81–90 of 382 posts
Care does scale and the human race is evidence of that. It is centralisation that doesn't scale well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then I'm completely lost on how it is relevant to an article that specifically mentions the care of orphans as its central example for how care does not scale.
I think the idea is that many totalitarian systems treat every child as an orphan, in some cases taking them physically away from their parents and then have people look after the children as a job. Hence the comparable situation. And, of course, all such systems I've ever read about do not care about the practical limitation of 1 caretaker per 1 child. I believe youth services in the Netherlands, for example, has 1…
This idea is just wrong. Wrong isn't strong enough, it's conterfactual. At most some of them treated female bodies as owned by the state. I do not remember any example of totalitarian society where a child of a political opposant would be treated the same as any military child. Maybe Salazar? But even then, it was so corporate-aligned I doubt children from owners were treated the same as children from workers at anytime.
This is ultimately a dichotomy between having the family unit or "the state" as the central point of governance. Many totalitarian regimes looked at newborns as "belonging to the state". The result is a unified mass person who dresses, thinks and acts in predictable ways. The more power, personal connection and influence parents have over their children, the more diverse society will become.
Totalitarian regimes often uphold traditional values like family as a means of control, promoting unity and loyalty to the state-yet they’ll redefine these values whenever it suits their ideology.
The reason why totalitarian regimes end up promoting traditional values relations is that to them the only imperative superior to ideology is survival.
There is a reason the Soviet Union backed off from it's repression of religion in the middle of WW2.
> But I wonder if part of that smaller focus comes from a deep realization that care doesn’t scale. My experience (and I believe it to be common) is that I'm really, really, really out of spare energy to care about anyone or anything else. Mind you, I'm in my best shape in years and I've explored my limits to find out they're actually way further than I originally thought, but still.
There was a story on HN a while ago that I can't seem to remember the title of. It was something along the lines of "The optimal amount of slack in an organization is not zero", or something like that. The argument was that, since it's impossible to plan for every eventuality, you need a certain amount of slack capacity in order to retain some flexibility. And that by always using 100% capacity, we end up dysfunction…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or importing even more foreign workers. Which I'm not strictly against, but does come with it's own set of challenges.
>Or importing even more foreign workers. Except you can't force foreign workers to do shit jobs the locals don't want. They're not slaves.
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No, because normal healthy children do not require 24/7 care, even as newborns. Children in care do, partly because of the circumstances that led to them being in care, but mostly because the State in general is not willing to accept the same risk profile as individual parents.
I think it comes down to the many meaning of the word "care" in English. The state is certainly willing to accept way greater risk than the individual parent, in many circumstances. If we take something like daycare, which I presume is included in "care", then it's typically four children per adult until the age of 4, in schools it goes down to 20+ children per one adult, where at home it might be more than two adult…
I don't think that's true.
> If we take something like daycare, which I presume is included in "care", then it's typically four children per adult until the age of 4, in schools it goes down to 20+ children per one adult, where at home it might be more than two adults per child (but also less obviously).
That's a much lower care ratio than parents accepted before regulation, so I think you're arguing against your own point here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or importing even more foreign workers. Which I'm not strictly against, but does come with it's own set of challenges.
>Or importing even more foreign workers. Except you can't force foreign workers to do shit jobs the locals don't want. They're not slaves.
Foreign workers are improving their lot (and that of their families back home). In a world where they don't have the same economic opportunities in their home countries, and the locals don't want to do those "shit jobs", it's a win win.
Even talking about shit jobs is pejorative. Foreign workers don't just pick fruit, they're also essential talent in healthcare and other critical areas.
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I don't think there is any contradiction here. Government care can work, but it simply cannot benefit from economies of scale. Gonna need to double the income tax to pay for elders that have been abandoned by their children.
You mean the elders who failed to take care of themselves, assuming someone else would do it for them.