All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free
themessenger.com
themessenger.com
As these things go, the plan was eroded over time, with the (in)famous Proposition 13 of 1978 dealing a big blow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...
What saddens me is that grand (and simple) plan "free education for all" gets watered down and chipped away to "free education for those who have money or connections" and later attempts to shore it up offten amount to "free education for $special_group". While I don't deny $special_group should get free education, what gets me is all the special-pleading going on.
In OOM programming terms, it's like we had a universal principle which was easy to implement, and this has now been replaced by a bunch of switch/case statements...
Pretty sure, yes. Why do you doubt it?
> some services are social goods and should be treated as such
I'm not disputing that. I'm just taking issue with the marketing strategy. I don't like selling it as "free education" because that's a lie, and I don't like lying because it catches up with you eventually. I think it should be called what it is: government-subsidized education. (I also think it should be means-tested. I see no reason for society to pick up the tab for rich people's kids.)
Do you think that definition is bad? If so, maybe you'll catch more nibbles by trying to engage in a dialog?
I've seen a lot of terms used for social services: subsidized, covered, available by grant, available to those who qualify.
But I don't always see those social services tossing around the word "free".
Sure, sometimes there are "free haircuts for the homeless" or "free medical services for the needy", or "free help to apply for benefits", but generally in the context of entitlements, we're not freely bandying this word around.
It's not the only way we refer to these things, but it's an accepted one.
It works great at the ballot box too! "Vote now for your free stuff! Everybody gets more free stuff when they vote for me! Support the bill for free stuff!" Because if you called it "using other people's money", then the Ghost of Margaret Thatcher would arise and invade Puerto Rico.
While you're voting, consider whether you're in that hacker demographic that gets a chuckle out of the meme that says "The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer."
I disagree with you, but I'm not discussing your value judgement, I'm discussing whether "free" is widely understood to mean taxpayer funded.
"Taxpayer funded" is a gross oversimplification, for any sort of government entitlement and college funding alike.
But anyway, I have seen students in college who were sent there by their employer. They work full-time, have families with young children, and they were expected to pick up several credit-hours to upskill. You've never seen a bunch of sleepier guys. A lot of people, sent by their employer picking up the tab, don't wanna be there, and it shows. They're really disengaged with the class, and that frustrates classmates and professor alike.
Then there's students whose parents paid for it, and family expectations on them finishing college so they get a "real job", or even support the parents and buy them a nice house soon.
Students who work their way through school adopt another distinct attitude. They will get tired too, but they make every credit-hour count. It's their own money and their own blood, sweat, and tears that bring them to the finish line.
There are students who apply for scholarships and get through college that way. There's all sorts of funding for scholarships: corporate sponsors, non-profits, churches, community-based organizations, philanthropic foundations. Someone came to speak at the fraternity meeting and she said she'd been awarded six million dollars in scholarships. I was unsure how you'd spend all that at a community college, but hey?
People who are spending, or supported by, other people's money spend it differently than if it were their own money in their own bank account with them watching the bills and transactions. The incentives are different. The risk/reward calculation is different. That's how it goes.
It is also understood that the source of funding for institutions which offer free services is taxes, fees, and levies from the general population. Regardless of what MMT proponents imagine, costs will eventually be repaid by resources, labor, or war.
I find it intellectually dishonest to advocate for “free” services without acknowledging how those services are funded. It does seem more of the population is interested in immediate gratification regardless of long term costs (see deficit spending, consumer debt, etc.), but that doesn’t make the cost disappear because it is ignored. It’s no different than suggesting because birds fly, they must not be affected by gravity.
I disagree with your opinion in the third paragraph, but I think we can agree to disagree.
We all know what is meant by "free" in this context, and there's no point in acting obtuse about it except to argue in bad faith.
In the case of covered education for foster kids, I’m conflicted. I’m in favor of providing anyone placed in the foster care system resources to offset their hardship. I would support non-profits that showed they could efficiently direct funding to programs to help foster kids go to college. I would wager there is research that shows positive economic and social impact by sending foster kids to college that outweighs the cost and significantly reduces the risk of foster to prison. But that’s my choice and don’t think everyone else should be forced to have the same convictions.
While not perfect, Arizona exposes this somewhat by offering tax credits for contributions to non-profits in certain categories (aid for working poor, tuition assistance, foster/adoption, public schools). I’m still forced to cover the cost of social programs, but minimally I get have some agency in choosing organizations that align with my philosophy in those domains and aren’t kicking back a slice of that money to politicians.
Many compalins ignore the costs of missing these services.
We have 'free' firefighters because entire cities used to burn to the ground. That's very expensive to rebuild.
We have 'free' sanitation becauae The Black Death did more economic damage than both world wars combined.
We have free school education because having a population that can't read and write is economically ruinous. And politically ruinous - illiterate people can vote, join cults, maybe they support the inquisition and burning witches at the stake. We've been thought that.
No-one i ever met believes we should go back to the times where majority couldn't read and write becauae parents could not afford school. Some just believe that education stops at an arbitrary age.
So if we're going to discuss the economic realities of government subsidies, we should go a bit further than "things cost money," because that's obvious and simplistic.
*Edit: Just want to add that the tax debate is indeed worth having. My point is only that the justification for subsidies is grounded in econ principles, not just the whims of the public.
>"Free education" really means education paid for by society at large rather than students. I'm not saying that's a bad idea. It isn't. In fact, it's a really good idea.
Like, he's no longer allowed to be a social democrat if he understands bsaic economics? Why am I not surprised?
> some services are social goods and should be treated as such,
Perhaps. But how is higher education that? It's true that not as many people as you would like have 4 year degrees, but many do, and those people serve me overpriced coffees while whining about unionization.
Where is the social good in their degrees? Like, even if they had gotten those for free and there was no student debt, how did their degrees help either society at large, or them personally?
It is apparently very easy for this to not be a social good.
OTOH, it is a much cooler slogan than 'education paid by society at large :)
That is far from clear. There are crazy people on the left just like there are crazy people on the right, and I think some of them really don't understand how the world actually works, and that you really can somehow magically make education "free for everyone".
Even if it's not true, it provides ammunition for the opposition to say that it's true. One way or another, I think using misleading terminology is generally not a net win.
When leftists say that something like public healthcare would be literally free what they mean is that the net cost compared to the alternative is null or negative, not literally that nothing is being spent.
If you want to give me a link of someone who literally thinks that free college means that no one has to pay anything for the college itself or it's staff, I'm willing to take a look. Otherwise, it's just an argument that the net cost to society is negligible or negative, which is a valid use of the word too.
Of course, not many people have the concept of money at the government scale either. What does $75B to Ukraine really mean?
it's kinda crazy that poorer countries than ours seem to get the pony.
Thankfully not all of them are trying to apply specifically to UCLA or even in state, but the numbers are staggering.
and so has the tax base and # of teachers. This is a non-issue. Society scales.
> and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good).
Not necessarily : see my comment below.
And I'm equally unsure if taxes have tripled, between increasing poverty on the bottom and more and more tax evasion on top.
If capacity at existing colleges is the problem, we could start new ones.
It can be an institution integrated into a city.
California hasn’t solved the issue because some percentage of residents or other interest groups don’t want to solve the issue and have had the political means to block attempts at resolution.
Which happens to be the metric that really matters.
- universities wasting massive amounts of money on things that have nothing to do with academics, such as sports programs, stadiums, etc.
- because they can, due to people getting ridiculous loans to pay the ridiculous tuition cost.
So all that would have to be done there is ban them from charging these ridiculous fees. Is that not it?
Don't forget administrative bloat.
The tax base and the number of higher education instructors may indeed have tripled. I'd have to check. But that would only be enough if you were going to teach the same fraction as went to college in 1960. What was that, 10 or 15%?
So we'd need something like a x30 increase in teachers. And even more in tax base (since we're building more campuses or enlarging the existing, not merely funding the existing ones).
Somewhat unrelated, but several states have seen unexpected growth since that time period
Kind of hard to believe, but in 1950 Florida and Kentucky had about the same population. Since then Florida has 8x'ed (I think because of modern AC). Other states (especially in the south and southwest) have seen similar levels of growth to CA. I don't see how the problem you mentioned is specific to California
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_census
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/27/8854037/us-population-history-...
(tldr - in which I conclude that we agree on the goal but disagree on “which was easy to implement”, after thinking through my own educational / economical history at some length ;))
I benefited from:
* a nearly free and (luckily) high quality school education from kindergarten through 12th grade - most schools were not that great in my time, I lucked out (with parents who strived / persisted until they got me into the right one) * a nearly free but terrible education for my bachelors in engineering in India * a largely discounted and excellent post-graduate education in the US, paid for by my work as a research assistant, which I had to compete for, and that paid the equivalent of $375/month after taxes for working 20 hours a week with a full course load from which I paid my living expenses (in the early oughts - so i was poor :)), but came with a tuition waiver.
