> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the whole thing. There is nothing good about ads, ever. If I want information about a product, I'll go looking for it, and I won't go to an advertiser. If I'm looking to watch a YouTube video, there is absolutely no condition under which I want to hear about a product unless that's explicitly what I went to that video to hear about.
All ads are lies. There is never an ad that tells you about the flaws in a product or compares it honestly to competing product. I'm simply not interested in being lied to.
ITT: advertisers, pretending there's something that could be changed about ads that would make them not ads.
Fundamentally, ads are bad. There just isn't a change you can make to ads that makes them okay.
At a personal level, ads distract us, they tell us we don't have enough, aren't attractive enough, just generally aren't enough. They don't inform us: a one-sided view of a product absent criticisms or comparison to competing products is effectively just a lie.
At an economic level, ads break any benefit to capitalism. Instead of companies competing to provide the best product at the lowest cost, ads make it so a worse product at a higher cost can become the market leader. Ads are one of the primary drivers of the enshittification of everything. Ads allow companies to launch with garbage products that nobody would ever pay money for, slap ads on them to monetize, and thereby prevent competing products actually worth paying for from ever even coming to market.
The only answer is to refuse, on principle, to view ads. If a company receives money from advertisers, you're the product, not the user. If a product has a "free" tier paid for by ads, paying to hide ads doesn't help because you're still competing with advertisers for that company's loyalty, and advertisers will always win in the end (i.e. ads in cable TV--mark my words, there will be ads in all the premium-tier streaming services eventually).
> They don't care about the code behind the scenes, what framework you used, etc as long as the software a) does what they want and b) does it "quick enough" in their opinion.
Business folks love to say this, but a lot of this time this is glossing over a pretty inherent coupling between code quality and doing what users want quick enough. I've worked on a lot of projects with messy code, and that mess always translated into problems which users cared about. There isn't some magical case where the code is bad and the software is great for the users--that's not a thing that exists, at least not for very long.
You're not communicating well--it's unclear what you mean by "hustle". It's also pretty unlikely that speaking in absolutes ("no engineer") is correct here.
It sounds a lot like you're saying "all engineers are lazy" and that's just obviously wrong.
And if that's what you're saying, you're unambiguously wrong on your overall point.
Plenty of engineers are building barely-functional products as fast (cheap, because time is money) as can be and doing a ton of volume. The entire Bangalore contractor scene was built this way, as well as a ton of small Western contractor shops. You honestly think no engineers understand undercutting competition? Really?
Committing to either "hustle" or "quality" is equally stupid. Quality is a means to an end goal, and eschewing quality is also a means to an end goal. And again, there are both business folks and engineers who are smart enough to choose when a focus on quality fits their goals and when it doesn't.
It sounds like you've bought into some ridiculous "sigma grindset" nonsense and you're now gatekeeping it as an identity. For your own good, stop. Contrary to what you seem to believe, hustles do fail, and if you close your mind to that possibility you're going to eventually hustle on the wrong thing and burn yourself out on a hustle that doesn't work. And even if you don't, you'll make yourself intolerable to anyone you'd want to interact with. It's not a good path.
> Committing to either "hustle" or "quality" is equally stupid.
Of course it is.
> It sounds like you've bought into some ridiculous "sigma grindset" nonsense and you're now gatekeeping it as an identity.
This kind of rationalistic bullshit is exactly what I make it my mission to rail against on HN. Speaking in a general sense can only be done well from an intuititionist perspective. My original post on this garnered 25 upvotes, quite above average these days. You're the one mistaking my generalization for gatekeeping, and it's precisely because you're holding on to a rationalist mindset, so you project that onto others.
All I was doing was committing to the bit. No half-measures for me. Nobody follows threads after the first day or so anyway. No harm in continuing discussions past the sell-by date.
> This kind of rationalistic bullshit is exactly what I make it my mission to rail against on HN. Speaking in a general sense can only be done well from an intuititionist perspective.
The terms "rationalist" and "institutionalist" you're using have too many different meanings in different contexts for this to be a meaningful set of sentences. Care to define your terms or use different ones so I can tell what you're talking about?
> My original post on this garnered 25 upvotes, quite above average these days.
I do not care how popular a wrong idea is. This is especially true on HN, where the focus on profit over humans has led to extremely harmful ideologies becoming popular.
> All I was doing was committing to the bit.
So this was supposed to be a joke? It was pretty unfunny.
