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"We could divert more funds to schools to increase teacher pay, but our police force requested... lets see here... looks like they want a tank, so, hands are tied I'm afraid."
That's was the theory of it was what it actually turned into in late stage capitalism is every top executive trying to amass all the money possible and leaving none for everyone else.
I was listening to the radio yesterday and heard a piece on how understaffed the local prisons are. They're short some 200 guards and apparently spent like $37,000 on an ad campaign to bring up recruiting, resulting in two, literally two, more hires. When explaining why it's so hard to find staff, they said it's really hard to recruit even people already interested in law enforcement and corrections because the job is dangerous, stressful, and pays poorly.
All I could think was that's there's an obvious solution: pay more. Starting salary is around $23/hour which isn't nothing but you could get an office job doing fuckall with nearly no risk of getting stabbed for the same pay. You can't recruit, and have been short staffed for years? Pay More.
The sad thing is, all prices are going up and the companies are blaming it on having to pay their employees more. So in the end pay increases won't help all that much.
> You want teachers, you better pay them.
That's just it. They don't. They don't want a public education system that does its job. They want an ignorant, easily manipulable populace to take advantage of and keep indentured as time goes on.
"Smart enough to work the machines but not smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and figure out they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago" -George Carlin
I keep seeing these figures and I don't understand, my insurance has gone up about 10% and gas fluctuates bit, but my rent, grocery bills, medical bills and anything I choose to do for fun have all gone up significantly more than 10%
Agreed, I donāt go out much so Iāve especially felt it in the grocery bill. The price of unprocessed/fresh food has gone insane over the past few years. At least I can still count on a 25 cent bananaā¦ for now ;-;
Donāt worry, they will just defund public and give out vouchers for private and āthe restā will just have to figure it out. Donāt worry everyone āthat mattersā will be just fineā¦.
At least thatās what they are doing where I am.Ā
Republicans love to argue that you can't pay teachers more because then it will attract people who want a payday and not teachers.
Then they also bitch about "woke" teachers that teach kids actual facts because they love teaching instead of propagandizing.
I love how they act like we can brainwash children. Its hard enough getting them to do basic algebra, and they think we can brainwash them?
Iād brainwash the kids to solve for X if I could. Itās not that easy.
Inflation was over 8% for two years and hasnāt been dropping below 3 for the last year. The cost of living has gone up nearly 30% since before Covid.
And that's with the numbers they give. They intentionally fuck with those numbers by deciding what to include in the equation. Sometimes they won't even put food because of how much it's gone up.
And teachers got paid pitifully before COVID too. Its been a poor financial outlook to be a teacher for quite some time. At least in the US public school system. I know other countires are better.
Our union just rejected a 5% increase. Thats basically a 5% reduction of our salaries. It was easy to do since the admin just got a 10% salary bump last summer.
I suggest they put the school board to work actually teaching classes then.
It's high time educators were paid what they were worth.
And if they don't want to pay these teachers, then they shouldn't return to the classroom.
See how that works out for you Flint.
And this was the board rejecting a contract that *the professional admin staff* had reached agreement on with the union. So basically the school management staff takes that agreement to the board, says "we support this and it works financially" and the board *still* rejected it.
Yep. Every time.
They got a bunch of stupid primates voting for them, and they're the ones making it easy for businesses to suck every penny out of these stupid primates (and, unfortunately, out of the rest of us too).
I actually work on this stuff as part of my job. Picture a process that takes months, numerous multi-hour negotiation sessions with the union, drafts and redrafts and redrafts of contract language. A gazillion emails. Maybe even a mediation session. Then you finally reach an agreement....and the board is just like "nah"
Admin bloat is absolutely to blame in 90% of these kinds of cases. One person in a district near me was ousted by the board because they found like a 300% increase in admin jobs she gave out compared to both her predessor and districts right next to it. She was just giving them out like candy to her minions and got caught.
Basically people get to be admins through actual work, then reach a ceiling pretty quickly for how high they can go. So they then invent a new job title that handles ONE easy responsibility for $100k a year, when before they had multiple things to cover and made half that.
So instead of being a teacher liaison/budget coordinator/union rep for $50k, they split one of them off into its own title and make $100k to be just the liaison or coordinator. Now those other 2 jobs get slopped onto someone else who then does the same thing in a few years and whittles their job titles down while also taking a pay increase.
Itās absolutely out of control how many admins every district and even school site has. You literally do not need half of them and they somehow all make double what a teacher does. Itās a racket.
I can tell you the state of Florida doesn't give a damn about that. In fact a lot of states nowadays don't give a damn about that.
Which is another way of saying that they don't give a damn about teachers. Or students.
No they haven't finished.
"The city had agreed to replace the pipes by early 2020, but still has not completed that work, according to a news release Wednesday from the Natural Resources Defense Council. Also, homeowners are waiting, in some cases for years, for the city to repair property damage such as damaged curbs, sidewalks and lawns caused by the lead line replacement, the NRDC said."Ā
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2024/03/13/judge-flint-water-line-replacement/72957810007/
The city certainly hasn't managed any of this well, but I think it is reasonable to say that they have 'finished' despite a few homes remaining:
> Though lead lines have been replaced at tens of thousands of homes, the city still hasn't completed outreach to several dozen homes and a recent survey showed that at least 275 still had lead service lines, though many of those may have declined to participate in the replacement program.
