I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt • Hacker News Board

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

#651

Post by Rhapso » Tue, May 06, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

mystified5016 wrote: post #650

Rhapso wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Getting this upset over a grammar joke is not healthy.

Assuming this message is in good faith, I appreciate your concern for my mental health.

I appear to have attracted the trolls, which is ok. That happens when you stand up to them. I don't tolerate bullies going ignored. I'm serious, but not as upset as you may be concerned.

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

#652

Post by Aurornis » Tue, May 06, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #630

Aurornis wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand the argument, but I’m trying to point out that similar claims were made about eliminating advanced math classes in California and it did not work at all.

I think the claim appeals to some people because they’re bought in to the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes, and therefore if you force them into your space and restrict their rights to other options they will use that extreme influence to improve the situation for everyone.

Yet in practice it doesn’t work, and we’ve seen it play out. In California the parents who cared about their kids’ math scores just gave up on school math classes and hired tutors or did their own at-home tutoring (at great sacrifice, especially for the non-wealthy). With school lunches you would just see parents with means sending their kids to school with good prepared lunches. I suppose the next logical extension is to ban wealthy parents from sending their kids in with lunches and hope that it will set off the chain of events that’s supposed to make them fix the problem for everyone.

Where I live our school budgets and funding are partially up for vote on the ballot every election cycle. It’s not for the wealthy to decide, it’s just a public vote. And things still aren’t passing easily. I think people reach for the wealthy as an easy excuse for who to blame, but whenever I look at the ballot results it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the general public is averse to increasing school budgets right now.

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

#653

Post by mschuster91 » Tue, May 06, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

framapotari wrote: post #497

verisimi wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this: we give all people all meals, clothes, housing, heating (all essentials) and spending money so that they can explore their interests, travel, etc?

If we're doing this, let's look at the other extreme as well: We give all people, including children, nothing as they are expected to take responsibility for themselves. No education, no services, no law enforcement, no roads, nothing at all. These are both obviously silly examples. The 'Where do we draw the line?!' answer can in this case be answered with 'On the side that feeds hungry children'.

> If we're doing this, let's look at the other extreme as well: We give all people, including children, nothing as they are expected to take responsibility for themselves. No education, no services, no law enforcement, no roads, nothing at all.

In that case, people will always self-organise such structures anyway. Even amongst the most failed of the failed states, eventually you will end up with at least someone claiming to be the chief law enforcer (of whatever kind), someone to look after the kids (i.e. education) while the rest works to provide for food, and some sort of fire brigade.

It will just be many orders of magnitude more inefficient than what a large government that governs more than a few dozen to hundred people can establish.

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

#654

Post by Aurornis » Tue, May 06, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

erikerikson wrote: post #642

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…

I get your math and appreciate the insight within it. At the same time, PTAs accept cash which when not being spent on private school is available. The challenge is getting those parents to allocate it when it will be spread across the entire student body. Far more impactful is the factor of alignment of incentives that given wealthy families' generally greater proximity to power can deliver funding. I liked this: it…

> At the same time, PTAs accept cash which when not being spent on private school is available.

I think this is magical thinking underlying the concept: That wealthy parents will step up to provide money to privately fund the public schools for everyone.

We have plenty of evidence that the is just isn’t the case, though. People spend that money on things like sending their kids to school with their own lunches and hiring private tutors.

When parents have lost faith in a school’s ability to provide good education (or lunches, or activities, etc) they don’t think the best course of action is to send the school a lot of money and hope for the best. They take matters into their own hands, outside of school.

The entire concept is built on layers of wishful thinking that just aren’t supported.

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

#655

Post by pfannkuchen » Tue, May 06, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

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]

I am just an enjoyer of garden path sentences.

I don’t expect people to be editing their comments for absolute maximum clarity on here, so it wasn’t a critique.

When I’m reading and my mind does a reparse, I feel amusement, I suppose because of the mild confusion followed by a brief puzzle solving exercise followed by understanding. The brain (or some brains, including mine, anyway) seems to treat this flavor of tension->resolution as humorous, as with other flavors of tension->resolution humor like taboo violation in a safe space, or close friends pretending to be about to hit each other.

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

#656

Post by Aurornis » Tue, May 06, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC

RandallBrown wrote: post #301

iandanforth wrote: post #232

On 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.

On the internet it’s easy to forget that the US education system is extremely heterogeneous. There isn’t one set of practices or laws that are shared across the country. It’s very local.

For me, I can barely remember school provided lunches existing as something that a small handful of students got. The majority of students brought a lunchbox from home that our parents prepared.

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

#657

Post by Rhapso » Tue, May 06, 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

pfannkuchen wrote: post #655

Rhapso wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I am just an enjoyer of garden path sentences. I don’t expect people to be editing their comments for absolute maximum clarity on here, so it wasn’t a critique. When I’m reading and my mind does a reparse, I feel amusement, I suppose because of the mild confusion followed by a brief puzzle solving exercise followed by understanding. The brain (or some brains, including mine, anyway) seems to treat this flavor of tens…

That is wonderful to hear. Thank you for sharing this.

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

#658

Post by wredcoll » Tue, May 06, 2025, 3:08 PM UTC

boneitis wrote: post #388

socalgal2 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can want kids to be fed and fully believe that the government giving out free meal to all kids will eventually lead to kids not being feed. I can think of lots of arguments Budgets might be cut directly, so can not feed some percent, budgets might be cut indirectly (less tax revenue). Giving out free food might make people feel entitled and less likely to learn to be self sufficient. The "give a man a fish he eat…

I feel it on those concerns, though after all, I think the point of some people's stances is that everybody should be able to take free (and dignified) student lunches for granted, as sensible as the fish-vs-how-to-fish adage is in general. I think the concern about entitlement better applies when looking out for vultures taking advantage of these campaigners' goodwill by trying to wedge themselves into the middle of…

> I think the concern about entitlement better applies when looking out for vultures taking advantage of these campaigners' goodwill by trying to wedge themselves into the middle of any cashflow for as-optimizably-marginal-as-possible contribution to those pipelines. Of course, I'm thinking of this more in some context of if there was a sort of centralized campaign to scale up efforts, say, statewide or nationwide (pardon my U.S-centric perspective), to solicit donations to pay off a bunch of schools' lunch debts in a region.

What on earth does this paragraph have to do with the position that school children should receive free lunch?

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

#659

Post by Suppafly » Tue, May 06, 2025, 3:08 PM UTC

gregw134 wrote: post #305

staplers wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt like a big part of my childhood had been sold to the lowest bidder. It was. Most local procurement laws enforce this.

In our case, sold to the bidder who gave kickbacks to the district supervisor.

we had pepsi machines in my middle school because the pepsi distributor in town "donated" a new score board.

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

#660

Post by ceejayoz » Tue, May 06, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #595

pnutjam wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

They're working very hard to change that. https://apnews.com/article/texas-school-vouchers-ec901398f7f...

"Texas will implement a $1 billion school voucher program, one of the largest in the country, that uses public dollars to fund private school tuition under a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed Saturday, capping off a yearslong effort by Republicans… Texas joins more than 30 other states that have implemented a similar program, of which about a dozen have launched or expanded their programs in recent years to make most students eligible."