Coping with Covid-19

My biggest fear from the current events, is that the city dwellers are going to start moving to the rural areas, meaning, where I live. I have been seeing a lot of New Jersey and New York license plates. A lot more than normal. My realtor acquaintances are happy as sales are up.
They are often a disruption to the normal peace and tranquility of rural life.
 
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X3 Skier said:
Are you at Ohio State?

Message from President Drake

“Dear Ohio State Community:

This week marked the start of the summer term. We will continue to teach and learn virtually throughout the term. At the same time, the university’s COVID-19 transition task force is exploring and developing plans for the fall and beyond.

While information continues to evolve and we will need to be flexible, our current goal is to have an announcement of our plans for the autumn semester by mid-June. ........”

Sounds like they haven’t decided yet about the Fall Semester and are “flexible”

Cheers
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The inside scoop is the smaller classes will happen in the big classrooms, and the bigger classes will be remote. That's what's getting said right now. If there's a bump in August we might be all remote again. Med school just let the grad students back in to do their research. No light for us on the other side.
 
Morgan3820 said:
My biggest fear from the current events, is that the city dwellers are going to start moving to the rural areas, meaning, where I live. I have been seeing a lot of New Jersey and New York license plates. A lot more than normal. My realtor acquaintances are happy as sales are up.
They are often a disruption to the normal peace and tranquility of rural life.
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I was wondering between the Covid and the currently unchecked domestic terrorism, whether dense urbanization will continue to be popular, and whether or not all that expensive “close to downtown” real estate has now dropped considerably in value.

Someone broke ground on a custom house out here on one of our few empty lots yesterday. I haven’t seen an empty lot out here sell in eight years. I think there’s only three in the neighborhood. Two now, I guess.

One more rat colony escapee. Will see if they stay after their first real prairie blizzard. :) The lot faces north. I hope someone told them to rotate the house so it doesn’t. The initial driveway cut didn’t look like it. That’s gonna suuuuuuck if they make that mistake.
 
denverpilot said:
I was wondering between the Covid and the currently unchecked domestic terrorism, whether dense urbanization will continue to be popular, and whether or not all that expensive “close to downtown” real estate has now dropped considerably in value.
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Definitely true that people are moving out from around here, especially because the big tech companies have said that many can work from home "indefinitely", and they don't care where your home is. They say rents are down. A little too soon to say anything about housing prices. Still insanely expensive, though, but they were always expensive compared to other parts of the country; even in the 70s. No wonder people give me quizzical look when I say I moved here after I quit my job and retired. Things haven't changed much for me, though. No protests near here, and the ocean is within walking distance. In fact I was at the beach the day the protests started, and had no idea they were happening. Not much Covid either. I would rather have a single-family house than a condo, but there are advantages to the condo too. I can walk away for a number of months and not worry about it. I did that for years when living in Colorado. Of course no more international travel, for now. :(
 
Everskyward said:
Definitely true that people are moving out from around here, especially because the big tech companies have said that many can work from home "indefinitely", and they don't care where your home is.
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Facebook announced they’d lower the pay of any worker they saw changed addresses to a cheaper place to live.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/f...to-cheaper-areas-to-work-from-home-2020-05-21

I foresee a black market of people who’d love to borrow your address to give to HR soon. Could be lucrative. 1% of salary? ;)
 
denverpilot said:
The article says they “pay by location”, but I highly doubt it.
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I don't. Pay in general, not just at Facebook, tends to be higher here in the Bay Area because the cost of living is a LOT higher than most other places.
 
They pay you more to live in those places so you'll come to the office. If you aren't coming to the office, they don't need to pay you more to live there.
 
Palmpilot said:
I don't. Pay in general, not just at Facebook, tends to be higher here in the Bay Area because the cost of living is a LOT higher than most other places.
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Oh fully understood. The thing is, if you’re worth paying that much it doesn’t matter where you live.

Maybe you just have a large family and need a sprawling suburban house to fit all of them in.

You shouldn’t be penalized for your address just because you aren’t a DINK living in the urban hell.

If you make it to the office on time, payroll has no need whatsoever to know where you live other than where to send checks and tax forms. And hell, these days that’s all electronic anyway. Provide a secondary email for someday when you leave for the last pay stub for direct deposit and the tax form later on.

With so many companies having data breaches anyway, they really don’t need your address.

But if they want to play games, there’s plenty of mailboxes for rent that have normal looking addresses and aren’t a PO Box.

Nevertheless. It’s a scummy business practice. If you move far enough away that you can’t even make it to the office, maybe reasonable.

