841–850 of 918 posts
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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.
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The world is not black or white, there are many reasons that parents may not apply for that, and deciding how child services should intervene in each case is much harder and time consuming problem than just providing free lunch to kids. It makes no sense to not solve the easy problem first.
Except that's a false solution. That does nothing to fix the neglect at home, especially over weekends and summers.
Yes weekends and summer is a still problem in terms of food, I am not sure how it could be solved, but it is definitely not solved by not giving food the rest of the year too.
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> 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…
To have this program exist requires children that can be trusted you got that completely wrong. it requires adults that teach children how to behave. Japan was able to do this by pressuring its citizens & youth to pay the cultural toll needed to get there, and it was a toll that *everyone* had to pay into now that is just offensive. this is how japanese culture developed. there was no toll to achieve it. (there are s…
Just in my direct environment are two elementary schoolers that despair of going to school (and one stopped entirely).
It really kills me that kids come out of school looking like that.
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Yet he is unwilling to cut a single cent, indeed there's a 13% increase for defense spending https://www.airandspaceforces.com/trump-proposes-1-trillion-...
Well hopefully he at least pulls out of NATO to give subsequent presidents room to decrease spending.
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NATO and all other forms of collectivized security make a static level of defense cheaper to achieve. America does not subsidize NATO. In fact, NATO asks each member country to spend 2% of their budget on defense, primarily by purchasing expensive material (US has one of the higher spends on human resources for armies in NATO) from us. It's been a defense sector subsidy since the death of the USSR, right up until Tru…
>NATO and all other forms of collectivized security make a static level of defense cheaper to achieve. For Europe, maybe. But the US is spending way more than necessary to defend the homeland. I'm tired of it. That money should go towards our own people. Just like Europeans have been saying. I don't want to subsidize the US military-industrial complex.
Well you picked the wrong government for that!
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> 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…
Not caused by, but the economy didn’t fully recover until all the wartime production started, and the measures that had been put in place to curb unemployment had been short term solutions with only a limited effect
> I hope Europeans take my comments on HN as a wake-up call that even Democrats like me are getting fed up with them.
You see the problem with you people is that you’ve strong armed your way into everyone’s business for the past century, trying to change cultures and ways of life, far beyond simple alliances - only to now turn around and abandon your so-called allies as soon as they become inconvenient for you. I say this as an African living in Europe who experienced firsthand one of your regime changes and subsequent cutting of ties when the new regime didn’t align
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Plenty of people would find ways to hide what's going in instead, and plenty would try but fail. And the notion of imprisoning people instead of simply covering a minor cost, and then harming their children further by taking them out of homes unless there are more serious reasons to that can't be trivially mitigated just comes across as brutally cruel and demonstrating a wildly irrational willingness to harm your own…
No, you’re conflating two things: subsidizing the poor (eg food stamps) and subsidizing education. We don’t subsidize the education of children for just the poor - we subsidize the education of children for EVERYONE, including families that can afford to pay for their own luxury choices like having children. This isn’t about letting children go without. This is about who out of two families, one with kids and one wit…
That you want to opt out of participating in meeting a critical need in society is indeed a moral issue. You should be free to opt out. But then society should be equally free to deny you access to use all resources funded by society, like public roads, and anything else tax funded. Letting you pick and choose would be equally morally fraught as denying you an out.
But you have an out: You can move somewhere with different policies.
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Part of the point of the Japanese way is to communicate that keeping public spaces clean is everyone’s responsibility. Paying kids for it communicates the opposite.
You have pushing (social pressure) and pulling (payment) motivators and there are small didactive tasks to teach children the worthyness of effort up to large societal goals, taught with them. Your comparison is weird. Expecting payment does not make you a self centeted capitalist. Children could become one if they seen the normalization of exploitation all around, when payment is more then just fair compensation but…
The relevant aspect of Japan that is special here is that beyond the classroom, in all aspects of society, people take care of the commons, without compensation. Paying kids for cleaning means that they’re off the hook when you don’t pay them; Japanese society has everyone taking care of public spaces because it’s a common social expectation, not because they’re compensated or rewarded in any way for it.
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>NATO and all other forms of collectivized security make a static level of defense cheaper to achieve. For Europe, maybe. But the US is spending way more than necessary to defend the homeland. I'm tired of it. That money should go towards our own people. Just like Europeans have been saying. I don't want to subsidize the US military-industrial complex.
> I don't want to subsidize the US military-industrial complex. Well you picked the wrong government for that!
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As noted by an earlier reply ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905660 ), I agree with the first 3 paragraphs. The last paragraph, however, is a launch in accusations, and will be treated as such. ---- > What's interesting to me is that you seem to think that the status quo in the US is rightly defensible. You're already reading into something that doesn't exist. The underlying cultural axioms of the US are, in…
The comment I replied to defended US individualism and criticised the Japanese "cultural toll". I am not "reading into something that doesn't exist", it's what I'm specifically replying to. Cultural choices are indeed a mixed bag, that was my point: everyone has them, and they're different, and you have to make choices. You might be right that partisanship occurs in alternatives to individualism, but my point is that…
The comment you replied to came from *me*. It was *me* that you replied to with:
> > > What's interesting to me is that you seem to think that the status quo in the US is rightly defensible.
In response to:
> > Whilst there can be pockets of local communities that can do this, the probability that the same thing can happen everywhere in the US is close to zero, given the cultural emphasis placed on individualism.
> > It is also from this emphasis of individual exceptionalism where there can be no guarantees that everyone will pay the cultural toll. It must be everyone, or this proposal won't work: It'll just be another form of subsidization by another name.
What was written noted the significant costs needed to get the program to both be (1) off the ground, and (2) self-sustaining via the community, *because* of the emphasis placed on individualism.
Nowhere in the given statements *from me* was there a defense for US individualism. Despite my general positive attitude (approx 0.3, within the range -1 to 1) towards the ideal of such a cultural axiom, *in this specific case*, it hinders the adoption & maintenance of such a program.
> I am not "reading into something that doesn't exist", it's what I'm specifically replying to.
What you replied to was not there to begin with.
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> Cultural choices are indeed a mixed bag, that was my point: everyone has them, and they're different, and you have to make choices.
Any attempts at conveying such a point were torpedoed by these 2 sentences:
> > > Looking in from afar with limited skin in the game I'd argue it looks really, really dumb. This "individualism" (but where the courts get to tell people who they are and what they can believe when it comes to certain issues that have religious or historical undertones), seems to be leading to a fractured partisan nation where everyone hates anyone who even slightly disagrees with them.
Both stances cannot be maintained simultaneously: It's either the negative stance that was originally posted, *or* the more neutral stance given afterwards.
Again, and as noted by another user, you mangled your own argument with the last paragraph.