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Comment by AnarchismIsCool | Hacker News Reader

I'm so fucking glad I'm not a kid right now.

We're trying to make the education system somehow worse than the dumpster fire it was when I was little, we have people campaigning on making sure kids don't get free lunches for...reasons?... and now we have people trying to ensure they can be exploited so the 0.1% class can make an extra 0.1% this year.

Screech about bootstraps all you want, it's awfully hard to pull yourself up by them if you don't have shoes at all. This isn't politics, this is thunder-dome-ism.

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I agree that teaching kids things that aren’t true, or telling them to not believe their own eyes, just to follow a particular political ideology is not good but I’m not sure what you mean about it getting so much worse. It is very hard to have any kind of education system without involvement from parents and instilling a value of education. I’ve seen many kids unable to recite basic facts or understand basic things that they were definitely taught in public schools. Being able to work at sandwich shop a little bit more a week and maybe learn a bit about business and how to deal with people and act professionally is not going to scar these kids. This idea is leftist hysteria.

> Being able to work at sandwich shop

I’d much prefer the kids who struggle with academics be given a comprehensive trade school education than having them act as a labor release valve for when businesses are unwilling to hire adults.

I’ve worked at sandwich shops and the idea that this is a good way to learn about business is not the experience I had.

If you can't even afford shoes, it's likely you're dropping out of school to go work and you need less restrictions so that you can get more hours and better opportunities.

If I need someone for an 8 hour shift and laws only allow me to hire you for 6, then I'm going to hire someone else instead of you.

This is the HN classic pro-sweatshop labor argument but aimed at americans? An interesting variant I guess.

Where is the sweatshop from these changes in laws? This is beyond hyperbolic. This is not about sweatshops.

You think the desirable employers are the ones that need bodies so badly they’ll hire children?

Don’t kid yourself, they’ll be lucky if they work in sweatshops and not in abattoirs.

Where are the sweatshops? Are you all delusional? Have you all not heard of the fact that teenagers have worked jobs for decades? This is unbelievable.

it's worse than sweatshops. from the article:

> Despite such findings, a new Iowa law signed last year by Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) allows minors in that state to work in jobs previously deemed too hazardous, including in industrial laundries, light manufacturing, demolition, roofing and excavation but not slaughterhouses. Separately, West Virginia enacted a new law this month that allows 16- and 17-year-olds to work some roofing jobs as part of an apprenticeship program.

> Six more states are also evaluating bills to lift restrictions preventing minors from working jobs considered dangerous. A Georgia bill would allow 14-year-olds to work in landscaping on factory grounds and other prohibited work sites. Florida’s legislature has passed a law, drafted by the state’s construction industry association, that would allow teens to work certain jobs in residential construction. It’s awaiting approval from DeSantis.

I grew up dirt-maximum-food-stamps-and-rent-control poor, in New York City, and I was LUCKY that labor laws allowed me to work full time since I was 15 years old.

This helped me to avoid homelessness and complete high school.

Because rich people thought you were worthless. If the 0.1% and congress wasn't comprised of psychopaths you would have had your needs paid for so you could have focused on your education.

Working a full time jobs is hardly the only possibility that would have enabled you to avoid homelessness and complete high school.

Systems are complex things, if you look at individual pieces in isolation you end up with suboptimal outcomes.

> Working a full time jobs is hardly the only possibility that would have enabled you to avoid homelessness and complete high school.

Sure you know more about my own lived experience than I do...

The specifics of your personal situation is irrelevant when talking about government policy.

Paying highschool students is one example of a possible solution that eliminates requiring underage employment for graduation.

And didn't exist at the time that I was in high school. You say that wasn't my only option but that doesn't reflect my reality at the time.

Especially with a crazy parent saying when you're 14 "work and contribute money to the rent or get the fuck out".

So I worked.

Still got kicked out with no meaningful money and nowhere to go at 18, by the way. Then I worked three jobs and lived off of the free coffee at work and couldn't afford to buy my own food for a few years.

And, at least back then when you had to apply in person, when you're young and white and male and walk into the office trying to apply for EBT in NY literally no one wants to help you and some will actively prevent you trying to get the benefits you're entitled to by trying to give you the runaround.

> You say that wasn't my only option but that doesn't reflect my reality at the time

No, I didn’t say that but it turns out:

> Especially with a crazy parent saying when you're 14 "work and contribute money to the rent or get the fuck out".

Talking with social services would have been an option to avoid homelessness for yourself. Some people in similar situations are trying to help their families which is a complex topic.

> Talking with social services would have been an option to avoid homelessness for yourself.

Lol, not that easy and especially then when you couldn't do any of that shit online, as previously stated.

You have no idea how many institutional barriers there were to most people getting benefits before basically 2008. People would literally lie to you to try and derail you through the system.