Here’s how it has led me to approach this subject:
* I definitely agree that the ideal of nearly free education for everyone that wants it is the right one for a richer society like America to strive for, but subject to some basic rules(eg maintain non-abysmal grades that reflect at least basic effort)
* Free just means someone else is paying for it - and that has its limits. In a free / subsidized college world, major states in India had (have?) so few engineering colleges that if you got less than 99%, you couldn’t study technology - at all! Barring a stroke of luck (family moving to another state where I at least got into a pretty bad engineering college) , I would have had to study economics instead of engineering.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/delhi-uni...
* Around the time of the article above (maybe a few years before) India started allowing private colleges to charge more. This has made education a lot more expensive in India on average, although I believe a similar number of “free seats” still exist, but the number of “seats” to study popular fields has gone up by on order of magnitude, and that has enabled a LOT more people to study what they want, but incomes have grown a lot too for white collar workers. For many (not all) fields, folks are able to take a loan and pay it back.
* If, for instance, the US government paid for just “degree granting post-secondary institutions” expenses, it would instantly become the #2 budget category just below social security and above health, medicare, “income security” and defense.
* It seems that 65% of US adults over 25 do not have a bachelors degree. It seems likely many of them will not support using their tax dollars to create a new #2 budget liability - despite the “chicken-or-egg” dynamic - that if the education was free, many of them would have a degree, and might support it.
Prop 13’s impact on the political economy, empowering comfortable boomers, is probably as bad as its impacts on the budget.
This is the real reason manufacturing is leaving the West, not regulation and not evil plan by China. This is also the real reason for culture of thowing away things and not repairing -> a new dishwasher costs £300, but a mechanic needs to charge £100 an hour to pay rent.
If you rent is 50% of your income, the rent is actuslly 75% of your income -> because when you pay for anything, say get a plumber, 50% of your money goes to pay the plumber's rent. If, hypothetically, rents were zero, the plumber would cost twice less. You would have 4 times more money.
Looks like it was about 38b https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4432
That link also has the allocations for that 38b. You can get 5Gb fiber in my neighborhood now. Some of that is probably due to this budget for instance.
The Jarvis Foundation promoted it as a cost containment measure after the measure had been qualified for the ballot.
It doesn’t matter to me if these sports generate more revenue than it costs. It is a distraction that we don’t need. If people want to participate in spectator sport, there are other places for it.
My justification is the same as that Google uses to kill projects. There might be a project at Google that makes a hundred million dollars of “pure profit”. However, if it takes even equivalent of a month of time and attention of the executive leadership team and the board every year, it is decidedly not worth doing and must be scrapped.
Similarly, it doesn’t matter to me how much money sports and other such distractions make. If it takes time and attention of the management and or the board of regents, it must be scrapped. Educational institutions exist for education. Cut it all out!
You could call all of these 'education' but the usual and implicit image of education in people's minds is lectures and tutoring sessions so it's worth highlighting these other aspects. All of these are present in universities around the world in varying degrees.
These are all things that happen in universities, but they are also all things that young people have the opportunity to do outside of university.
The old adage comes to mind: "you loved your college years because you lived in a socialized infrastructure with walkable neighborhoods and the opportunities for spontaneously meeting old friends and new people alike".
Same goes for computer science and like every humanities degree - you can become an autodidact in any subject that does not require expebsive equiment and facilities.
On the contrary, > 60% of most people's lifelong friends consist of people they met at school or university. That suggests we are not very good at connecting eith random people we meet on the street.
I have no idea how they handle things in say China, but at least here it’s quite obvious that the point of university is more or less to prepare students for life in general rather than just get educated. Education is of course the grand goal and at least here in Finland universities get some significant amount of money from the government for each graduating student, but your first sentence is still dishonest argumentation at best.
Besides, the GP is talking total nonsense in general. Everyone I know outside the US looks up to your college sports scene in admiration since it looks like an awful lot of fulfilment and fun on top of studies and produces a massive amount of successful athletes in all kinds of sports. We’re envious of it, nothing more. Your country is and has been home to the most innovations and set a positive example to the rest of the world for decades and decades now, and frankly saying otherwise is just silly.
Second, according to Finnish law,
> The mission of the universities is to promote independent academic research as well as academic and artistic education, to provide research-based higher education and to educate students to serve their country and humanity at large.
It has been argued that getting involved in volunteer activities is part of the education. Participating in college sports would qualify, while watching them and supporting your team would not.
I don't think that's true? It's just that they're not a huge public thing, televised, random locals watching live, with people attending the 'college' purely to play for the team, studying as a technicality. The only people involved, generally, are those playing (self-organised).
I played ice hockey in the UK university league (which was at the time in the EU, but I'm not nitpicking that point) and the team occasionally travelled abroad (I went to Eindhoven, NL) to play other university teams in Europe. (And get absolutely thrashed: hockey's bigger in much of Europe, especially colder countries, than it is in the UK, so they were the cream of a big pool of talent, while we were ..scraping a team together from interested parties is only slightly an exaggeration.)
I know what I am saying. The whole point is spiraling costs and tragedy of the commons. Colleges and universities must keep spending on spectator sports because otherwise you can’t pull students away from other colleges and universities that do the same. The whole point of my comment is to make college accessible and affordable. You can’t just say “don’t look up”. Something has to change.
Definately, debating, fencing and politics of student councill all belong in university.
But is a highly-commercial sport appropriate.
My understanding is that these studenta do sport instead of studying. They basically get a degree instead of cash compensation. This seems both corrupting education and exploiting the students.
If you think that's okay, why is this approach not applied to Formula Student?
It has engineering students build racecars and compete. If a graduate in mechanical engineering buildz a winning racecar, thats a hood indicator of conpetence. A winner in football is an indicator of.. anything?
College sports aren't exactly an export like oil or software.
This is objectively false for the small college I went to… in any case, you ignored my whole comment, even if it does make money, I don’t want it because this money corrupts beyond just the one university. It changes expectation for all colleges and universities. Now my NCAA division 3 college has to go to donors and beg for flood lights for the football stadium. This is time the UA people could spend on begging for dorms or chemistry lab equipments.
You got lucky. My alma mater needed to pay for similar, so they added new line items to every student's tuition.
OTOH, that in itself shows that the increased tuition hasn't actually kept people from going to college.
I never thought something like that would be possible for me. It ended up being fairly easy. Moving to California radically changed my life for the better.
Realistically this doesn't change much since it's extremely unlikely a foster kid wouldn't qualify for a full ride prior to this.
The only people who really get screwed are middle class families who make too much to qualify for aid, but can't really afford to pay for school.
Rent/living cost is another matter, but tuition can be still be reasonable if you state in state and don’t attend expense universities.
But I totally agree - there is a lower/lower middle class of people that attending college is vet challenging and free tuition for all at some schools would be massively beneficial for them and society.
If your parents earn $150k/year in California, their after-tax income will be about $100k/year.
If I was to propose something I'd make in state tuition fully free for residents, and if that cost too much maybe make people do the first 2 years at a community college. Honestly I credit community college with turning my life around. I ended up graduating from a state school and I'm very happy with my degree! It's not in computer science, but after a very long journey I feel it's something to be proud of.
The best part about college is your free to take time off and finish later.
It is perhaps reflective of this state's small size that there has been almost no national news coverage of the change, and even a lot of websites comparing state programs still haven't been updated to include the new changes that significantly expanded eligibility.
New Mexico also makes it relatively easy for students to establish in-state classification after moving into the state for college, so we can expect a number of out-of-state students to take advantage as well.
Oh, they're paying for it all right.
As for the nonresident tuition issue, it seems like a matter of having the state make up the difference between resident and nonresident tuition so that the university receives the same fee regardless of residency status.
[0] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...
[1] https://admission.ucla.edu/apply/freshman/freshman-profile/2...
I don't agree its fair, though, for the blue collar folks or the people who aren't bright enough to go to college to have to subsidize it.
Or in Georgia's case, those with a gambling problem.
We shouldn’t be leaving people behind but the idea is that we all benefit from an educated workforce.
There’s plenty of arguments to be made over the details but let’s not miss the big picture here.
Besides, what s%^%t return for the blue collar! For every, what? 200 paper pushers with a BS white collar job they get one surgeon.
in other words : it's less likely that an elementary school student has to juggle an unwanted pregnancy, an estranged family, and a job at McDonalds; it's not that uncommon later on.
If you attend school and turn in your assignments, regardless of how poorly you do, you will graduate from a modern US highschool.
Turns out the answer is interesting - about 50 years ago, the graduation rate for high school was around 50%. These days it's much higher (90% or more in some areas).
Does this mean the children is learning? Perhaps.
It also may represent a failure of our systems - in the past, not everyone needed a high school degree to be a functional member of society, and forcing those people to "graduate" may in fact be a net loss to society.
In other countries, this is explicit: people are tracked to "educational" vs. "vocational" career tracks earlier, and there is not the emphasis on graduation rates as a metric.
<Captain America pointing> I understood that reference.
cite? This seems to be saying the graduation rate was between 80 and 85% back in 1972: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-americas-rising-high-...
Primary and secondary educational standards have dropped precipitously in the USA.
Kids also drink less alcohol, commit less crime, get teenage pregnant less often. So yeah, they are likely to be learning more then in 1970.
> drink less alcohol, commit less crime, get teenage pregnant less often
Stats lie.
