Human teeth, hair. There's plenty of possibilities there. Especially with keratin. Nails are plenty robust. The real question is how do you motivate those disconnected components to perform work efficiently, but with gears like those in the OP you could hypothetically build a ratcheting system.

I don't recall anybody soliciting the public opinion on action. We didn't vote, we were told. And regardless of partisan approach, I think we'd be in much the same boat. We have no control.

Yeah. Adding on to this, I don't claim to deeply understand SF city politics, but from what I can see all the partisan Democratic elected officials like Mayor London Breed have been pretty forceful in condemning the school board and union for not opening schools and focusing on things like renaming them. Breed has been advocating pretty heavily for school reopening for months, at least since September, and speaks and supports parents protesting for school reopening. City Hall recently sued the school district and it seems like they are pulling out all the stops, such as trying to bring the governor into this.

It actually seems to be the entirely nonpartisan elected officials at the school board and the teacher's union who are pushing back. A lot of the school board is former teachers (that's most of the people who run anyway), which means there's not a ton of representation for parent's interests there.

I don't think the voters should ever be blamed for "shooting themselves in the foot" and suffering regardless of who they elect, but in this case it makes even less sense. And I certainly can't take any joy from this situation that is hurting so many. I feel the same way about failures from officials impacting people with different politics than me.

If you throw money at a black hole, and put the expenditures under the "education" column, that's where it will be counted. You should see the inane &#@* they buy, and the volumes of it they purchase.

I work in education, I'm also in school and was in school. My educator cohort has uniformly spoken about the retention issues their students have had, it seems shutdowns seriously retarded the academic growth of their students. I can corroborate that, myself: I was forced to leave my studies, and elected to take the fall off, hoping for a return to normalcy in the Spring of '21 - this was done both to ensure that work and school wouldn't conflict, and that I could observe the normal curriculum instead of a haphazard entree of online learning and recorded lectures and sans the labs that I'm paying extra money to participate in.

Having returned, things aren't back to "normal", one of my professors elected to use recorded lectures which don't have the same quality as in-person lectures. Not to mention it tries my attention sitting at a computer. I had the same class previously, and returned good grades up to the lockdown, I'm now a C student in the class where I was before an A student.

Mathematical concepts have almost entirely slipped. I seem to have forgotten all of my previous training, even simple processes like factoring were lost. I was an B student in the previous class, and had a reasonably solid grasp on the concepts, which we reviewed this year, and I found myself almost entirely lacking. I'm now a struggling C student and whats worse is the constant battery of assessment is actually doing more harm than good, requiring me to hamfistedly smash through chapters without ever studying the subject to develop understanding.