OnTheReel

The statistics simply do not bear this out, at least not in most urban school districts in the states. And even if it did, keeping students healthy is more than protecting them from Covid which does nothing to most of them anyway. Nobody considers the mental health aspects of keeping children locked in their house with no socializing, and no exposure to any other viruses that will make them healthier and stronger in the long run. You also have kids in bad home situations where physical and sexual abuse will now go undiscovered. And we are seeing an uptick in child suicides as well. As far as parents, many depend on the schools to “watch” their kids so they can work as an integral part of the economy. Most families who have kids in public schools are not set up with a stay at home mother or father...if they had means to allow that, they would be sending their kids to private schools from the start anyway. If in-person teaching goes away for too much longer, we very well may end up with a bunch of unadjusted, socially awkward, unhealthy half-wits that will be afraid of their own shadows and incapable of working a real job. In 10 years will any of this have been worth it?

Yes, there are distinctions between pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic. Nevertheless, research suggests up to 80% of children never have symptoms at all, which many believe would make the risk to school staff relatively low, and the risk to children as a whole virtually nil. With all the data we have, if we still cannot find a way to get even the zero risk portions of the population back to some semblance of normal, the outlook for the rest of us is pretty bleak. We’ve gone from two weeks to stop the spread to nobody can ever get sick again. Sort of ironic when you consider all of the mental and physical health issues we’ve created in the process.

While I don’t think masks on kids are doable, the rest shouldn’t be a problem. For what it’s worth, I didn’t mean anything I said to be a personal attack on you, just venting and sharing the general impression I’ve gotten from the teachers around here that have not done a great job and don’t seem to care. Many reports of them doing half-ass distance lessons and then moonlighting at Amazon to double dip while complaining of how unsafe it is to open schools. Teachers union doesn’t have the students best interest in mind. I could go on and on, but I didn’t mean to lump you in with them and I came off harsh. I apologize.

Maybe Trump should introduce a country-wide mandate for masks so the media and health officials can suddenly be opposed to their use again. It works for everything else he does. ?

Most of us that have been working through this didn’t have being put in harms way in our job description. It’s the reality of the situation that there’s a (small) risk anyone employed will get it and most people have no choice in the matter if they want to get paid. Teachers have been the only profession that we refuse to allow to be exposed to any risk and I’m simply questioning why. If distance learning actually worked and was healthy for kids, it would be one thing, but it doesn’t. I don’t recall any study ever saying that kids flat out don’t get it. It is shown that they get it but it rarely affects them at all. And being asymptomatic leads to almost no risk of them passing it to adults. More often it goes the other way around. Hence me not getting the point of an article about babies. Again, we don’t have to pretend or guesstimate about what will happen in schools. We have plenty of data from more sane countries where they either never stopped in person teaching or resumed it shortly after the outbreak.

Of course it’s going to be challenged. Obvious question...are babies going to school now? Why would this matter for kids 5 & up? I would think just about everyone here has seen and heard enough from the medical community saying it’s safe, and necessary for school aged kids to go to school.

Doctors and nurses wear medical grade masks, change them out regularly, don’t wear them when they don’t need to, and are trained to wear them correctly. Contrast this to a guy working a 10 hour shift at McDonald’s, sweating through a cloth mask that may as well be made of old T-shirt scraps, constantly adjusting it and in the process touching his face before and after touching your food. In a lab environment, sure a mask works. In reality? Not likely. Look at the MERS studies, masks did nothing for the general population. Didn’t do anything for China either in this go-round. But enough talking reality, half of this thread isn’t living in it. Teachers are public servants just like doctors, nurses, police officers and so on. Why should they be isolated from any and all risk while continuing to collect a paycheck? All other essential, and most non-essential workers haven’t been off since March. I think think the real idea being leaving schools closed is: keep the economy in the toilet, keep the teacher unions happy, and make a good case for mail-in fraud voting in November...if it ain’t safe to go to school, it ain’t safe to go vote. Time to steal another election.

Mainstream media and health officials gave your left wing rioters encouragement for two months because they expected it to hurt Trump. When they found that it was having the opposite effect, they all but stopped covering them. Most officials still wont fess up that the riots had anything to do with the spike because they want to continue to pin the spike on...you guessed it...Trump. You can’t have it both ways though. You basically admitted people of your own political persuasion are to blame, so thank you.

Umhmm. Tell me what the mask-compliance figures in California were for the past month. You can carry on blaming me and blaming Trump but the fact is, nearly everyone (including me) is going along with the stupid policies you lefties are coming up with, and still the virus carries on. At some point we are going to have to confront that there is not a lot we can do about this situation besides push through it.

