Overall, I love it here. Every thing I love to do is here. Great snowboarding and skiing is a drive away. We have seasons passes for a great mountain like mammoth and nearby mountains only 2 hours away. I love the beach. My daughter loves surfing now so I see myself doing that for years again. We could not have a better year round golf climate. Mountain bike riding. Hiking And personally, I like many of the people. Really my only current complaints are bad govt and high taxes. This place was so well run in the 80s and early 90s.... it is a shame. What i miss would be the tremendous cultural things to do in D.C. or New York... but I lived in those places so I live to visit. I could substitute boating, clay court tennis and fishing in FL... that is good too... don't get me wrong. But... to get in shape I cut out 99 percent of my beer drinking...
I respect your opinion and wish you the very best. Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to live and work in CA. And I had the opportunity for some good money. But once I equalized the higher cost of living, it was a joke.
Along those lines. Two weeks ago... one of my sons who is Texas right now... went to his girlfriend's home in a nice neighborhood near or in Dallas. My son was impressed and figured they were "rich" and she must have had far more money than us. But, then he and his girlfriend zillowed the value of our homes. My son was blown away how much more our home was. It completely changed my son's opinion about his standard of living growing up. But... made him conclude he will be living in Texas when he graduates. If you don't need to work here or be near the beach... then... it seems smarter to live elsewhere.
I can attest to this very thing. The house we bought in a suburb of Tampa is 5000 sq feet and would get me about 2000 sq feet and no yard in San Diego where I was considering prior to moving here. All for the benefits of....well, I don't know. I'm not sure what the benefit would be. No thanks.
"DeSantis for the win" - Let's kill the kids and their families edition... Gov. DeSantis says Florida schools should not close due to COVID-19 outbreaks https://www.news4jax.com/news/local...s-should-not-close-due-to-covid-19-outbreaks/ Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday said as the school year continues in Florida amid the pandemic, school closures “should be off the table.” The comments from DeSantis come as two Jacksonville schools — Fletcher High School and Douglas Anderson School of the Arts — made the decision in the last week to temporarily close their campuses due to an increase in the number of reported COVID-19 cases. “[Closures] don’t do anything to mitigate [COVID-19], but they do cause catastrophic damage to the physical, mental and social well-being of our youth. Let’s not repeat any mistakes of the past,” DeSantis said during a press conference at Jacksonville Classical Academy in Mixon Town. When asked about the Jacksonville schools that closed, DeSantis said he didn’t know about the specific cases, but added that closing a school is “not the best option,” and encouraged a more surgical approach. The governor’s advice Tuesday appears at odds with the advice of state health officials. (More at above url)
They shouldn't close. Our school has had multiple people come down with COVID multiple times. All parents have the opportunity to pull their kids and put them in virtual school. None have. Everyone has gone back to school the next day except those being asked to quarantine. This is because COVID is essentially harmless to kids. CFR is .00014 Less than the flu for this demographic. More GWB fear mongering and desperation as people ignore this bullshit more and more each day.
Are The Risks Of Reopening Schools Exaggerated? Despite widespread concerns, two new international studies show no consistent relationship between in-person K-12 schooling and the spread of coronavirus. And a third study from the United States shows no elevated risk to childcare workers who stayed on the job. Combined with anecdotal reports from a number of U.S. states where schools are open, as well as a crowdsourced dashboard of around 2000 U.S. schools, some medical experts are saying it's time to shift the discussion from the risks of opening K-12 schools to the risks of keeping them closed. "As a pediatrician, I am really seeing the negative impacts of these school closures on children," Dr. Danielle Dooley, a medical director at Children's National Hospital in Washington, D.C., told NPR. She ticked off mental health problems, hunger, obesity due to inactivity, missing routine medical care and the risk of child abuse — on top of the loss of education. "Going to school is really vital for children. They get their meals in school, their physical activity, their health care, their education, of course." THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS 'Children Are Going Hungry': Why Schools Are Struggling To Feed Students While agreeing that emerging data is encouraging, other experts said the United States as a whole has made little progress toward practices that would allow schools to make reopening safer — from rapid and regular testing, to contact tracing to identify the source of outbreaks, to reporting school-associated cases publicly, regularly and consistently. "We are driving with the headlights off, and we've got kids in the car," said Melinda Buntin, chair of the Department of Health Policy at Vanderbilt School of Medicine, who has argued for reopening schools with precautions. Emerging evidence Enric Álvarez at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya looked at different regions within Spain for his recent co-authored working paper. Spain's second wave of coronavirus cases started before the school year began in September. Still, cases in one region dropped three weeks after schools reopened, while others continued rising at the same rate as before, and one stayed flat. Nowhere, the research found, was there a spike that coincided with reopening: "What we found is that the school [being opened] makes absolutely no difference," Álvarez told NPR. mask-wearing for all children over 6, ventilation, keeping students in small groups or "bubbles," and social distancing of 1.5 meters — slightly less than the recommended 6 feet in the United States. When a case is detected, the entire "bubble" is sent home for quarantine. Insights for Education is a foundation that advises education ministries around the globe. For their report, which was not peer reviewed, they analyzed school reopening