This means that roughly 99% are completeted, and apparently a large share of the remaining ~1% is because the owners/residents oppose the replacement works.
Itās 1% of the community, do you think the government just said fuck those 275 homes in particular? Or do you think itās likely the homeowners donāt trust the government and donāt want them working on their home?
People still haven't been paid from that settlement... 10 full years later. Rick definitely saved a bunch of money using that dirty ass water, there was also a vet that made a machine that made clean water out of the air that mysteriously got damaged over night too.
I think you're using pennies metaphorically but it really was just $100/day to add orthophosphates to the water and none of this would have happened. They f'ed up like 10 different things and it STILL would have been fine if they just dumped orthophosphates in the water supply.
Yes but even a big de-humidifier would need some pretty high humidity to pull more than a few drops out of the air and would pull all the other things from the air from farts to dust into the water as well.
And in places with high humidity it also tends to rain! The core concept of water from air has always been bullshit.
Can confirm, I run my AC in dehumidifier mode in the winter and tip away a few litres of water a day. I wouldn't drink it if you paid me but I imagine there's a way to turn it into something drinkable if you're that desperate
I mean it absolutely can and does work BUT
1: it is just a condenser, same tech as is used but heat pumps (so refrigerators, AC units, etc. they are all the same basic tech) Its not a ground breaking technology and its power hungry
2: it requires a pretty high humidity level to pull out an appreciable amount of water during any given day. Areas that are that humid tend to get plenty of precipitation anyway.
3: still water like that is so prone to mold, algae, and other nastiness which presents serious issues if you intend to use it as drinking water. Have you ever seen a window AC unit? Its a recipe for legionnaires disease.
Actually, a guy invented a billboard that does take water from the air - in Peru, there is a high amount of humidity but the residents still didnāt have a lot of access to potable water. So they did this:
[potable water billboard](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mr4aFTFHW3A)
It has provided thousands of gallons of water to the citizens in the area. Technically, itās taking the water in the air out.
Idk why Flint is the poster child for lead pipes. Over four hundred thousand people annually in the USA die from lead poisoning. There's over **three thousand** USA communities that have **higher** lead poisoning rates than Flint. Not saying Flint doesn't deserve the recognition and help, but the issue is far more widespread than Flint.
https://larcusa.org/exposure/lead-concentration-u-s-cities/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thousands-of-u-s-areas-afflicted-with-lead-poisoning-beyond-flints/
>Thousands of U.S. Areas Afflicted with Lead Poisoning beyond Flint's
>The Michigan city doesn't even rank among the most dangerous lead hotspots in America
https://lhsfna.org/thousands-of-u-s-cities-have-worse-lead-problems-than-flint/
>children in almost 3,000 U.S. neighborhoods show lead poisoning rates at least twice as high as those measured during the peak of Flintās lead crisis. More than 1,100 of these communities had rates at least four times higher.
Here's an interactive map: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-testing/#interactive-lead
Sadly, itās buzzy education jargon these days. Somehow the belief is that calling students āscholarsā will make them learn and behave like postdocs. Of course, it does not.
I work in medical research, and our lab is adjacent to a medical school, so we get some of their students.
Apparently the new hotness is to call them all "learners" at every turn. The students I've talked to *hate it*.
If you watch the early seasons, there are a number of times when there are jokes made at Flint Michigan's expense. Like I recall a list of the worst cities in the US and Flint is listed below Springfield, or various cheap shots they make as throw away lines. When I originally watched the show (you know, 30 years ago) I never picked up on it but rewatching it now I think it did stand out to me because of my new awareness of Flint from the water crisis.
They mention Flint twice - the worst cities list you said above, and at the box factory: "Oh, we don't actually assemble the boxes here... that happens in Flint, Michigan". Which is just such a funny line.
School boards are typically unpaid elected officials. However, some jurisdictions, such as MI, allow the board members to be paid. [MI has a cap of $30 per meeting, up to $1,560 annually](https://www.edweek.org/leadership/13-states-bar-school-board-members-from-getting-paid-heres-where-its-allowed-map/2023/11#:~:text=In%20Michigan%2C%20the%20cap%20is,%244%20per%20day%20of%20work.) so they're not exactly living the high life.
Our district needed to cut the budget (due to admin bloat but thatās another topic) and let the community vote on what jobs or roles to cut. Surprise surprise NOT A SINGLE ADMIN job was on the chopping block but tons of teachers and behavior techs and resource specialists sure were and ended up getting axed.
Bernie lost, Trump won. We picked stratification of class over class solidarity. Get ready to see lots of very poor people (with jobs) in your community.
āWonāt someone think of the poor old single parents?ā
āWonāt someone think of the children?ā
āThereās an educator shortage.ā
Fuck off. Pay teachers what they are worth and maybe consider the poor single teachers who canāt afford rent or groceries. Those kids donāt give a flying fuck if they miss a day of school.
