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I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

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Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#541

Post by ggandv »

hgomersall wrote: post #493
camgunz wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I stake out such a strong position, so that positions like this poke their heads up. Individuals getting benefits when they're ineligible accounts for tiny amounts of the total fraud in these programs. Time after time we discover at least one of two things: - The effort/cost required to reduce fraud usually overshadows the cost of the fraud itself and also dramatically reduces the benefits of the…

As the lauded private sector are well aware, the optimal amount of fraud is non zero: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

I wonder if optimizing for votes, as is the day to day business of most policy makers, gets you to the same place as optimizing for profits like in the private sector? If not, studying that could be one way to improve the public sector output. Not that shareholders vote, on average, but you get the idea.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#542

Post by [deleted] »

verisimi wrote: post #361
yojo wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not denying food to the parents, you are denying food to the children. They did not choose to be born, and they certainly didn’t choose the fiscal responsibility of their parents. Maybe there is room in there to shame the parents or give them a slap on the wrist, but the kids are blameless and denying them food makes you probably a monster.

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Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#543

Post by pergadad »

fakedang wrote: post #535
em500 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and school lunches should be free (from a EU country, this isn’t even a thing here) I'm from another EU country (the Netherlands). Primary schools do not provide any lunch or other food whatsoever, secondary schools might have a canteen selling some snacks or low quality fast food. But everyone is basically expected to bring their own or go out/home for lunch.

Yes, we had the same system when I went to school in a (relatively low-income) expat (Indian) school in the Middle East. But nowhere was a child expected to leave the break hungry - I saw firsthand a teacher ruthlessly scolded by the grade supervisor (who was a GOAT all-round) because she found a student still eating after she had arrived at the class, and sent him to stand outside as punishment. Another time, a teac…

No one is starving in the netherlands. There's a difference between offering a canteen but charging for it with some able and some not able to pay, and a general expectation that all bring food from home. Many Dutch, German, etc companies will also not have canteens but rather people bring a sandwich or last night's leftovers from home. The standard warm meal is the evening meal.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#544

Post by amelius »

blueflow wrote: post #531
amelius wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Are you aware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch ? Might be a cultural thing to not like that word.

I have deleted this comment because this discussion is going nowhere.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#545

Post by sneak »

askonomm wrote: post #366
mtnGoat wrote: post #343

As someone who experienced this first hand growing up. I consider how someone feels about free school lunch, a basic test of their humanity. If you think kids should go hungry or be embarrassed at school because of their parents finances… we can’t be friends, nor acquaintances. IMHO, you are subhuman at that point and not worth my time. My dad believed that because he paid taxes he shouldn’t have to pay the school to…

This is wild to me. In Estonia school lunches are free for everyone, paid by the taxpayer. Doesn't matter if you are poor or wealthy, everybody gets the same food.

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Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#546

Post by gadders »

This doesn't really exist in the UK, I think. Most people get free school meals if they're on state benefits (as I did when I was younger). **

However - what a great thing to do to just ring up a school and pay off their debt, and then start a charity to do that and advocate for policy change.

I think people don't realise how much impact they can have when they just take action. You don't have to be anyone special.

//edit//** Or rather, lunch debt does not exist. Free lunch shaming definitely does. A colleague that had free school meals told me that at her school, people with free school meals had to get their meals last.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#547

Post by sneak »

notnaut wrote: post #504
RS-232 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subhuman is a rather severe (and incredibly reductionist) judgement. Sure, being anti-free lunch for children is morally objectionable… but they’ve failed to probe that line of reasoning. They’ve encountered a bug, but instead of debugging it, they’ve closed their IDE and walked away. Sometimes an honest conversation—with carefully placed, introspective questions—can be revealing to all parties. When we use our tongu…

This, and there’s something all-too human about ignoring or even basking in the suffering of others, including children. Pretending it’s somehow less than human to be on that side of things feels a bit head-in-sand.

A certain amount of ignoring human suffering is positively required to exist in the modern world, otherwise it would be an impossible-to-defend-against exploit to walk up to happy people in the first world and say “ten thousand children die every day from lack of access to clean water”, because then you would permanently alter or ruin their life.

FWIW this is true on Earth today.

It is required to turn a blind eye to slavery and oppression and hunger and thirst and preventable death and disease otherwise it would be impossible to have any semblance of a happy life in the good parts of the world, because the scale of preventable human suffering is both epic and, thus far, neverending.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#548

Post by derelicta »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #417
heresjohnny wrote: post #367

As someone from Europe, I had heard before about bankrupting ambulance rides, slavery in prisons, and food deserts. I did not expect to add “lunch money humiliation ritual” to that list. I’ll think of this next time I complain about my 50% income tax.

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Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#549

Post by j16sdiz »

timewizard wrote: post #364
Dylan16807 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Child labor Are you serious. > Because /some/ children struggle to eat enough? They said "without kids", not without this particular program. > Carrying everyone who can't walk is not a universal good. Particularly when some of those people can't walk because of a tiny, temporary, and highly solvable problem. > Now you have people who make it their career to carry people. Their motivations are to carry as many peop…

> Are you serious. Yes. I'm calling into question the idea that modern treatment of children is responsible for the world we live in. Clearly it is not given the relative scarcity of it in our history. I'm not saying we shouldn't give children a free lunch just that the OPs reasoning was rather lofty and detached from history. > They said "without kids", not without this particular program. They're replying to someon…

Extended families, charity and churches exists long before public school exists.

They have been taking similar role before the industrial revolution.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#550

Post by homebrewer »

amelius wrote: post #544
blueflow wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch ? Might be a cultural thing to not like that word.

I have deleted this comment because this discussion is going nowhere.

He's absolutely right. As someone whose society suffered very heavy losses from the Nazis, this is the first thing that came to my mind when I read the root comment. It's like posting swastikas online and then dismissing concerned replies because "it's a Buddhist sign, what are you on about?"
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