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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

#591

Many people, especially in our subculture, tend to feel like if they can't solve an entire problem forever, if they can't Change The World, what they're doing is futile and pointless But most people can't change the world. Most individuals shouldn't have the power to change the world. What we can do is be a force for good in the lives that are proximal to us. If we can make a few people's lives better, we should rest…

On the other hand, people pushing for incremental improvements on narrow issues while maintaining motivated ignorance of 2nd and 3rd order consequences multiplied by scale is exactly how we get the perverse systems we have.

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

#592
Upon seeing the term "school lunch debt", I was confused. My country has had free school lunches for all students since before I was born. Not a matter of economy or socialism, I thought, for everyone can afford food, but just convenience.

"7-year-old clarity" indeed.

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

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's astonishing this is a thing." Indeed, any decent modern society should provide free quality education, and that should include free quality meals. Especially the richest country in the world.

America provides food stamps that provide groceries to those who need it. However, I'm not sure it is the responsibility of a "decent modern society" to provide free quality meals to the populace. How far does this go? Does the government need to run restaurants? Vouchers to use at restaurants? I'm not convinced restaurants are even serving necessarily "quality meals". I think a program providing groceries is a good…

I didn't say free restaurants for everyone, that's a ridiculous extrapolation.

But it is the responsibility of a decent modern society to ensure kids get at least a basic level of care and education. Morally, and in fact in the interests of having a decently educated and functional society.

For foodstamp groceries, are you expecting the kids to prepare their own lunch? It seems like another callous 'personal responsibility' argument.

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

#594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't talking about the Netherlands per se, but wanted to pinpoint that alternatives exist in places other than the US, which ensure that no kid starves. In fact, my comment was an add-on to yours, as we followed the same system as you guys do in NL.

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

#595
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids don't go to all schools: they go to their school. So by fixing things in one school, any school, you're really fixing things for all the kids that go there.

This is why the wealthy should be required to use public schools.

People who send kids to private schools pay taxes (which fund schools) but don’t take resources from public schools.

Forcing them to use the public schools would further divide the tax funding across more kids, reducing the funds available per kid.

This suggestion is reminiscent of California trying to reduce educational inequality by eliminating advanced math classes and putting everyone together. It was a terrible idea, but it made sense to someone looking for what they thought was an easy solution.

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

#596
post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this also the tragedy of the commons problem though? It only takes a few bad actors to not take care of their own area and over time, those that are doing extra to make up for them eventually feel like they're being taken advantage of. I feel like in Japan it works because the culture adds enough social pressure that those not doing their part fall in line - or something. I don't think most western culture has…

The only thing that changes behavior is consequences. Thus fines and a functioning justice system are born. Somehow shame doesn't work anymore.

I think shame fails to work when people can broadcast online a version of events that makes them look like the victim and get tons of people backing them up.

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

#597
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused - where did they say that?

They said that implicitly by choosing to debate a trivial sentence designed to impart the reader with the sense of importance that this principle holds for the OP. This kind of tone policing is a tactic designed to pull you away from the original argument.

Or maybe they just don't think wishing ill upon someone for having a different world view than you or I is an reasonable thought?

I think school meals should be free, I do not wish harm to anyone who disagrees on that. People disagree all the time, I don't start calling them subhuman

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

#598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can do both, especially given the latter pays dividends. People moan about the US's domination on the world stage because it obviously benefits you, collectively, as a country, substantially. Foreigners are always insisting on this to me, but they're never able to come up with concrete examples that are very compelling. The US was doing absolutely fine prior to WW2, back when we didn't feel Europe was our proble…

> The US was doing absolutely fine prior to WW2, back when we didn't feel Europe was our problem. Our economy was going like gangbusters during that period in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

Well sure, I might as well link you to info on the 2008 crash to demonstrate that the modern US economy is just as broken.

Here are some interesting facts from the Wikipedia page you linked:

* "The economic contagion began in 1929 in the United States, the largest economy in the world" -- i.e. we were doing really well, as I said: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Gr...