> Care to define your terms or use different ones so I can tell what you're talking about?
Rationalist: someone who only values positivistic reasoning. Someone like this does not have a useful guide to truth and typically deigns to fill the role themselves.
Intuitionist: someone who is comfortable dealing in vague, messy, imprecision. The kind of stuff the real world is based on.
> I do not care how popular a wrong idea is.
I do not care whether you care or not or whether you think it's wrong or not. This is that 'not having a useful guide to truth so you deign to fill the role yourself'. If you had a useful guide to truth in this instance, your argument that it's wrong would be based on that, not just on your feelings.
I'll give an example so as to not leave you completely lost. If I told you 1+1=3, then you could prove it to me that I'm wrong. All you'd need is a few apples. This would be a positivistic approach to reasoning and since you're a rationalist, this is the kind of reasoning you value.
If you tried to convince me Naziism was the best political theory, I would have two fundamentally different ways to respond. I could try the rationalist way, to attempt to construct a convincing argument through the history of political movements, perhaps grounding my argument in the idea of best for most.
But intuitionist me knows that's a dumb plan, and would just solve it by having the bartender throw you out of the bar, no nazis allowed.
The reason the rationalist approach to the Nazi question doesn't work is because positivistic logic must flow from something and that something must be a settled place of knowledge, the justified true belief. Political philosophy isn't a positivistic domain. You can't prove Naziism isn't the best political philosophy because politics is one group of people having power over others. Nazis are immune to reason. That's why no nazis in bars.
When rationalists try to operate in non-positivistic domains, they get out of their element quickly, because rationalists tend to discount the humanities as useful fields to study, and so they have to substitute something other than knowledge to form positivistic arguments.
An intuitionist very much values the humanities and realizes, over time, the limitations of positivism. If you study enough of the humanities, you will form an intuitive view of the world that can survive being challenged, proof isn't as useful as the rationalist thinks it is. A rationalist's view of reality is thus brittle, while intuitionist understanding is flexible.
And so when you said I was buying into some sigma grindset bullshit, that's an example of rationalist reduction of someone's understanding as similar. In reality I was just intuitively wandering around the space of what different folks in and around business care about, using my experience in corporate America as a guide. I identified this idea of 'hustle' as separating two different mindsets and was trying to sketch a loose picture of what this was.
An fellow intuitionist would see exactly what I was trying to do, and would help with his own intuitive understandings of business. A rationalist is only interested in reductive determination, so you reductively deduced me to 'sigma grindset' guy.
Anyway, that was fun to write, even though I'm pretty sure you aren't going to follow.
> Rationalist: someone who only values positivistic reasoning. Someone like this does not have a useful guide to truth and typically deigns to fill the role themselves.
So... you basically define "rationalist" as someone who is wrong. Sounds like a pointless word to me. And let me guess, you're going to call me a rationalist later, rather than actually respond to anything I said? Let's continue and find out!
> Intuitionist: someone who is comfortable dealing in vague, messy, imprecision. The kind of stuff the real world is based on.
So... someone who doesn't use phrases like "no engineer" because they're obviously wrong in a messy, imprecise world?
It doesn't sound much like you're the intuitionist here, but I am sure you think you are!
> I do not care whether you care or not or whether you think it's wrong or not. This is that 'not having a useful guide to truth so you deign to fill the role yourself'. If you had a useful guide to truth in this instance, your argument that it's wrong would be based on that, not just on your feelings.
My argument wasn't based on my feelings. It's based on your beliefs. I'm appealing to your belief that popularity isn't equivalent to correctness. And if you're going to pretend you don't believe that, I'm out, because you're not making an honest argument.
> An fellow intuitionist would see exactly what I was trying to do, and would help with his own intuitive understandings of business. A rationalist is only interested in reductive determination, so you reductively deduced me to 'sigma grindset' guy.
Wow, what self-congratulatory nonsense.
Maybe, the intuitionist isn't interested in helping you reduce the world into two deterministic roles: hustling business people and quality-focused engineers. Maybe, the intuitionist's experience has led them to a very different intuition, because they actually care about understanding what other people are doing instead of congratulating themselves for getting a business degree.
To use your silly terminology, the intuitionist solution to people like you dismissing pretty obvious facts isn't to argue facts, because you're more interested in sounding smart than in reality. The solution is to dismiss your nonsense as "sigma grindset bullshit" or some equally pejorative AND ACCURATE description. The argumentative equivalent of kicking the Nazi out of the bar.
