Hey America, is everything okay down there?
Y'all have some truly dystopian stuff going on there. Felony prosecution for showing kids books that the Governor didn't approve of?
Yikes.
Y'all have some truly dystopian stuff going on there. Felony prosecution for showing kids books that the Governor didn't approve of?
Yikes.
I will not contribute my money to a government that does not allow me my rights, and will also not disarm myself to make myself more of a juicy target just to temporarily sight-see. Not worth it. Plenty of pretty sights to see in the states that aren't ridiculous.
Are you the president of the United States? Are you a multi-millionaire? Are you openly a member of a gang or other criminal organization?
If not, then, quite plainly, you're not a target. Period.
You'd be surprised how often people get targeted for no reason / stupid reasons.
Frankly, I find that the people that oppose guns and concealed carry are usually the type that live in nice neighborhoods and make nearly six figures, where the opinion is invalid. So, basically the demographic of Hacker News.
1. Do what you can to make all neighbourhoods better. (Donate to or volunteer at local organizations working to improve neighbourhoods, get to know your neighbours, vote for positive change, join neighbourhood watch, etc.)
2. Do what you can to protect yourself until Step 1 comes to fruition. (Avoid high-risk areas, maintain situational awareness, train in self-defense, carry self-defense tools, etc.)
That disabused me of any notion I am never a target.
Out of curiosity, do you ever travel out of your country?
If yes, how do you deal with the gun issue? If no, how do you feel about being locked within your national borders?
It helps that my state is also comparable in size to larger European countries. And has a pretty dynamic environment. Very mountainous and foresty in the north, planey in the east, red desert to the south, and tan desert to the west. Blazing hot in the summer, and well below freezing in the winter. I still haven't seen the majority of just this state.
I guess that does not bother you, but what are your thoughts on this anyway?
Instead of taking property tax money, pooling it, then evenly dividing it across a state. The way most states are designed is that property tax is given to the local school district, meaning that areas with cheaper homes get less money than areas with more expensive homes. This is made worse by demographic problems associated with poverty which makes teaching poor kids more expensive than rich (e.g. ESL, food poverty, unstable households, behavioral issues, untreated mental health problems, etc).
There're three tiers: Private education, rich area public, and poor area public education.
Actually fixing US schools amounts to "fix (or significantly mitigate) the US poverty-cycle problem", unfortunately. Unfortunate because if just funding poor schools like rich schools (Nb sometimes those funding levels are the opposite of what you'd expect, though—there are state and federal programs to funnel money to really, really bad schools) then it'd be straightforward and (relatively!) cheap to fix. The actual causes are more complex and would require far more "political will", as they say, plus a lot more money, to fix.
I disagree. When poorer areas have worse student:teacher ratios while paying teachers less, and giving them the most challenging students, it is absolutely about the money.
Even if teachers are willing to take on a bigger challenge, we're also asking them to take a pay cut to do so which isn't reasonable.
We can and should fix the money issue, but it's barely gonna move the needle on outcomes. I wish it would because, again, that's a pretty simple fix in the scheme of things, but it won't. The causes are much deeper and would be much harder to address.
Yes.
The topic was leveling out district funding, not paying teachers more. Leveling out district funding might help a little, but it's not the main cause of bad schools/districts. Paying teachers more might help, but would also not do much for the worst districts. Those bad schools and districts are, to a large degree, merely symptoms of larger societal problems that schools aren't equipped, empowered, or intended to address.
The problems are in how our economy is structured, how our social safety net is scoped, funded, and arranged, how fallout from various racist older systems have affected the current state of the country, the justice system, and probably in certain socialized behaviors or attitudes (which are all tied up in those other things, anyway). You cannot turn a terrible district in a very bad part of the city, or awful, poor rural school districts, into good districts just by giving them more money, no matter what they spend the money on (unless you put the schools in charge of sweeping social reform programs, I guess, but I don't think anyone's proposing that and it's probably not the best way to administer such things).
The kids and the parents have problems the schools can't fix, and those affect school life in ways that put a ceiling on how well the schools can do, no matter how good the schools per se are. The main reason some districts or schools are better than others has more to do with selection bias than funding—schools with easy-to-teach kids do well, schools with hard-to-teach kids don't, and the reasons some kids are in one of those categories and others are in the other mostly aren't within the scope of what schools can fix, period.