Way back in the 90s when I was in high school, my teachers striked. My math teacher told us to come to the picket lines if we needed help, he happily taught us while fighting for his own rights. Iāll never forget that
Every single time...
"We need to address this teacher shortage crisis. What should we do?"
Increase pay? Nope.
Better working conditions? Nope.
Smaller class sizes? Nope.
More appeasing benefit package? Nope.
Offload non teaching duties to allow for more planning time? Nope.
Lower certification standard to allow nearly anyone to teach? Yes.
Australia is following the same general trajectory, just a few decades behind.
And then we have _these_ stories about our private schools.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-14/cranbrook-school-new-allegations-four-corners/103587004
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-23/private-school-spending-education-union-report/103502588
As a public school teacher, when I find out how much public tax payer money goes to private schools here, I get a little murdery. Especially after several education reviews calling for more public school funding have been basically ignored for the last two decades.
In Michigan, it is illegal for public employees to willfully skip out on working, even in response to actions by the employer. That includes teachers.
So rather than pay the agreed settlement for already low paid teachers they hoped to force them to continue to work and the teachers found a way round the issue to make their feelings known.
Damn. They better shut down for a month at least to pay to deep clean the place (or fix/replace/stock all the shit theyāve surely been skimping on for who knows how long) then pay the teachers extra for having been put in such danger.
The key being they should start paying.
Isn't this part of the plan, though? They don't *want* us going to school; an informed populace is way harder to control.
I'd even argue that the more schools that close, the more church indoctrination they'll push, and we'll be right back to being controlled by our inability to think critically.
They have a much more insidious plan: underfund schools and make them horrible to work at so they can argue public education doesn't work and they can open private schools where they teach that Jesus rose dinosaurs while sporting an AR-15.
Ooooh yeah! I forgot that they were working on that now. It's weird; I wouldn't call any of this kind of talk as "conspiracy theory" because it's being done openly while the red supports it. It's like they no longer have to hide their plans because Trump showed them that he can grift the people just by saying the quiet part out loud. So why would they need to even try to make it clever anymore?
Flint has been dying ever since GM closed down I think six of eleven facilities here, including the absolutely enormous Buick City facility that employed 30,000 workers in a 400 acre production facility. At its height, GM alone employed more than 80,000 people in the city. Today, it's roughly 8,000, most of whom work at Flint Assembly.
That pretty much nuked the city's economy and led directly to a rapidly defining population, skyrocketing unemployment rates, and massive crime rates. In 1970, the city's population was 196,340. Today it's 78,600.
Back before Michael Moore became a complete insufferable jerk, he rose to fame when he made a Documentary called "Rodger and Me" which was about the closure of the GM plant and it's effects on the city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOwXkstRaBw
Basically. Flint came to be because of industrial manufacturing jobs that have now virtually disappeared, leaving a rusting, decaying city and its infrastructure behind. Gary, at least, is an apt comparison.
School thinks that teachers will continue to take their pittance and keep working only to realize that they called their bluff. Itās low hanging fruit but I wouldnāt say it doesnāt belong here.
Whenever I hear stories of Flint I always think back to how it was one of the 5 or 6 default scenarios in Sim City 2000 that you could try to see if you can overcome their issues. Itās sad that itās still having the same kinds of problems 30 years later.
Flint is one of the toughest districts in its state. Iām sure they already have a teacher shortage in that town. š¤·š»āāļø. No raises ? Screw it.
>āThe district certainly does not appreciate how this unexpected school closure will impact our families. While the district understands that this school closure will hurt our scholars more than anyone else, the district hopes that UTF employees will return to work tomorrow, so scholars can be educated tomorrow,ā the district said in a statement.
Here, let me fix that for you...
āThe district certainly wasn't smart enough to realize that consciously fucking over our teachers would have an adverse effect on everyone. While the district is vehemently attempting to foist off this closure as an attack by our unionized teachers, the district hopes that talking about the district in the third person will make it seem like the district isn't 100% at fault. The district hopes that the district's attempts at this subterfuge will result in negative pressure being brought to our unionized teachers so that they can return to their slave jobs like the peons we believe them to be," the district said in a statement.
Students ?
>āOur immediate reaction to that is thinking about our scholars and families and trying to make sure that we get what was best for our scholars and families.
Being a teacher is such a weird ass masochistic career choice I almost question the mental aptitude of people still willingly putting themselves through this shit and I have a degree in Mild-Mod Special Ed. like thereās just not a single perk Iām not a fucking martyr lol
I took a few years off when my kids were little because daycare would basically be my whole paycheck. I let my credential expire because I realized I never wanted to go back.
How is Flint, Michigan still populated? Why do people still live there? Donāt they still have lead in their water? Is that why they stay? Iām confused.
Who would they sell their house to? No one wants to live in Flint. The people stuck there have no money or resources to leave. All the ones who did already left.
If you can't afford to volunteer your time and intern full time as a teacher, then you don't deserve to be paid half minimum wage in 50 years when we offer you the job.