But you were hired at a salary and you’re worth that salary wherever you live. The company can save money selling off the building you don’t need to report to anymore. They don’t need to profiteer their own employees paychecks.
 
steingar said:
What we get in the fall will make what we got in the Spring look like a picnic. Do whatever you want, the guys running my University are smarter than you lot, they aren't going to let students back on campus with this thing hanging over them. The loss of tuition and fees is nothing compared to the lawsuits they'll get when students start dying of this stuff. I'll stay home, go to the store during the old people hours. Heck, I just about qualify.
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They work at a University so they are smarter? What a joke! I work in higher ed and the majority of those smart people you are talking about I wouldn't trust to change the oil on my 20 year old lawn mower. They are typically single subject book smart individuals who have spent their entire life in the classroom and little time gaining any practical knowledge of anything.

The things I see being proposed at most institutions are delusional smoke and mirrors. They make the TSA look like rocket scientists. 18-24 year olds do not social distance. You can put all the restrictions on them in the world and they still will ignore them. The restrictions are simply them being able to say they set up the system to follow CDC guidelines. If the student choose not to follow them their parents can sue all they want but it won't take much to prove the college wasn't the problem.

Reality is that a large number of higher ed institutions are going to be closing in the next few years. Particularly small private liberal arts schools. They were hurting before this started, there is a demographic cliff on the horizon of college age kids and frankly this is likely the straw that will break them. They all have these great ideas about "hyflex" and allowing students to take classes online or in person at will. My prediction is that instead of doing either well they will do both poorly. In any case I also predict given the option of coming to school under massive Covid restrictions or take a gap year/semester until this blows over 15-25% will choose not to come.

Vaccines are a pipe dream they take a long time if ever. Do some research Reminds me of the scene from Top Gun when the guy asks how long it will take to fix the catapult and they say 10 minutes. He says BS, this thing will be over in 2.

Protect the most vulnerable and get on with life.
 
denverpilot said:
Oh fully understood. The thing is, if you’re worth paying that much it doesn’t matter where you live.

Maybe you just have a large family and need a sprawling suburban house to fit all of them in.

You shouldn’t be penalized for your address just because you aren’t a DINK living in the urban hell.

If you make it to the office on time, payroll has no need whatsoever to know where you live other than where to send checks and tax forms. And hell, these days that’s all electronic anyway. Provide a secondary email for someday when you leave for the last pay stub for direct deposit and the tax form later on.

With so many companies having data breaches anyway, they really don’t need your address.

But if they want to play games, there’s plenty of mailboxes for rent that have normal looking addresses and aren’t a PO Box.

Nevertheless. It’s a scummy business practice. If you move far enough away that you can’t even make it to the office, maybe reasonable.

But you were hired at a salary and you’re worth that salary wherever you live. The company can save money selling off the building you don’t need to report to anymore. They don’t need to profiteer their own employees paychecks.
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It's the law of supply-and-demand. :dunno:
 
Palmpilot said:
It's the law of supply-and-demand. :dunno:
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Yep - gotta pay bigger bucks in high cost areas because it's the only way to attract the talent. None of these companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts! :)
 
DFH65 said:
They work at a University so they are smarter? What a joke! I work in higher ed and the majority of those smart people you are talking about I wouldn't trust to change the oil on my 20 year old lawn mower. They are typically single subject book smart individuals who have spent their entire life in the classroom and little time gaining any practical knowledge of anything.
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Obviously you think small engine repair is the end-all, but I got news. To get to and stay on the cutting edge of science takes huge amounts of training and tons of work. I'd rather the folks doing it not know how to fix their mowers if it means more time for them to do their jobs. By they way, the average science professor at the average University works insane hours. I'm the huge exception because I never brought work home, most of my colleagues do. I didn't know any of my neighbors for the first dozen or so years here because I was never home.

Oh, and I just had to fix a 20 year old mower. I scrapped the thing and bought a new one. They're cheap and my time is valuable. Who's the dumb one again?
 
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One approach would be to keep all the students in college for the duration of the semester, allow them to mix and mingle and spread their virus load around. It probably wont kill too many of them, a few in the hospital and maybe we'll find out about some new manifestations of the virus. At the end of the semester, they all get tested before they are allowed to return back home.
 
steingar said:
Obviously you think small engine repair is the end-all, but I got news. To get to and stay on the cutting edge of science takes huge amounts of training and tons of work. I'd rather the folks doing it not know how to fix their mowers if it means more time for them to do their jobs. By they way, the average science professor at the average University works insane hours. I'm the huge exception because I never brought work home, most of my colleagues do. I didn't know any of my neighbors for the first dozen or so years here because I was never home.

Oh, and I just had to fix a 20 year old mower. I scrapped the thing and bought a new one. They're cheap and my time is valuable. Who's the dumb one again?
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You missed my whole point but that is fine this is just the internet. Carry on.
 
weilke said:
One approach would be to keep all the students in college for the duration of the semester, allow them to mix and mingle and spread their virus load around. It probably wont kill too many of them, a few in the hospital and maybe we'll find out about some new manifestations of the virus. At the end of the semester, they all get tested before they are allowed to return back home.
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Kids are one aspect, staff is the other. And there is a lot of support staff.
Another dimension in most university areas local businesses....

isolation would work better for little kid sleep away camps; but not so much for college age.