Believe it or not, one can be an intuitionist without losing interest in the truth. One can both kick the Nazi out of the bar and argue against Nazism.
But hey, if you want to work yourself to death on a hustle that fails because you think hustling sounds masculine, have at that sigma grindset bro. All I ask is that you don't spread that mental illness.
> But hey, if you want to work yourself to death on a hustle that fails because you think hustling sounds masculine, have at that sigma grindset bro.
Lol. I trade the markets. One trade, ten minutes. Then I catch up on socials, close up the machine then do whatever the hell I want. You wouldn't catch me dead doing anything remotely resembling hustling. Read my essay again. Or don't!
You're really like a dog with a bone, aren't you. Let me be explicit. I was not spreading any kind of ideology. You just believed i was. And because I didn't argue with you in the precise way you wanted me to argue you with, just doubled down on your preconceptions. Letting reactionary emotions be your guide instead of the logic you think you were arguing from.
That's true, but it's dependent on the creator of the PDF having aligned incentives with the consumer of the PDF.
In the e-Discovery field, it's commonplace for those providing evidence to dump it into a PDF purely so that it's harder for the opposing side's lawyers to consume. If both sides have lots of money this isn't a barrier, but for example public defenders don't have funds to hire someone (me!) to process the PDFs into a readable format, so realistically they end up taking much longer to process the data, which takes a psychological toll on the defendant. And that's if they process the data at all.
The solution is to make it illegal to do this: wiretap data, for example, should be provided in a standardized machine-readable format. There's no ethical reason for simple technical friction to be affecting the outcomes of criminal proceedings.
> The solution is to make it illegal to do this: wiretap data, for example, should be provided in a standardized machine-readable format. There's no ethical reason for simple technical friction to be affecting the outcomes of criminal proceedings.
I can’t speak to wiretaps specifically, but when it comes to the legal field, this is usually already how it operates. GDPR, for example, makes specific provisions that user data must be provided in an accessible, machine-readable format. Most jurisdictions also aren’t going to look kindly on physical document dumping and will require that documents be provided in a machine-readable format. PDF is the legal industry standard for all outbound files. The consistency of its formatting makes up for the difficulties involved with machine-readability.
There’s not a huge incentive to find an alternative because most firms will just charge a markup on the time a clerk spends reading through and transcribing those PDFs. If cost is a concern, though, most jurisdictions will require the party in possession of the original documents to provide them in a machine-readable format (e.g. providing bank records as Excel spreadsheets rather than as PDFs).
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying? PDF isn't a machine-readable format for most kinds of data and keeping inherent court costs down is always a concern because it keeps the courts fair to the poor.
I’m saying that most jurisdictions likely already do require data to be machine-readable, but when you run into PDFs, it isn’t a document dump (which courts don’t look kindly upon), but is instead a product of mixed parts convention and motivated laziness.
There are specialized models, but even generic ones like Gemini 2.0 Flash are really good and cheap, you can use them and embed the OCR inside the PDF to index to the original content.
This fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Effective OCR predates the popularity of ChatGPT and e-Discovery folks were already using it--AI in the modern sense adds nothing to this. Indexing the resulting text was also already possible--again AI adds nothing. The problem is that the resultant text lacks structure: being able to sort/filter wiretap data by date/location, for example, isn't inherently possible because you've obtained text or indexed it. AI accuracy simply isn't high enough to solve this problem without specialized training--off the shelf models simply won't work accurately enough even if you can get around the legal problems of feeding potentially-sensitive information into a model. AI models trained on a large enough domain-specific dataset might work, but the existing off-the-shelf models certainly are not accurate enough. And there are a lot of subdomains--wiretap data, cell phone GPS data, credit card data, email metadata, etc., which would each require model training.
Fundamentally, the solution to this problem is to not create it in the first place. There's no reason for there to be a structured data -> PDF -> AI -> structured data pipeline when we can just force people providing evidence to provide the structured data.
I agree with Spolsky in theory. But in practice, I've been on one project in the last few decades which I actually think benefited from integrating a web framework. The majority of projects I've worked on absolutely did not need JavaScript, and the rest would have been served by an approach similar to what's described in the OP--a few minimal vanilla JS files to create a few web components.