Their doctors give them drugs way more fun than alcohol, all of their crimes are unattributable to them because they're being committed in a virtual world where there is no accountability (it's not the Boomers SWATing each other, DDoSing anything that disagrees with them, and running fraudulent crowdfunding grifts), and the decline in teenage pregnancy has more to do with the entire demographic's sexual interests being fine-tuned to bespoke pornography and/or their own reflections.
Number of school shootings only ever increases, and an entire generation claims to be mentally ill. Something is wrong here.
Wow, so when kids get shot, it's their fault too? Holy cow, this is like the definition of victim blaming.. Why do you hate the younger generation?
The guy you replied to said a million other stupid things and you picked the only accurate one to complain about.
Pluuus it was kids who then protested and lobbied against legalized guns. Aaand it was his generation who called them crisis actors and bullied then. And bullied parents of dead kids.
In here, I would point out that SWATing is a thing solely and absolutely because adult cops behave over the top aggressively. SWATing is not a thing in countries with less aggression and violence prone police. Not because their teenagers would be overall better, but because their police forces are harder to be used.
That said, yes, there was a dramatic increase in attendance and graduation from ~1900, when the graduation rate was about 6%.
US Department of Education, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait, p 55, "Table 18 --- High school graduates, by sex and control of institution: 1869--70 to 1991--92"
<https://books.googleusercontent.com/books/content?req=AKW5Qa...> (PDF)
> As of 2021, there are 35 states that have some type of statewide postsecondary education tuition waiver or scholarship program for students who have been in foster care.
> 24 states have statewide tuition waivers: Alaska[1], Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, (Dark blue color on the map)
> 4 states have state funded grant programs for students in foster care are: Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia. (Light blue color on the map)
> 7 states have state funded scholarship programs for students in foster care are: Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, and Washington. (Purple color on the map)
> 16 states and the District of Columbia have only the Federal Chafee Educational Training Voucher: Colorado, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming (Yellow color on the map)
https://depts.washington.edu/fostered/tuition-waivers-state (bonus points for software gore right below the title)
What I was thinking of was the Chafee Educational Training Voucher, which gives up to a $5000/year reimbursement:
> Students can get up to $5,000 per academic year based on cost of attendance, available funds, the student’s unmet financial need.
> Note: For the federal fiscal year 2022, the voucher’s maximum annual amount was temporarily increased to $12,000. On Oct. 1, 2022, the maximum award will revert to $5,000 per year.
https://studentaid.gov/sites/default/files/foster-youth-vouc...
[1] - https://www.tn.gov/collegepays/money-for-college/tn-educatio...
I suspect that it is cost-beneficial (where-ever the funding source) to have a technical/trade -educated workforce. "Rising waters lift all ships."
Historically state autonomy has not been good unless you like living in the premodern era. See for instance Jim Crow and the Dobbs decision.
Now let’s invest in a free state education for every citizen!
Completely free will be abused probably, let’s be honest
https://www.nycfoodpolicy.org/states-that-have-passed-univer...
Doesn't the means-testing bureaucracy frequently outweigh any potential savings? Food is cheap. Bureaucrats are not.
Maybe. Don't assume yes.
I'm not. I'm positing yes based on the cheapness of food.
On the other hand we've got the phrase "Programs for the poor become poor" for a reason. Having a program that benefits everyone means that we all can support it out of enlightened self-interest.
We can reduce overhead by providing food for everyone and not putting in place a complex government bureaucracy to carefully approve some people but not others, to give lobbyists a chance to advocate for the benefit of their constituents at the expense of everyone else, etc, etc.
edit: The idea that your tax dollars are going to pay for the universal benefit of someone who pays more taxes than you do is mathematically nonsensical. It's purely a gimmick. It's a shell game with no shells other than innumeracy.
Hungry kids don't learn well, so feeding them will lead to a modest increase of academic achievement on average. Academic achievement correlates with higher earnings, thereby paying for the program with their future taxes.
And I don't think the ruling elite's kids are eating free lunch at public schools :)
Think of how every family in Finland taking home a newborn baby gets a box of starter supplies. The box doubles as a crib, so most babies, regardless of their parents wealth, spend their first days sleeping in the same cardboard box.
IMO it's cool as shit to start everyone off the same way like that. From what I understand it also helps reduce the sort of stigma that can hurt kids taking advantage of free lunch programs
I would hope they get taxed more under this regime so it's not really you subsidizing it for them.
Means-tested benefits result in bureaucracy that sometimes costs more than the increase in cost from giving the benefit to everyone would be, they create poverty traps, and they screw over people in atypical situations (i.e. a kid whose parents care so little they can't even be bothered to get the paperwork done that proves their low income status).
By helping specifically the poor/not wealthy, you end up with a massive bureaucracy trying to decide who is wealthy enough, and add paperwork on top of poorer people to "request" such benefit.
The cost benefit just isn't there.
BUT... I checked the menu of a school where I used to live...
Pizza, hot dogs, fries... We can make the most delicious vegetables, roasted, ...
And they get carbs. Nutrition taken from nature decomposed in its elemental components put back together for the perfect addictive meal...
Not teaching kids to eat whole foods is one of the greatest assaults on public health we’ve done in the last century, from what I can see. They become adults who normalize eating these perfect addictive meals, who allow their own kids access to the same junk, and then they their own kids as well, and so on. Until today when grocery stores are quite literally predominately food that you shouldn’t eat. You just shouldn’t.
Most common diseases in north America are highly correlated with diet. I find that so profound. We’re all eating ourselves to death in some form or another, it seems. To have that start in a public school is a real affront to individual and social well-being.
I remember in school we had a lot of programs for nutrition which were basically health-food propaganda. Yes it was the "Food Pyramid" so not ideal, but there was a clear message to eat minimally-processed foods (fruits, vegetables, dairy, grains) and avoid junk. We watched "Supersize Me" and a documentary which explained all these "vegan / whole foods" diets. But kids still eat junk because they're kids and they don't really understand or care, and everyone around them eats junk; and then grow up and continue to eat junk because it's cheaper/easier and they did as kids.
Also, we had fruits and vegetables in every school lunch, as well as salads and wraps as alternatives to the hot meal. But the fruits were often wilted or bruised, and vegetables canned and/or overcooked. If we had good-tasting healthy food, I'm sure more kids would eat it; but the school lunch was school-lunch quality, and bad quality degrades healthy food more than it does junk food.
The problem is, if we want to teach kids how to eat unprocessed food so that they actually listen, we need nuance and funding. To teach them "healthy <> bad tasting", we need to give them access to good-tasting healthy meals, which are hard to cook. Or if we just keep scaring them into eating less junk, we need to change society so that it's more ingrained that junk food is bad outside of school; right now they get mixed messages, where 1 semester of health class says "junk food bad", but few people care anywhere else. But nuance, funding, and affecting culture are things the government is really bad at, especially when it's an issue as "insignificant" as eating healthy.
Now if you can pull a boiling frog meme and make the pizza be healthy, haha more power to them!
But we forgot how to make decent food at scale.
We should definitely encourage schools to renovate and make use of the kitchens when they have them, encourage kitchen facilities be included in new construction, and maybe even encourage creative solutions when no other options exist.
Some hopeful example :
Quebec hospitals started cooking all their food internally on the same budget.
More and more French municipalities stopped their frozen food subscription to hire a handful of cooks and gardeners with a similar budgets. ( those are minimum wages jobs than can be sourced locally )
To conclude : human have been cooking food in batch for quiet a while. That what I mean when I say « we forgot » : some communal facilities like school don’t even have kitchen anymore.
I just want to play devils advocate on the cost : How would be paying people minimum wage to batch cook food from scratch with local produce be more expensive ?
We did that for centuries without conserve, fridge and NPK to grow our food.
We now have access to cheap energy ( historically speaking ) and a variety of preservation methods. That should be considerably easier.
( and in fact i think it is, I’m in Quebec now, public hospitals switched to cook all their food on the same budget as previously frozen crap. A lot of French municipality are doing the same. Basically you have to pay the yearly salary of à cook, some gardener and a CPA to handle what can’t be grow ( 50% )
A frozen hotdog is pretty expensive for what it really is.
Question : how would be our Republicans friends do lunch for schools? Every kids bring a box ?
Local produce is more expensive, as is cooking from scratch[0]. Another problem is that won't scale. You can't feed millions of kids twice a day every weekday from the local farmers' market.
[0] https://www.vox.com/videos/2018/3/22/17152460/healthy-eating...
> how would be our Republicans friends do lunch for schools? Every kids bring a box ?
Make them pay for it. If they can't pay, they don't eat.
I’m ready to change my mind once I’m reaching a wifi.
In interval :
how did we do it for millenniums before frozen carbs?
Random: Let’s say the Roman army. Ok. They were relying on canned food a lot. ( garnum )
But for sure they were not eating frozen hotdog
We didn't. Child mortality was higher, populations were smaller, life expectancy was lower and malnutrition and starvation were more common.
Our current population size is the direct result of post-industrial farming and food production making calories easily available to the masses, and all kinds of foods accessible year-round.
But again, the problem isn't modern processed food, which can be perfectly healthy, it's an unwillingness to fund school lunches enough to provide more than cheap, empty calories.