dates and coronavirus trends from February through the end of September across 191 countries. "There is no consistent pattern," said Dr. Randa Grob-Zakhary, who heads the organization. "It's not that closing schools leads to a decrease in cases, or that opening schools leads to a surge in cases." Some countries, such as Thailand and South Africa, fully opened when cases were low, with no apparent impact on transmission. Others, such as Vietnam and Gambia, had cases rising during summer break, yet those rates actually dropped after schools reopened. Japan, too, saw cases rise, and then fall again, all while schools were fully reopened. But the United Kingdom saw a strong upward trend that started around the time of reopening schools. "We're not saying at all that schools have nothing to do with cases," Grob-Zachary said. What the data suggests instead is that opening schools does not inevitably lead to increased case numbers. What about the U.S.? On Oct. 14, the Infectious Diseases Society of America gave a briefing on safe school reopenings. Bottom line? "The data so far are not indicating that schools are a superspreader site," said Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Michigan's medical school. One place in the U.S. where systematic data gathering is happening — Utah — seems to echo the conclusions drawn by the new international studies. Utah's state COVID database clearly reports school-associated cases by district. And while coronavirus spread is relatively high in the state, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sydnee Dickson believes that schools are not, for the most part, driving spread. "Where you see cases on the rise in a neighborhood, in a county, we see that tend to be reflected in a school," Dickson said. "[But] we're not seeing spread by virtue of being in school together." Tom Hudachko of the state's health department said that after both colleges and schools reopened in early September, there was a rise in cases among the 15-24 age group. But with targeted public health messaging those cases have started to come down. For the most part, Hudachko said, K-12 school clusters have been concentrated at high schools. "We have had some outbreaks in middle schools. They've been far less frequent. And elementary school numbers seem to be one-offs here and there." And these clusters — including one large reported outbreak with at least 90 cases — have largely been traced to informal social gatherings in homes, not to classrooms. (Álvarez, in Spain, also said that clusters among young people there have been traced to social gatherings, including rooftop and beach parties). Few states are reporting school-related data as clearly as Utah. And that's a shame, said Buntin at Vanderbilt. "One might argue that we're running really a massive national experiment right now in schools," Buntin said, "and we're not collecting uniform data." THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS New Dashboard Tracks Coronavirus Cases In Schools Across 47 States The largest centralized effort at such data collection in the United States — the unofficial, crowdsourced COVID-19 School Response Dashboard — has gotten a lot of publicity. But it is self-reported, not a representative sample of schools. Buntin and other experts said it's likely that the dashboard is biased toward schools that are doing an exemplary job of following safety precautions and are organized enough to share their results. Also, the dashboard doesn't yet offer the ability to compare coronavirus cases reported at schools with local case rates. In the absence of data, there are scary and tragic anecdotes of teachers around the country dying of COVID-19. But it's hard to extrapolate from these incidents. It's not immediately clear whether the educators contracted the virus at school, whether they are part of school-based clusters, or what safety precautions were or were not followed by the schools in question. A recent study from Yale University could potentially shed some light on these questions. It tracked 57,000 childcare workers, located in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, for the first three months of the pandemic in the United States. About half continued caring for very young children, such as the children of essential workers, while the other half stayed home. The study found no difference in the rate of coronavirus infections between the two groups, after accounting for demographic factors. Walter Gilliam, lead author of the study and a professor of psychology at the Yale Child Study Center, cautioned that it's difficult to generalize this report to a K-12 schools setting, because the children were mostly under the age of 6 and kept in very small groups — and, he said, the childcare workers were trained in health and safety and reported following strict protocols around disinfection. However, he said, "I think it would be great to do this study with school teachers and see what we can find out." Risk and benefit When you add up what we know and even what we still don't know, some doctors and public health advocates said there are powerful arguments for in-person schooling wherever possible, particularly for younger students and those with special needs. "Children under the age of 10 generally are at quite low risk of acquiring symptomatic disease," from the coronavirus, said Dr. Rainu Kaushal of Weill Cornell Medical Center. And they rarely transmit it either. It's a happy coincidence, Kaushal and others said, that the youngest children face lower risk and are also the ones who have the hardest time with virtual learning. "I would like to see the students, especially the younger students, get back," said Malani at the University of Michigan. "I feel more encouraged that that can happen in a safe and thoughtful way." Chicago Public Schools, one of the largest districts in the country, seemed to take that guidance into consideration when it announced recently a phased reopening starting with pre-K and special education. Kaushal said it's important to keep in mind that Black, Latinx and Native American communities are much more severely affected by COVID-19. And that many of the "children that are at the severest risk of disease, are also at the severest risk of not having a school open, whether it be for food security, adult time, security, losing the time to learn or losing the skills that they have acquired over the last year or so." Any decision made on school reopening, she said, has to focus on equity as well as safety. There are no easy trade-offs here.