And yet large teams of very smart people reach for NPM as just part of their initial setup process. It's so ubiquitous that I essentially had to learn to not write this way on my own, by asking myself "can I do this without JS"? Almost every time I asked that question, the answer was "yes", and the non-JS way was much easier. But for a long time I wondered if I was wrong--maybe the framework JS way is easier in some way I don't understand--because everyone around me was doing it the framework JS way. It's taken me years of experimentation to build up a preponderance of evidence to persuade myself that in fact, the framework JS way is just worse, most of the time.
Everybody wants to be Facebook or Google, but the fact is you probably just aren't. You probably don't have their problems and you probably don't need to use their tools.
I've not been in a place with a functional transit system where fares were high enough to prevent disruptive people from boarding. I've seen rich people get onto Acela trains obnoxiously drunk.
I have, on the other hand, seen transit operators (bus drivers, mainly) kick people who had paid fares off for being disruptive. The definition of "being disruptive on the subway" does not seem to be the barrier you think it is.
How many assistance programs have you applied for? Frankly, if you haven't applied for any, your opinion is uninformed. Even people who are told how difficult it is, underestimate how difficult it is to apply for many programs.
I've helped a bunch of homeless folks apply to assistance programs (not for school lunches, but for a lot of other aid) and almost universally, applying for aid is extremely difficult. I've walked at least 30 people through the process of applying for housing aid and I'm pretty sure exactly none of them have actually received aid. The only program's I've seen people actually successfully apply for were medicaid and SNAP. It is the norm for it to take over a month to receive medicaid, and it's the norm for it to take over 6 months to receive SNAP. Meanwhile people are dying of medical conditions and starving.
Now add in all the reasons people are in this position in the first place--these people are struggling. It's hard to apply for these programs, and it's harder when everything else in your life is going poorly as well.
And after all that, you might discover that you don't qualify even though you clearly have need. In the OP the author notes that many families with lunch debt were right above the income line for receiving aid.
Some political forces are concerned that people will take advantage of these programs who shouldn't, and others simply don't want these programs to work so that they can have an excuse to cut them, and as a result there are numerous hurdles set up before you can obtain any sort of aid.
That's also in the heart of the issue, having arbitrary thresholds and obscure bureaucracy here makes it easier also to restrict or even close down such a subsidised program, which can be harder when a permanent program of free school lunches has been established.
The NSLP has been around for more than 50 years. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. It serves about 4.5 billion lunches annually with 70% of them being free or reduced. It seems there isn't a problem here.
As it stands today, making sure that all children who need them are provided with healthy school lunches is far from a solved problem.
There are problems and inefficiencies in the NSLP. Making free lunches available to every child would solve some of them. That's unlikely to happen any time soon though. The current administration has repeatedly threatened and chipped away at the program while also making it harder to provide safe and healthy food to the children who are currently enrolled.
At the rate things are going I wouldn't have so much faith that the program will continue or, if it is to continue, that it wont continue to be made worse and leave an increasing number of children going hungry.
Applying for school lunches is pretty simple compared to most any other programs. The schools in general really want as many as possible on free lunches, not only does it give students free lunch, but it is used to calculate all sorts of grants.
Applying for medicaid and SNAP is quite a bit more difficult, especially for a homeless person. But school lunches is really as simple as it could be, excepting just making it free for everyone.
Yes, I'm familiar with medicaid and some other stuff. Your complaint about SNAP ignores foodbanks. They usually don't check anything and it starts immediately. This can cover the gap. Medicaid may take months to recieve but it can cover costs incurred since applying retroactively once it is approved. Most hospitals even have case workers that will help patients apply.
It's abundantly clear you're looking for evidence for what you already believe instead of educating yourself and forming an opinion.
> Yes, I'm familiar with medicaid and some other stuff.
...and you're notably not disagreeing with anything I said about them.
> Your complaint about SNAP ignores foodbanks.
Food banks can safely be ignored. The nearest food bank to where I am currently located is a 20 minute drive, with no public transit that goes there, so you're SOL without a car, and it's run by a church which is extremely conservative (i.e. gay and trans people need to put up with hearing how they're going to hell if they'll be served at all). They're also open 1 day a week.
Food banks are great--but they should not be necessary.
> Medicaid may take months to recieve but it can cover costs incurred since applying retroactively once it is approved.
Do you even know what a poor person is, or do you simply lack all empathy?
Poor people don't get to "incur costs". They simply can't pay for care and then therefore don't receive it. So getting reimbursed for care they didn't receive because they couldn't pay for it, isn't really all that helpful.
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.