Statistically it’s debatable at best. From day one, the virus raged through many of the most locked down and repressed areas of the country with little slow down, and much collateral damage from the shutdowns, including untold deaths. And masks? Mandatory in California since mid-June. If they were the silver bullet people all of the sudden consider them to be, why is California still in a bad spot right now? Moreover, why are ALL places that require masks still hot beds? It could be a chicken vs the egg thing, or they could be ineffective! Nothing wrong with asking the question, especially now that the goal is shifting away from anything reasonable. You agreed to not see your family for a few weeks, or even a few months at first. It’s now stretched to six months and you’re still complicit. But how will you feel in two years?

Basically everyone has already given in to the mask whim...Even where governments haven’t felt the need to mandate it, private companies are. And that’s totally within their right. Walmart, Target, CVS, Walgreens some recent additions. Of course it’s a business calculation, not them being altruistic. My only question is...when the mask doesn’t work because they haven’t worked anywhere, what will be next? More shut downs? That’s how it’s playing out in California and parts of NY again. And shut down until when? Until there’s a vaccine? A vaccine that fewer than half of people will get in the first year or two (due to logistics alone, not anti-vaxxers)? And a vaccine that may also only be 50% effective in people who get it? You see how anyone with the capability to critically think gets concerned about the long term strategy here. Never mind it not being warranted; nothing we have done has worked and none of it is sustainable. To overcome, I believe our mindset needs to move back to reality. It’s not a war, it’s a virus that’s well over 99% survivable as a whole, and literally 100% survivable in many age groups.

I know. GM did the same with the Colorado...4 cylinder stripper only. Used to anyway, now you can’t get the manual on any of them. I read an article saying the off-road oriented “Sasquatch” package will also not be available with the manual. I guess a 7 speed with a crawler gear, AND an off-road package makes too much sense. One or the other is all you get. Why spend the money to develop it then...

I had to laugh when I saw Chicago put Wisconsin on their “watch list”...we should have closed our border with Illinois three months ago when they were bringing the virus up here to enjoy freedom from their oppressive lockdown state. The sunbelt states should have blocked all the vacationers from NY too. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/cdc-chief-says-northerners-heading-south-for-vacation-may-be-to-blame-for-surge-in-coronavirus-cases-not-state-reopenings.html They fled their own lockdowns to greener pastures, and now want to lock us out of their unfree places...as if anyone wants to go to their shithole crime ridden areas anyway. All the while media tells us to look to NY as the role model. Simply because they killed off the weak early, and are much further into the natural course this virus is going to run everywhere, no matter what. Give me a break.

There’s a difference between reporting the threat of the virus accurately, and deliberately spreading fear and fudging numbers in an effort to serve a political agenda. But apparently there’s no room for reason anymore. If you (rightfully) question one bit of what’s reported you become a conspiracy theorist. The good thing is the truth always comes out in the end. These con-artist democrats, MSM, health officials, and the people who regularly repeat their BS here get caught with their pants down constantly... Florida is just the latest example. Remember the forum and media geniuses bloviating about that state’s mismanagement of the virus...all to find it was just more lies, lies, lies...And when they are proven wrong...all they can say is...”well, the virus is still bad!”

I’m very sorry your truck got cancelled, I can see you’re taking it hard. It may be a good time for you and whoever will fit in your tiny back seat to take a trip...get some time away and clear your head. To prove you bought the right truck, you can even bring along the items that will only fit in a 6.5’ box, like your mattress and surfboard. Since I’ve never seen either of those items strapped to the roof of a Subaru with a “coexist” bumper sticker, I know they cannot be moved with anything less than a double cab driven by a real truck guy like yourself.

Well, there’s one of the boiling frogs now. Today masks are a “new normal” when 3 months ago they weren’t necessary. The science behind masks hasn’t changed since then, but the “guidance” has. Wonder what will be the “new normal” 3 months from now? Because if you told me a few months ago that everyone over 3 years old needs to wear a mask, even outdoors, in the city of Milwaukee...I probably wouldn’t have believed it. But here we are. And there’s no end game and no limit to any of this. We continue to move the goal posts. They throw us a bone saying we can open up, but now we need masks and limited capacities. Most are still happy to comply and get a sliver of their normal life back, rather than question the need for any of this. With that attitude, this will go on for years, and what’s worse, the same process will be repeated for every other new virus that comes along because the standard is set. No infections and no deaths are acceptable. Hope everyone is ready to sign half their life away to homeschooling, masks and lockdowns.

