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All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

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Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#311

Post by throwaway72762 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #295
throwaway72762 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we'd be better off not having any country or state or city does X type posts here unless they're about tech. (That won't solve it, though, because any mention of certain cities or states, even in a tech context, brings out the culture warriors.)

This site doesn't limit posts to only tech. The social culture in this site simply makes technical posts more likely to hit the front page. 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 citi…

There is something wrong with it.

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.

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#312

Post by phpisthebest »

jncfhnb wrote: post #269
phpisthebest wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the city government elected? How do you square support for democracy, and stating the city government is controlled by "the land owning elite" I am told questioning elections is a conspiracy.

Well let me also tell you that proactively playing the victim and daring people to challenge you is cringey and gross. 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.

Well good news, The local elections in San Fran I believe are already your dream.. How is that working out?

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

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#313

Post by l33t233372 »

subsaharancoder wrote: post #281
remote_phone wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you deserve help as well. This is why I suppose universal basic income, because for someone like you, an extra $1000/month would help tremendously.

Who pays for this magical UBI? Pretty sure you'd have to at some point increase taxes for the very people you're trying to "help" in order to give them back that $1000

Taxing mega corporations more aggressively is one often cited approach, but I agree this doesn’t really provide enough for UBI. 1000 a month to each household would be about 1/20th of our GDP.

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#315

Post by nonethewiser »

veave wrote: post #235
throwaway72762 wrote: post #111

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.

What kind of discussion did you expect on a post like this? Obviously everybody is going to talk about the politics involved, that's the only thing that you can discuss here.

Honestly we'd be better off cutting out everything political and err on the side of being over-inclusive with "political." California deserves to be dunked on for a lot of things but should hacker news be the place for that?

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36820544

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#316

Post by jewayne »

coffeemug wrote: post #285
jewayne wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have a staggering amount of wealth to share with the less fortunate 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 h…

America is the most charitable country in the world[1]. But, as evidenced by the parent's comment, there is no shortage of people willing to spend other people's money, and Americans are justifiably cautious of that. [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-char...

I think what you will find is that a stunning amount of that "charity" falls within the giver's social circle. My understanding is it includes donations to the giver's own religious organization. Or even donating to a cause once it's touched you personally -- your mother dies of cancer so you donate to a cancer charity. Giving within your own monkeysphere, and being willfully ignorant of everything outside it, is what I am talking about.

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#317

Post by johnnyanmac »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #301
johnnyanmac wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UC's are a huge exception, yes. The better equivalent is the CSU system and even then it's relatively competitive comared to other public unis.

> UC's are a huge exception 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.

yes that is a good list of 20+ universities (if I throw in the prestigious UC's) out of... 1700 public institutions.

Pareto heuristics suggest there will be about 300 "good" universities that people compete over compared to the other 1300 we can't name.

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#319

Post by ajju »

xmddmx wrote: post #294

This idea is not really new - the California Master Plan for Education essentially promised a free higher education to everyone in California. In 1960. [1] 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...

They implemented a great component of those ideas. Seems like cause for at least some celebration, right? :)

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#320

Post by l33t233372 »

jonathanlb wrote: post #145
slashdev wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Please cut me some slack here, by the nature of the world we live in, I have not uttered these thoughts to another human being, and they might have obvious flaws. It's tough when you can't talk about ideas out of fear of the consequences. 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…

It's true that enslaved people and their enslavers are no longer alive, but 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 polic…

> the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development

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?

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