Even outside of morality it's a straightforward issue. Investments in children benefit the whole economy and society, for decades. If a person can't see that then they could be immoral but they might just be stupid.
Plenty of human beings genuinely and earnestly believe that investing in the "wrong kinds" of people would be harmful to society as a whole. This is not limited to regressives or conservatives either, with plenty of savants on tumbler and reddit reinventing eugenics "against rich people this time".
"It's not that I don't want kids fed, I would just rather that kids go hungry than feeding them with the inefficient and corrupt system that I imagined."
> And what I like about leftists is their sympathy. What I dislike is their lack of real-world knowledge
The problem is that leftists have more real life knowledge then far right, maga and Trump.
It was not leftists who voted for administrations that blow up deficits the most while complaining about deficits. It was leftists who were 100% correct about what conservatives plan and do. And it is not the left who pointificates about health and education ... while actively making them worst and actively slashing ways to measure how they are performing.
> It’s not that I don’t want kids fed. It’s that I know deep in my soul that $100 will be spent per child, with $99 extracted along the way by various politicians / consultants / unions, and $1 of disgusting food will (sometimes) be provided to a child.
If you oppose any actual steps to feed kids, then you don't want the kids fed. The rest of this is just you justifying why you don't want the kids fed.
If you want the program to feed the kids to be efficient: guess what, the left wants that too, and we're really happy to work to make that happen.
But the fact is, the right is happy to simply throw out the program and let the kids starve rather than tolerate any inefficiency. And notably, that inefficiency is often created by right-wing policies which attempt to prevent anyone perceived as not deserving aid from receiving aid.
If you vote Republican because you want the government to be more efficient, you're piling on even more bullshit. The national debt consistently increases more under Republican presidents than Democratic ones[1]--the perceived austerity of conservative government is entirely nonexistent. This problem is only worse under Trump: DOGE has made things less efficient by firing and rehiring half of the workers in government without even a basic understanding of how the programs work and or could be improved[2].
> And what I like about leftists is their sympathy. What I dislike is their lack of real-world knowledge
I'm well aware these programs are inefficient, though they're certainly not 1% efficient as in your made up numbers. It's just that I'm not willing to stop helping people because it's inefficient. I'd like to make it more efficient, but it's pretty hard to make programs more efficient when people like you are constantly trying to get rid of them and defund them.
The arguments are so facetious and facile. India has more corruption then the US and they can handle a free lunch program for all kids. Why can't America?
Because many of the people that need it the most keep voting against their own interests. Because education is terrible in all the the states that vote red.
>If you oppose any actual steps to feed kids, then you don't want the kids fed. The rest of this is just you justifying why you don't want the kids fed.
Don't be ridiculous. It won't win you any arguments.
My country (Canada) gives every parent money every month for each kid they have. It’s enough to pay for food, so there’s really no excuse to not feed the kid. We don’t have school lunches and it’s not a problem. Do you think Canadians are all ghouls?
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 eats for day, teach him to fish he eats for a lifetime", type of thinking. Some people might believe it encourages parents to be irresponsible. Back to budgets, it might remove money from other school needs. I guess the thinking would be, schools should teach, food is not their responsibility. If it comes their responsibility then they'll do less teaching which is back to not helping make their students able to ultimately fend for themselves but instead makes them dependent.
I'm not saying I buy those arguments but I can see them as valid arguments.
Helping directly is not always helpful. There's plenty of examples of that. Whether that's true in this case I don't know.
> Giving out free food might make people feel entitled and less likely to learn to be self sufficient
To be clear, the subject is still children, right? Refusing to feed children to "teach" them self-sufficiency is, IMO, right up there with a non-ironic "the children yearn for the mines". What could a self-sufficient 6th-grader even do for money? Steal baby food and small electronics from Target for fencing?
I (British) am familiar with the term, especially as a verb like "fencing stolen goods". You can find British newspapers reporting this in the last decade.
Note, I'm not saything this is how it is. Nor am I saying I believe free school lunches are bad. I'm saying the position that they are bad is a valid defendable position to take.
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 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.
> 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?
> Budgets might be cut directly, so can not feed some percent, budgets might be cut indirectly (less tax revenue).
Stop talking as if there's no human actor involved in this. If budgets are cut (less tax revenue) it's because the same people who oppose feeding kids oppose taxing rich people. This is just people saying, "We can't feed kids, because we might decide to not tax rich people instead." I'm not confused about this possibility or missing this possibility: I'm saying "don't be an asshole, collect enough taxes to feed the kids".