Absolutely. Post WW2 food production with NPK intrants and machineries changed how we grow food. ( thanks Bayers ! )
But it’s hardly the sole factor and I would not be surprise if it was not the main driver of multiplication.
Medecine & Basic hygiene also went a long way. As well as the great convenience of bottled energy to move things arounds for cheap.
But I think we talk about a bunch of stuff at once here.
For instance I did not mention biologic produce.
Just … cooking food in a large communal kitchens with large kitchen equipment. The kind where you can cook for 50 people at once.
As opposed to : complex industrial process to build a hot pocket or a frozen breakfast burrito.
One is something most people can be trained to do, and the other needs a team of engineers to design, and another team to build the factory and another to run it.
( watching your vox link )
Oh. Ok. Yeah. I find that part relevant
> But the US government also doesn’t subsidize leafy vegetable crops in the same way it supports wheat, soy, and corn, vital ingredients in a lot of junk food.
I think it says it all. Why is the US government meddling with the market? I live in the Us as well: We don’t pay the real price of food. Yeah produce are labors intensive. But a lot of crap food has hidden cost that should be factored in. ( but that’s yet another topic :) )
To summarize, I find it hard to smallow that buying a frozen product that flew to you and is the result of a complex industrial process is cheaper than whatever grow with sunlight, a hour of care a day and some water.
I don't ask my kid to volunteer because he got a chicken pox vaccine, he just gets to not have chicken pox for free. And that's ok.
We can choose to make the next generations lives better than ours, even if we gain no material benefit ourselves. (Though I'd argue that an educated youth does materially benefit the populace.)
[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
For many, foster care is a temporary program with an agency directive at reunification of the family.
I was a foster parent and one kid was briefly in the system due to a clerical issue where the father was not awarded custody after the mother was arrested.
Would that 14 day clerical issue now be awarded with a free education? Cause that system can be easily gamed.
It feels great to say "California's most vulnerable young people can take agency over their lives by seeking higher education," but how much is this changing? And since we know most high school grads aren't prepared to basic college freshman classes (cough social promotion cough), then how many of these foster kids are really going to benefit, rather than just spinning their wheels before they fail out?
This feels a lot like a big headline that makes people feel good but doesn't actually do much (if anything, or makes things worse).
About 61% of foster youth in California graduate high school on time. Past 18 things turn into a messy patchwork of semi support, simply successfully transitioning to a point with a high school diploma, a job, and stable housing is a success story. Many are homeless at points, and living on the street is the backup plan if anything goes wrong. (Note: non-CA experience, but Google shows a similar alphabet soup in CA.)
NFYI says about 3-4% of foster youth graduate with a 4 year degree.
I wonder if this could plausibly cause some families to purposefully get kids placed into foster care 1 or 2 years before college. Hopefully not. Usually that whole experience is a nightmare.
Letting everyone attend state college for free is the real deal. To save costs fire 90% of the admin staff.
(I have not done research on the California state specifically but most colleges have absorbed far too many admin roles. Then due to cost not done enough to expand the teaching staff)
This shouldn't have ever been a question and should have been the default.
Just more tax dollars being siphoned away from my family that got zero assistance.
Post secondaries are quite overpriced. Community / state colleges are usually priced better.
Can you give an example of a college that you are priced out of?
The increasing gap between graduates and the non market because the rate of change in the world is outpacing the rate of change in curriculum to keep up in post secondaries is an opportunity.
Effective allocation of public funds and ensuring there is value received for the public purse is something that needs to be taken up by the average person to learn about and to ask informed questions about.
I'm not from the US, but here in the UK when I when went to college and university the state would give students several thousand pounds a year for their parents being unemployed. My dad was a postman who used to do delivery driving on the weekend for extra cash for my family. We were poor, although I was deemed "wealthy" enough to be given no help because my dad made around £30,000.
The end result of this was that I basically the poorest person I knew from 16-21 because my friends either had unemployed parents so were given thousands of pounds to spend on laptops and things to help them get through university, or had rich parents who could buy stuff for them.
Because my dad was a postman I ended up having to work two jobs while at university and had to go into my overdraft almost every month.
Looking back now I am grateful for that hellish 5 years since I actually gained a lot of professional experience in tech during that time, but it came at the cost of severe depression and physical exhaustion. I cannot explain how difficult this period of time was for me. It shaped who I am today but I wished daily that my dad was unemployed so I didn't have to go through it.
I relate to this a lot. All of my friends were on welfare growing up. My family were poor, but my dad did work a crappy job.
I guess that's what upset me – growing up I never felt privileged at all. I remember growing up there was a kid on my street who's dad was a builder and who's mum worked in a school and I thought they were super rich because they had two cars lmao... It was just kinda annoying to be punished for my dad having a job as a postman, and arguably me having to work two jobs while trying to get a degree is why I didn't do that great at uni. If I had government support or if my parents were richer I wouldn't have been in that position.
> I still don't feel like I belong amongst "rich" people (aka middle class).
This is something I have written endless comments about here. Trying to emulate being middle class today is very hard for me. I don't know if you find this, but middle class people are so polite and so well spoken compared to what I'm used to. They're also very sensitive and have a different sense of humour to what comes naturally to me. That often makes it difficult to fit in. Also trying to talk about my personal life is nearly impossible because middle class people don't have a good understanding of drug abuse and criminality.
Super cool that you broke the cycle and are doing well though man!
1. free healthcare
2. free college education
3. supplemental income
I see people talk bad and stuff about how this shouldn't be. However those with parents usually have some sort of financial support.
It does suck it is free-free, because it doesn't teach the foster kid important life lessons, but there is more merit to this.
I still think the kid has to pass the accepting test and I think this is the case. If the kid does well, passed the acceptance test they are clear to learn.
Foster kids are not adopted kids, you can adopt but that makes them your kid. Foster kids have sponsor dads and moms.
What about the many countries with free university for everyone? Are those students missing out on important life lessons as well?
My parents are low middle class. We didn’t qualify for any financial aid and they were tasked with trying to find a way to send both my sister and I to college which they couldn’t afford.
So what did we do? Take out a bunch of loans. Good thing I got a decent job that can pay for them. Too bad for my sister who had a masters and is making $35k as a teacher in Tennessee which is barely more than minimum wage.
There will be gazillion universities overnight similar to coding bootcamps - all competing for state funded tuition without any regard to quality
> Problem with free tuitition is it only incentivizes cash grab from educational institutions.
my understanding is that "free college" usually applies to public institutions (state college/universities)...?
Problem is with American University itself, its overbloated mandate, abysmal efficiency, and dysfunctional bureacracy that has very little to do with actual education and its outcomes
> Problem is with American University itself, its overbloated mandate, abysmal efficiency, and dysfunctional bureacracy that has very little to do with actual education and its outcomes
from what i've heard it didn't always used to be like that....
The difference is day and night, especially in academics.
Public schools became sort of free daycare. I fear public universities will become something like that plus job program for bureacrats unemployable anywhere else (just like with any state government)
If it's a public school, those loans should begin falling off after five years and be forgiven after ten [1].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/teacher-student...
Just further down the education funnel and accessibility will be relative to navigating the barriers in K-12
Loan servicers had every incentive to thwart this by declaring payments late or incomplete, steering borrowers into forbearance or non-qualifying repayment plans, etc.
As you can imagine, fewer than 1% of applicants successfully had their loans discharged.
They've been trying to fix things since the pandemic for people who consolidate to a federal direct loan.
The sequential requirement has been removed, right?
This is the real crime.
Oh and that’s not even considering how much of her own $$$ is needed to successfully supply a classroom and how barely any is tax deductible.
Her experiences almost single handedly altered my political viewpoints and who I vote for.
> No administrator of any education system may be paid more than twice the lowest-paid teacher, no matter how many hours that teacher worked during the school year. A teacher is anyone who is responsible or in charge of children or students. Political salaries are deemed administrative of the educational system that is under the purview of that elected body.
I believe it's possible to have loans forgiven if you work in certain industries (like public school teaching) for enough years, but it's not a few years — more like a decade or two.
If you think someone who gets a masters shouldn't have to pay back their loans, I'd counter that such a policy would be a wealth transfer from taxpayers to universities. Masters degrees are almost always a negative ROI endeavor, once opportunity cost is factored in. We shouldn't be subsidizing them even further, which will lead people to get even more of them, given how little they add to future earnings.
The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. There's no clearer illustration of our values than the fact that children who, through no fault of their own, have become the responsibility of the state are treated like unwanted trash. The idea that a society like that could figure out how to ethically treat prisoners or immigrants is laughable.
In this utopia you describe, I'd think all kids lived like kings.
Grow like kings
Dream like kings
Give back like kings
Yet these are children, specifically, who deserve every opportunity we can afford them by default. Not “hopeless addicts” or some other group deemed not worth saving by so many of us, but people quite literally the epitome of worth saving. These people need every ounce of reassurance that we care and that they can integrate and function in society. That they deserve opportunity as anyone else does.
If we had to be self serving we could look at it like “each one of these people is statistically far more likely to be a burden on my own children in the future, so a small investment now could save a lot later”, but we seem to fail even in being selfish about it. I find this topic heart breaking.
