Excellent garden path sentence.

let's eat, kids.

let's eat kids.

punctuation saves lives.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/B1pppR4gVKL._CLa%7C2140%...

  I felt like a big part of my childhood had been sold to the lowest bidder.

Not to be a total downer but I often feel like this is true of every aspect of life in America.

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.

In kindergarten, we had a rotating chore to take the collective milk money for the class, exchange it for a crate of milk at the cafeteria, and return it to the kindergarten room. I can imagine social norms have changed since then about this de facto mandatory financial exercise.

In later grades, we had some rotating lunch duties including, at least, rinsing the lunch trays and loading the big dishwasher. I can't remember if we ever helped serve food, but I do remember being told to be careful with the very hot water spray nozzle in the washing basin. I can imagine this having changed due to shifting safety and liability norms.

> 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 requirements (which is almost nothing).

To have this program exist requires children that can be trusted to not waste the food that they're given, to behave, & to learn about preparing their own meals.

It's a bootstrapping problem, trust problem, & expectations problem, all at once.

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. No exceptions.

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.

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Note: This doesn't mean that it can't happen, just that the amount of effort needed to get there is monumental, and that certain axioms have to be relaxed significantly to do so.

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 some downsides, but they are mostly in the behavior of men towards women, which is a global problem). this is how most asian cultures work. and african too. children learn to do these things, and they learn how to behave properly.

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.

lack of social pressure doesn't eliminate bullying for example. actually, bullying is a form of social pressure too. i do agree that social pressure is bad. pressure to conform is bad. conforming itself isn't. but the point really is that the social pressure in japan is actually just of a different form compared to the pressure that exists in the US. it is an illusion to think that there is no social pressure in the US. and i understand that in japan this is extreme. but learning to prepare food or clean is not the problem here.

the big downside in japan is that it is more difficult for victims to speak up. but it wasn't much better in the west until recently. that child you mention has no one to talk to to get help. social pressure to conform is only part of the problem here. it's also lack of awareness and understanding. but i have the impression that this is changing, so i am hopeful.

My son here gets stressed out if he’s not brought a hairnet in the proper color for swimming lessons.

Never mind that there’s no requirement to wear a hairnet in my home country, the idea of requiring a specific color, or the teacher getting upset if it’s forgotten is bizarre.

Nonetheless, everyone thinks this is a major problem here, and so kids internalize that and perpetuate it.

In regards to the speaking up thing, I think a major component there is that it’s often considered a you problem. All these other kids go to school just fine, so the problem must be you.

So by fixing things in one school, any school, you're really fixing things for all the kids that go there.

In a completely unrelated phenomenon, private schools are incredibly popular among Californians of means.

There are plenty of good public schools in CA. There are only a handful of good private ones.

And $250k is wealthy. That's literally top 1.5 percentile in the U.S. They don't have to blow half of their income sending their kids to an expensive school. They choose to do so and that is the hallmark of wealth.

Also. If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed. I went to public school all my life and then ended up in Berkeley. I'm 40. It was borderline negligent for my parents to send me there in my opinion as a kid knowing what I know now. But we were pretty hard up for money.

But if you told me, should someone lease two luxury cars or send their kid to private school.... You'd have to be nuts to think you'd gain more from the cars than the school.

Or in other words, even with profligate spending you still have money leftover. Which brings us back to this: techies apparently are good at code but very bad at basic finance.

If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed. I went to public school all my life and then ended up in Berkeley.

Berkeley is considered one of the best universities in the world. If you don't think it's a good school, the problem is you, not the schools.

If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed.

I volunteer coach to various local schools (changes every season). My alma mater is (now) considered one of the best public schools in state and occasionally makes the national list; it sends a higher % of students to the prestigious colleges (Ivy League, Berkeley, Stanfurd) than the famous local private schools (Troy and Harvard-Westlake).

But if you told me, should someone lease two luxury cars or send their kid to private school.... You'd have to be nuts to think you'd gain more from the cars than the school.

This is a nonsensical strawman...which supports my first point.The choice is not to lease two luxury cars or send their kids to private school. Both choices are the wrong choice. The correct choice for someone making $250k who claims that they are living paycheck-to-paycheck is to send their kid to public school, and address any deficiencies with tutoring or extracurricular activities (both of which are more likely to benefit college admissions and academic performance than private school and cost a fraction of private school tuition).