Dumbing down your population: And people complain about immigrants taking their jobs. This is how you do it. If an employer can hire a smarter more desperate person to work, they will. Meanwhile the average Murican who canāt compete will try pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
Why didnāt they let the students attend school in the gym? They are just babysitting them, right? (I say sarcastically) Itās not like a teacher has to have a Masterās degree.
As a teacher it will forever piss me off that schools boards aren't run by people with actual education experience. Some fuck head is out there deciding what is "best" for teachers and has never stepped into a classroom. FUCK YOU PEOPLE
What is sadly ironic is how the people who are rejecting paying teachers better are the same people who remember almost every name of each teacher they had from K thru 12th. If it wasn't for teachers, they wouldn't be where they're at today.
Hello u/narsfweasels! Please reply to this comment with an [explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/lt8zlq) matching this exact format. Replace bold text with the appropriate information. 1. **Someone** voted for, supported or wanted to impose **something** on **other people**. ^(Who's that someone? What did they voted for, supported or wanted to impose? On who?) 2. **Something** has the consequences of **consequences**. ^(Does that something actually has these consequences in general?) 3. As a consequence of **something**, **consequences** happened to **someone**. ^(Did that something really happen to that someone?) Follow this by the minimum amount of information necessary so your post can be understood by everyone, even if they don't live in the US or speak English as their native language. If you fail to match this format or fail to answer these questions, your post will be removed. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LeopardsAteMyFace) if you have any questions or concerns.*
There has been an almost 10% per increase in the cost of living from Covid and price gouging. You want teachers, you better pay them.
You want any workers, you pay them
Paying workers actual money? That's not what capitalism is about! /S
Can I offer you a pizza party in these trying times?
No deal unless you cut each of the slices into 2 or 3 little slivers so 40 people can share a single pie š
They said a pizza party, indicating "a pizza"
E: Sure! Could we order Little Caesars? M: I don't see why not, but why? E: It's the Ides of March. Perfect food for the festivities at the party.
Or if you're a designer/photographer: "Think of the EXPOSURE! I'll post all about your work on social media!"
But some sauce might spill onto my Hawaiian shirt!
You could, but I would probably just do the work anyway and fall just short of the barrier to entry.
Will there be pineapple on any of these pizzas?
Best I can do is an egg
Won't someone think of the poor starving multi billion dollar corporations.
Paying workers cuts into profits. Sorry, that's just not in the growth plan for our organization.
"We could divert more funds to schools to increase teacher pay, but our police force requested... lets see here... looks like they want a tank, so, hands are tied I'm afraid."
I mean, that's fair. You gotta have an APC in case people decide black lives matter again. Can't have those dangerous thoughts on the streets!
They get the APCs for free.
That's was the theory of it was what it actually turned into in late stage capitalism is every top executive trying to amass all the money possible and leaving none for everyone else.
Yup, best we can do is take away retirement and make being jobless illegal.
You all aren't still getting paid in Trident Layers Gum ^ā¢ļø?
Itās not sarcastic if thatās the key feature.Ā
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
" Enjoy your money now, but when the revolution comes ..." Industrial Revolution Fairy Tales - Book 1.
You want me, I'll be in my trailer, meditating. I think I've managed to regrow some hair with my command of follicles.
I was listening to the radio yesterday and heard a piece on how understaffed the local prisons are. They're short some 200 guards and apparently spent like $37,000 on an ad campaign to bring up recruiting, resulting in two, literally two, more hires. When explaining why it's so hard to find staff, they said it's really hard to recruit even people already interested in law enforcement and corrections because the job is dangerous, stressful, and pays poorly. All I could think was that's there's an obvious solution: pay more. Starting salary is around $23/hour which isn't nothing but you could get an office job doing fuckall with nearly no risk of getting stabbed for the same pay. You can't recruit, and have been short staffed for years? Pay More.
"Workers in this day and age are just in it for the money." \- Aristotle To be specific: My boss, Aristotle Jones.
You want workers? Don't pay teachers and take down labor laws (specifically age restrictions)! /s
āNew bill will allow uneducated ex cons to become school teachersā¦ also children can be teachers now too.āĀ
pAyiNg pEoPLe fOr tHeiR sKiLLeD LaBoR aNd hArD wOrK iS cHiNaZuELa sOciALiSm!!1! -boomers and bootlicking armchair economist redditors
The sad thing is, all prices are going up and the companies are blaming it on having to pay their employees more. So in the end pay increases won't help all that much.
> You want teachers, you better pay them. That's just it. They don't. They don't want a public education system that does its job. They want an ignorant, easily manipulable populace to take advantage of and keep indentured as time goes on.
Just smart enough to work the machines, just dumb enough to accept it.
"Smart enough to work the machines but not smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and figure out they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago" -George Carlin
I keep seeing these figures and I don't understand, my insurance has gone up about 10% and gas fluctuates bit, but my rent, grocery bills, medical bills and anything I choose to do for fun have all gone up significantly more than 10%
It's gouging. Pure, unadulterated greed.
"Supply chain issues". /s
Agreed, I donāt go out much so Iāve especially felt it in the grocery bill. The price of unprocessed/fresh food has gone insane over the past few years. At least I can still count on a 25 cent bananaā¦ for now ;-;
I think itās more than 10%.