> Giving out free food might make people feel entitled and less likely to learn to be self sufficient.
Stop talking about "people" as if you've forgotten these are children. Kids should feel entitled to eat, because children are entitled to receive food. Obviously we should be preparing them to learn to feed themselves as adults--nobody is confused about that--but it's going to be a whole lot harder for a child to learn if they're unsure about their next meal. And again, it's the same people who oppose school lunches who oppose education programs.
Giving a child a fish and teaching the child to fish are not mutually exclusive. And US conservatives oppose both.
> Back to budgets, it might remove money from other school needs. I guess the thinking would be, schools should teach, food is not their responsibility. If it comes their responsibility then they'll do less teaching which is back to not helping make their students able to ultimately fend for themselves but instead makes them dependent.
Again, stop pretending there's no actors doing this. It's conservatives who are creating these artificially constrained budgets. It's conservatives who are not allocating enough money to both feed and educate children.
I'm simply not interested in any argument which involves pretending there isn't enough money to feed children. There is enough money, you simply don't think feeding children is important enough to collect taxes to do it.
I'm simply not interested in arguments about who should be feeding children. I want the federal government to fund schools to feed children because that's the only viable path to all the children in my country being fed on the table at the moment. You haven't presented any alternatives that work, and you won't, because you are more interested in avoiding taxes than you are in feeding children.
People generally don't want the Federal government involved, thats where the consensus has been lacking.
this is exhibit A of showing that these country sized states are fully capable of handling their own affairs and universal access to things, the same as the 21st century developed nations that do the same thing
You and the other parties actually agree that it isn't controversial, there are many funding sources if its deemed important, keep the federal government out of it
This is simply not true. Multiple states have tried and failed to pass state funding for universal free lunches - because in each state there are groups who argue giving free lunches to all kids is bad. It’s not an argument about where the money comes from.
I'm not sure how the observation that other places also lacked consensus at the state level discredits anything.
Some people dislike it on the federal level, and are fine with it at the state level, as they are two different organizations. My comment was only about them.
> Some people dislike it on the federal level, and are fine with it at the state level, as they are two different organizations. My comment was only about them.
You said:
> People generally don't want the Federal government involved, thats where the consensus has been lacking.
So no, your comment was a claim about "people generally".
If you'd like to say you misspoke, fine, but everyone can read what you said, so there's no point lying about what you said.
Except none of that is actually true. Unconvinced? Go look at a heat map of poverty in the US and then check out which states get bulk of federal assistance dollars. Note none of those states is running a massive budget surplus. While I have you I'd like to also point out that "hrrr federal government bad" is not only tautological, as an ideology it's deeply stupid . States frequently encounter problems that require a bigger budget than they can muster to solve (see also: disaster recovery).
"hrrr federal government bad" is not my argument. I don't think the federal government is bad. I think its budget is not balanced and its funding has strings attached that undermines the sovereignty of independent institutions.
Disaster recovery is also not the topic nor does it provide any introspective ability on this topic.
yes, I agree if something is not within the budget, and there is also no consensus, then it won't happen. I'm not sure that even needed to be said, but I am familiar with people that would try to make programs happen in those situations too. I would vote no on those proposals in those cases.
> I think its budget is not balanced and its funding has strings attached that undermines the sovereignty of independent institutions.
1. The budget of most Red states is not balanced.
2. States aren't sovereign institutions.
3. Funding being provided without strings attached is practically nonexistent. Money is allocated for a purpose. Allocating money with no string attached is simply not a thing that state or local governments do, so it's bizarre that you'd think states do this any differently from the federal government.
4. If you want the federal budget to be balanced, definitely you should vote for Democrats, because Republican presidents have increased the national debt more than Democratic ones consistently. Republican austerity is a total lie not borne out by any facts.
Frankly, this is a blatant distraction. I don't give a shit whether it's states or the federal government that feeds kids, I just want a government to feed all the kids in my country.
The only reason conservatives give a shit about state's rights is because being in favor of state's rights sounds a lot better than being against feeding children. But the fact is, when states do things like pass gun regulation or refuse to bypass due process to arrest immigrants, suddenly conservatives are against state's rights. And make no mistake, whenever there is any major movement for states to individually provide school lunches, it's conservatives that oppose it.
I never mentioned any party or conservatives or democrats.
I don't think this is the gotcha you think it is.
I never mentioned any party or conservatives or democrats.
