Enforcement, one countries laws don’t apply in another. Which is kind of why the age verification thing won’t work… There will always be some jurisdiction that’ll ignore things for profit.
Not entirely true. If I'm incorporated in country A and want to offer a service in country B, I'll have to comply with the local regulations. Furthermore, most VPNs have local presence in the EU as well. NordVPN is incorporated in Panama, but also has an entity in The Netherlands.
Many areas of law enforcement are whack-a-mole. There's no online gambling regulation so strict that it will stop unlicensed sites from existing entirely; that doesn't mean the rules are pointless or resources dedicated to enforcing them are wasted.
Sure. However, the effort spent vs. what is gained has to be considered. Not all games of whack-a-mole are created equal.
VPNs are incredibly easy to spin up, gambling groups are not. Within a week I could probably spin up a dozen or more semi-legitimate VPN companies. Multiply that by however many hundreds of people are willing to do the same. Add a few thousand more people willing to spin up completely shady 'free' VPNs.
The scale quickly exceeds what you can possibly block, unless you firewall the nation.
Sure. But majority of the people (as seen with China, or Russia) do not care about VPN and won’t care. So, it seems to me that this way it will be easier for law enforcement to achieve what they want just because the target pool is already smaller.
>But majority of the people (as seen with China, or Russia) do not care about VPN and won’t care
The article that our comments are under are about an 18x increase in sign-ups from the UK for one provider, a 2.5x increase for another provider, a 10x increase for yet another provider, etc. in just days.
I'm curious about your stats for China/Russia, though. Where/how do you find out how many internet users in those countries have a subscription to and/or use a VPN? Would those stats continue to hold true if there was not a great firewall in China, and just rudimentary IP-blocking of VPN providers?
> The article that our comments are under are about an 18x increase in sign-ups from the UK for one provider, a 2.5x increase for another provider, a 10x increase for yet another provider, etc. in just days.
Those numbers mean nothing without the baseline. What if before it was 1 person and now it’s 18x more, totaling 19 people?
W.r.t. data about China and Russia, I don’t want to pay for market reports, but occasional discussions about China, for example, show that about 35% of internet users use VPN (https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/i3afnz/how_many_peop..., the thread has some links for more info). However, it is unclear how many of those users are private citizens use VPN to specifically bypass censorship. From my anecdotal experience from work and my PhD, most Chinese I met just don’t care about censorship and lack of access to FB, YouTube, or whatever. Chinese are like western users for the most part, on average they need social media, financial apps, maybe search, etc. they are not actively looking for censored info.
>Those numbers mean nothing without the baseline. What if before it was 1 person and now it’s 18x more, totaling 19 people?
They obviously don't mean nothing. Knowing absolute numbers would be much better, but knowing that the direction of the trend (people previously not caring now care) is informative by itself. It's safe to assume that more than 1 person had a VPN subscription previously.
I appreciate the link and additional insight. The way you phrased it before, I was expecting you to quote sub 10% or less. 35% is not inconsequential, especially considering the environment.
In the end, I'm not convinced you can extrapolate Chinese internet usage patterns to the UK, given the large cultural differences (specifically in regards to internet, history of censorship, etc.). Someone who has grown up their entire lives under the great firewall will react differently to censorship than someone who has grown up their entire lives under a mostly free internet that is now being censored.
> but knowing that the direction of the trend (people previously not caring now care) is informative by itself.
Sure. However, without baseline numbers how do you know who are the people signing up for VPNs? This is the whole point: is it the general public en masse, or some of tech people who had no VPN before?
> In the end, I'm not convinced you can extrapolate Chinese internet usage patterns to the UK, given the large cultural differences (specifically in regards to internet, history of censorship, etc.). Someone who has grown up their entire lives under the great firewall will react differently to censorship than someone who has grown up their entire lives under a mostly free internet that is now being censored.
Of course culture makes a huge difference, but you cannot strongly prove the opposite just based on the assumption about cultural differences. I think the the average consumer simply does not care enough. Remember, the expectation on average is that the access to the information is free.
There was an old farmer in my town that had a steel deer decoy on a hill up the road from his house, poachers would shoot it, not knowing he would hear the sound, shut his gate then call law enforcement on them as there was no other way out.
Actually they don’t, visa heavily restricts those business and the amount of chargebacks they are allowed to have, other industries have much higher rates of chargeback.
51% of the voting population. Not the majority of the population. Big difference in numbers there, only 65.3% participated. So, less than a third of Americans voted for the current president… why people don’t vote, I’ll never understand.
