271–280 of 585 posts
Is everything culture war all the time now on this site? Every post becomes a stupid comment section where we'd be better off getting an LLM to write the comments for us. 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.
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As a taxpayer who funds public schools, I find it acceptable to subsidize the food of those who are struggling, but I do not have any desire to subsidize the ruling elite (who, in many cases, intentionally keep working class pay low). They can pay for their own children's food.
The ruling elite don't let their children eat school food in the first place.
Now in a better world we'd drop a word from this sentence and make it free for all state residents. That's closer to what it used to be. 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.
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.
Now in a better world we'd drop a word from this sentence and make it free for all state residents. That's closer to what it used to be. 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.
Middle class families can pay for school: In 2019-20 in state tuition and fees in California averaged $9k. 100% of which you can take a federal loan and payback 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 tuit…
If your parents earn $150k/year in California, their after-tax income will be about $100k/year.
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From the guidelines Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
I agree with the guidelines, but they aren't working anymore. I can predict the tenor and content of the comments on half of the HN front page these days just from the title and domain, which means flagging isn't cutting it.
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If foster children were raised so well that people were jealous, maybe that would create an adverse incentive for people to create more children than they can handle and desert children that they’ve already had?
You live in a democracy. If ward's of the state were well taken care of, it would imply a voting majority who recognize this as valuable. Maybe they would also do other things with that power, like vote for increased assistance and benefits for parents in general, or expand the program to be a blanket "everyone can have free state college".
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for lunch.
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I guess a better question is whether reparation paid out to 5th+ generation descendants of slaves make sense. How do you even implement that practically?
Figure out how much the labor was worth. Throw on punitive damages for having enslaved them against their will their entire lives. Now calculate for having invested that money at the time that slavery ended. 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…
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.
This is what affirmative action should be... helping people out based on their individual situation, not because their skin color or gender.
Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been enslaved legally in the US is not a race, it's an atrocity. 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…
Fix the adoption system and stop needlessly expanding the state and taking on more clients.