Wards of the state: our responsibility, through no fault of their own.
Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault.
Immigrants: not our responsibility, but an indication of how well we can manage our economy. We should be able to put anybody who comes here to work.
Emigrants: we should let people leave who don't want to be here.
The first three are connected because there's no way to sustain providing anything for prisoners and immigrants that you don't provide for regular citizens. Wards of the state are the nation's children; there's nothing that normal citizens get that they shouldn't get. If they don't get anything, normal citizens are getting less than nothing.
What percentage (approximately) of prisoners in the United States would you categorize as "their fault" and not some product of their upbringing/situation?
Prisons should be a place to house people that have been deemed unable to function in society until such time they can (sometimes that is never). This is not necessarily only violence but violent offenders should be the majority, but people that simply refuse to follow the rules of a society also degrade and are a danger to the society over all. We see this today in the way of rampant shoplifting, and car thefts/breakins taking place in some communities.
These are deemed "non-violent" so the offenders are just let go, however once these "non-violent" crimes reach an extreme level businesses close, people stop shopping in the area, insurance companies stop offering insurance, etc etc etc. That is all with out getting into the real psychological effects of having your property stolen and violated in that way.
At the end of the day I am not concerned about their upbringing/situation, I am concerned about their criminality
Indeed, your example of how urban cores have been affected by wealth inequality and real estate speculation is a great example of this. San Francisco was a lovely city until landlords and real estate speculators turned it into a casino for gambling on housing and office space.
before I even begin to address your others points, many I probably agree with we need to stop with this gas lighting narrative.
landlords and real estate speculators are not the villains of the San Francisco of the story. The city government (and the larger state government) is.
From the endless zoning regulations, environmental regulations, and building regulations that make it impossible to build affordable housing, and a decades long process to build any housing at all to the activist prosecutors refusing to prosecute crime in the city, to the "de-fund the police" movement that has put the local police dept at a huge understaffed situation.... Those are the root causes of the problems. not landlords and real estate speculators
You want to have an honest conversation about corporatism I am game, but you are starting out with disinformation and lies so....
I am told questioning elections is a conspiracy.
I don’t really like our democratic republic setup personally. I would prefer a popular vote based democracy for presidential elections with federal holiday voting and no ID requirements. Same for city elections although the problems on that scale are different.
I really like our electoral college system, believe we need stronger ID requirements to vote, and believe we need to repeal the 17th amendment returning more power to the states, removing it from the federal government.
I will agree with one of your reforms, that of a voting holiday, though i would prefer instead to just have Voting week, starting on Sunday, ending on Sat, with no state allowed to release results until the next Monday eliminating the 24 hour news cycle on "election day" and eliminating problems like "voting day bugs" or "rain outs" etc. and the constant battle for "news" organizations to "call" an election 2 seconds into the voting
My Support for it is because we are a Union of States, i.e the United States. Our founders rightly believed government is most responsive at the local level, as such they only engineer one 1/2 of 1 branch of the federal government to be popularly elected. I believe this is the correct measure.
Direct Democracy tends to devolve into dictatorship, and we have seen this in American History as we become more and more "democratic" in our processes, more and power power has shifted to the federal government, and as more and more power has shifted to the federal government that power is further concentrated not in congress but in the Executive Branch, and the Administrative State.
So much so today that agencies of the federal government on a whim or executive order can simply establish new regulations that make millions of people criminals, or completely change entire economic markets with no input from Congress or the people, and in fact it takes an act of congress (or worse the Supreme Court) to stop them.
This is a complete and utter bastardization of a republican form of governance.
Eliminating the electoral college further drives us towards a more direct democracy, something I oppose
We've had tons of voter initiatives totally steamrolled by lobbyists in Sactown and SF. We passed a law to restrict rent increases, a couple years later the corporatists got it shut down before it could become a law. doesn't matter if the citizens elect the city government when rich people and rich corporations can come in and literally bribe their way out of anything.
Who do you think it is exactly that demands that politicians enact these laws? The homeless? Renters? No, it’s the landlords and the real estate speculators who are trying to pump up the value of their investments. This is a very simple case of cui bono.
I’m not in anyway spreading “disinformation and lies,” you just seem to have a very distorted understanding of cause and effect. Here’s the order of operations:
Landlords and real estate speculators buy properties -> Landlords and real estate speculators pressure politicians to protect their investments -> New housing doesn’t get built as a result of this pressure -> Cities become unaffordable because of lack of supply -> Crime and homelessness spikes.
I would love a citation to support your claims
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-san-...
That said your link does not prove your claim, the fact that Newsom is supported by liberal elite is not news, and only 1 of the families in the story seemingly have connection to being landloards
The other were a oil company, a retailer, and 2 owners of hotels, of which all of them seem to be old money with seemingly no direct connection to current San Fran real estate market.
People were complaining about land speculators in SF in Mark Twain’s time. That was literally when the city started growing. So I’m trying to figure out when you thought SF was a lovely city? Maybe during the property bust of the 1990s?
The point of prisons, which Americans consistently fail to grasp, given their penchant for cruelty and selfishness, is reform.
That's what "our responsibility" means. We need to take these broken people and try to rebuild them, because they, their parents and society failed them the first time. Not all of them can be helped, but not to try produces what we have now, which is an abomination.
The results is worsening crime rates and multiple examples of serial recidivism where the public pays the cost through lower quality of life.
I’m not saying there isn’t room for reform, but some people need to be in prison not for their own good, but for the public’s good.
This knowledge is not a sufficient excuse to give up on the problem. The status quo is unacceptable. That's the key fact.
Oh yes it has. Mass release of violent criminals during Covid. Repeat offenders being released even for violent crimes.
They are finally figuring out that these are the exact people who cause so many crimes. Shocking!
I also do not agree that the "reform" we need is simply letting criminals go who commit property crime, or because of the socio/econimic circumstance, or any of the other "liberal" or "left" visions of reform
Today's system is centered around punishment, not protection of society, or reforming people, etc. It is just punishment. The criminal owes a "debt to society". I disagree with this model.
There is a whole host of reforms I would support both to prisons, and to criminal justice over all. However simply refusing to prosecute shoplifting, or other "minor" property crimes is not one I can support.
People that really feel this responsibility become foster parents. But saying the state should deal with them isn't taking on that responsibility - at the end of the day actual people need to be their parents. I'm happy to support those people by having taxes directed their way, but the state doesn't get credit for their good deeds.
The common US system where foster families receive funds to provide temporary care for kids in the system isn’t parenting it’s a disaster that’s a massive disservice to kids in the system. In many individual cases it works, but overall it also results in unacceptable amounts of mental, physical, and sometimes even sexual abuse.
Put another way, when we don't rely on governments to help with things like this - does that incentivize people to take on responsibility? I suspect not...
Your statement reeks of someone who lives in an ivory tower somewhere.
Many Americans will stop you at that first word. Who is this we you speak of?
If the pandemic taught me anything, it's that to all too many Americans the most important freedom is freedom from strangers' problems. They don't want to see them, they don't want to hear them, and they sure as hell don't want to pay for them.
Now, if THEY happen to have that problem, that's a different story...after all THEY are real people, unlike...checks notes..."foster kids".
If you look at polls worldwide, most people wouldn’t leave their home country even if they had the choice to emigrate somewhere else: https://news.gallup.com/poll/468218/nearly-900-million-world.... In South Asia, where I’m from, it’s just 11%. Even in sub-Saharan Africa it’s under 40%. Immigrants are the outliers who are willing to leave everything they know behind.
Of course over time there’s regression to the mean, and new communities form here in the US. But most of the US population traces their ancestry only back to the late 19th century or early 20th century. This constant population turnover means there’s a very limited ability to develop the kind of solidarity required to make sacrifices on behalf of strangers in your community.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-char...
Maybe double check your link next time?
> The most noticeable change was arguably the United States, which ranked first in the world in giving for the years 2009-2018 but fell to 19th in the world in 2020.
(I also seriously doubt the methodology of this confident ranking of the world's charity based on self reported charitable behavior in surveys, but this was more humorous)
> However, the U.S. was not the only high-level giver to drop. In fact, many countries that landed in the top 10 most charitable countries in previous years slid completely out of the top 20. According to Charities Aid Foundation Chief Executive Neil Heslop, these changes are not a sign that people's willingness to donate decreased, but that their opportunity to donate diminished, largely as a result of pandemic-related lockdowns. Charity-based retail stores were forced to close, fundraising events were canceled, and many elderly charity volunteers had to shelter themselves instead of volunteering.
I could go on at length about this. I'm deeply convinced this component of North American culture has contributed significantly to many aspects of decline and general loss of well-being. I won't go on at length of course, I just wanted to say I think you're on point and this feature of a lot of our cultures here is quite harmful.
Given that the money to do that would have been taken from those parents, you can see why in a democracy parents would object to having their resources stolen for government kids to have better lives over their own.
That does not sound dystopian at all..
Actually this sounds completely dystopian. In what world should people really wish they were foster kids? Its no wonder people warn against an effort to destroy the nuclear family.
The logical end of this thinking is that people who would otherwise be perfectly capable of raising children would put them up for adoption because they would want the best outcome for their kids.