I don't think this is the gotcha you think it is.
You are bringing up other positions to discredit a position you assumed I have, because you saw something that overlapped with something partisans say, when the only position I have is that the federal government doesn't need to be involved. and this subthread is about the federal government not being involved, because a state did it on their own. the article is about an individual doing it on their own, the article is about a foundation that does it on their own.
that's the whole position the whole time.
and I don't care who does it, the federal government doesn't need to. not everyone that would be against one particular organization doing the action with money is against the actual action occurring. that's what I think gets lost here, and how its masquaraded as controversial to suggest a different organization is capable of doing it. this article and thread is exhibits a, b, and c of different organizations doing it.
If it quacks like a duck, flies like a duck, swims like a duck, and fishes like a duck, it probably is a duck.
If you spout all the verbatim opinions of a neoconservative, you're probably a neoconservative. I don't care if you identify as a libertarian or an attack helicopter. You're in this thread opposing the only proposed solution to feeding children, so it's pretty clear what you are.
Please don’t respond with a fake quote; double quotation marks are for direct quotes (which are assumed to be from the parent unless otherwise attributed). If you’re going to make something up, please use single quotes, and make it clear that the parent didn’t actually say that.
I'll play devil's advocate, and you tell me the immorality of the position.
Say you have no children. Is it an acceptable position to hold that 'those people who have children should also be the ones to look after them'? Shouldn't you have considered these sorts of expenses and being able to meet them, rather than expecting to receive handouts?
You are not denying food to the parents, you are denying food to the children. They did not choose to be born, and they certainly didn’t choose the fiscal responsibility of their parents.
Maybe there is room in there to shame the parents or give them a slap on the wrist, but the kids are blameless and denying them food makes you probably a monster.
In the wake of a demographic collapse, you're arguing against helping feed children - future tax contributors, caretakers, social workers, healthcare personnel...? Who will pay taxes for you when you won't be of working age anymore? Who will be your caretakers?
Contributing to the next generation's upbringing is the least we can do, even if some won't have kids of their own they would still (directly) indirectly benefit from this.
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.
That's how most of Europe actually works: we assist those who for whatever reason are unable to support themselves.
Granted, our systems aren't perfect either. People fall through the cracks sometimes or have to deal with inane bureaucracy. But you generally won't see large encampments of homeless citizens openly defecating on the sidewalks or school children being shamed for their parents not having lunch money.
Somebody should individualistically autonomously amass enough tanks so that they can point them at individuals who think like you so they can make their autonomic individualistic decision that they'd rather feed children than be shot at by a tank.
We know that's how humanity does collective action nearly 100% of the time, but it doesn't apply some linguistic shortcuts fro the sake of moving the discussion along.
Morality is written by the guys who had the most tanks last time.
i say this genuinely, with as much love as i can muster for a stranger on the internet: this line of thought is annoying to most people who understand that living collectively requires sacrifice and accepting imperfect solutions in the pursuit of good. individualism is a weird personality myth that 99.9999999% of people will never realize. kids are hungry and we can feed them. one thing cannot be concretely addressed and the other thing can.
> should I have my wealth forcibly extracted to do so anyway?
if you have amassed anywhere near what most people would consider "wealth", then yes, you should.
> is it ok to force people to pay for stuff that they don't want to?
Yes. Happens all the time. Money doesn't exist unless people are forced to use it to pay for something they don't want to. (read Graber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years.")
I don't want to pay for nuclear weapons. Why am I forced to pay for it through my taxes? Because if I don't, the state will use its power to punish me.
Pacifists can't direct their tax monies to avoid military expenditures.
Adherents to one faith can't say their taxes can't be used on apostates.
You sound like this is a surprise. Like you don't understand why people have to pay taxes for schools even if they don't have children, don't understand why people who don't drive still have to pay taxes for roads, don't understand why people who don't swim still have to pay taxes for public pools, .. the list is very long.
Your comments sound very much like 1980s Thatcherism - "There is no such thing [as society]! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
The last 40+ years of neoliberal thought hasn't turned out so well, as those who have money no longer feel pressure or obligation to distribute it, resulting in a return to Gilded Age power concentrations.
That's what you want, it seems.
> such as increased salary and pension contributions
Such as tax cuts for the rich. Make Gates "only" a billionaire and we can use the remaining $100 billion to pay off school lunch debt (works out the math) ... forever.