just like the occasionally more reasonable discussion we have seen regarding Sweden and the possibility of herd immunity... They started seeding that along side their fear mongering crap for plausible deniability after the election... "See we were balanced" . Like 99 to 1 and the 1 coming after they had already scared the hell out everyone they could.
Florida needs herd immunity from Trump-influenced Gov. DeSantis https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinio...0201020-divw6pv7bjfrfg32skrxbgzjhe-story.html The director of the National Institutes of Health calls it “dangerous” and “scientifically and ethically problematic.” A former Harvard Medical School professor and pioneering HIV/AIDS researcher calls it “mass murder.” Yet Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis embraces it. We’re talking about the idea of letting the coronavirus spread rapidly among supposedly less vulnerable people while isolating the most vulnerable. In theory, once enough people have been infected, even those who haven’t contracted the disease will be protected. It’s called herd immunity. In recent weeks, the governor has hosted discussions with contrarian scientists and doctors who oppose lockdowns, mask-wearing and social distancing. Those contrarians joined others this month to support the Great Barrington Declaration. It advocates a “focused protection” response to the virus. President Trump is a fan. During a town hall in Pennsylvania, Trump said, “You’ll develop herd — like a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd developed — and that’s going to happen.” Because credible public health experts reject “focused protection,” states have shown little interest. As the Washington Post reported, however, Florida is the exception. How predictable. Whatever Trump believes about the virus, no matter how dubious the source, DeSantis will get on board. “Focused prevention” aligns with Trump’s wish to open as much of the economy as possible. Last month, DeSantis moved Florida into Phase 3 reopening without giving counties any notice. DeSantis has long made a Trump victory in Florida more of a priority than Florida’s public health. After Dr. Scott Atlas – a neuroradiologist, not an epidemiologist – joined the White House Coronavirus Task Force, DeSantis hosted him in Florida. Atlas supports herd immunity. According to news reports, the former Fox News commentator has taken over the task force. He has quashed efforts to expand virus testing. Against all evidence, he believes that widespread use of masks does not restrict transmission of the virus. More ominously, Atlas reinforces Trump’s mistaken opinion that the country is “rounding the turn” on the virus, as Trump told a rally in Fort Myers over the weekend. Trump has used that phrase for seven weeks, as case numbers in some states are at record levels. Florida is not setting records, but case numbers from the last two weeks were the highest in a month. The state reported 54 COVID-19-related deaths on Monday, which was almost three times the number for New York. On Tuesday, the state reported 86 deaths. DeSantis has his fans. An op-ed from one of the libertarian think tanks that favor herd immunity praised the governor’s stepped-up reopening: “Under the influence of some courageous and brilliant intellectuals with a conscience, Florida has joined South Dakota and Indiana in the land of the living.” Consider that South Dakota comparison. Gov. Kristi Roem, a Republican, welcomed about 500,000 bikers to an annual August rally in the town of Sturgis. New reporting suggests that the rally contributed to a spike in cases throughout the Upper Midwest. DeSantis would understand. By refusing to close the state’s beaches in March, the governor turned Spring Break into a superspreader event. Many universities rewrote this year’s calendars to eliminate Spring Break. With vaccines still in development, herd immunity can tempt people who want children back in school and places of worship open. But as 80 scientists stated in response to the Great Barrington Declaration, it’s “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence” that critics say could cause one million or more preventable deaths in the U.S. Even COVID-19 survivors may suffer lifelong damage. “Focused prevention” also wrongly assumes that we could isolate all of the vulnerable elderly. Researchers also don’t know how long immunity lasts. Herd immunity fans point to Sweden, which rejected lockdowns and kept schools open. But Sweden’s COVID-19 death rate is higher than those in neighboring Denmark and Norway and the economy performed worse. Perhaps DeSantis, father of three small children, will volunteer for a herd immunity experiment. If not, he should stop embracing the herd mentality from the White House.