It's like Black Mirror episodes write themselves.
I think nobody argues that it's a vile, morally repugnant thing to enslave another human being. But that was a long time ago, and all those slaves and the people who enslaved them are all dead.
The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved. How do you make an argument that those descendants are victims in need of reparations? No crime was committed against them directly, and they seem to have benefited from the crimes committed against their ancestors.
I must stress that this is not in any way excusing or justifying the wrongs that occurred. But how would you make an argument for reparations, given how things turned out?
Yes. The slaves did labor. That labor demands wages. The fact that the formerly enslaved also benefited from public goods to which all citizens had access does not pay down the debt owned to them for their labor.
That's a good STARTING point.
Japanese-American citizens got locked up for a few years during WWII and the result was that Reagan signed a bill allowing for their descendants to receive $20K for each incarcerated person.
Now consider how many LIFETIMES were wasted in slavery.
Turns out that the same people who always complain about others having their hands out are just upset at any situation that doesn't personally enrich them.
Or themselves since plenty of the victims were alive. This was a single event that lasted ~4 years with comparatively very good records.
Slavery lasted for several hundreds years, there are not records for most slaves and even cases where they can identified good luck tracking down all of their descendants. That's several magnitudes more complex, to an incomparable extent.
> Figure out how much the labor was worth
So do you need to find specific ancestors who were slaves and the payout would be based on how long did they work for? So... somebody who's great-great-great-great-grandfather died when he was 72 years old would receive twice as much than someone who's ancestor only lived to 36?
Of course you'll be especially lucky if you can find any ancestors who were shipped to the America in the 1600s. I bet slaveholders kept perfect record, especially back in those days.
Then you have to figure out how to split the payout between 50 to 1000 (un)verifiably descendants of the same individual or will be on first come first serve basis?
All this just seems so bizarrely impractical that I can't believe anyone would seriously suggest it after spending more than 2-5 minutes thinking about how would it work.
Meanwhile we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math. It's not that difficult to come up with a minimum standard unless you're in the "do nothing" category.
Maybe that’s not an argument by itself for doing nothing.
> is hard
Not hard, objectively infeasible to accomplish in a sufficiently equitable way.
> we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math
What math? And what would you do with those censuses? There are no individual records... Could you at the very try least try clearly define who would receive these "reparations"? Would any descendants of black slaves or enslaved Native Americans (or are we not thinking about the natives at all?) get the same share? Would it depend on the proportion of your ancestors who were enslaved? Would your current financial circumstances affect this? Would you have to do a DNA test measuring the proportion of your genome coming from Africa, Europe etc. and use that to calculate the payout?
Gets people really against each other, and away from your profits.
Do you mean each successive generation of blacks were wealthier than the previous? What about a comparison to the average white person?
There were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.
That's my justification for affirmative action (not reparations). Should it last forever? No but it hasn't been that many generations since the civil rights act
No I mean the average African-American is easily over 10x wealthier, and has far better opportunities than the average citizen of the countries that now inhabit the lands they originally came from. Were it not for slavery, again as abhorrent as it was, they'd be a lot worse off today.
> here were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.
Yes, that's a fact.
A better approach would be to try to provide opportunities that people can take advantage of. The US actually does a great job of this which is why we don't see mass exodus of people trying to go back to the African nations.
If that isn't part of the discussion, then people are just proposing a welfare system to give money to people based on the color of their skin.
Because those countries were devastated by Europeans
Would you say Native Americans were behind? They had a thriving society.
That's subjective. Maybe happiness is the most important aspect of a society
A very oversimplified pro argument: if it wasn't for slavery, these families would have generational wealth and better social situations. African Americans in the US ARE disproportionately lower wealth/income and this has CLEAR historical origins.
The oversimplified con argument: Okay, but if you come from a wealthy African American family, why should you have a leg up over a poor (or otherwise more disadvantaged) white student? What about an immigrant, who didn't benefit from slavery at all?
Fundamentally there's a huge swath of different injustices across society, and we obviously can't fix all of them at once, so a big challenge in this sort of debate is how you slice the injustices and how you prioritize fixing them.
I have some ancestors that fled religious persecution in France. Many died. The ones that fled gave up everything. Should I play the victim card and petition France to restore the land my ancestors were chased off of?
History is pretty ugly, I'm sure everyone could find a justified grievance if they tried hard enough.
I think the logical thing is to focus on equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. What things can we do to distribute opportunity more equally in society? Things like free post-secondary education, free health care would seem to be a better use of resources.
So it seems like you understand what needs to be done but what not what the blocking issues are.
I think one could come up with a more fair proposal than that.
By contrast Irish Americans could very justifiably claim that were it not for Anglo oppression, they would be far wealthier. But we wouldn't fine Anglos today to pay Irish Americans. Slavery hits a similar issue, limiting the reparations to the party that did harm is very vague when you're approaching two centuries later. Most proposals for "reparations" aren't anything remotely close to actual reparations. A recent immigrant is assigned as much liability as a descendant of plantation owners. This isn't a reparation, this is a tax assigned without regard to culpability.
(this isn't to say that things can't be changed, but it would require the adoption of new amendments).
I'm confused by the pro argument. My known lineage was not enslaved, but my grandparents immigrated with 0$, and my family has no generational wealth and we don't receive reparations.
Isn't being freed from slavery the same as being freshly immigrated with 0$?
Furthermore, there are tons of Asian immigrants that come from a third world country with virtually nothing, but become top earners because of their cultural values of education and filial piety
Well, if you're immigrating, it isn't <country you're moving to>'s fault you have no money.
If you've been enslaved, it's very much <country you were enslaved by>'s fault you have no money.
The US economy, and hence those immigrants, were better off, because of the gains made from slavery.
PS your terminology shows your biases.
Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development. Furthermore, it risks minimizing the experience of ongoing racial discrimination faced by Black Americans.
The idea of reparations isn't necessarily about compensating individuals for specific harm done to them, but about a society taking responsibility for historic wrongs and making a concerted effort to rectify those systemic inequalities. Reparations could take many forms, including investment in education, healthcare, housing, and economic opportunities for communities disproportionately affected by racial discrimination.
This is a fact.
> Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development.
Maybe, don't forget the slave trade enriched tribes inhabiting those regions. It was Africans enslaving other Africans and selling them (at least to my limited understanding on the subject, which may be wrong.)
> Reparations could take many forms, including investment in education, healthcare, housing, and economic opportunities for communities disproportionately affected by racial discrimination.
Why make it about race? Just make those things available to all disadvantaged individuals, period.
Because…
> the legacy of slavery has left significant and enduring socio-economic disparities between descendants of enslaved people and those who are not. Inequalities in wealth, education, health, and opportunities persist, often along racial lines. These disparities aren't merely coincidental, but have been reinforced by racially discriminatory policies and practices like segregation, redlining, and racial violence, all of which have historical roots in the institution of slavery.
Parent made the case very plain.
Try a thought experiment: your ancestors were enslaved in America. After emancipation, every generation of your ancestors was subject to both systemic and individual discrimination and violence.
The question is, what would you want done? Do the answers “well that’s all in the past” or “how about these other people though” satisfy? It’s worth thinking about. Personally I do not know what my own answer would be, other than that I would almost certainly be angry and distrustful.
I can certainly understand why one would be bitter about "every generation of your ancestors was subject to both systemic and individual discrimination and violence". They have a right to be upset. A lot of people have a right to be upset about a lot of things. I don't think you can jump from that to reparations though.
That’s the hight of results-oriented reasoning. The historical norm is that different societies did not progress at the same rate. Europeans got ahead of Africa and Asia in the 1500s-1900s. That’s why they were positioned to engage in things like colonialism to begin with.
But go back a bit further—Britons were about a thousand years late to the Bronze Age. Nobody held them back. It’s just that key milestones of civilizational development aren’t distributed evenly. Because of course they aren’t.
It was my understanding that most of the slaves traded were already slaves, so it wasn’t just plundering the continent to kidnap people.
I’m not particularly well studied about this. Am I wrong? What were the effects that hindered the continent’s development? Was it the incentive to capture slaves to trade led to more wars of capture/conquest?
I really don't see how the slave trade could lead to a 95% reduction in GDP over 200 years later.
Slavery in Africa was widespread before the Atlantic slave as well as after the Atlantic slave trade. There's some apologism (interestingly enough, quite similar to Southern U.S. slavery apologism) claiming that it wasn't that bad, but if you look at the actual accounts it could be extremely brutal. Like with the U.S. there was certainly a degree of different experiences, but like in the U.S., that doesn't justify the practice.
In the end it was actually European powers that ended most slavery in Africa, often with a great deal of local opposition ("The End of Slavery in Africa" is a decent starting place if you want to see how it happened in each individual area).
Ethiopia is an interesting example - it wasn't colonized[1], and so slavery there persisted long after it ended in most of the continent. The League of Nations kept pressuring the country to end the practice, but it kept dragging it's feet. It only ended when Italy invaded in the run-up to WWII (it's also interesting as a non-colonized control country when it comes to colonization).
[1] It was conquered by fascist powers for some years, the same as most of Europe.
The median net worth of Americans in 2019 was $121,760.
In 2019, the median net worth of white Americans was $189,100.