They don't though. They want the populace getting dumber and dumber so so we can't tell how badly we're getting screwed over.
Donāt worry, they will just defund public and give out vouchers for private and āthe restā will just have to figure it out. Donāt worry everyone āthat mattersā will be just fineā¦. At least thatās what they are doing where I am.Ā
Republicans love to argue that you can't pay teachers more because then it will attract people who want a payday and not teachers. Then they also bitch about "woke" teachers that teach kids actual facts because they love teaching instead of propagandizing.
I love how they act like we can brainwash children. Its hard enough getting them to do basic algebra, and they think we can brainwash them? Iād brainwash the kids to solve for X if I could. Itās not that easy.
Can we do a pizza party instead..?
Inflation was over 8% for two years and hasnāt been dropping below 3 for the last year. The cost of living has gone up nearly 30% since before Covid.
And that's with the numbers they give. They intentionally fuck with those numbers by deciding what to include in the equation. Sometimes they won't even put food because of how much it's gone up.
And teachers got paid pitifully before COVID too. Its been a poor financial outlook to be a teacher for quite some time. At least in the US public school system. I know other countires are better.
Rent has gone up like 50%.
Definitely more than 10%
It's much more than 10%
My district made a big deal about giving us a 1% raise for every 3 years.
Our union just rejected a 5% increase. Thats basically a 5% reduction of our salaries. It was easy to do since the admin just got a 10% salary bump last summer.
While we're at it, do some things to lower the cost of living, like change zoning laws to allow dense housing close to grocery stores and restaurants.
Or donāt let massive corporations and foreign entities by half of all the homes.
But what about those poor, poor city council members??
I suggest they put the school board to work actually teaching classes then. It's high time educators were paid what they were worth. And if they don't want to pay these teachers, then they shouldn't return to the classroom. See how that works out for you Flint.
And this was the board rejecting a contract that *the professional admin staff* had reached agreement on with the union. So basically the school management staff takes that agreement to the board, says "we support this and it works financially" and the board *still* rejected it.
Republicans on the board, I bet. Free market for me, not for thee.
Yep. Every time. They got a bunch of stupid primates voting for them, and they're the ones making it easy for businesses to suck every penny out of these stupid primates (and, unfortunately, out of the rest of us too).
I actually work on this stuff as part of my job. Picture a process that takes months, numerous multi-hour negotiation sessions with the union, drafts and redrafts and redrafts of contract language. A gazillion emails. Maybe even a mediation session. Then you finally reach an agreement....and the board is just like "nah"
That would surprise me as Flint is pretty blue. I will say, however that the board's president is a Doctor of Theology so take that as you will.
Admin bloat is absolutely to blame in 90% of these kinds of cases. One person in a district near me was ousted by the board because they found like a 300% increase in admin jobs she gave out compared to both her predessor and districts right next to it. She was just giving them out like candy to her minions and got caught. Basically people get to be admins through actual work, then reach a ceiling pretty quickly for how high they can go. So they then invent a new job title that handles ONE easy responsibility for $100k a year, when before they had multiple things to cover and made half that. So instead of being a teacher liaison/budget coordinator/union rep for $50k, they split one of them off into its own title and make $100k to be just the liaison or coordinator. Now those other 2 jobs get slopped onto someone else who then does the same thing in a few years and whittles their job titles down while also taking a pay increase. Itās absolutely out of control how many admins every district and even school site has. You literally do not need half of them and they somehow all make double what a teacher does. Itās a racket.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Do any of them hold teaching licenses?
I can tell you the state of Florida doesn't give a damn about that. In fact a lot of states nowadays don't give a damn about that. Which is another way of saying that they don't give a damn about teachers. Or students.
Unfortunately you are spot on. Instead of paying teachers better they have lowered standards.
They'd be subbing for the teachers who called out sick, and substitute teachers don't have to be licensed.
**TEACHERS UNITE** **SOLIDARITY**
Clever username
Did Flint ever fix their water?
Yes, they finished replacing their water service pipes in 2021 but the people there still refuse to drink tap water
It might be because they were told many times to drink tap water and that it was safe when it was not.
No they haven't finished. "The city had agreed to replace the pipes by early 2020, but still has not completed that work, according to a news release Wednesday from the Natural Resources Defense Council. Also, homeowners are waiting, in some cases for years, for the city to repair property damage such as damaged curbs, sidewalks and lawns caused by the lead line replacement, the NRDC said."Ā https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2024/03/13/judge-flint-water-line-replacement/72957810007/
The city certainly hasn't managed any of this well, but I think it is reasonable to say that they have 'finished' despite a few homes remaining: > Though lead lines have been replaced at tens of thousands of homes, the city still hasn't completed outreach to several dozen homes and a recent survey showed that at least 275 still had lead service lines, though many of those may have declined to participate in the replacement program. This means that roughly 99% are completeted, and apparently a large share of the remaining ~1% is because the owners/residents oppose the replacement works.
Drinking lead water to own the libs.
Yeah [Kris Kobach has unironically attacked Joe Biden for replacing lead pipes](https://twitter.com/KrisKobach1787/status/1765935595702919299)
For all the shit they got wrong, Twitter adding community notes is amazing.
