New?! This is the original area in which China excelled at producing electric vehicles. London’s early electric buses were European licensed production of BYD buses (or more likely BYD licensed powertrains)
Is China even allowing electric buses to be exported yet? The last time I looked it was still going to take over a decade to replace all the buses in China, but a chunk of a decade has passed since then.
There’s an old report from New York City putting the value of an electric bus at about $1.2 million, mostly the health benefits from no emissions not fuel savings. At the time there was no way for New York City to buy them because there’s no way to fund transit out of healthcare when the state pays for one but not the other, there were no non-Chinese manufacturers, and then shortly after they couldn’t compete with London that valued an electric bus at £1.7 million if I remember correctly, and the UK could justify funding buses based on healthcare. I think those first buses were about €600k. At the same time kneeling electric transit buses in China were about $90k, and small electric buses were $30-$40k.
I’ve eaten on about that before, but decades ago when food was cheaper. Nothing is satisfying, you are hungry all the time, constantly craving some nutrition you no longer even know how to acquire or what it is, but it’s absent from everything you eat.
Peanut butter and bread was too expensive. Peanut butter was a treat. Bread from bakery surplus cost two to three times as much as rice. For your example, at $400 a year you’re looking at $8 a week. If a jar of peanut butter is $3 and has 4800 kCal in it and bread is $1 a loaf and has 24 60kCal slices in it, then a jar of peanut butter and 5 loaves of bread a week only gets you 12000 kCal a week, which isn’t enough for a moderately active adult. And you’re going to be missing out on all sorts of nutrition.
At the time the best things to buy were eggs, beans, rice, and processed dry foods. Then you buy things that make eating them bearable and are also cheap in combination: whole or powdered milk to eat cereals, raw sugar, fat to cook into things, very cheap meats, cheese when it was cheap, and processed frozen foods that are similar in price to their constituents, which at the time were common because they are a way of storing food from a production season to sell in an off season. Then you get a few things to try to stave off cravings, like some long-term storage plastic-packed cuts of meat, or canned vegetables, or concentrated frozen fruit. At a low budget a can of food represents everything you get to eat for a day, or more. Fresh vegetables or fruit were completely unobtainable unless there’s a local surplus.
Now the structure of food markets is different and everything is priced based only on demand and not on supply, so frozen processed foods that were available then due to the product being made to take surplus or trimmings and then store them are now priced based on demand for the product. The only things that have stayed similar are the prices for eggs (usually), the cheapest meats (sometimes), staples (usually), and canned foods which are priced based on the cost of transportation and are still routinely too high for such a low budget.
Do you have a medical diagnosis for autism or ADHD or just school diagnosis?
A “developmental delay” is only eligible for special ed under that category until a kid’s 10th birthday.
If you can, getting a medical diagnosis for autism makes other services available even outside school (see kidswaivers.org). Doing so can be difficult both in cost and in the backlog of neurobehavioral health clinics that do autism diagnosis. You would probably need a referral from the kid’s GP/pediatrician.
You can get more services on an IEP than a 504. If your kid needs individualized instruction they need an IEP. Either way your kid will have special protections when it comes to disciplinary action. A school can not academically disciple (suspend, expell, ot remove from the classroom, or e.g. not allow to attend full day vs half day) a disabled student for more than 10 school days in total over the course of a school year without holding a “manifestation to termination meeting” to determine if the behavior is a manifestation of the disability. If it is the school has to implement behavior intervention programs instead of disciplinary action.
If they ask you to come pick up your kid early that constitutes “suspension or removal from the classroom”. If that happens keep track of the number of days, and use those words talking to administrators.
I don’t know if those rules apply to preschool and kindergarten, but they should if kindergarten is mandatory in your state.
School district are also required to attempt to identify children with disabilities living in their district prior to enrollment in a process called “child find”. This is to provide early intervention programs, like developmental preschool.
It’s extremely distribing that your son was excluded from preschool due to a disability. I would be considering talking to a lawyer if I were in your place, at least seeking out the advice of a Michigan specific advocacy group.
Oh, I thought Outlaws of Thunder Junction was the rotation. I was a bit confused because the crime/etc themes seemed to go with the other current sets and mechanics, and expected a larger reset of mechanics for a new standard. I will definitely “Jump In!” then.
(I’m the spouse of a special ed teacher, but not in Michigan. I’ve just been around this stuff for over a decade hearing it from the grad student/teacher side)
Getting a diagnosis should make it much easier for you to get appropriate IEPs, 504 plans, and services. I’m surprised they got IEPs without a diagnosis, since there are legal thresholds for a school/states to get federal funding related to IDEA (more on that later)
It sounds like your local schools and community services are a mixed bag of how well they provide special education services. The positive things to notice are that they have
found a way to get IEPs for your kids even without a diagnosis
seem to be concerned with making sure they are providing education in the least restrictive environment
The extremely worrying thing is that they refused to let your youngest stay a full day last year for his first year of school. If this was because it was a kindergarten/pre-school year and the normal school day is a half day I would be less concerned about getting services in the future.
Federal laws
There’s two main federal laws that guarantee your kids get an education:
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act addresses providing accommodations to students with disabilities, and guarantees they get a free and appropriate public education, and prohibits discrimination based on disabilities.
IDEA is 3-pronged. It restates a requirement for a free and appropriate public education, requires individualized special education and services for certain disabilities (IEPs), and requires that students receiving special education services do so in the least restrictive environment.
Your locale seems to be addressing some of these, but not others.