The median net worth of Black Americans was $24,100
I forget how to link on hn but it's from the motley fool.
Asian Americans are even better off, but why should they have to pay for reparations? Their ancestors weren't involved in slavery in the US.
Hispanic Americans are also pretty poor (more so than African-Americas if memory serves), but they weren't disadvantaged by slavery, should they have to chip in for reparations?
Southerners were clearly disadvantaged by fighting and losing the civil war, does the North owe them anything?
What about the survivors and next of kin of the soldiers that put it all on the line for their country in Iraq and Afghanistan only to find out the government lied to them and everyone else about why they were there?
Everybody could find a grievance if they look hard enough. Which ones do we try to address?
And who even gets reparations? If someone’s great great great grandmother was a black slave but every other relative was white, does this person get reparations?
No?
Then we need reparations.
How do reparations actually move the relationship forwards? Handing out money does not solve anything fundamentally. They need to focus on understanding and building a positive future for all, which means working towards ensuring legally and policy-wise there is no remaining racial bias or discrimination (equal opportunity for all - not outcome) and working away from holding the grudges of previous generations.
This is such a loud dog whistle, even deaf dogs can hear it.
Absolutely. As my mother used to say, parents should (at a minimum) pay for education and therapy (not to mention housing with electricity and indoor plumbing, food, clothes, etc.). Since the government of California is the legal guardian of these children, it's really the least they can do.
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for lunch.
Fix the adoption system and stop needlessly expanding the state and taking on more clients.
How do you apportion the taxes? Do new immigrants owe the same as people here generations? Do the descendants of Irish immigrants owe the same as descendants of slave owners? What about the black descendants of black slave owners, of whom there were over a thousand?
And how far does this go back? The Comanches were extremely brutal. They killed and enslaved many people from many tribes, especially the Apache. Should they be responsible for reparations to the Apache and other tribes they crushed?
Also, just helping them out. Nobody gets hurt. This isn't creating an allotment of seats for foster kids. The selection process, and thus odds, are the same for them and everyone else.
UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, Virginia Tech, College of William & Mary, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin Madison, Purdue...
America has a solid stable of top-tier public universities.
Pareto heuristics suggest there will be about 300 "good" universities that people compete over compared to the other 1300 we can't name.
Community colleges are rarely described as "state colleges." The latter refers to state-backed higher education institutions, from De Anza College to the University of Pennsylvania.
The delineation between colleges and universities varies regionally. Nowhere does it solely signify exclusivity. In America, there is an accreditation difference that largely pertains to graduate school.
https://onlinepublichealth.gwu.edu/resources/equity-vs-equal...
How old are these definitions?
I've only seen them used this way in public policy circles, and left-leaning ones at that. It's also totally discontinuous with the treatment of equality in classical literature.
Put another way, isn't equity just a masking term for top-to-bottom wealth transfers?
Using the term launched, similar to how tech companies launch products, implies a conspiracy to bring this word to the public's attention
Investment is one a thing.
Having access to opportunity is another
This isn’t what equity means, according to this socioeconomic model. It’s equality of outcomes.
Would you say Equality and equity are the same?
It depends on with whom I'm speaking. Even the Wikipedia page for the former is a disambiguation [1].
The historical (and international) use of the former is closer to that of egalitarianism [2]. I fail to see what is gained by redefining equality and creating the term equity when equal opportunity vs. equality of outcome has decades of scholarship behind it, to say nothing of being clearer on first glance.
I don't know enough to render judgement. But it smells like the tail-chasing semantics the social sciences love, randomly re-appropriating jargon instead of debating the underlying problem.
In any conversation, inter-discplinary or not, agreeing on what a word means is important.
For me, there is a difference between equity and equality.
As you mentioned, people will hammer on the lens of the interpretation without being aware of it, or not being able to explain the core of it.
I would start with the idea of access to education and access to opportunity to apply education to uplift current and future generations.
Removing built in barriers that have been in the public education system (based off the industrial education system to keep turning out reliable and obedient factory workers by omitting certain information) is one place to start.
Still, not every baby starts at the same start line, and not everyone has the same headwinds, or tailwinds. Some argue its impossible to make everyone equal or equitable, but there are some parts of that spectrum that will never be able to to even be close to equals in average, and the conversation starts around that, and those who are in a position to more default succeed by failing upwards, and those who are not.
There's a lot of focus on breaking ceilings. I often wonder about how it looks for the average person, however that is defined to access opportunity compared to someone who is not a part of the majority, for example.
The interpretation on whether this should be made equitable for everyone, or only to a certain degree is definitely a topic of discussion.
But then you’d need a K-12 system that doesn’t fail them or set them up for not succeeding by getting them into lower stream courses.
But K-12 delivery would need to be reasonably similar quality everywhere, and it’s not, and that would take a decade or two of waiting.
It can be easy to say what’s good for another and how to solve them when their problems aren’t ones you have grown up or lived through.
Just make the schools free for all, and collect with higher marginal income / wealth taxes.
It should not be dependent on parents’ status either. I got zero aid due to my parents, but I also got zero from my parents.
While providing universal health care to a similar number of folks and with a smaller aggregate economy.
Those Europeans must be cooking the books, eh? /s
US GDP[0]: $25,462,700 million
Aggregate EU GDP[1]: 15.8 trillion euros
N.B.: USD/Euro Exchange rate (23 July 2023)[2]: 0.89 Euro == 1 US Dollar.
[0[ https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=2022
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/279447/gross-domestic-pr...
[2] https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=...
If America disappeared, Europe would look a lot less socialist
- accepting fewer students (having strict requirements).
- failing students out in early classes (fewer opportunities to retake classes).
- more professionally focused and shorter curriculum.
- less class and subject choices
- the degree commanding significantly less earnings
For whatever reason, the best students seem to end up at a few top European schools (like Oxford) or go to the US.
At the undergrad level, the subject matter is generally very well-established. But when you want a job after graduation, being close friends with the CEO's child helps far more than a few tenths of a point on your GPA.
Legacy admissions and nepotism are still very much a thing.
Although, I also do not think government needs to pay for free schooling for 17 years. Can easily cut some fluff and drop that to 15 years, and still give people a solid foundation equivalent to a Bachelors.
Also, schools are state funded as well as federally funded. So there's a bunch of issues when it comes to out of state students and who should cover. That exists even with today's crazily high priced tuition.
I recognize the racism, but I also see the point of justification there. There is some distinct difference in discrimination at the top and discrmination at the bottom of the societal rungs.
It's almost as if they are being punished for ruining the narrative through their own hard work, which would force people to admit that other minorities being underrepresented at Ivy League colleges is due to something other than just "systemic racism".
I just did. You don't have to accept that justification, but I don't imagine it's an uncommon sentiment. There's a difference between not getting into Harvard but pretty still having a dozen top universities of choice and barely even getting out of high school because your area's education was under-funded due to historical factors.
I don't know the historical factors that lead to Asian-Americans being so successful in comparison to other minorities, but it's clear they need less help as a whole compared to other minorities. There's your justification.
>It's almost as if they are being punished for ruining the narrative through their own hard work
You can interpret it that way. You can also say that the AA is starting to focus more on those who need it, and Asians seem to need it the least as of now.
>force people to admit that other minorities being underrepresented at Ivy League colleges is due to something other than just "systemic racism".
So what are you suggesting? Again, my Asian american history is very superficial, but I think it's hard to deny that it's a shorter history than African or Mexican American history in this context.
The reason they take these cases so often is because affirmative action must be narrowly tailored and affirmative action programs are often found to be Unconstitutional.
Also, affirmative action as a whole, as acknowledged by the Supreme Court, is a temporary measure to level the playing field of prior systemic racism. So even in the instances a program is currently a constitutional even that is for a temporary period of time.
People often complain about the nature of it, but generally don’t have any solutions to address the realities of historic discrimination codified in law, at best people suggest to ignore it a do nothing be happy those old laws have been over turned and move on, the problem there is typically the people that suggest doing nothing to right the wrongs of the past benefit from damage of historical systematic racism and discrimination.
If you stiffed a whole generation matching X criteria, you should give reparation to people matching the same X criteria, whatever that criteria is.
I am almost amazed how they managed to do the right thing...
The condition of being descendants of slaves, or people who faced other forms of official discrimination cited in the prevention of intergenerational wealth such as redlining, blockbusting or unfavorable treatment in the GI bill, etc., is ultimately an individual situation for each individual affected.
The idea that you can dismiss that as not an individual hardship -- though it kind of is for those impacted -- strikes me as pretty much a word game, nothing more. Not unlike the word games American laws started to use when they could no longer punish people de jure for their race.
It's a lot easier to quantify and equalize the situation here and now rather than to try to make up for a future that could have been, and for which no living being is responsible. The past is complex and blurry, and families aren't a straight line. And generally, people aren't bound by their ancestor's misdeeds.
Poor people should get more help from society in the US, that's a fact: race might be a strong predictor for poverty, but the best signal for poverty remains income and wealth, right here and right now.
Why bother looking at anything else? Are poor whites or asians somehow more blameable for their poverty than poor blacks? Should a successful black person get reparations from a white hobo, simply based on their lineage (that none of them have control on)?