Rich districts aren't good mainly because they have more money on account of high house prices, but because high house prices and (sometimes) other circumstances (car dependency, commute range) select for kids with stable, comfortable home lives, parents who value education and are themselves educated, and little criminality or blatantly anti-social behavior in (at least) their immediate family & friend circle—because absence of those qualities in home-life tend to correlate with poverty, so, with not being able to afford to move to districts with expensive housing. The house prices are an important part of the reason, but not (mainly) because they enable higher tax revenues.
[0]https://floridadep.gov/sites/default/files/FloridaSunshinePu...
2) This is about the state government doing things. Florida's different criminal disclosure laws have no relevance here. Florida is fucky because florida's state government is run by a narcissist who wishes he was a dictator.
Not to say this isn't insane, just explaining how I think it happened.
I mean, so? This is small minority of people we're talking about. Why do they get veto power over everything present in the classroom? It's the teachers' job to teach the kids, manage/provision the classroom, etc.
At some point you have to just tell people "No".
Personally I'm not a huge fan of democracy, but you're looking at it.
Personally I also find it bizarre system where the majority vote of the other 49 states tells your state what to do, under federal law, particularly in wholly intrastate matters.
I'm sure states would love to just take that money in directly, but the federal government gets first dibs and states complete with each other on the remaining taxation. For instance, Florida is not just a popular retirement spot for the weather -- it also has zero income tax and a property tax with capped year-over-year growth.
Maybe you love your representative and Senator(s) but your party is in the minority. So, you don't approve of Congress.
Maybe ditto on the liking your reps, but Congress is always doing really stupid shit even when your side's in charge (like the goddamn own-goal "debt ceiling" bullshit) simply because they can't rally enough support to make that junk stop, so you don't approve of Congress. Or maybe your side controls both houses and the Presidency but still can't do jack-shit because of Senate rules, or because some other Senator or two (not yours) in your preferred party like playing both sides to advance their state's interests at the expense of everyone else—so you don't approve of Congress.
Maybe you like your reps and your side is in charge but you've really taken anti-politician stand-up jokes to heart, or follow media that highlights and exaggerates all the stuff you hate about reps on the "other side" even when yours is in charge, so you tick the "disapprove" box.
And so on.
There is a massive corrupting temptation of corporate money for all members of congress. We might elect somebody that we believe will represent us but ultimately they are swooned by the siren song of fat sacks of cash. However, I think more often than not, the people that get elected spent the most money on their campaign. The majority of money spent of campaigns comes from contributions that we are supposed to believe don't buy influence.
Whatever you feel about Matt Gaetz, his interview with Tim Pool illustrates the corporate influence issue we are up against.
Why would that be the presumption instead of, you know, looking at polls?
This group of people you are talking about are well organized to take action on anything that aggrieved them. It just so happens that they are aggrieved by anything that isn't explicitly what they believe. Instead of accepting that some may not agree with you, they believe that anyone not in agreement is wrong and must be stopped at every turn.
I couldn't give a shit if kids were bringing Anarchist Cookbook and images of the tortures at Abu Dhabi prison to school. What the kid and his family obtain on their own through private means and choose to read in a public venue like a school IMO is none of my business.
If the teachers are curating books that disproportionately pushes certain non-academic agendas, though, then maybe the parents ought to have the right to guide the employment of that teacher to make sure it follows the desires of the voters. Criminal charges are insane though.
In this case, Florida has decided to manage that activity by making it a felony to merely happen to have a book on the shelf that's not on the pre-approved list.
Check teacher forums, this kind of over-management and micro-management are major reasons for discontent in the job, and one of several factors pushing good teachers out of teaching.
Translation: Teachers are woke and shoving down the kids throat their political agenda.
Note that nobody in this thread defending the policy has been able to name any of these porn books that have been given to children, and that none of them attempt to defend the ramifications of the policy as implemented.
There is a strong movement afoot to define any material teaching about
1) consent (whether it mentions sex or not)
2) the child's own body (in ways designed to help them recognize and avoid things like sexual abuse)
3) queer issues of any kind, but especially trans issues
as pornographic, regardless of the actual content, so that they can ban it and claim they're saving the poor children from horrible, horrible sexual material.