As someone who experienced this first hand growing up. I consider how someone feels about free school lunch, a basic test of their humanity.
If you think kids should go hungry or be embarrassed at school because of their parents finances… we can’t be friends, nor acquaintances. IMHO, you are subhuman at that point and not worth my time.
My dad believed that because he paid taxes he shouldn’t have to pay the school to feed me. I begged, borrowed, and stole spare change to pay. He’d chip in once in a while, but once you are so far in debt they won’t feed you anymore (at least they didn’t at the time). I remember going to the lost and found every day to check the pockets of the clothes in there. I learned how to pick the locks on the gym lockers and would steal money from other kids pockets. I sometimes left school so I could go steal lunch from a grocery store near by. I got caught once, but after the lady knew what was up, she conveniently was always looking away from me during mid day of I came in. From the bottom of my heart I hope she receives every possible blessing in this life.
No child should have to do that. Ever! Happy to pay taxes to and live in a state that has solved this problem!
Even if you want to look at it from a purely selfish point of view... if you want to live in a good, prosperous society, this starts with childrens education. A well fed, happy, well slept child is an ideal here to get them the best education they can.
Not wanting each child to get the best possible start in life makes absolutely no sense to me.
"Not wanting each child to get the best possible start in life makes absolutely no sense to me."
Maybe to lower the chances of other children against your own (wealthy) offspring? So from a very selfish individualistic perspective there is sense? I suspect that might be the base motivation, even though you likely won't find many openly stating that or even are aware of it.
It could do but only for the kids that would be competing closely with your own children, so of a similar socioeconomic status.
For children from much poorer backgrounds it's more likely that making their prospects even worse will just create later negative impacts on society, such as crime, drug addiction, prostitution, gang violence and so on.
The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. In your case, it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload.
So as long as you're going to charge for lunches, you need to have some kind of enforcement mechanism. Embarrassing the kid ideally would not be part of it.
California pays for it all, but California is a pretty rich state. And if you're a poorer state, you have the choice between eliminating this problem, or addressing many other types of educational need.
There are no moral hazards when it comes to social welfare programs. People really think there are, but every time we look we find practically no freeloaders. This idea that we have to threaten people with literal starvation to get them to be productive members of society is ironically deeply impoverished.
And if we really think that's true, why do we let people accrue wealth at all? Why do we then think that the most productive people in our society are also the richest? Shouldn't it be the opposite? I struggle to see the pillars of this moral structure in any other way than "poor people are a different breed and need stricter rules to keep them in line". Which again is super wrong! TFA cites research that shows that these kids' parents work, but their wages/bills are too low/high. Does anyone want to guess how bad those parents' jobs are? Do we need to detail the struggles working people go through (lack of health care, wildly inconsistent hours, sexual harassment and assault, etc)? The nicest thing you can say about this kind of thinking is that it's out of date.
And what is "freeloading" anyway? Kids of all backgrounds and parenting situations get to eat? Bring on the freeloading then. Who do I make the check out to?
>People really think there are, but every time we look we find practically no freeloaders.
I don't believe that is true. You didn't provide any support for your claim at all either. Let's just consider a single example:
>In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.
>...
>I talked to lots of people in Hale County who were on disability. Sometimes, the disability seemed unambiguous.
>...
>As far as the federal government is concerned, you're disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it impossible to work. In practice, it's a judgment call made in doctors' offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment -- back pain, mental illness -- are among the fastest growing causes of disability.
Why are these health problems growing so fast? The obvious explanation is that the stigma against faking disability is evaporating in places like Hale County. That's how they got to the point where 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability there.
Another example: mtnGoat stated that their father was perfectly capable of paying for lunch but did not do so. If there was a need-based lunch program, mtnGoat would presumably be a "freeloader".
Arguably, the real problem in mtnGoat's case is they had an abusive parent. The relevant state tool would be child-protective services, not a cafeteria lunch lady.
I'm in favor of free school lunches for kids. But I'm very annoyed with the strawmanning in this thread. For example, it seems like a strawman to say that people who are against free school lunches "want kids to go hungry". Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state.
> I'm in favor of free school lunches for kids. But I'm very annoyed with the strawmanning in this thread. For example, it seems like a strawman to say that people who are against free school lunches "want kids to go hungry". Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state.
