immigration that completely went over my head as a kid).

Similarly, Pippi Longstocking has all sorts of adventures that should make one cringe, but they don’t because she’s so irrepressible.  (Though be careful– Pippi in the South Seas is kind of racist and definitely colonialist.)

L. Frank Baum has a number of short stories set in Oz or related places where nothing at all bad happens– they’re dreams of magical lands made from candy.  DC1 and I could also handle the first two Oz books without problem– there are adventures and from an adult standpoint it seems like bad things happen, but as a kid they weren’t emotionally bad.  In the third book, there are some genuinely terrifying creatures, like the nome king, the wheelers, and a princess who cuts off people’s heads so she can change her head depending on what she wants to look like for the day (this last one, oddly, I did not find as horrifying as the former two when I was a kid).

A more modern book with “just the right size” adventures is The Adventures of Miss Petitfour.  The worst thing that happens in this book is running out of marmalade and that is easily solved by a trip to town (with a bit of magic thrown in).

Books recommended by commenters:

Nate the Great — these are very short mysteries.  They do hit a perfect sweet spot, but they just don’t last very long… they get outgrown pretty quickly.  Cam Jansen is somewhat similar, but has longer staying power, and you may need to screen some of them first.

Frog and Toad — DC1 loved these with what would have been to pieces except they have extremely good binding.  There are a few bits here and there that are uncomfortable but they get resolved very quickly and everything is going to be ok.

minca recommends:

– Sophie Mouse
– The Owl Diaries
– My Furry Foster Family
– Mrs. Piggle Wiggle
– Zoey & Sassafras
– Calvin & Hobbes
– Magic Treehouse (she’ll skip any “scary” parts)

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle does have situations that *should* set off people behaving badly triggers, but for some reason, especially in the first two books, they didn’t.  Again, I think it’s that it seems more abstract than personal in a lot of these early-mid 20th century books by American authors so the logic centers are engaged rather than emotions?

As your kid gets older, 20th century American magic books like those by Edward Eager will be readable — they do have bad situations but you KNOW that everything is going to turn out ok… in the end everything always seems to happen for the best.  The same is not true for British books of the same vintage (exception:  Bed-knob and Broomstick … though also compare The Borrowers to The Littles and it’s clear that the American version is more optimistic and fun)– with those there often seems like if anything is going to go wrong it will, and at best they will get back to where they started but with more knowledge, after a lot of fighting.  For a more modern take on adventure where it’s obvious everything is safe underneath, try Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library.

Grumpy Nation, what books would you recommend for sensitive children?

 

Abandoned Wednesday post ideas from 2010

• We have a ton of money posts and a ton of Ask the Grumpies, but these Wednesday posts are a bit harder to come up with.  I guess all I think about these days is money and work and whatever interesting questions Grumpy Nation comes up with for us?  I’ve been dipping into our archives for ideas and it’s a bit crazy how irrelevant or not applicable so many of these things are now.
• The oldest abandoned post is called “On the Importance of Moxy.”  It only has a title and it was started in 2010.  I’m pretty sure it was about faking it until you make it and how you shouldn’t put yourself down because people start believing it.  But now I know more about the double-bind that women are in and how hard it is to get that humble yet confident thing right.  And the literature says to praise other women and have other people praise you, but what happens there is that sometimes other people don’t praise you back and then they end up getting resources because the powers that be think you’ll be ok with that.  I’ve gotten so negative!  Not just cynical, but also negative.  Maybe I’ll delete that one.  Still– don’t put yourself down.  That never helps because people do believe you.
• The next one is about Nice to Live vs. Nice to Visit (also 2010) and I think that was about how nice it is to visit some places (Boston, LA) but not as great to live there.  4 years of Trump has made me rethink what it means for a place to be nice to live.  Though I still am worried about the unhealthy body images that LA indoctrinates people with.
• The last 2010 post was a Mini-rant that I thought for sure I’d just use sometime when we needed a post.  Maybe I’ll do that even though the thing it’s ranting about isn’t as big a deal as it seemed to be 10 years ago when unhealthily messed-up “raw/honest” etc. was in.  With picture-perfect influencers being “in” right now it’s a bit outdated.  Still, there may be a backlash brewing.  Maybe you’ll see it next week!  (But also maybe not!)
• After deleting or scheduling those 2010 posts we now have 142 items in drafts (not including this one which is scheduled).

Do you have any thoughts on places that are nice to live vs. nice to visit?  How important do you think moxy is?  Have you worked on not putting yourself down or does it come naturally to you?  Are you interested in me going through 2011 next?

Teaching a first semester required course

This is a post initially started in 2011!  But apparently not much has changed in the intervening 10 years…

Teaching a first semester required course is really hard!

