I went to college in the mid 1970s. This was a time of transition for many things. One of them was a change in admissions policies that mostly opened it to better scrutiny. By and large, this was a good thing. Policies that had been discriminatory were changed, and lots of people who had been denied college were able to go. For most people, a college degree opens lots of doors. When I went to college, most people didn't have college aspirations, although many people took advantage of Junior College and the specialized trade schools. Today, most people do have college aspirations, including the vast majority who do not have the aptitude for it. This has opened a gigantic market for scam colleges and perhaps even worse, scam college lenders.
Wealthy and upper middle class families have always seen college as a natural step for their children and the vast majority saw to it that their kids got in. Most got in through the various aptitude measurements, but plenty of kids really didn't have the aptitude. In the old days, the college was happy to take a kid that wouldn't have otherwise made it, in return for a nice donation. This would be sufficient to provide the kid with tutoring and other needed support, and in most cases it was sufficient to give a scholarship to a bunch of other kids who did deserve it but couldn't afford it. This was a good arrangement. Everybody understood that the kid was there on the merits of daddy's donation, and kid would end up having career undistinguished by anything but the nice diploma and probably a large bar tab and perhaps a few racy scenes in the tabloids. It was corrupt, but openly so, and the good it did far outweighed the bad.
The new admissions schemes have ended most of the corruption. But not all. Good parents will do their very best to open doors for their kids, and if open corruption is blocked, they will find ways around the rules. The recent scandal involving sports recruiters getting students admitted on the basis of non-existent talent, mostly in relatively obscure sports, is an example of this. Lori Loughlin apparently spent $500,000 getting her two kids into USC. Had this been open, that could have provided 12-15 student-years of free rides for deserving students. Instead, it mostly went to various scammers.
Most of the people who went to college this way in the old days lived undistinguished lives. There are a few exceptions though. It's pretty clear that Donald Trump doesn't have the mental wherewithal to get into a decent college, much less a good one like UPenn. Daddy Fred plainly found a way to open the door though. Don apparently did attend a few classes, but managed to be remembered mostly for being absent from most of his senior year while he started his real estate business in New York, and somehow graduating anyway.
I say: This is ok, but there should be a clear paper trail to be found by anyone who is curious, such as grad schools and newspaper reporters. If each undeserving student pays for a half dozen or more deserving ones, that's an acceptable price, provided the undeserving student can be prevented from using their purchased diploma for evil, as the Trumps did. An undeserved admission should never be used for admission to subsequent education, such as medical school. On the other hand, there are plenty of cases of bad students waking up during their college years and going on to do something great, so it shouldn't be a barrier either. MCATs, GREs, LSATs, and actual decent college grades should be sufficient to separate the wheat from the chaff.
17 May 2020
What to do About the Novel Coronavirus
The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, was first discovered in late 2019 in Wuhan, China. There is no vaccine, humans have no pre-existing immunities like we do to the Flu, and it weakens us in a way that may kill us on its own, or it might expose us to opportunistic infections. It is fairly infectious, including for a week or more before we show any signs of being ill. Around half of people recover before they show any symptoms, yet they were infectious the whole time. There are no known palliative measures, although a few have briefly shown some promise. So far, none have panned out.
The Trump administration chose to abandon all pandemic preparations made during previous administrations. This included demoting or firing most of the people who had any real expertise, such as the Pandemic Response Team, tossing their extensive plans, and installing a toadie as head of the CDC. The first Trump CDC director was pushed out for blatant corruption, the second seems to have engaged largely in preventing the CDC from doing its job properly.
Trump has consistently poo poohed the need for testing, and has consistently lied about it. He has also obstructed the distribution of medical ventilators, and most alarming of all, has obstructed the distribution of all types of Personal Protective Equipment: masks, gloves, gowns, etc. We're 3 months into this thing and while it's finally possible to get a simple mask, it is still not possible to get an N95 without a special connection. Most of this can be categorized as negligence, but two things: forcing the distribution to be exclusively on the open market, which has led to enormous gouging, and numerous cases of federal agencies swooping in and confiscating PPEs just before they got to their end user, have massively and needlessly exacerbated the problem.
So what should we do? In the absence of anything better, quarantine. The bubonic plague has been pretty much eliminated through quarantine. Smallpox was substantially suppressed with quarantine, although its final elimination didn't come about until we had a vaccine. And so on.
But there's all this asymptomatic contagion. The first step was stay-at-home orders for just about everybody. Unfortunately we need medical attention and groceries, so there has to be some big holes, which allows a lot of spread. Fortunately, we already have several tests, but unfortunately, the knucklehead in charge at the CDC screwed up when it was discovered that there had been a mistake, and Trump has insisted on the vicissitudes of the free market governing availability. This would have been a perfect use for the defense authorization act, but no. He has several times suggested that he doesn't like testing, and the reason always seems to be that he's afraid that knowing the truth will make him look bad. On this I am sure he is correct. How about fixing this problem by not being such a pathological idiot?
The first and most important thing we need to do is to get a lot more testing. As of today (May 17), we are doing about 200,000 tests a day. People who regularly come into contact with the disease, mainly medical people, should be tested every day. There are 1.1 million doctors and 3.8 million nurses in the country. Not all of them are working COVID. Let's estimate that 2 million of them are. In addition, there are around 20 million people who have jobs rated "essential" (e.g. grocery clerk) that come into contact with a lot of people, but only a few of them are likely sick, and with barriers and similar measures, we can reduce their risk, but not eliminate it. We should probably test them once a week. That's another 3 million tests a day for a total of 5 million. This is the bare minimum.