If parents are responsible then the children of the parents who can't or won't provide will go hungry. That is a fact. You may not _want_ children to go hungry but if you advocate for that system then you are absolutely okay with a number of children going hungry.
When I was in school we paid for (very fairly priced) school meals while the poor students were subsidized. It was handled pretty discreetly as well, I don’t think any kid was shamed for it, plus kids have a million ways to find out who’s poor anyway if they’re into bullying. So pretending the solution is binary is ridiculous.
Hell, my college education from Stanford, including room and board and a very modest allowance, was entirely covered by a university fund, no strings attached, while the rich kids paid in full. If $65k a year can be selectively waived (from a very rich institution, yes I’m aware, but I’m talking about the model), no way you can’t do that for a small portion of school lunches.
Look into the expression "perverse incentive". Maybe he doesn't want people so thoughtless they'd make children without being able to feed them to do so?
Also, too many Americans blindly praising socialism without knowing its consequences in the deep end. It's not all rainbows and butterflies.
This is the thing to me. I'm sympathetic to the concern of people taking advantage of others, but if the government is forcing children to be there (which we are), and already having to bear the cost of funding these schools generally, we really should include the cost of basic nutrition for all students as an operating cost, just like the electric bill and teacher's salaries.
1) Only a very few people are expected to be able (time and competency) to give a general education to their children, unlike feeding/housing.
2) Let's be real, it's not just socialism/charity, one of the major reasons for compulsory education is shaping malleable young minds (for good or bad, mind you).
1) If they don't have time or competency then surely they can pay for the services of someone who can. Most people don't have the time or competency to grow their own food but we still expect them to purchase their food from someone who can.
2) The state taking money from people by force in order to mandate the shaping of malleable young minds sounds like exactly the kind of grave consequences of socialism you fear.
Yeah, I'm a socialist: I believe children shouldn't be hungry in the richest country the Earth has ever seen. Sue me. Your slippery slope fallacy is no excuse for you willingness to let children starve.
Your country is falling into fasicsm and there are still people like you going "feeding kids is literally communism". No wonder this country is going down, its citizens are incapable of the most basic compassion toward one another.
As much as I'm in favour of such programmes, they are in fact social welfare and part of the social welfare state.
It's not absolute public ownership of all means of production. But within the continuum between reactionary caveat emptor lessez faire private absolutism and fully automated luxury gay space communism, it's a nudge or two toward the latter.
If you’ve ever considered going on disability, or needed to, you’d be very quickly enlightened. It’s hard. You have to have documentation, you will get denied. Even then the benefits are pretty shit. It’s not a thing that you can just accidently get. There’s a lot of people who are just disabled.
What happens if the parents who should be responsible, aren’t?
Which do you think is cheaper: Involving social services because someone isn't paying for school lunch, which would involve the state either paying foster parents or providing other costly monitoring, possible court cases, and/or support, or simply covering the cost of school lunches?
But "negligent" isn't a binary, and it's not just parents who don't want to, but parents who can't afford to. For a lot of children, easing things a little bit might be all that is needed. For others it might ease things enough that it can be part of a set of relatively light interventions.
For those who genuinely need more heavy handed interventions, it's not a solution, but it's also not in any way detrimental.
Yeah, but in this concrete case we are talking about someone whose parents could have afford it, but didn't to teach the state a lesson or something, but all they(or he) did was made life hell for their son. That is a serious parent fault and someone acting like this here, would likely also act weird with other things.
But like I stated, I am not a fan of child protection service, they can make things worse.
And if school is free, so should be lunch for the students. Apparently people assumed I opposed that here?
For every story about it being difficult to claim, there are plenty about people who haven't worked for 20 years who have received over £400,000 in welfare, who could have worked, because they learnt the game. The two sides have to move beyond these talking points if any useful discussion is to be had.
> For every story about it being difficult to claim, there are plenty about people who haven't worked for 20 years who have received over £400,000 in welfare
This is perfectly accurate: the stories you hear make these issues out to be equal, when in fact they're anything but. Study after study shows that work requirements (the policy you're implicitly advocating for here) do not work:
More to the point, millions of people are eligible for TANF benefits but don't receive them. Which is to say, even if there are some people scamming the system, there's tons of people who could legitimately receive benefits but don't.
---
The overall point here is that if we let criminals and a very small number of freeloaders sour us on these programs, we literally let kids go hungry; we literally let them die of preventable illnesses; etc. etc. It is absolutely bonkers to me that we are making this tradeoff.
so, you anecdotally know enough people who are somehow receiving benefits you don't think they deserve to tip the scale by a statistically relevant amount?