TLDR: if you are in the top 1.5 percentile you are not, nor will you ever be considered living paycheck to paycheck. If you tell someone that, they'll smile at you politely and assume you have a severe mental defect.

This is absolutely batshit to someone living in the midwest. I could save enough to retire in 5-7 years if I were making that much.

"Living paycheck to paycheck" means that you just barely make enough to pay for food and rent, and don't have any spare money to cover unplanned costs like medical care. Spending a ton of money on vacation and private school is by definition not living paycheck to paycheck.

And that goes back to how taxes for public schools are driven. The problem seems too engrained and too massive to fix. And since schools are state controlled, you'd need 50 solutions, not 1.

I am, by any measure, at least upper-middle-class (though I do have to work for money; it's not free in my mailbox). I don't have kids, so I wouldn't be taking advantage of the public schools I pay for, but I also grew up in a very median-income household and went to private schools (which were much less expensive at the time, though still not cheap). So my parents paid for public schools that neither of their children ever attended.

No, no, no. If you want better schools then vote for school choice.

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 idea, but it made sense to someone looking for what they thought was an easy solution.

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."

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's not private school vs public school, it is private school vs public school plus a tuition's worth of enrichment.

Your other comment does get at why my kid is in private school: you can't ignore special education needs.

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.

We made our decision (noted before) when the school spent its energy to manage us rather than fix problems and serve our student. To be fair, there were ties they had no control over but they definitely failed in ways they could have done better too. When things that matter to us are out of our power we put them back under our power to the extent we can.

The problem with defection is the large scale/long term reduced prosperity trajectory.

And summer "enrichment". That was popular among the small group of well-off families that insisted on sending their kids to public schools (in, essentially, a school-within-a-school that actually taught the kids instead of warehousing them for six to eight hours a day). Expensive camps, summer programs in Europe, that sort of thing.

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 make sense if you think about the numbers, but it appeals to people who are more interested in punishing wealthy people than fixing the situation.

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 public schools as every body else, then those people would be more inclined to use their influence to try to make public schools better and would be less inclined to fight against raising taxes to improve public education. Of course this would go against those peoples narrow self interest (since many of their kids would probably end up getting a worse education) so it is unlikely to happen

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.

It's not control.

It's simply that there exists a (relatively-speaking) small fraction of wealthy people. To wit, income inequality.

If we had less income inequality in the US, there wouldn't need to be nudges to align wealthy people's interests with everyone else.

If we're fine with large amounts of income inequality, then we're going to need to put in some utilitarian guardrails, given that $ = political power and political power controls school funding.

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.

In Austrian civil service I worked with kids who had special needs and were predominantly from poor social backgrounds. I made homework with them, drove them to school and back from day care in a bus, and I prepared food with them, had them deal with the dirty dishes, etc.

Most of the kids totally crazy behavior immidiately made sense once you met the parents. In fact there were only two kids where this wasn't the case and the first had PTSD of a life-changing magnitude (fled the Syrian war) and the other had good parents but a mental condition (I suspect severe ADHD).

Most of those kids would have been classified by the general public as hopeless cases.

I cooked with them, did the dishes, baked, regularily. Even kids that get beaten at home or were riddled with war trauma are surprisingly reliable if you just give them a task they understand. And turns out tasks they do every day are easy to understand after a week.

If those kids could make it, I am not the least worried about kids in better circumstances. Will it always be 100% perfect when kids do it? Will every kid be at it with full effort every day? Will a new kid grok it instantly? No. But that is okay. What is the worst that can happen? They go without food as a consequence? Other Kids show them how?

You're making it sound as if preparing food together is some unnatural herculian challenge while preparing food together was probably the most common act humanity has ever shared doing throughout its history.

No it must not be everyone. Prepare food? Get food. Pretty simple. Waste food? That was yours. And the other kids also don't like to see that.

The rason for having a society is to deal with those kind of differences. If you teach kids how to get structure into their lives and how to eat healthy the wasted food will easily be saved in future costs in the health and social systems.

Also: my kids could do this, US kids can't. What does thst mean for the US economy 4 decades down the line in comparison? You really think the US can afford to "educate" kids that way?

