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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

#621

Post by Aurornis »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #615
Aurornis wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The idea is around the wealthy having the incentive to financially support public schools.

Public schools are funded by taxes. Wealthy people already pay those taxes.

If you force everyone to use the public schools, you’re just dividing the tax money across more students.

In the context of school lunch, they would just send their kids to school with a packed lunch.

The whole concept of forbidding people from taking advantage of other educational opportunities is half-baked class warfare fodder. It doesn’t make sense if you think about the numbers, but it appeals to people who are more interested in punishing wealthy people than fixing the situation.

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

#622

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

> I'm calling into question the idea that modern treatment of children is responsible for the world we live in.

> They're replying to someone with the obvious implication that this program is in some way critical to children "learning and becoming productive members of society."

They were not saying it's "critical" or that the specific treatment of children is responsible for anything.

It was a very simple argument that everyone should care about children growing up well because we need them.

> Does this career have the effect of increasing the number of children they care for in exchange for greater profits?

This doesn't make any sense. I understand your incentive argument but what is Big Lunch going to do, make pro-birthrate propaganda? We're already sending children to schools and expecting them to eat the school lunch by default. It doesn't matter who pays as long as the school has motivation to reduce costs.

> The tragedy here being that schools consider their primary obligation to the child and not to the family. So when parents are in a situation where they cannot care for their children successfully, for whatever reason, we completely ignore the core problem and instead patch over it.

It would cost so so much more to do that, and while I agree that it would be good, fixing poverty is super far outside the scope of a school's job.

> Worse it can sometimes create negative stigma for the child and work to further destabilize their living situation.

This is an argument for giving all students free meals. No stigma.

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

#623

Post by blueflow »

amelius wrote: post #616
blueflow wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like you, probably, I got a very systemizing brain and had trouble understanding this for decades. What the dictionaries say about the words does not matter - what is offensive to other people does not follow any system, but their feelings. And that means its arbitrary and you have probably no chance to know it ahead of time. I feel your pain, tho.

I hope you understand that by acting offended, you are offending other people, making them say things they are not saying.

Yes. This is very exploitable.

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

#624

Post by bgnn »

mettamage wrote: post #437
bgnn wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, dry bread and cheese..

Read the HN guidelines. I didn't downvote you, as I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, but it reads as a sarcastic snarky comment [1]. It's bread, butter and cheese. Not dry bread and cheese. I didn't eat that as a kid though, I hated cheese when I was young. The quality of the bread varies, depending on the views of the household. The way I grew up everyone favored white bread but me. I always ate brown bread.…

Hey, I'm Dutch and that was indeed a snarky comment coming from my own experience. Sorry that it's a big deal for you, or others it seems. That wasn't the intention.

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

#625

Post by beart »

giantg2 wrote: post #238
freehorse wrote: post #163

I feel like this has already been discussed before one million times more than the simplicity of the issue should require. Any income etc based coupon system is inefficient and automatically excludes a big portion of children that such measures are supposed to be for, eg because a lot of them come from families that are too dysfunctional to apply for those, ignorant of them due to language and other barriers, or beca…

"it is a total moral bankruptcy for a society to have their children starve for their parents dysfunction." Sounds like child services should take those children then? If they can't apply for the lunches, then surely they aren't getting food at home, nor the proper medical care.

What do you propose to do with these children, once they have been taken away from their families?

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

#626

Post by bgnn »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #559
mettamage wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the HN guidelines. I didn't downvote you, as I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, but it reads as a sarcastic snarky comment [1]. It's bread, butter and cheese. Not dry bread and cheese. I didn't eat that as a kid though, I hated cheese when I was young. The quality of the bread varies, depending on the views of the household. The way I grew up everyone favored white bread but me. I always ate brown bread.…

Brown bread is the superior one; white bread just feels like a snack, it doesn't last. Just not the whole grain, seedy, or extra dark ones, plain brown is fine.

Absolutely! I love rye bread too.

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

#627

Post by 9283409232 »

Rhapso wrote: post #618
pfannkuchen wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children Excellent garden path sentence.

[flagged]

They were just making a joke. I understand humor might be too foreign and loose for people on HN but trust me, there was no maliciousness in their comment.

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

#628

Post by m2024 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #609
kerkeslager wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like this seems like such a dividing line to me. Like, in theory when people believe things that are morally wrong, I want to reach out to them with compassion and respect and try to gently persuade them to my side because we're all, in theory, on the same side. But if you don't want kids to be fed, I really am not sure we're actually on the same side any more and I really am not sure what to do with that.

[flagged]

[dead]

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

#630

Post by dagw »

Aurornis wrote: post #621
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is around the wealthy having the incentive to financially support public schools.

Public schools are funded by taxes. Wealthy people already pay those taxes. If you force everyone to use the public schools, you’re just dividing the tax money across more students. In the context of school lunch, they would just send their kids to school with a packed lunch. The whole concept of forbidding people from taking advantage of other educational opportunities is half-baked class warfare fodder. It doesn’t…

Full disclosure, am a parent who sends their kid to a charter school and strong advocate for parents to be allowed to choose where to send their schools.

That being said, the strong version of the argument being made is that if all schools are funded nationally (so that schools in more affluent areas don't automatically get more money) and rich people and people of influence were forced to send their kids to the same public schools as every body else, then those people would be more inclined to use their influence to try to make public schools better and would be less inclined to fight against raising taxes to improve public education. Of course this would go against those peoples narrow self interest (since many of their kids would probably end up getting a worse education) so it is unlikely to happen

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