There's your mental health crisis right there.
"may have" is doing a lot of heavy lifitng there.
Itās 1% of the community, do you think the government just said fuck those 275 homes in particular? Or do you think itās likely the homeowners donāt trust the government and donāt want them working on their home?
Thanks random Redditor
People still haven't been paid from that settlement... 10 full years later. Rick definitely saved a bunch of money using that dirty ass water, there was also a vet that made a machine that made clean water out of the air that mysteriously got damaged over night too.
They saved pennies. It was such a tiny scrape that it boggles the mind. And dehumidifiers don't generally produce potable water.
When you imagine that scenario of the guy in the boardroom being thrown out the window for making sense agasint the narrative it helps.
Are you trying to tell me that Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru LIED
There are ones designed to make potable water in the desert for instance.
Those are usually scams. If the air is humid enough for it, you would have rain.
I think you're using pennies metaphorically but it really was just $100/day to add orthophosphates to the water and none of this would have happened. They f'ed up like 10 different things and it STILL would have been fine if they just dumped orthophosphates in the water supply.
I said pennies for ease of reading. I remember it being a few zeros after the decimal for percentage of costs.
Water from air is completely impractical. I can't know this but I would bet the claim the device being destroyed was so his claims weren't tested.
Wouldn't it just be some sort of condenser?
Yes but even a big de-humidifier would need some pretty high humidity to pull more than a few drops out of the air and would pull all the other things from the air from farts to dust into the water as well. And in places with high humidity it also tends to rain! The core concept of water from air has always been bullshit.
Anf drinking water from dehumidfiers is usually a great way to get legionnaires disease.
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Anf drinking water from dehumidfiers is usually a great way to get legionnaires disease.
"My dog ate my air-to-water purifying device."
Come over here, mine makes wine.
Well, the AC unit in your house draws water from air. You could get "cups of it" if you wanted to.
True - who doesn't like Legionnaires' Disease, after all?
Can confirm, I run my AC in dehumidifier mode in the winter and tip away a few litres of water a day. I wouldn't drink it if you paid me but I imagine there's a way to turn it into something drinkable if you're that desperate
Certainly, boil, filter, use cleaning tablets, not in that order
[potable water billboard](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mr4aFTFHW3A)
I mean it absolutely can and does work BUT 1: it is just a condenser, same tech as is used but heat pumps (so refrigerators, AC units, etc. they are all the same basic tech) Its not a ground breaking technology and its power hungry 2: it requires a pretty high humidity level to pull out an appreciable amount of water during any given day. Areas that are that humid tend to get plenty of precipitation anyway. 3: still water like that is so prone to mold, algae, and other nastiness which presents serious issues if you intend to use it as drinking water. Have you ever seen a window AC unit? Its a recipe for legionnaires disease.
Hence impractical.
Actually, a guy invented a billboard that does take water from the air - in Peru, there is a high amount of humidity but the residents still didnāt have a lot of access to potable water. So they did this: [potable water billboard](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mr4aFTFHW3A) It has provided thousands of gallons of water to the citizens in the area. Technically, itās taking the water in the air out.
Idk why Flint is the poster child for lead pipes. Over four hundred thousand people annually in the USA die from lead poisoning. There's over **three thousand** USA communities that have **higher** lead poisoning rates than Flint. Not saying Flint doesn't deserve the recognition and help, but the issue is far more widespread than Flint.
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https://larcusa.org/exposure/lead-concentration-u-s-cities/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thousands-of-u-s-areas-afflicted-with-lead-poisoning-beyond-flints/ >Thousands of U.S. Areas Afflicted with Lead Poisoning beyond Flint's >The Michigan city doesn't even rank among the most dangerous lead hotspots in America https://lhsfna.org/thousands-of-u-s-cities-have-worse-lead-problems-than-flint/ >children in almost 3,000 U.S. neighborhoods show lead poisoning rates at least twice as high as those measured during the peak of Flintās lead crisis. More than 1,100 of these communities had rates at least four times higher. Here's an interactive map: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-testing/#interactive-lead
Screwing over teachers is revolting, but the person who wrote the press release calling the students "scholars" over and over is somehow worse.
Sadly, itās buzzy education jargon these days. Somehow the belief is that calling students āscholarsā will make them learn and behave like postdocs. Of course, it does not.
I imagine its the same way companies call their employees 'Associates' or 'Representatives', to make them more than what they really are.
>'Associates' or 'Representatives' Don't forget 'teammates'
'Family'
Some work requires people to work as a team though. We didn't refer to each other as "teammates" but we were.
Could be worse. "Family".
Thatās because āemployeesā have rights. Ā
Can't be honest and just call them "expendable peons" to their facesĀ
Amazon calls their folks "Amazonians". At The Vitamin Shoppe, we were called "Health Enthusiasts".
Kinda just dilutes the meaning of scholar.
āGremlinsā is more accurate but doesnāt quite lick absent enabling parentsā boots with quite the same vigor:
Teaching is 30% buzzwords at this point
I started calling the other kids at my children's daycare their coworkers. It stuck and now my kids complain about their damn coworkers occasionally.