The reason for that is that you’re not just managing expectations about the class itself, but about the major and about what it means to be a college student (or graduate student!).

It’s ok to tell them that they need to be taking notes.  They honest to goodness don’t know.  A lot of them went to high schools where they could just get by on their smarts.  In college, at least in a challenging major like ours, they are going to need some memory aids.  It’s ok to tell them to put their cell phones away and laptops down.  I tell mine that they need to be taking notes with pencil and paper and they can only use a tablet if they have a stylus.  Trying to draw diagrams using a laptop without a stylus is a huge waste of time and takes them out of the more important parts of actually understanding the lecture.

We also added to our core syllabi information on how college is different from high school– they’ll be expected to think and deal with ambiguity and ask questions, not just memorize lists.  We tell them they should expect to be stressed out sometime in the middle of the semester and they will feel dumb, but at the end of it they will feel a lot smarter.  That seems to help a lot.

A lot of books written by white-haired white dudes will tell you to treat students like adults.  My teaching evals got a lot better when I started treating them like toddlers (keeping in mind that I would be an excellent pre-school teacher).  Students understand the “teacher” persona and seem happiest when a female teacher fits into a box that they can understand.  They like guidelines and structure and clear expectations while still being expected to learn and grow.

For those of you that teach, do you have any tips and tricks for students just starting out?  For those of you who have been taught, what do you wish your first semester teachers had done, or what did they do well?

Link love

So, uh, Saturday. Not really sure what to say. Not that many links either!

One cheerful (/s) local news story:  the county health department has been getting over 2000 new positives a day, but only reports the ones that they confirm.  BUT they only have the manpower to confirm about a 10th of that.  So… cases are underreported (on top of people who don’t work at the university not being able to get covid tests because they’re all booked up).

USA Today lays out optimal Covid public policy.

What a difference a year makes pic.twitter.com/IAGBouLz9T

— Dr. Glaucomflecken (@DGlaucomflecken) September 7, 2021

Identical twins got covid, only the vaccinated twin survived.

Leah sent this article from NYTimes on professor/student relationships. (Me, I’m just trying to not get Covid from mine…)

Here’s some research drama I missed initially.  And I am totally shocked that Dan Ariely would be involved. He’s not like Steve Levitt where you’re like, oh, that’s not surprising since he’s so shifty in so many other ways.  (Disclaimer:  I briefly met Dan Ariely before he was super famous and he was friends with people I really respect.  That was like 20 years ago though and people change and I don’t know any of his current friends!)

A person called OwlKitty changed the Business Card scene from “American Psycho” to the guys showing each other pictures of their cats on their phones… and it could possibly be the greatest masterpiece ever 😂 pic.twitter.com/RPhktTou1d

— Couch Nish (@CouchNish) September 9, 2021

So about that time Steve went off to college… #BluesClues25 pic.twitter.com/O8NOM2eRjy

— Nick Jr. (@nickjr) September 7, 2021

Ask the grumpies: Realistic numbers for a 529 plan

First Gen American asks:

What’s a realistic number as your max for 529 savings per kid? Is it 4 years at a state university or something different and why?

Disclaimer:  We are not financial professionals.  Please consult an actual financial professional with fiduciary responsibility and/or do your own research before making any life-changing financial decisions.

This is going to depend on a whole lot of things–where you think your kid will end up going, how much financial aid you think you’ll get, whether there are younger siblings, how much you can afford to contribute, and so on.

If you’re high income and you think your kid might go to one of your state universities, then yes, 4 years at a state university seems really reasonable.

I don’t like our state universities– our graduate students from our state schools (even ours) often come in thinking only in terms of black and white and multiple choice one right answer.  Students often don’t know how to use the library system because they never had to.  Many of them can’t write essays with topic sentences.  Our students from regional midwestern schools are generally better able to think in terms of shades of grey.  So… that’s not going to be an option for our kids.

We also have two kids, so anything leftover from DC1 can go to DC2.  Also, DC1 and DC2 have both skipped a grade or two, so it might make sense to just do a masters degree before going into the workforce just to be closer to a normal age for that.  With DH employed again, we’re back in the “not eligible for financial aid” category.  Not even at Harvard, which is particularly generous to high income parents.  (Here’s the Harvard calculator)

So what we did was try out a few calculators for various colleges that DC1 might be interested in going to.  Here’s some older posts on that.  Ponderings on college costs from 2015.  College savings are hard to plan from 2017.

I think I will revisit those posts…

DC1 currently has:  $253,277.50 .  DC2 has about $130,000 (we plan to re-start saving for hir once we know if DC1 will have any leftover).