$2.8 million debt for Utah with a population of 3 million people. US population 340 million. Call it $300 million in school lunch debt. Probably within an order of magnitude. That's less than the interest on $100 billion.
Yes, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would have an actual positive impact on education if, instead of funding projects that trained educators knew would fail - and eventually did fail - they has simply put their $10+ billion into funding school meals.
Instead, rich people get to fund "non-profits" that they control - reducing their taxes while not relinquishing the power and influence tied to their money. Gates' wealth gives him a very undemocratic and malignant influence over US education policy.
And you want to blather on about supporting student lunch debt?!
>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?
But it's the logical continuation of the argument. It's not like we're going from "something something unlimited free speech -> something something more bullying something something more suicides" - which is a slippery slope fallacy if you don't show the logic or proof that one leads to the other. The argument for free school lunches is exactly the same as the argument for free school breakfasts, free dinners, and free clothes.
An adult can either be a net tax contributor or a net tax burden over their lifespan. The probability of them being a net contributor is much higher if they are well educated and not malnourished. The effect is stronger at younger ages. It’s good ROI for the tax payer.
I'm glad that you're saying this, but honestly, it's disgusting that this has to be said.
I want my country to feed and clothe children because it's the right thing to do. The sort of person that wants an ROI to agree to that, is not a good person.
What is the purpose of this pedantry? Plenty of children do not get the appropriate nutrition during the day due to food insecurity, and for many the only consistent meal they get is at school. Why argue over technical definitions of starvation?
What is the purpose of using a word that means something different than what is currently being discussed? Why not say that children are suffering from malnutrition or food insecurity, rather than using a term used to describe a cause of death?
You wouldn't say that someone who choked on a glass of water to have drowned, or someone who received a momentary shock from frayed cord to have been electrocuted.
Words have meaning, it's not pedantic to comment on the usage of a word that has a different meaning entirely from manner in which it is being used, in what I suspect is an attempt at an appeal to emotion.
I think most (all?) people would understand "starve" to mean to suffer from hunger, rather than to literally die from hunger. Especially from the context.
One would think that the actual dictionary definition of a word, rather than hyperbole, would be the most widely (all?) accepted and understood meaning of a word. Being defined, in a dictionary, and all.
What is the outcome of a flame starved of oxygen? A plant starved of light? A person starved of food?
many problems with your argument. I will enumerate just a few off the top of my head.
- if a child was born with poor planning from the parents, it’s too late and unhelpful to say “i told you so”. Feeding a disadvantaged child raises their chances of doing well in school and reduces their chance of being a much larger burden on your tax dollars down the line. Are you saying we should save $5 on this child now so we can spend $100 in the future (subsidizing their social security payments, maybe jail time, maybe homeless, etc)? Sounds like a smart business move! (sarcasm) Feeding kids is good ROI.
- it’s possible to get pregnant even when being responsible. No protection is 100% except for abstinence your entire life.
- you can “plan” for these expenses all you want. Sometimes a spouse dies. Sometimes a person needs to spend money to support their aging parents, AFTER their child is born. Or a divorce ruins one’s finances. Or someone loses their good job due to layoffs. Life is not a simple path, not sure what gave you that illusion.
- congrats you don’t have children. Guess what? When you’re old and need a diaper change in a nursing home, who do you think will be wiping your ass? One of the nurses… one of those kids that is not yours. Who will be delivering food to the grocery store? That’s right, one of those other kids. Who will be your doctor? Right again! One of those other kids.
- it’s easy to be smug until you’re unlucky in life. What if tomorrow you’re hit by a drunk driver and you go bankrupt trying to pay for major medical bills. Suddenly it’s not so fun saying nobody deserves a handout. At the end of the day, this mindset is an empathy problem.
It seems like _most_ of my fellow americans have an empathy problem. Are you all dead inside? Anyway…it’s useful to invest in our society. Not everything is about me me me.
You don't really "have" a child. A child is new separate human that will eventually grow into free separate adult human. The question is, do you want there to be more humans in the future or are you fine with the ones that are already here until they die. And should they be starved or dumb?
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the whole thing. There is nothing good about ads, ever. If I want information about a product, I'll go looking for it, and I won't go to an advertiser. If I'm looking to watch a YouTube video, there is absolutely no condition under which I want to hear about a product unless that's explicitly what I went to that video to hear about.
All ads are lies. There is never an ad that tells you about the flaws in a product or compares it honestly to competing product. I'm simply not interested in being lied to.