For a student to be eligible for special education under IDEA they have to qualify under one of 13 categories, one of which is autism spectrum disorder. To qualify under autism spectrum disorder requires a diagnosis, usually an outside medical diagnosis, but occasionally, if a school really cares and tries they can provide (at least here) a school-specific diagnosis based on how it is affecting education. Eligibility for special education is required for an IEP. Since your kids have IEPs the school presumably somehow found a way to qualify them even without a diagnosis. Eligibility for special education has to be reviewed once every 3 years. IEPs have to be updated annually, and they require parental participation, and parental assent (at least initially, they may not for renewals, I’m not sure).
Special education services and education for students under IDEA have to be provided in the “least restrictive environment”. This means that a student receiving special education must be getting education along with their peers as much as possible. This is supposed to provide a number of benefits like socialization with peers, exposure to grade-level curriculum, and preventing schools from sending all the students to a special ed room and ignoring them all, which is historically how many students with disabilities were treated even after many updates to IDEA. The positive interpretation of CMH saying your youngest son no longer needs their services and should stay in his normal classroom is that they are trying to make sure he gets services in the least restrictive environment.
If your school is not letting your youngest son stay for a full day they are not providing a free and appropriate education and are discriminating on the basis of disability. You are going to need to advocate for him or dispute with the school district, and are probably going to need help from an advocacy group, mediation, or lawyer. In some states the state will provide a mediator to make sure school districts comply with the special education rules, but that does not seem to be the case for Michigan.
504 plans
Section 504 is the easier of the two for a school to use to provide accommodations. For a 504 plan they only need to document two things:
That the student has a disability that limits a major life activity
That it is interfering with their education
(the second of those might not even be required)
There are many accommodations that a school can provide for autism besides individualized education, and these can be called out in a 504 plan instead of an IEP if for some reason you can’t get an IEP modified in a timely manner. Example accommodations include:
Speech and language services
occupational/sensory therapy
social/time management/educational skill services (though these are more often part of an IEP)
behavioral intervention
Extra time on tests/homework
Break times to unwind from sensory overload
Noise cancelling headphones
stress relief/fidget/sensory toys
Quiet areas
Anything else that would help your child that isn’t getting individualized instruction
IEPs
Individualized education plans require eligibility under one of 13 disability categories. This requires 3 things:
An identified disability (this can be identified as part of the eligibility process)
The disability must have an adverse effect on their education
The student must show a need for specially designed instruction
The major difference between a 504 plan and an IEP is specially designed instruction. If the student’s getting specially designed instruction, it needs to be an IEP (from the school’s point of view). This means school districts might only provide speech and language services/sensory therapy/social skills/study skills/etc. under an IEP and not under a 504 plan. An IEP can include any of the services that could also be provided under a 504 plan.
An IEP is where you are going to get help with any academic area your kid is struggling with due to a disability. For autism spectrum disorder this varies greatly between students, but that’s the point of an IEP, that it be individually designed for the student.
IEPs require an annual review and parents are entitled to participate in that process. The annual review involves updating goals and progress and what services are appropriate/need to be provided and in general modifying the plan. This means you should get to participate in what services your kids are getting in no more than a year, but there should be nothing that prevents a school from updating these at some other time if it’s appropriate and they include you/their IEP team (see the parts of the pages I linked below about “Prior Written Notice”) and learn who should be on your student’s IEP team)
Eligibility for an IEP must be re-evaluated once every 3 years. With a diagnosis for autism your kids will only need to show an adverse effect on their education and a need for specially designed instruction to remain eligible.
If your school district simply won’t provide appropriate special education services, many parents will seek out a different source of education than the school district. This can be a local charter school, an online charter school, or some other school of choice system. Beware that not every charter/school of choice system is required to provide special education services at all. Online charter schools with good special education programs get a lot of students enrolling in the school, getting evaluation, eligibility, and IEP plans, and 504 plans, and then transferring back to a brick and mortar school with documents in hand. A 504 plan from an online school will not address many in-classroom accommodations because there isn’t a physical classroom, but might still include accommodations that can be adapted to a physical classroom like being allowed to use stress relief toys during class.
No. This is the alternate history of energy. We could have been building primarily molten salt solar plants for the last 40 years. They had similar costs to coal, fuel plants, could be built with no semiconductor manufacturing bottlenecks, provided more consistent base generation than wind, had no fuel dependencies, combustion emissions. Now photovoltaics and battery storage are cheaper, more efficient, don’t require water and cooling, and work with wind as well as solar, and aren’t really bottlenecked by manufacturing.
I hate gender roles and assigning anything to them. But everybody deserves a positive view of the traits and ideals they identify with and everybody deserves positive examples of how to express/demonstrate the traits and ideals they identify with.
Noticing more smells and colors and flavors and sounds and being able to listen to more complicated music are all skills that we gain over our life. Identifying and identifying with traits you have or aspire to is almost certainly the same, and even if it isn’t I have no place to say that someone else shouldn’t think about themselves primarily as being a reproductive male (which may be devastating if that’s not something they can do), and since that is a common way to see oneself, due to the importance of reproduction or due to culture or due to some aesthetic like which flavors go together, then people identifying with masculinity deserve positive views of it, and positive examples of how to express it.
That makes as much sense as saying trans, non-binary people only need to have a satisfying, meaningful life without a vision of masculinity, femininity, or gender Identity.
Silly. The limit should be 0. You can take no gas that you don’t pay for. You can vent/leak no methane except for emergencies, some tiny fraction of leak/well or pipe distance. If you flare gas you have to pay for both the gas you took and the lost utility of the gas to other users.
And that’s not even getting to addressing climate issues.