I have assumed the full tuition cost of DH’s Alma Mater (a private “regional ivy”), which is around $55K tuition give or take, plus the calculator’s default for room and board.  I don’t think Harvey Mudd (our most expensive potential option) is going to happen.

This calculator says we should be saving about $500/mo more for DC2.  We’re going to wait on that.

This simple calculator says we should have a surplus of about $3K for just DC1.  If we do, it will go to DC2.

Basically, if we oversave for DC1, it can go to DC2, but if we oversave for DC2 then it is not as easy to deal with.  Someone has to use the money for some kind of education or we will need to pay a penalty.  Now, education could be a professional degree or a fun class for us, but I’d rather not have to come up with something in order to use up money.  It’s also possible that we could transfer the 529 to a child who could then use it for a grandchild, but we can’t predict the future and our kids may not have kids.  We could do something similar to transfer it to a nibling, but I don’t know that we have any plans to pay for our niblings and there are 6 niblings from two siblings so I’m not sure how fair transferring to just one person would be.  (I don’t think there’s a safe direct path to transfer to the relatives we are paying for and they’ll all be in their 30s and 40s by the time DC2 finishes college anyway.)  You can get money put into a 529 back without penalty if your kid gets scholarships for the amount of the unexpected scholarships.

So, to sum, for us we saved for an expensive private school for DC1 using a number of different online calculators (that take into account parental income) and then less than that for DC2 (who is 6 school years behind).  We have stopped at this point after doing a couple of lump sum contributions and will rejigger once we know where DC1 is going and how much that’s going to cost.  We have the ability to cash-flow things if necessary and can also take out parental loans if that seems like a reasonable thing to do.

As a reminder:  Max out your retirement savings first– 529 money counts for financial aid purposes but retirement savings does not.  If I could go back in time, I would have maxed out our retirement first.

Grumpy Nation, what is the max that you would save for your kids’ college?

RBOC

• A bunch of junior faculty contacted me individually to thank me for shaming my unmasked colleagues at the last faculty meeting.  Thankfully, since then most of the other faculty have started masking, at least when students are around. The guy who teaches our security economics course (and doesn’t publish) is being a huge jerk about not masking.  His office his now next to mine too.  UGH.  I think he’s a national security risk.
• We’re doing a poetry unit in homeschool and DC2 wrote this haiku which is miles away better than anything I have ever written.  (Though when I was in 5th grade my limericks were much better than hirs(!)  Zie hates limericks but I loved them.)

The wind turns my page.
Golden light glints off the book.
A good day to read

• I love it so much!
• A senior faculty member emailed me to complain about nobody in his section masking and he sent me a cnn article on how hard this is for faculty at these universities.
• I had an obviously sick student in one of my classes (he volunteered it was nothing).  Nobody seemed perturbed other than me!  I don’t know what I’m allowed to do in those cases.  Also, will I get sick?  Will other students get sick?
• My friends at sane schools are in a completely different world right now.  They’re testing every other week, masking, requiring vaccines, and freaking out over what seems like really small numbers of cases.
• I submitted two job applications.  Both would probably be paycuts and I am ok with that.
• I am so tired.  I never understood the RE part of FIRE, but… there’s a lot to be said for not being forced to put oneself in danger or to be a party to others endangering themselves.
• There are a LOT of republican stickers on the backs of laptops this year.  I certainly wouldn’t go to one of these schools if I had any way of going someplace that cared more about safety.

 

Selection into the sample on the variable of interest: A Rant

First, a disclaimer:  I dislike mike the mad biologist.  I blame men like him for Trump being president because of his relentless attacks on ‘this woman, I would support any woman for president, just not this one” and the fact that he’s one of those assholes who does absolutely zero work and again, attacks people who are actually doing something as always doing the wrong thing.  Those men make doing things that they claim to support more difficult and emotionally draining while not lifting a finger themselves.  The only reason I ever look at his blog is because he’s on Bardiac’s blogroll and occasionally he’ll have one of those post headlines that I have to click.  Previously I thought he was just an unselfaware misogynist blowhard.  Now, I’m realizing that he’s … also not got very good statistics training.  (Interestingly, I’ve seen a recent survey that finds that people who are explicitly racist also just tend to be wrong about other things unrelated to their racism.  Not saying that translates to implicit misogyny, but… )

Ok, so here’s the post in question.  In it, he claims that a survey of people who aren’t getting vaccinated proves that time pressure and inability to take a day off work are not reasons.  (Therefore any policies targeting making getting vaccinations easier or getting time off work are wasted effort.)

The problem?  If you click on the survey, it says it has a 6.1.% weighted rate for taking the survey.  (So only about 6 out of every 100 people they sent the survey out to actually responded.)  Also, it is an online survey.