Japan may look different to the society you are used to or grew up in, but it's no less or more conformist, it's just different.

As a very simple example, in the US, people work for tips and often struggle to make ends meet in minimum wage jobs: that's a form of cultural toll. In Japan, nobody needs to work for tips (you may be followed out of the restaurant to have your tip returned to you), most people can make ends meet more easily, but there are other expectations around work and family: that's cultural toll too.

What's interesting to me is that you seem to think that the status quo in the US is rightly defensible. 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. Not a great way to bring kids up... perhaps y'all could try something else for a while, hmm?

This, 100x times over. The cultural toll of 'conformity' sounds bad until you realize it's a construct enabling everyone to 'play nice' in the general sense and work towards a greater good, collectively. We are losing that conformity. The average US citizen person is socially crippled by their outrage. Nothing else matters. If you have doubt in yourself, get back in that echo chamber that probably made you into what you are and reassure yourself. It used to be ok to disagree, have intelligent debate, vote on it, and lose.

In today's US, if you want to be heard, it's more about how emotionally outraged you are, not how good your ideas actually are. The more dire you can make the outrage, the better. Come up with a sound bite for your movement, catchier the better. Misrepresent anything your oppositions says, retire objective and reasonable critical thinking to 'dinosaur thinking'. Then, convince people your group/movement/lifestyle has been marginalized. Then, if your subject agrees with you, make sure they're at least as outraged as you. Use any guilt that they have to steer them current or future causes. Next, if they won't comply, publicly shame and label opposition so that you can associate them with bad things/people/events. When you dont get what you want, attack the process, call them bigots, etc. Rinse and repeat until you get what you want.

As our "cultural tolls" are avoided or erode, the more divided we become as a people. The more divided we are, the more we are seen as individuals. Everyone becomes marginalized when everyone is an individual. The more divided we are, the less we hold open doors and the more we slam that door in their face, because you know... they're a bigot or whatever, so you dont have to feel guilty for hurting that evil person.

You are operating under a model that every view of the world is equally valid, moral, and unworthy of emotion. That is not where we are as a country. People have made decisions to actively harm people I love, and they cheer it on to my face. This is not an emotion, it's a fact.

I'm a white man. I am polite to my friends and family, and I am good at getting people to share what they really think. I have family all over the country. They talk a lot like you in public, decrying a vague sense of union we used to have in a fictional time of American history. But they whisper a different tune to me in private. I have heard some absolutely vile beliefs from people who used to bounce me on their knee. I don't speak to them anymore. Not because I'm in an echo chamber, but because I cannot reconcile or stomach the things I know about them. My extended family believes others should bleed so they don't have to scuff, and I believe this reflects a large portion of the country.

You have it completely backwards. It's not that we are so angry with each other that we can't establish a cultural toll, it's that much of the country never wanted to pay this toll, and that's what makes the rest of us angry. We cannot live collectively without sacrifice, but many refuse to. The many debates regarding this article is evidence of that.

Thats a good observation. I wouldn't say I had it completely backwards, after thinking on it, I still feel that many people can't/won't get past their anger and that prevents them from paying into the toll. You didn't specify why they don't want to pay into the toll and anger/resentment could be part of that.

> "People have made decisions to actively harm people I love, and they cheer it on to my face. This is not an emotion, it's a fact."

Does that fact make you angry? Emotional? I suspect you are passionate about the issue. Wouldn't your feelings towards your loved ones and the harm done to them galvanize your stance and give you a sense of conviction? If so, why aren't you doing more to help them, don't you care? Why are you on hacker news talking to some rando instead picketing for your cause, raising awareness and funding?

Apologies, I was being intentionally abrasive, trying to make the point that it is relatively easy to fan the flames of someone's passion into outrage. One can be supportive and encouraging about it and push you towards that conviction/outrage, but it takes more time. If one were to be an ass about it, I bet a dollar your conviction/outrage would be near instant and an order of magnitude greater.

Passion is healthy. Outrage is not. With passion, you are happy with yourself and your effort, perhaps a "live to fight another day" mentality. When you slip into outrage, you are never happy until YOU get what YOU want.

So, if given the choice to feed a group of people, but some of them hurt your loved ones, what do you do? What if it's their kids?

