pmonks

Or they could have been excellent test takers and not much else. Unless you’re trying to say that cheating on standardized test is commonplace, which would be yet another black mark against them.

My money’s on you being right tbh.

Sure but grades aren’t all that indicative of anything in the real world. Some of the worst hires I’ve made were graduates who, on paper, should have been outstanding ICs.

Fair enough. FTR I think you’re trying to dunk on SF using factually incorrect claims about what actually happened at local schools during the course of 2020 and into 2021.

Nope. I literally meant what I wrote - that I do, in fact, know enough families in the city to personally know what happened at most of the schools, both public and private, in the city.

Recall that SF isn’t that big a city - only 800,000 people (and with a low %age of children to boot) - so there aren’t that many schools in the city.

[edit] it’s also the case that the only variation in response was on the private school side - SFUSD took a monolithic approach to their schools (which are the greatest in number and have most of the students in the city)

My own family was one of them.

You literally said:

> During the pandemic, SF had in-person schooling at private schools, but not in public schools.

This is patently false. All of the private schools in SF that I’m aware of switched to remote learning from March 2020 to the end of that school year, and many had “hybrid” models (e.g. alternating one week in-person, one week remote) when they resumed in August / September.

This is 100% false.

Source: I know many families with kids in various private schools in SF, and not one of them had uninterrupted in-person learning throughout the pandemic.

That said, SF public schools were slower to reopen to in-person learning than private schools, which seems to me to have mostly been due to pushback by the SFUSD teacher’s union (who, imvho, responded to this crisis poorly).

It does not sound reasonable, as the concerns (and actions in response to those concerns) in the city during 2020 were driven by the actual documented damage COVID was already causing elsewhere (especially NYC), not based on some hypothetical “dunk on The Donald” point scoring exercise.

Many people seem to forget how in the dark we were about COVID at that time, and are now criticizing the actions public health organizations took with the benefit of hindsight.

Briefly:

* NYC is a lot more than Manhattan.

* NYC is a substantially larger area than SF.

* SF is also substantially built on top of reclaimed mud flats.

* NYC is tectonically stable.

All of these things mean that comparisons between the two cities approach to land use are basically meaningless.

[edit] to fight HN’s formatting

It really was. I still see ghosts from that time as I move through the city.

You’re comparing apples (the Big Apple, it turns out) and oranges. SF is 7 miles by 7 miles of hilly, earthquake prone land, surrounded on 3 sides by water. There is literally no “new land” available to build on, and redeveloping existing lots to rezone, or increase density, or whatever is costly and slow (and that’s true in most US cities, not just SF).

These are _essential_ complexities of land use in SF that are fairly unique to it, and hence comparisons to other cities are rarely useful.

How do you know what’s “in the minds of SF folks”? Do you live in SF, yourself, for example?

San Francisco has always been a boom and bust place, as anyone who was here during the 2008 crash, the dotcom bubble, or probably even the gold rush would tell you. The author of this seagull* article needs to take a deep breath, wait a couple of years, observe, and then realize that they could have saved themselves the effort.

*fly in, crap all over everything, fly out

No one said you could. That doesn’t mean it’s not still financially beneficial.

Furthermore he didn’t start Tesla anyway - it was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk didn’t invest in it until 2004 and didn’t become CEO until 2008.

The guy is a loon, and while I think he’s done some good for the world (mostly via Tesla), he’s a walking, talking clusterfsck of Dunning-Kruger, narcissism, and unchecked ego.

Yeah that’s a terrible approach. All you’d get are kids who are good at testing and nothing else.

A (perhaps funny) anecdote of my own: I had just started as product manager for a remote engineering team, and it had been briefly mentioned in passing that one member of the team was an intern from UBC. I quickly got a feel for the work ethic and output of the team members (and they were generally great), and just jumped to the conclusion of who the intern was.

Fast forward to the first time I meet them all in person, and I say to who I thought was the intern something like “how have you enjoyed your internship?”. Cue horrified looks, and my engineering manager counterpart swiftly moving in to smooth things over. Turns out the worst performing, least engaged engineer on the team was an FTE, and the UBC intern wasn’t even remotely who I thought it was (they were awesome)!

Sure, but he’s fixated on ~1% of the “top schools”, and seems closed to the possibility that the other 99% will be just as good (and in some cases better) for his son than that list.

That’s before we even unpack your claim that there’s a clear line between “top” and “middle” schools. I see it as more of a spectrum myself, ignoring “brand recognition” (which is a mostly meaningless metric).

My point is that he’ll be surrounded by super smart people giving him real challenges at many schools beyond the ones you’ve listed.

What makes you think he’s only going to get a great CS education at the Ivies, Cal, Caltech, Stanford, etc.? Very few of the best graduates I’ve worked with in my ~30 year career studied at those schools - it was places like UW, UBC and Waterloo that stood out to me as producing a high number of high quality, socially adapted graduates.

[edit] and before anyone asks, no I’m not Canadian

The burden of proof lies with the person making the claim. That would be Dr Doom in this case, not throwaway23597.

As an American friend of mine once said: "why would we let facts get in the way of our illogical obsessions with socialism, encroachment by the state on personal liberty, etc. etc.?"