Tim
 
steingar said:
I didn't know any of my neighbors for the first dozen or so years here because I was never home.
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Not picking on you toooo hard, but please don’t think that’s different from any other serious professional job. Or the constant study.
 
denverpilot said:
Not picking on you toooo hard, but please don’t think that’s different from any other serious professional job. Or the constant study.
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Sure it is, because academia is a woke profession. How else could they continue to convince more and more and more people to funnel money into a college for a piece of paper after 4 years.
 
Do I even want to know what a "woke profession" is? LOL All college professors are not created equal, and not all of them are genius. Time and training in their field does require someone with smarts, but that doesn't always translate into being smart about life stuff. I think most college profs are shooting in the dark just like most of us. Some of them might have a penlight that the rest of us don't have. None of them can foresee the future, no matter how much time they've spent training for their field or how many lawn mowers they can or cannot fix. Also, I would bet that the professors aren't making the decisions, the administration is.

As for neighbors, I only work an 8-hour shift, 9-5. I bring nothing at all home from my job, as not only do I value my time to myself, it is hard to take someone's child home with you and not have the parents upset. ;) I do commute half hour each way (which to me is a short commute). I never see my neighbors. In the morning, they are at work, and by the time I get home, they're all inside eating. By the time I eat supper and do the requisite stuff like the dishes and laundry, everyone else is in their own houses for the evening. So not knowing your neighbors doesn't necessarily mean you have a demanding job or that you spend hours outside of normal hours at it or that you are smart.
 
KSCessnaDriver said:
Sure it is, because academia is a woke profession. How else could they continue to convince more and more and more people to funnel money into a college for a piece of paper after 4 years.
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I got some use out of some of my college courses and never got a piece of paper. So there’s some useful stuff available.

Degrees in underwater basket weaving probably aren’t the best life choice, however. :)
 
COVID 19 is going to put many private small colleges and universities out of business in the next few years. They simply are not a good value however a person calculates it, and like other small businesses, lack the capital resources to carry through these times. I know some recently tenured professors at some of these small schools (less than 3,000 students) and they are sweating bullets right now. At one particular school In Oregon, they simply removed an entire department as a way of trying to balance the budget resulting in layoffs of some 20 professors. These colleges, particularly their Administrators are simply deluding themselves into thinking students, or their parents, are going to pay $35-45K per year in tuition to go to school on line. That’s simply not going to happen. Students will tolerate it for a short period, but not over the long term. Kinda of amusing right now in the sense that the brand marketing for many of these small schools is the relatively small class size, the campus environment, and the culture and life style. No sure how you get that on line. The same is going to be true for small state universities. Some of them are already seeing drastic budget cuts through lack of housing revenues, revenues from their state sources, federal revenues, etc. I think that the competition for students is going to get real serious, and with the cliff out there, many places will simply close down.
 
An article published today in the journal Nature references an article in the New England Journal of Medicine of a coronavirus treatment breakthrough.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01824-5?

An inexpensive and commonly used steroid can save the lives of people seriously ill with COVID-19, a randomized, controlled clinical trial in the United Kingdom has found. The drug, called dexamethasone, is the first shown to reduce deaths from the coronavirus that has killed more than 430,000 people globally. In the trial, it cut deaths by about one-third in patients who were on ventilators because of coronavirus infection.
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Kinda seems like something every doctor would be giving as part of treatment for this sort of issue. :confused:
 
Stan, I sent a message from a 2008 post. Trying to work this out. Please contact me if you would. Dale was my buddy from the Air Force. We had no idea he had passed. Had tried many times to contact him with no success. Rick Bates 817-821-8201, Jeannette Bates 817-897-5955
 
Richard L Bates said:
Stan, I sent a message from a 2008 post. Trying to work this out. Please contact me if you would. Dale was my buddy from the Air Force. We had no idea he had passed. Had tried many times to contact him with no success. Rick Bates 817-821-8201, Jeannette Bates 817-897-5955
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Tagging @Stan Cooper to help you out. He's more likely to see the post that way.
 
Richard L Bates said:
Stan, I sent a message from a 2008 post. Trying to work this out. Please contact me if you would. Dale was my buddy from the Air Force. We had no idea he had passed. Had tried many times to contact him with no success. Rick Bates 817-821-8201, Jeannette Bates 817-897-5955
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Hi Richard. I just left a voice mail at 817-821-8201 with my mobile phone number. Dale's sudden passing from Covid in March, 2020, was a shock and a huge loss to me personally and his many friends.
 
Thank you for contacting me Stan. Dale was very private, so we had no way of contacting him other than his cell phone and address. If you have any idea where he is buried or other info we would certainly appreciate it. Rick and Jeannette Bates
 
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