Do you feed the people you hate? Weigh the options? Figure out the percentages? Try to heal? Find a way to exclude the offenders? Or do you just bail completely? Do they have to be near death before you'd offer help? I gander the result depends how outraged you are.

My point is that the more outraged you are, the more morality and validity go out the window, and less likely you are to donate to a school to pay off lunches because you might be doing something to benefit someone you disagree with.

The "vague sense of union" we had was the social tolls that we paid. Like universal praise for donating school lunches. But in today's world, you'll be criticized for donating to the wrong school because there wasn't X, Y or Z. You'll be shamed, maybe doxxed, hated and maybe even physically assaulted. All because an outraged group or person felt like something was taken from them.

So, my model of the world isn't that every view "is equally valid, moral, and unworthy of emotion", it's an awareness that emotions greatly affect people's judgement around validity and morality, for better or worse, and that needs to be accounted for.

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> 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 a reductive sense, focused more towards individual pursuits, with the accompanying effects that came from such a cultural choice being made self-evident. No defense was made towards those axioms, only that changing them requires the same toll that Japan paid to also be done by the US.

> Looking in from afar with limited skin in the game I'd argue it looks really, really dumb.

I've lived my entire life within a "3rd world" (S.E.A). To that end, I will say that I have isolated pockets of envy for what's allowed within the US. Other parts... I could do without, but I recognize that they're part of the "US' whole deal" bag, and adopting it requires taking on the whole bag, without exceptions.

The cultural choices made are a mixed bag, and should be treated as such. Prescriptivist blanket statements like that serve no purpose other than tribal in-group signalling that can be done without.

> 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.

This is not something that's wholly exclusive to individualism.

The same kinds of partisan rhetoric can similarly be achieved with "anti-individualism" cultures, simply because humans came from a tribal background: When more than one non-immediately-societally-lethal path exists for people to choose from, partisan support for a given path X will happen as a side effect of advocacy for X.

The partisan rhetoric that comes when A clashes with B (and/or C, D, E...) is the conclusion of (1) only being able to choose one choice, & (2) that anything that is not A being chosen feeling like a loss.

"Individualism bad because partisanship" does not mean that its alternatives avert this phenomenon.

> Not a great way to bring kids up... perhaps y'all could try something else for a while, hmm?

This is mud slinging, given the most charitable interpretation possible.

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 individualism without a shared sense of society can accelerate partisanship. In the US, ironically there is tribalism (we now call them echo chambers, due to the dominance of media in this conversation), telling people that their individualism is being taken away. It's both what I'm worried about, and what you mention, in a feedback loop.

I maintain that compared to every other Western liberal democracy, this is not a great way to bring up kids. That isn't mud slinging, it's an opinion.

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.

Outliers will be everywhere, you only have to select the right ones, and not fix an entire suburbs culture, and ofc the obligatory: tax the rich.

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.

You could have a society that's diverse but not individual, or a non-diverse one that's individual. Though there is a correlation.

Tribes that talk about individualism as being a great strength and then punishing you for not conforming are not really that individualistic, in my opinion.

It's not the individualists who are the problem. They are the ones getting ostracized by all for daring to have a set of beliefs that don't conform precisely with any of the tribes warring with each other. They would prefer that the tribes disbanded and everyone was free to believe what they wanted without fear of pissing off people they have never met. Most people, as far as I've seen, just want to live their lives believing what they like without getting attacked out of the blue one day. I remember when you didn't know what others believed and could spend a lot of time with your favorite drink in hand finding out, arguing, agreeing, and leaving in peace. Well, at least most of the time.

I then transitioned to a typical American public school. I was disappointed to find my only option was cheap, factory made, mass produced, strangely flavored and textured food. This stark contrast and downgrade has made me forever passionate about the topic of improving school lunches.

They also clean the classrooms and hallways.

He sent me a picture of what he was served -- cold pizza slab with a cup of fruit. His comment was simply "How are you to learn when your soul hungers? Is this really how American schools prepare the minds of the youngest?" I responded with "Oh you're lucky, you got the fancy meal."

That a cheese slice between two slices of bread with some mayo would be served to a child as their only food of the day was spiritually disgusting to him in a way he did not have words for.