This is not a new movement; conservatives have been trying to ban queer people from any kind of public visibility for decades by claiming that their very existence is sexual, ignoring the fact that heterosexual romance and sex is being shoved into our faces constantly, often in far more blatant ways, and often in media explicitly aimed at children. They're merely redoubling their efforts now that it's becoming clear that society at large is starting to genuinely accept trans people, which they cannot abide.
Conservatives have been pushing to make being gay or trans or queer in any way to be morally equivalent or at least directly leading to pedophilia forever.
This means that the people they follow and support can do an identical action to someone they hate, but the liked person does a good thing and the hated person does a bad thing in their eyes.
Take for example, epstein. Both Bill Clinton and Trump (among a hundred others) were clearly and publicly acquaintances of Epstein, however, to conservatives, clinton is a pedophile and trump is innocent.
The only thing worse than a law against your definition of "bad" content is a law against your definition of "good" content. But that's what will be next if this law moves the Overton window.
Which is why it's dangerous to focus on the actual content being regulated. Be upset that content -- any content -- is being regulated, because the US Bill of Rights is supposed to prohibit such laws. In a free country, there shouldn't be laws controlling what people say to each other.
I'm not familiar with this. Searches yield articles about freezing of Planned Parenthood funding. Could you point me in the right direction for more details?
I think this view has been quite comprehensively debunked by now. I for one do not want to live in a country where most people have access to handguns.
Because it works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australi...
2A was intended to allow the populace to keep government in check. In the age of muskets that was probably good thinking, but try that now and see what happens.
Looking across the pond I see people being arrested for mean tweets and memes.
Seems rather further dystopian than a state mandating their public tax funded schools keep content neutral around divide topics - allowing parents to make their decisions.
This isn't about Governor approval. This was approved by the legislature and signed into law by the governor. Not a mandate by them.
The context of all of this is teachers putting books in front of kids that their parents don't approve of.
I'm not in Florida but I'll give you a local example to me that's come under debate. A book with sexually explicit material was recently pulled from an elementary school. Kids 10-ish and under. sex education doesn't come until the end of elementary school. If I understand it right, this was not an education book.
There is debate over whether this should be in the school and there are parents, politicians, and teachers on both sides of this.
What got Florida to this point is worth exploring and discussing. No matter what side you're on.
What book was it?
I ask because the first real science fiction book that I ever read, that inspired a life-long love for the genre, and which I read under the age of ten, was Rendezvous With Rama, which did contain a sex scene. And the presence of said sex scene didn't traumatize me or anything; I mostly just didn't understand it. Certainly not worth preventing me from having access to that book in its entirety over!
The discussion noted that the book discussed using "toys". They also noted that there was an add for buying sex toys as part of the book. These are elements that really caught my attention.
I have a hard time seeing most parents in the US being ok with this material being put in front of kids who are 5-10 years old.
But when you dig a little farther most of that stuff's usually handled just fine at the school or district level. There's very little justification for involving state or even county level government in addressing things like inappropriate lessons or content, because they do happen but are not an actual systemic problem because they're already dealt with by the existing, very-local systems.
If you want to prevent any "sexualization" content from reaching your young readers, you pretty much have to limit them to Go Dog Go.
This raises the question of what is material considered sexually explicit. Do you have the title and author of this book?
There isn't widespread agreement. That's how we got here. Parents are disagreeing with teachers as to what material they want in front of their kids.
The book I referred to earlier described using sex toys and had an add to get them. This is in a library for kids aged 5-10ish. People were arguing in support of the book being in that library.
Who gets to choose what's appropriate?
* e.g. the book my mom made me read about how our bodies change during puberty.
the overwhelming impetus and application of laws like this is to prevent religious autocratic conservative parents' kids from learning the actual nature of the secular (i.e real) humanist world,
most typically through canon and contemporary literature which does its job: illuminating the human condition, and the hypocrisy venality ignorance brutality and rigidity of people exactly like those who oppose such illumination.
Been telling my friends who e.g. foolishly moved to Austin or Florida chasing the "nest Silicon Valley": if you intend to, or have, kids, GTFO now. The descent of Texas and Florida into autocratic christofascism continues and raising a child, especially a young woman, there, would be actual hell
Hey putin, you can downvote me all you want!