We need to test the people in nursing homes. These are people who are especially vulnerable and they're living in very close contact with each other. There are about 1.5M of them. they, and the people who take care of them, should probably be tested pretty often. Lets say 300,000 tests a day nationwide. The prisons are roughly the same size. There are only about 70,000 people in the meat slaughtering and packing business, but they work in very close contact and there have been several bad outbreaks. They should probably be tested a couple of times a week. There are probably a bunch of other such occupations.
I'm thinking we should probably test everybody at least every other month or so. There are 320M of us, but subtracting the people from other categories, it's a bit under 300M. If we test each of them every 60 days, that's another 5 million tests a day. We're up to a total of 10 million tests. That means we're undertesting by a factor of 50.
The Trump administration chose to abandon all pandemic preparations made during previous administrations. This included demoting or firing most of the people who had any real expertise, such as the Pandemic Response Team, tossing their extensive plans, and installing a toadie as head of the CDC. The first Trump CDC director was pushed out for blatant corruption, the second seems to have engaged largely in preventing the CDC from doing its job properly.
Trump has consistently poo poohed the need for testing, and has consistently lied about it. He has also obstructed the distribution of medical ventilators, and most alarming of all, has obstructed the distribution of all types of Personal Protective Equipment: masks, gloves, gowns, etc. We're 3 months into this thing and while it's finally possible to get a simple mask, it is still not possible to get an N95 without a special connection. Most of this can be categorized as negligence, but two things: forcing the distribution to be exclusively on the open market, which has led to enormous gouging, and numerous cases of federal agencies swooping in and confiscating PPEs just before they got to their end user, have massively and needlessly exacerbated the problem.
So what should we do? In the absence of anything better, quarantine. The bubonic plague has been pretty much eliminated through quarantine. Smallpox was substantially suppressed with quarantine, although its final elimination didn't come about until we had a vaccine. And so on.
But there's all this asymptomatic contagion. The first step was stay-at-home orders for just about everybody. Unfortunately we need medical attention and groceries, so there has to be some big holes, which allows a lot of spread. Fortunately, we already have several tests, but unfortunately, the knucklehead in charge at the CDC screwed up when it was discovered that there had been a mistake, and Trump has insisted on the vicissitudes of the free market governing availability. This would have been a perfect use for the defense authorization act, but no. He has several times suggested that he doesn't like testing, and the reason always seems to be that he's afraid that knowing the truth will make him look bad. On this I am sure he is correct. How about fixing this problem by not being such a pathological idiot?
The first and most important thing we need to do is to get a lot more testing. As of today (May 17), we are doing about 200,000 tests a day. People who regularly come into contact with the disease, mainly medical people, should be tested every day. There are 1.1 million doctors and 3.8 million nurses in the country. Not all of them are working COVID. Let's estimate that 2 million of them are. In addition, there are around 20 million people who have jobs rated "essential" (e.g. grocery clerk) that come into contact with a lot of people, but only a few of them are likely sick, and with barriers and similar measures, we can reduce their risk, but not eliminate it. We should probably test them once a week. That's another 3 million tests a day for a total of 5 million. This is the bare minimum.
We need to test the people in nursing homes. These are people who are especially vulnerable and they're living in very close contact with each other. There are about 1.5M of them. they, and the people who take care of them, should probably be tested pretty often. Lets say 300,000 tests a day nationwide. The prisons are roughly the same size. There are only about 70,000 people in the meat slaughtering and packing business, but they work in very close contact and there have been several bad outbreaks. They should probably be tested a couple of times a week. There are probably a bunch of other such occupations.
I'm thinking we should probably test everybody at least every other month or so. There are 320M of us, but subtracting the people from other categories, it's a bit under 300M. If we test each of them every 60 days, that's another 5 million tests a day. We're up to a total of 10 million tests. That means we're undertesting by a factor of 50.
11 May 2020
Marion Medeiros
Marion was a teammate of mine on the cross country and track teams at Cupertino High School in the early '70s. I stumbled on this last night, which is an obituary from the San Jose Mercury. He was a sophomore when I was a senior, but we were pretty good friends anyway. He was a good kid and a great runner and pole vaulter. He set the school pole vault record as a sophomore and seemed destined to go quite a bit farther.
He had been teased as a child about having a girls name so he usually pronounced his name "Morion". He was definitely not a girl, although I have no idea about his sexuality. We talked about all sorts of things in the two years we were teammates. I think he thought of me as a sort of mentor, although he was a better runner than I was by far.
His older brother Baron was also a teammate and I knew him well too. The last time I saw either of them, Baron had just enlisted in the army, and would join up after finishing high school. Apparently Marion joined the army too and worked as a recruiter.
The article says Marion had a stroke which made him quadriplegic. It doesn't give a date, but it looks like it happened in 1990, give or take. Marion would have been about 38. 19 years later, in July 2009, the house he and his family had grown up in burned. His mother was able to get out, but Marion was not. (This house was in Rancho Rinconada, a housing development in Cupertino, not far from the High School)
My heart aches. Rest in peace, Marion.
He had been teased as a child about having a girls name so he usually pronounced his name "Morion". He was definitely not a girl, although I have no idea about his sexuality. We talked about all sorts of things in the two years we were teammates. I think he thought of me as a sort of mentor, although he was a better runner than I was by far.
His older brother Baron was also a teammate and I knew him well too. The last time I saw either of them, Baron had just enlisted in the army, and would join up after finishing high school. Apparently Marion joined the army too and worked as a recruiter.
The article says Marion had a stroke which made him quadriplegic. It doesn't give a date, but it looks like it happened in 1990, give or take. Marion would have been about 38. 19 years later, in July 2009, the house he and his family had grown up in burned. His mother was able to get out, but Marion was not. (This house was in Rancho Rinconada, a housing development in Cupertino, not far from the High School)
My heart aches. Rest in peace, Marion.
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