These are sticky questions, but if you're serious about reparations being law then you should be prepared to give some straight-forward answers without deflection.
i am having a difficult time understanding this sentence. Poverty by definition is a lack of income and wealth. Why are you saying it's a signal?
I'm not staking out a position here, I haven't made up my mind myself. I'm just pointing out that OP raised a valid point which you didn't really address.
Poverty is disproportionately in minorities' court due to historical discrimination based on skin color. That doesn't mean that there aren't poor white people. But it does mean that actions targeting minorities end up overlapping a lot with poverty.
The main reason it's relatively easy to target skin color is, well, visuals. Another can of worms in and of itself, but for the most part it's pretty easy to look at a certain minorities and pin them as such.Meanwhile financials are private and it's not like every millionaire is driving a fancy car with a suit and tie.
Yes, but they also have a false positive rate (rich minorities) and a false negative rate (poor white people) that is much higher than a properly administered means test.
Given this, and given how controversial race-based affirmative action is, it's worth questioning whether attempting to sort based on race as a sort of shortcut to sorting based on economics is doing more harm than good. If we could implement a race-blind affirmative action program that got bipartisan support, could we not solve poverty faster than if we continue to alienate one side by insisting on excluding poor white people?
> The main reason it's relatively easy to target skin color is, well, visuals. Another can of worms in and of itself, but for the most part it's pretty easy to look at a certain minorities and pin them as such.Meanwhile financials are private and it's not like every millionaire is driving a fancy car with a suit and tie.
Why should a goal of an affirmative action system be to be able to make the accept/reject call based on a quick glance at the applicant's photo?
We already ask college students to provide an assessment of their means for the FAFSA, and about 3/4 do so. It's not long or complicated, and I see no reason why a similar system couldn't be used for a means-based admissions process.
The issue is that it's hard to make something "race blind". Not without essentially making a lottery system in the process with how little data you're given. The moment you give high school data, you give approximate data on your area, which means your area's demographic and economonics. If we could have a world where standardize grades and national test scores it may be possible to pull it off (btw: national test scores also correlate with income levels, especially since they cost money/time to take and can be taken multiple times. IQ tests have also shown their bias). But as is it is a utopic dream.
>Why should a goal of an affirmative action system be to be able to make the accept/reject call based on a quick glance at the applicant's photo?
It's not just a photo. your race is considered a public statistic. You can opt to say "prefer not to answer" but I imagine 95%+ of applicants to report it.
It's the exact opposite of finances, and it's not as easy to grab that data even as a public institution. I don't think submissions offices even get that data to consider. Should they get that data? I don't know. I think we can imagine a dozen ways that can help and also be a complete catastrophe. That's a much larger topic of discussion.
Foster children are not a protected class under the law.
Perhaps foster kids could or even should be a protected class, however unlike most protected classes that have faced historical systematic discrimination codified in law, the general hardships of foster children are not based in unjust laws.
I have worked in Dependency law (ie with children that have been abused, abandoned and neglected) which deals a lot with foster kids.
I favor programs that provide funding for foster kids like this and provide assistance when they “age out” of care, but it is a broad brushstroke and doesn’t take into consideration individual situations as you suggest. In other words foster children are not all alike nor are their situations. Some live in group homes and they are just a number or a check for foster parents, some live in loving and supportive homes, even sometimes in the homes of relatives when parental rights were lost but they are still considered foster children. Some become foster kids at 17 and others are born into it. There is everything in between.
It is about the equivalent in terms of diversity of situations as being a minority/protected class that has historically been discriminated against.
Squint and we might start looking like college tuitions in Europe.
Trust me here in Florida there are many parents who put their kids in foster care at 17 so they qualify for governmental housing allowances.
I’m all for free college tuition, for all. I want an educated society, I want better paying jobs resulting in higher taxes, and I don’t want government guaranteed loans resulting in unaffordable tuition and life long debt.
I don’t think your comment adds much.
Seems like the opposite of universally accessible higher education regardless of background.
It seems like California is leaving themselves open to a 14th Amendment Equal Protection violation claim, doesn't it?
And even if they have an almost adopted type of situation with their final foster parents, those parents still shouldn't have to pay all the college costs. They may not have even had the children placed with them long enough to save for that.
I mentioned in another reply, in Florida we have programs that offer financial assistance to kids that age out and continue their education. I support the programs, but there are things that should be acknowledged like it resulting in foster kids not getting adopted that otherwise would as financial strategy, or kids going into foster care right before aging out to qualify for the program.
Affirmative action is about reinforcing the bottom so it doesn't fall any further. It isn't about supporting anyone for a particular reason, but anyone in a condition they can not control.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/11/15/black-ame...
Could one be taken away from rich abusive parents with a mandated allowance?
Here it's people trying to insert their affirmative action narratives and also rant about California a bit (in a backhanded way).
We can do better.
Always has been.
It seems increasingly common that long-time HN readers lament that the fraction of computing news has diluted at an increasing rate itself.
I wonder if there's a way to measure that.
What I lament is that the community of tech folks, embodied by sites such as HN, have splintered and moved away from their roots. I mean go watch the documentaries about the early days of the 70s and 80s and even the not so early days of the 00s: vision, tinkering, weirdness, geekery, cussedness, anti-authority, pay it forward, etc. That is what defined the scene. That's our roots and I'd like it to come through in comments here. Instead it's just culture war: us vs. them, grievances, IGMFU, and all the rest.
Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.It seems pretty relevant to me. The comment was also positive, applauding this policy for actually trying to identify improvishment.
I don't see how you could describe this point as "culture war", "negative", or "flamewar". I suspect you just don't agree.
What's unfortunate about HN is that when enough people disagree, those ideas go away and others aren't aware they are even being expressed. The intent of these moderation features is to remove low quality content, but it's almost always a filter for ideology and sociability.
I can't count the number of times I have been reading an interesting comment or submission, and suddenly its flagged and completely invisible.
I'm not surprised techies are inherently interested in some socio-political stuff. Especially a topic like education where they may feel it should be an egalitarian endeavor (the interpretation of "egalitarian" inevitably causes conflicts, of course).
>any mention of certain cities or states, even in a tech context, brings out the culture warriors.
any mention of any high level topic will bring them out. I don't know what to say about that. As long as they are engaging with the topic and arguments and not devolving into attacking users or spreading hate, there's nothing wrong with a strongly opinionated comment.
I think about it information theoretically. Oversimplifying, the information content of something is how unpredictable it is in a given channel. On HN, in 2023, the information content of yet another comment ranting about some given city or state or group of people is basically zero. Everyone has seen those comments a thousand times recently and it adds nothing to the discussion.
I think the post itself is worth noting and is interesting. It has room for, how you put it, unpredictable responses. I can't control who or what comments on it, only who to engage with or flag. In that regard, it sounds like a moderation problem more than a content problem to me (Maybe a user problem, but I'm assuming that banning 10 specific users doesn't solve the problem). And I feel you're offering a content solution to a moderation problem, which simply doesn't align.
The real question to ask is: is the moderation inadequate? How do we fix it? I feel like asking to ban these posts is giving up to the trolls and provocateurs rather than fixing the underlying problem.
If I remember correctly, not so long ago dang was editing out posts about ongoing armed revolt in Russia - a country that started largest war in Europe in recent history. And yet there is a post about minor policy decision in one of the 50 states.
I think you can argue there's an interesting new phenomenon here. By these rules, I'm guessing the original "Russia attacks Ukraine" post would be allowed, but not the 50th update on the war.
I'm sure someone will glibly informs me that "everything is political". So please tell me how "High-Performance server for NATS.io, the cloud and edge native messaging system"[1] is political like this discussion about controversial public policy. Clearly, and thankfully, there is a spectrum.
Handouts are not generally a great way of accomplishing goals. I don't have a better idea, just thinking if there can be a way to make sure there is some ownership on the part of the students.
If reunification is determined to be impossible, the state goes to court to sever parental rights. This determination normally takes a year plus, and usually means the parents have checked out or are no longer trying to resolve the issues. Only once parental rights are severed is the child considered "legally free", and is eligible to be adopted into another family. In the ideal case, this is the family they were staying with before parental rights were severed, but not necessarily.
I haven't looked into the details of this article, but I assume these funds will be used for kids that have had parental rights severed, and were either adopted or "age out" of the foster care system.
Once in foster care, most kids are traumatized. Once parental rights are severed, it is incredibly difficult for parents to "re-adopt" their kid. I sure hope no parents are so short sighted to put their child through hell to reduce the cost of college.
Handouts and free passes as long as you're characterized by $some_immutable_trait? Then don't be upset when you're passed over for a promotion to fulfill a company diversity promotion threshold.
Or look down on them.
It’s funny hearing about the concepts of handouts when the people most offended are too often including those who have access to some amount of privilege but not enough.. and end up upset about sharing it.
There is a lot of easily accessible learning available there for your statement that would help illuminate a bigger picture for you. You are already part way there by being engaged on it.
Mostly about it’s not being about an immutable trait. Knowing this requires you to exert more than a basic interpretation and opinion.
If you don’t think it’s a big deal would you switch positions with someone in that position since it’s so easy?