If that 6.1% were a randomly selected sample of a general population, there wouldn’t be a problem.   The problem is when the selection into the sample is based on the outcome that you’re measuring.  In this case, if you’re measuring people who don’t have time or ability to get vaccinated, well, likely they don’t have time or ability to take a survey either.

The Census Bureau isn’t stupid– they know this is a problem and they have lengthy documentation about the non-response bias in the sample generally.  They make it clear what you can trust the results for and what you can’t, as well as the limits of their weighting schemes.  The survey isn’t completely useless, but it is only externally valid for the groups that were surveyed!

I had been planning to use this little example of “sample selection on the Y variable” in my stats class this fall, but now I can’t because his response was so ironically ignorant that I have to blog about it instead.

Here’s his response:

The low income people who are supposed to be burdened by the time constraints also don’t report access as an issue compared to other factors. Are there any data that could convince you, or will the answer always be the same?

So– I guess I was right about his complete lack of self-awareness.  Can you imagine being convinced to make a huge policy change based on one extremely selected survey?  The people who ran the survey would never ever want you to make a policy change based on this result!

The answer to the question of what would be convincing (taking it seriously rather than just an accusation of me being set in my ways):

1.  A nationally representative sample that found the same result.  The US government has some of these, where you are required to take the survey and they have much better response rates (not perfect, but much better).  This survey is not one of them.
2.  A sample representative of the population who we are trying to target with our policies (ex. a state going into a few factories with onsite vaccination clinics before expanding the program).
3.  Multiple biased surveys that are biased in different ways (that is, are not biased on the outcome variable of not having enough time).

No good policy maker would make policy based on such flimsy evidence as the survey mike the mad biologist presents.  In fact, we rarely make big changes based on the result of any one study, unless it is the only study available or is the only well-designed large experiment available.  And even then, good policy makers keep their eyes out for new evidence and try not to do huge national things when the evidence is scant.  Ideally we’ll have a largescale randomized controlled trial, but failing that we’ll take a series of mixed methods– qualitative information, event studies (these two are the easiest and cheapest to do but can be biased depending on how they’re done), natural experiments, and so on.  Ideally we’ll have information about heterogeneity– we think, for example, that the effects of the Affordable Care Act and the effects of universal health insurance were different for Oregon compared to Massachusetts compared to Wisconsin or Tennessee.  And that could be because they have different populations and different starting environments, or it could be that each of these states had a different methodology used to study it with different biases.

Unlike Mike the Mad Biologist, every single thing I do (in research and in teaching!) has the potential of helping or harming someone’s life.  I have to be extremely careful.  I don’t make policy recommendations until the bulk of evidence supports those recommendations.  Because, getting back to that first disclaimer– I’m actually out there doing stuff, not just complaining about the people who do things.

So yeah, I teach my students about how not to use samples that are selected on your variable of interest.  It’s a more challenging concept than people say, lying about their weight or height, but it is an extremely important one.  I have a lot of students who go out and design/make/evaluate policy when they graduate.  Hopefully the lessons I give them remain with them.

Link love

The news has been pretty awful.  I’m not sure what actions to recommend.  I’m sorry guys.  :( https://sevenstories.com/blogs/227-free-ebook-the-new-handbook-for-a-post-roe-america

DC1 has been exposed to Covid in class 4x in 3 different classes (most recently in BC Calc), but so far no symptoms (*crosses self*).  One of my friends had a daughter exposed at the university daycare this week and said daughter had standard toddler cold symptoms so they tried to get her a covid test but had to wait two days for an appointment.  Everywhere in town that gives covid tests (other than the university, but being a student at the daycare doesn’t count for access to that) was booked up for more than a day.  Even urgent care couldn’t get her a test without an appointment.  Which means cases aren’t being detected.  Home tests are also sold out pretty much everywhere.  Speaking of undercounts, the local news reports that the death count in our county is undercounted by a couple dozen or so because it’s missing the deaths in our county that were reported directly to the state.  There were 10 new deaths yesterday, which is a record for our county, and includes a couple of young adults.  Test positivity is 8.5% even though the required testing from the university should be driving that number down.  Most people in my first class this week didn’t wear or in many cases even bring masks, but masked up as I individually pleaded with them and provided disposable masks.  My second class pretty much all came in masked, and those who didn’t masked up on their own without me having to say anything, which I am grateful for.

People who opt out of shots should have to pay penalties.

There’s no escape from Facebook even if you don’t use it.

morning! pic.twitter.com/7Bc632d29o

— b¡ ʚĭɞ (@sunsaintly) August 28, 2021