Why American cities are weirdly shaped • Hacker News Board

Re: Why American cities are weirdly shaped

#171

Post by devdas » Thu, Dec 27, 2018, 3:05 AM UTC

pishpash wrote: post #148

alistproducer2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>how American history shook out along racial lines. Your comment is contradictory. On the one hand you say that crime, who is undesirable, and culture ate incidental and have nothing to do with race and then in this sentence you acknowledge that American history was largely determined by race, although you use very passive language as though that "shaking out" was some benign, incidental process instead of the cruel…

It's not contradictory at all. I'm saying historically past racist policies created a racially correlated class system, and I'll even say that in a great deal of regressive areas the past was very recent, say up to the 70's, but within the most recent generation, many of the issues people are concerned about are genuinely class issues, and they only appear to be race issues to the extent that race is still correlated…

I would default to rasicm first, since using race as a proxy is still racist.

Re: Why American cities are weirdly shaped

#172

Post by devdas » Thu, Dec 27, 2018, 3:11 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #96

monocasa wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I have several family members who work in under privileged schools, and what they pretty unequivocally say to this argument is that it's one of those "it's expensive to be poor" kind of things. These kid's parents work two or three jobs, so we give them subsidized after school programs. Their housholds are food insecure, so we give them breakfast and lunch so they can focus on schooling and not their empty stomach…

To be clear, there are all manner of reasons why the schools for a poorer population often need to spend more money per student than an upper middle class suburb. At the same time, as you suggest, the best money can probably do is to bring students and the school as a whole closer to parity. It's not surprising that many people who can afford to do so opt out of urban public school systems one way or another.

It would be interesting to include all private/parental expenditure on children in the cost of schooling as well.

Re: Why American cities are weirdly shaped

#173

Post by kiriakasis » Thu, Dec 27, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

AdrianB1 wrote: post #154

jganetsk wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the post was referring to states, not counties, when referring to "countries".

Yes, it was about states, but these states are not equivalent to European states, but with counties because in Europe the lowest level to adopt a law is the state, in US is the county.

> Europe the lowest level to adopt a law is the state

This does not really makes any sense. Scotland has a parliament, in Italy some regions have special local powers, and I believe many other countries have various kinds of exceptions.