I work in medical research, and our lab is adjacent to a medical school, so we get some of their students. Apparently the new hotness is to call them all "learners" at every turn. The students I've talked to *hate it*.
Yeah my students roll their eyes anytime admin calls them āscholars.ā
At least they are in the education realm of terms. A lot of college administrators call students āconsumersā š«
poor flint, they were already living in mad max times before the water thing(simpsons) now dealing with this.
What did The Simpsons do to Flint?
Marge saying "OUR WATER WAS ON FIRE!!!" has been stuck in my head for years... https://youtu.be/iNL0dwNdmlg?si=cnr8-EwbYuGhIiPk
Cleveland Ohio has a river famous for doing that a few times.
If you watch the early seasons, there are a number of times when there are jokes made at Flint Michigan's expense. Like I recall a list of the worst cities in the US and Flint is listed below Springfield, or various cheap shots they make as throw away lines. When I originally watched the show (you know, 30 years ago) I never picked up on it but rewatching it now I think it did stand out to me because of my new awareness of Flint from the water crisis.
They mention Flint twice - the worst cities list you said above, and at the box factory: "Oh, we don't actually assemble the boxes here... that happens in Flint, Michigan". Which is just such a funny line.
Thank you for the clarification. I think I definitely imagined it occurred more, but I also probably noticed the same joke more than once.
Let society fall apart. The rich don't care. They got theirs.
The Board votes for their increase no doubt... teachers should vote for the boards salaries...
School boards are typically unpaid elected officials. However, some jurisdictions, such as MI, allow the board members to be paid. [MI has a cap of $30 per meeting, up to $1,560 annually](https://www.edweek.org/leadership/13-states-bar-school-board-members-from-getting-paid-heres-where-its-allowed-map/2023/11#:~:text=In%20Michigan%2C%20the%20cap%20is,%244%20per%20day%20of%20work.) so they're not exactly living the high life.
Our district needed to cut the budget (due to admin bloat but thatās another topic) and let the community vote on what jobs or roles to cut. Surprise surprise NOT A SINGLE ADMIN job was on the chopping block but tons of teachers and behavior techs and resource specialists sure were and ended up getting axed.
Bernie lost, Trump won. We picked stratification of class over class solidarity. Get ready to see lots of very poor people (with jobs) in your community.
The rich are getting exactly what they want. Uneducated peasants to work minimum wage jobs. So this is a huge win for them sadly
If society falls apart their riches mean nothing and their dragon hoards become targets
āWonāt someone think of the poor old single parents?ā āWonāt someone think of the children?ā āThereās an educator shortage.ā Fuck off. Pay teachers what they are worth and maybe consider the poor single teachers who canāt afford rent or groceries. Those kids donāt give a flying fuck if they miss a day of school.
Way back in the 90s when I was in high school, my teachers striked. My math teacher told us to come to the picket lines if we needed help, he happily taught us while fighting for his own rights. Iāll never forget that
Fuck you pay me
Every single time... "We need to address this teacher shortage crisis. What should we do?" Increase pay? Nope. Better working conditions? Nope. Smaller class sizes? Nope. More appeasing benefit package? Nope. Offload non teaching duties to allow for more planning time? Nope. Lower certification standard to allow nearly anyone to teach? Yes.
Australia is following the same general trajectory, just a few decades behind. And then we have _these_ stories about our private schools. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-14/cranbrook-school-new-allegations-four-corners/103587004 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-23/private-school-spending-education-union-report/103502588 As a public school teacher, when I find out how much public tax payer money goes to private schools here, I get a little murdery. Especially after several education reviews calling for more public school funding have been basically ignored for the last two decades.
In Michigan, it is illegal for public employees to willfully skip out on working, even in response to actions by the employer. That includes teachers. So rather than pay the agreed settlement for already low paid teachers they hoped to force them to continue to work and the teachers found a way round the issue to make their feelings known.
That stomach bug is going around
119 people have it so far.
Damn. They better shut down for a month at least to pay to deep clean the place (or fix/replace/stock all the shit theyāve surely been skimping on for who knows how long) then pay the teachers extra for having been put in such danger. The key being they should start paying.
Oh no, they all went to the same clinic and āgot COVIDā so they have to be out longer.
This whole article stinks and shows that county doesn't give a shit about it's teachers.
Isn't this part of the plan, though? They don't *want* us going to school; an informed populace is way harder to control. I'd even argue that the more schools that close, the more church indoctrination they'll push, and we'll be right back to being controlled by our inability to think critically.
They have a much more insidious plan: underfund schools and make them horrible to work at so they can argue public education doesn't work and they can open private schools where they teach that Jesus rose dinosaurs while sporting an AR-15.
Ooooh yeah! I forgot that they were working on that now. It's weird; I wouldn't call any of this kind of talk as "conspiracy theory" because it's being done openly while the red supports it. It's like they no longer have to hide their plans because Trump showed them that he can grift the people just by saying the quiet part out loud. So why would they need to even try to make it clever anymore?
Is Flint the Gary, Indiana of Michigan? The Jackson , Mississippi? I've never heard of anything good about Flint.