* "with the devastating Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929" -- sounds like it didn't have much to do with a failure to defend Europe

* If you're going to try to argue that tariffs worsened the Great Depression -- I'm not advocating tariffs. I didn't vote for Trump btw. I hope Europeans take my comments on HN as a wake-up call that even Democrats like me are getting fed up with them. (I don't advocate a gold standard either.)

* "Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who from 1933 pursued a set of expansive New Deal programs in order to provide relief and create jobs." If you think the New Deal ended the depression, which some economists appear to believe, that's basically an argument for the "welfare state" course I'm advocating.

* As far as I can tell, literally no one argues for the position you're implying, that the Depression was caused by the lack of a NATO-type alliance:

>The precise causes for the Great Depression are disputed. One set of historians, for example, focuses on non-monetary economic causes. Among these, some regard the Wall Street crash itself as the main cause; others consider that the crash was a mere symptom of more general economic trends of the time, which had already been underway in the late 1920s.[3][8] A contrasting set of views, which rose to prominence in the later part of the 20th century,[9] ascribes a more prominent role to failures of monetary policy. According to those authors, while general economic trends can explain the emergence of the downturn, they fail to account for its severity and longevity; they argue that these were caused by the lack of an adequate response to the crises of liquidity that followed the initial economic shock of 1929 and the subsequent bank failures accompanied by a general collapse of the financial markets.[1]

Fun fact: Chaos in Europe might have even been good for the US economy:

>According to Christina Romer, the money supply growth caused by huge international gold inflows was a crucial source of the recovery of the United States economy, and that the economy showed little sign of self-correction. The gold inflows were partly due to devaluation of the U.S. dollar and partly due to deterioration of the political situation in Europe.[56]

I advocate a Swiss foreign policy for the US. We should have a much stronger default towards neutrality, and stop being so eager to sanction so-called "bad actors" like Russia. That will strengthen the USD as a reserve currency, since central banks won't feel as much need to diversify away from it in order to beat sanctions.

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

#599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do both, especially given the latter pays dividends. People moan about the US's domination on the world stage because it obviously benefits you, collectively, as a country, substantially. The US gets tremendously wealthy off the power and influence it buys with the way it acts on the world stage (as well as unparalleled safety and security). Which is why it grates and/or is mystifying when you complain about…

>You can do both, especially given the latter pays dividends. People moan about the US's domination on the world stage because it obviously benefits you, collectively, as a country, substantially. Foreigners are always insisting on this to me, but they're never able to come up with concrete examples that are very compelling. The US was doing absolutely fine prior to WW2, back when we didn't feel Europe was our proble…

>It's very simple. I want the dollars spent defending Europe to be spent here at home.

Presumably you would still like to spend some dollars defending the US? How many dollars do you think is the difference? (keep in mind there are many nonlinearities in defense spending: you can very easily cut spending by 20% and wind up with 20% of the capability instead of 80%) The US's presense in Europe is very much strategically part of the US defending itself.

>I want the US to switch to emphasizing "growth" and "welfare state", and let the Europeans handle their own continent. The fact that Europe has historically underinvested in growth and military is very much their problem.

If Europe ceased to be an ally to the US and instead became hostile (due to being occipied by e.g. Russia), then it very much would be the US's problem.

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

#600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is ridiculous. I'm a socialist and I believe that people should have far more of life's necessities provided to them by the state; I think supermarkets should be nationalised; I think water and electricity should be free up to a limit. on the other hand, this "people disagree with me about something sensitive so they're unevolved and/or subhuman" lark is childish as fuck and completely hypocritical people think…

No, there, at least in the USA, a large amount of very dumb people. They also tend to be quite sadistic as well, thinking 'those people' deserve the sadism and torment. This percolates through our whole society, one case of which is this scholastic food 'debt'. And also, during some of Biden's years, there was a few years of free school lunches. And was also summarily cancelled. Even democrats have this pervasive 'th…

you're proving my point. people think these things because, as you say, they're instilled in the American national mentality. it makes sense to think that's wrong, it makes sense to think people should think for themselves and try to engage their empathy circuits for people not in their immediate family, but it's taking it a million steps too far to say they're subhuman or unevolved, and it's not helping anything anyway. perhaps it was too far to say that it's rarely because they're stupid though
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