This post by John Hayward is a worthwhile read even though it’s arguably too late. “The debate over coronavirus policy has drifted very far from the original understanding that we needed extreme measures to prevent hospitals from being overloaded, causing patients to die from a lack of urgently needed medical care. The coronavirus debate offers one of the fastest examples of an Overton window moving that we've ever seen. If you say today what everyone in authority said about the virus and lockdowns in March, you're now a witless anti-lockdown extremist who wants people to die. The crucial data points about hospitalizations and deaths have been lost in a surging ocean of static about positive test rates. Absolutely no one would ever have agreed to the lockdowns if told they couldn't be lifted until no one was testing positive any more. Likewise, no one would have agreed if told this miserable lockdown or semi-lockdown culture would last until a vaccine was discovered - something that might not ever actually happen. People would have considered that argument irrational and unworkable in March or April. But as the old, biologically dubious but metaphorically perfect adage has it, you can boil a frog by turning up the heat a few degrees at a time. You move that Overton window by changing facts on the ground quickly and then dragging public perception along in their wake. Opinion tends to swirl around enforced reality, like iron shavings dancing around strong magnets. Ironically, the movement leftward exploits the fundamentally conservative nature of the populace: they grow accustomed to the New Normal very quickly. The speed at which the New Normal can be accepted, and the window of possibility shifted accordingly, has never been demonstrated as profoundly as with the coronavirus. The atmosphere of panic and the underlying fault lines of unrest in our society threw it into fast forward. Imagine telling parents in March that their children might not be allowed to go back to school in September. They would have rebelled from coast to coast. But now that's a "mainstream" position that is under serious debate. There are already clusters of opinion forming to protect the New Normal of lockdowns, including people who really LIKE the lockdown lifestyle but don't want to admit it, so they mask their true opinion with a form of political-religious fanaticism. Guilt juices their fervor. That same sense of inherent conservatism, that feeling of an opinion window shifting permanently, causes the arguments of yesterday to be forgotten with remarkable speed and thoroughness despite our Information Age resources. It's hard for anyone to remember clearly what was being said only a few months ago - the doomsday projections, the promises about "15 days to flatten the curve," what various parties were saying about masks, etc. The past is forgotten even though it's not even half a year old. Consider the hyper-speed example of the coronavirus, and how quickly the mixture of panic and power changed everything in a matter of weeks, creating a new America so distant from the old that remembering last year has become incredibly difficult for most of the public.”

There’s times I have missed an 8’ bed, but to go from 6’6” to 5’8” is not even worth worrying about. There’s very few items that will fit perfectly in one but not at all in the other. More often than not you just have an extra 10” of overhang to contend with. We make do just fine and if not, there’s such a thing as a cargo trailer. People that do real serious hauling in their trucks buy HDs anyway. Payload capacity on a gussied up luxury trim double cab half ton isn’t gonna cut it for them no matter what. And therefore it’s about as niche of a market as you can get.

Double cab SLTs are not going to Barrett-Jackson in 5 years, they are going to a used car lot. Where they will be listed for less money than the equivalent crew cab, just as they are now. They cost less up front and sell for less used. Nothing wrong with buying one if it fits the bill, but being uncommon does not mean desirable. It usually means the opposite in mass produced modern vehicles.

Wow, so a whopping 4 pound difference. ?

This is a pretty nice package for them to add to the WT/ Custom models. Takes care of that horrible cluster and lack of steering wheel radio controls.

Doubtful, there was talk of them adding it for 2020 too. The tech package was even selectable on the build and price for 1500 SLT very briefly and then it got pulled. Oddly enough you can get the tech package on HD SLT. Half ton SLT makes do with the trailer camera package that gives a 270 degree overhead view with the front blacked out.

I gave mine a few hundred miles, mainly because I was fairly certain the dealer filled it up with regular gas. Probably the case with yours too. Beyond that, my idea of breaking something in is putting it to the mat as often as I feel like.

Tried to locate some apples to apples here to find out what the real difference is. In theory with the new towing sticker, it wouldn’t be hard to find two otherwise identically equipped trucks with different engines. In practice it is hard because dealers rarely photograph the sticker in their listings. At any rate, I have two that are really close... RST CCSB 4x4 6.2 w/ All Star and CPII; Curb weight 5327. RST CCSB 4x4 5.3 w/ All Star and CPII; curb weight 5293. The 5.3 truck has a few more small options. And only the 5.3 has Z71, but being that the other is a 6.2, it also has the same two speed transfer case and dual exhaust. In other words, the big weight changing things are the same between the two. Same trims, same major equipment packages. Point #1, there’s not a 400lb difference between the 5.3 and 6.2...it’s virtually nothing. Point #2, Denali chart is not right...curb weight of a 5.3 RST is 200lbs heavier than what’s listed for a Denali! The Denali has more standard equipment than an RST could ever get, it could never be 200lbs lighter! Point #3, it’s not been like this forever, people have been misinformed forever. But no more, thanks to these stickers that give the correct curb weight vehicle by vehicle.

3:42 axle ratio is included in the max trailering package. You have the 3.23 in the AT4. Locking rear is standard on AT4. Cameras, trailer TPMS are not included in or related to the max trailering package. Not really a big deal though. The sticker on your door jamb gives you the pertinent info about your payload and trailering capability, just stay within that and it’s all good. Even with the 3.23 you’re not going to be short on power, I can tell you that much.