The kid is starving and child protective services isn't a free lunch program. Is the effort of potentially displacing the kid to foster care really solving the immediate problem?
Foster parents are also paid most places. Even purely in financial terms, for each child in foster care over something like this you could feed a lot of children instead, and avoiding the harmful effects of unnecessary interventions.
The benefit we're talking about here is food. Served in school lunchrooms. To students who are enrolled at that school. How exactly do you see this being abused?
People can only eat so much at a single sitting. Even highly-active, sports-team-member, teenaged boys. (I used to be one.) There are no massive opportunities for skimming or graft in the lunch line itself.
What could go wrong?
A child who's not otherwise likely to be in school decides to attend because they get fed. Win!
A child whose family are capable of affording a full-cost lunch free-ride. So what, that's a small fraction of total meals, make it up in taxes! (As I've discussed previously in this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43895455>.)
Complaints about free meals are like complaining about penny-ante voter fraud. The big opportunities aren't in showing up to polling places, as that's simply too expensive (in direct, physical-space costs). Voter fraud as a viable tactic occurs through unwarranted voter-roll purges, by disinformation about voting times and places, very rarely through corruption of counting processes (voting machines, election judges, and the like). But not by having people showing up to vote multiple times.
Sure, there's opportunity for fraud in school lunch programmes, but it's not transacted through stomachs. It's lunchroom staff skimming the till, it's vendor fraud, it's political corruption, it's kickbacks and sweetheart deals.
All of which are in fact real fraud.
But they are not identified or mitigated through means testing. Rather you want forensic audits, oversight, management practices, and law-enforcement investigating and prosecuting actual political corruption.
> Why are these health problems growing so fast? The obvious explanation is that the stigma against faking disability is evaporating in places like Hale County.
You can just look at what Social Security says about this [0]. TL;DR:
- Baby boomers getting old
- Economic conditions (you can see this in the data [1], where there's a suspicious huge leap in claims right around Trump monkeying around w/ the economy)
- Absent/inadequate health care
More directly, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with culture. The average disability application age is ~50 [2]. If this were a cultural issue you'd see that number declining.
> Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state.
What policy are you advocating here? So far all you've talked about is the non-existent freeloader problem.
> There are no moral hazards when it comes to social welfare programs.
This is a wild statement. Of course people take advantage of welfare programs. Of course welfare programs have unintended consequences and sometimes encourage immoral or anti-social behavior. That doesn't mean they're all bad or that they need to be completely eliminated, but leading with this obvious falsehood made it very hard to read the rest of your comment.
This is exactly why I stake out such a strong position, so that positions like this poke their heads up. Individuals getting benefits when they're ineligible accounts for tiny amounts of the total fraud in these programs. Time after time we discover at least one of two things:
- The effort/cost required to reduce fraud usually overshadows the cost of the fraud itself and also dramatically reduces the benefits of the program. There were 640,000 SNAP fraud investigations in 2014 [0]. If they cost $1,000 each that's $640m, and I bet they cost more!
- The vast majority of fraud is either criminal, retailer, or both [1]
The "moral hazard" angle of these programs is wildly overplayed. You don't hear anything about:
- criminal trafficking
- retailer fraud
- program benefits
There's political reasons for this, but it doesn't matter. Our brainrot on social programs is intense.
Looking at the fact sheet linked from that release [2], that stat that jumps out to me is 3,500 individuals charged totaling $1.4b in stolen CARES Act funds (this isn't a direct stat, but the numbers only get worse if we presume even more money from this and other programs was stolen), which is $400k/individual charged. It doesn't really seem possible for a person or household to have bilked the government for $400k under the individual benefits of the CARES Act [3]. We're looking at white collar fraud here, again a thing you never hear anything about.
Finally, we should view some levels of fraud as indicative of broader social ills. For example the number of blue collar jobs has greatly diminished just in a single lifetime [4]. Could that be responsible for the dramatic increase in Social Security Disability claims (yes)?
I wonder if optimizing for votes, as is the day to day business of most policy makers, gets you to the same place as optimizing for profits like in the private sector? If not, studying that could be one way to improve the public sector output. Not that shareholders vote, on average, but you get the idea.
You swept the issue of fraudulent social security disability claims under the rug. It seems apparent to me that your attitude toward individual level accountability is one that denies agency of the individual and ascribes their moral failures as a result of societal-level problems. After all, there is no moral hazard when individuals have no moral agency to begin with.