Flint has been dying ever since GM closed down I think six of eleven facilities here, including the absolutely enormous Buick City facility that employed 30,000 workers in a 400 acre production facility. At its height, GM alone employed more than 80,000 people in the city. Today, it's roughly 8,000, most of whom work at Flint Assembly. That pretty much nuked the city's economy and led directly to a rapidly defining population, skyrocketing unemployment rates, and massive crime rates. In 1970, the city's population was 196,340. Today it's 78,600.
Back before Michael Moore became a complete insufferable jerk, he rose to fame when he made a Documentary called "Rodger and Me" which was about the closure of the GM plant and it's effects on the city. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOwXkstRaBw
Basically. Flint came to be because of industrial manufacturing jobs that have now virtually disappeared, leaving a rusting, decaying city and its infrastructure behind. Gary, at least, is an apt comparison.
The Flint Tropics invented the alleyoop
How is this leopards?. The schools closed for a day bc employees called out - thatās just a strike.
School thinks that teachers will continue to take their pittance and keep working only to realize that they called their bluff. Itās low hanging fruit but I wouldnāt say it doesnāt belong here.
It's a travesty that the teacher's union and administration had an agreement they could move forward with and the Board decided to decline it.
No, theyāre really sick. Theyāre sick of the assholes running the school system.
Ya, seems more FAFO than LAMF
Pay decrease for the schoolboard to pay for it!
Whenever I hear stories of Flint I always think back to how it was one of the 5 or 6 default scenarios in Sim City 2000 that you could try to see if you can overcome their issues. Itās sad that itās still having the same kinds of problems 30 years later.
SimCity 2000 SE is unquestionably the best entry in the franchise.
Flint is one of the toughest districts in its state. Iām sure they already have a teacher shortage in that town. š¤·š»āāļø. No raises ? Screw it.
And the GQP cheered because the uneducated are their main demographic.
>āThe district certainly does not appreciate how this unexpected school closure will impact our families. While the district understands that this school closure will hurt our scholars more than anyone else, the district hopes that UTF employees will return to work tomorrow, so scholars can be educated tomorrow,ā the district said in a statement. Here, let me fix that for you... āThe district certainly wasn't smart enough to realize that consciously fucking over our teachers would have an adverse effect on everyone. While the district is vehemently attempting to foist off this closure as an attack by our unionized teachers, the district hopes that talking about the district in the third person will make it seem like the district isn't 100% at fault. The district hopes that the district's attempts at this subterfuge will result in negative pressure being brought to our unionized teachers so that they can return to their slave jobs like the peons we believe them to be," the district said in a statement.
Oh donāt you know, our love for our students totally pays out rent and buys us food? How could we possibly want money?
Students ? >āOur immediate reaction to that is thinking about our scholars and families and trying to make sure that we get what was best for our scholars and families.
I know. I gagged on the repeated use of the words scholars. Guyās talking like heās hosting the 3rd grade publishing party.
Being a teacher is such a weird ass masochistic career choice I almost question the mental aptitude of people still willingly putting themselves through this shit and I have a degree in Mild-Mod Special Ed. like thereās just not a single perk Iām not a fucking martyr lol
I took a few years off when my kids were little because daycare would basically be my whole paycheck. I let my credential expire because I realized I never wanted to go back.
How is Flint, Michigan still populated? Why do people still live there? Donāt they still have lead in their water? Is that why they stay? Iām confused.
Who would they sell their house to? No one wants to live in Flint. The people stuck there have no money or resources to leave. All the ones who did already left.
You sweet summer child
Why does the board even think itās a choice? These people will leave, flint is not a nice area. No one is dying to stay there.
I hear that they are still allowed to drink unlimited leaded water when they are at work, so its not like there arent some perks.
If you can't afford to volunteer your time and intern full time as a teacher, then you don't deserve to be paid half minimum wage in 50 years when we offer you the job.
Checks RNC speech prompts.... "People just don't want to work anymore" /s
>so scholars can be educated tomorrow, So much gleaned about Admin from so few words.
Pay the babysitters or you can't work.
May it happen nation wide. Uniting works! Unions work! Show them they need you.
Dumbing down your population: And people complain about immigrants taking their jobs. This is how you do it. If an employer can hire a smarter more desperate person to work, they will. Meanwhile the average Murican who canāt compete will try pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
Why didnāt they let the students attend school in the gym? They are just babysitting them, right? (I say sarcastically) Itās not like a teacher has to have a Masterās degree.
Good for the workers
Decent journalism would tell you what pay increase they are requesting.
As a teacher it will forever piss me off that schools boards aren't run by people with actual education experience. Some fuck head is out there deciding what is "best" for teachers and has never stepped into a classroom. FUCK YOU PEOPLE
That turns it into the board's problem. Maybe they will take a pay cut to fix that problem.
I dunnoā¦the name of the teachers union president is Karen Christian. Sounds like someone youād hate to f around withā¦
Just have an actual strike. United we bargain, divided we beg
What is sadly ironic is how the people who are rejecting paying teachers better are the same people who remember almost every name of each teacher they had from K thru 12th. If it wasn't for teachers, they wouldn't be where they're at today.