Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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.
I laughed out loud.
I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
631–640 of 918 posts
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#632On the off chance you're interested in school lunches I highly recommend watching videos of Japanese school lunches on YouTube. There's a bunch out there now and if you were raised in the American system it will probably blow your mind. The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children are active participants in serving and cleaning up is just crazy. When I encountered it for…
> The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children are active participants in serving and cleaning up is just crazy. > When I encountered it for the first time I felt like a big part of my childhood had been sold to the lowest bidder. ....I share the sentiment, but I also see the chasm between the requirements to get to what's desired, & what's actually given to meet those r…
Every other part of the school operates on the assumption that kids can behave, learn things, and do stuff.
There is no need to paint it as some kind of cultural/racial narrative. American children could, in fact, have more civilized lunch behavior if it was desired by the adults in charge.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#633Many 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…
> Most individuals shouldn't have the power to change the world.
This is a great insight. I have a tendency to think grandiose thoughts about the impact I should be having on the world, but there's really no reason that any of us should be able to make an outsized impact.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my favorite quotes: > "I was in the Air Force a while, and they had what they call 'policing the area,' and I think that’s a pretty good thing to go by. If everyone just takes care of their own area, then we won’t have any problems. Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there. And look around you, and see what needs to be changed." -Willie Nelson
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.” — Gandalf
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Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's assume (bad assumption, but it should be good enough for the math) that a Happy Meal™®© is a decent meal. It costs about $6 around here, so let's say without toy it's $5. https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp says there are 71 million kids. $466 billion a year. Ok, ok, that is maybe too high. Let's assume a wonderful world where you can produce a meal for a dollar (less than the local scho…
If a school lunch is served for free, then parents who would have bought that lunch now get to keep the money. If we would raise taxes to fund these programs, it's possible the majority of people could actually save money.
Nothing else changing, the families who were paying for lunch would come out ahead (they lose the expense, but taxes are over EVERYONE, and most people don't have school-aged children).
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even a very low fare still needs a huge and costly infrastructure around to enforce it
Here in Queensland we just paid $400 million for a ticketing system that is now used entirely for 50c tickets. The marketing line is that the fee is necessary for analytics, but the cynic in me says that it's probably a combination of secret contract negotiations with a pay-per-tap component, and sunk cost fallacy.
I liked it when the ticketing systems were the simple ticket dispensers and maybe some transit cops checking for your ticket.
Millions and millions for apps and taps and other worthless junk is annoying, and the recovery barely pays for the machines, let alone the lines.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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.
If it is a joke, it seems more like mockery than good humor.
> I understand humor might be too foreign and loose for people on HN but trust me, there was no maliciousness in their comment.
Adding your own mockery doesn't help with my perception of the situation.
Malice isn't required to do harm and it's absence doesn't really change my opinion on the situation.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#638On the off chance you're interested in school lunches I highly recommend watching videos of Japanese school lunches on YouTube. There's a bunch out there now and if you were raised in the American system it will probably blow your mind. The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children are active participants in serving and cleaning up is just crazy. When I encountered it for…
Maybe this wasn't all over the US, but in the 90s I helped serve and clean up our elementary school lunches. There was a rotation through all of the older classrooms.
Mind sharing which school?
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure where to even begin with this, but a large part of why free school lunches exist is that there are many kids in abusive or simply desperately poor families who do not get fed properly, meaning that the school lunch may be the only decent meal they get. > Not giving people free things is not a punishment. This is absurd. Kids don't have money to purchase what they need, so parents have a duty to feed, clo…
>meaning that the school lunch may be the only decent meal they get "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." By giving away food you are getting people stuck in a bad situation. Preventing a reconfiguration of people's lives. A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustain…
> Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
It’s a lot easier to teach someone when they aren’t starving.
Teaching someone to fish almost certainly requires giving them a fish.
That’s how teaching works. First you do it for them, then you ask them to try and you help them when they falter.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#640Earlier 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…
You swept the issue of fraudulent social security disability claims under the rug. It seems apparent to me that your attitude toward individual level accountability is one that denies agency of the individual and ascribes their moral failures as a result of societal-level problems. After all, there is no moral hazard when individuals have no moral agency to begin with.
I posted about it in a different little branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43903848
TL;DR: the average disability recipient age has hovered ~50 (stddev 1.54 years) since 1960. The theory of "baby boomers are a huge generation, they got old and US health care sucks ass" is far more parsimonious than your theory of individual accountability, which has to explain why every generation suddenly becomes fraudulent/immoral/unaccountable at the exact same point in their lives.