NY wasn't exactly tripping over itself to give out money back then unless you were a model poor person (single mother, etc). Applying for these services in person meant you relied on the sympathy and personal investment in your situation of the case workers in the city offices.

Growing up my mom always made sure whenever we had to appear at city offices or go to free clinics that we looked extra poor, extra grubby and extra dirty. That was the reality but you really did have to look the part and leave your dignity at home.

Bleeding-heart people know absolutely fucking nothing about the reality of poverty and will also tell other people what their idea of it is like assuming they also have no real experience with it.

Easy isn’t the same as possible. I had a family member go through NYC social services back in the 1940’s, it’s been functioning for a long time.

Parents threaten to or actually kick their kids out on a depressingly regular basis there’s various procedures for dealing with it. I don’t think talking through the specifics of your situation would be appropriate on a public forum like this, but you can look them up.

The 40s is long before the city completely went to shit, ran annual budget deficits starting in 1961 and had a massive fiscal crisis in 1975 (after most of its tax base left the city) where it was one day away from formal bankruptcy followed by almost two whole decades of being a rotting, stinking, hollowed-out mess.

And yet basic city services continued even as crime skyrocketed they still removed snow etc.

I don’t know how much of that 75-95 period where alive for, but it was still one hell of a city even through the worst of it.

I grew up dirt poor and worked 3 jobs to put myself through college, and I still wouldn't wish that shit on anybody.

Good or bad I don't think your scenario is what this article is about.

"Federal law forbids all minors from working in jobs deemed hazardous, including those in manufacturing, roofing, meatpacking and demolition." "although there is an effort underway led by Republican lawmakers, to undo those restrictions,"

> [W]hile colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself

- Michel Foucault

Fuck that, kids should have basic necessities (food, clothing, education etc), at a minimum, covered through public funding. If the government has one fucking purpose, that's it right there. If people can't even have a fucking childhood what are we doing.

While I agree with you, most red states can't even afford that kind of thing and are already paying out a ton in overburdened welfare programs (except maybe Georgia and a few others that are aggressively anti-welfare). In the absence of those funds and that regulation, at least allow older teenagers to compete against grown adults in the labor market if they need the money.

Yeah, the funding streams are bonkers at the moment. We need to be able to get the funding to kids, the money exists, we've just made the logistics insane.

11.6 million kids in poverty in the us. The naive approach: just give each kid 1k/mo would cost 12B/mo or 144B/yr, so 3.2% of the 2023 4.5T annual budget. That's entirely doable given the political will.

Maybe red states could afford nice things if they'd stop screwing up their economies?

They absolutely CAN afford those kinds of things if they'd stop giving away sweetheart tax deals to major corporations and actually accept federal funds when they're offered.

How will Brett Favre's girl can play volleyball, or how can his pharma company can make money without capturing welfare dotations ?

> most red states can't even afford that kind of thing

What made them so poor? Was it bad governance?

If they can't afford it, why do they keep turning down federal money that will let them do exactly that?

We absolute should provide that, and government absolutely shouldn't be involved in that. Whatever society can do itself, government should never be involved in.

....uh...I'm an anarchist but...the world isn't perfect. We can do a lot to reduce power structures but we still need to designate someone to take money from billionaires and move it to poor people, otherwise the billionaires will just spend the money on private security to fend off the starving hordes.

Bruv. Government is a construct of society.

Just as many other things, like organised crime. Government is still society's main enemy and never should be trusted with anything that a monopoly on violence is not necessary for.

Omg I truly want to be respectful in my reply. But... just... I need to communicate to you that this logic is so messed up. Just because systems of capital want something from us, that does NOT mean that we must provide it. We don't need to allow a social context where a child must work harder to survive or support their family -- we can, and should, reject that premise. If the household is failing in that way, we need to ask how we elevate that household.

Social welfare exists to protect ppl from the exact sort of thing you are arguing permission to indulge.

There's no lack of wealth in this country, it's just been captured and is distributed massively unequally in fucked up ways.

Unfortunately in this society a lot of people look to screw each other over for a payday.

If I have a retail business I likely can't be there every single minute that it's open. There's no incentives for me to hire someone who I can get massively fined for if I don't make sure they clock out when they're supposed to and go home on time. It's literally just not worth the hassle to worry about.

It's similar to why people in Texas with tree farms don't hire US citizens. It's not because they're trying to pay illegals less money -- in fact the ones that I know pay well but still hire illegals -- it's because every time they hire a US citizen two weeks into the job they "accidentally" cut the tip of their pinky finger off with a hedge trimmer and file a worker's compensation lawsuit. One nursery I know had this happen to them _dozens_ of times.

It's unfortunate that the world works this way but running a business is fraught with risk and most smart business owners want to avoid hassle and turnover (teenagers in jobs are fickle and do things like blow off work -- I sure did). You only hire the cheapest labor if you literally have no other choice.

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