TL;DR: the average disability recipient age has hovered ~50 (stddev 1.54 years) since 1960. The theory of "baby boomers are a huge generation, they got old and US health care sucks ass" is far more parsimonious than your theory of individual accountability, which has to explain why every generation suddenly becomes fraudulent/immoral/unaccountable at the exact same point in their lives.
Aggregating statistics regarding age has very little explanatory value in regards to fraud and is a non sequitir. I would not be surprised if the average age of a convicted insurance fraudster has remained relatively constant over time either.
The example in linked materials of 1 in 4 adults in Hale County receiving disability payments is a clear example of a situation where individuals and healthcare providers have both contributed to widescale fraud. This is an obvious case where moral hazard is present and you continue to deny it.
This is my claim: the narrative that these programs incentivize and facilitate freeloading is false. Let's use your example: NPR's exploration of Hale County [0], which I'm not sure you've read/listened to.
The first interview [1] is exactly what I've written: baby boomers got older and more disabled, and economic conditions pushed people into disability. Quote: "consider this: Since the economy began its slow, slow recovery in late 2009, we've been averaging about 150,000 new jobs created per month. But in that same period, almost 250,000 people have been applying for disability every month." What do you want these people to do, manifest new jobs?
The second interview [2] outlines how the definition of disability has expanded over the years and the way the legal profession has exploited that to increase the number and success rate of disability claims. Again, not freeloading.
The third interview [3] describes how welfare-to-work legislation put a higher burden of the welfare onto states, so it's actually in their financial benefit to move people off of welfare and onto Social Security disability--so much so in fact that they pay people to do it. Quote: "PCG estimates it'll save Missouri about $80 million with all the people that will be getting onto disability and off of welfare".
Interviews 4 [4] and 5 [5] describe how people and families get trapped in these systems where if they do too well they'll experience extreme financial hardship. Quote: "a lot of the letters that we got from people responding to the stories were people saying, I'm one of those 14 million people on disability and I want to work. But I get health insurance on disability and what job am I going to find that accommodates my disability, it also gives me health insurance."
If your model of this problem is "there's a bunch of people too lazy to work who are freeloading on the public dole" you will be unsuccessful at solving it, because your model is wrong.
Your method of argument relies on lumping all persons into one category. The annoying detail about designing public policy is that policy changes happen on the margin, and it is the marginal cases where moral hazard presents itself first. If you continue to boundlessly extend your empathy for everyone that walks into their doctor's office to anybody that says they have back pain, you will clearly have fraud. And Hale County is clearly a case where this fraud is broadly present. You have presented your argument in the best way to try to lump the fraudsters in with the rest of the empathy-deserving recipients.
When Hale County has 1 in 4 adults on disability, it is beyond evident that the system is not working as intended. Yes, it is distinctly clear that some of those adults should be getting jobs. Your question "What do you want these people to do, manifest new jobs?" implies that this must be some unthinkably cruel thing to believe.
>If your model of this problem is "there's a bunch of people too lazy to work who are freeloading on the public dole" you will be unsuccessful at solving it, because your model is wrong.
Even if freeloading is unsolvable, the moral hazard exists. My primary claim prior to this comment has been limited to the fact that the moral hazard is present. Your argumentative strategy to claim that because the problem isn't solvable, it must not exist, strikes me as dishonest.
I'm gonna do the point by point thing here, not because I think you really deserve it, but because I want you to really think about the arguments you're making. Will it work? I don't know. Do I know of a better way to do it? I wish I did. OK here we go.
> Your method of argument relies on lumping all persons into one category.
I literally broke people up into different generations, people who can work, people who can't, children, people who are lawyers, policymakers, government workers or contractors moving people from welfare to disability. I really think you not only didn't read the NPR stuff, you didn't read what I wrote either.
> The annoying detail about designing public policy is that policy changes happen on the margin, and it is the marginal cases where moral hazard presents itself first.
You've no evidence for this. It's also not true; see for example the financial collapse of 2008. Also people who cry "moral hazard!" (this is you) don't think this, because their chief villains are subsidies and bailouts which explicitly create moral hazard. Also people who cry "social programs create moral hazard!" (this is also you) don't think this, because they see this as the fundamental dynamic of aid programs.
> If you continue to boundlessly extend your empathy for everyone that walks into their doctor's office to anybody that says they have back pain, you will clearly have fraud.
You've also no evidence for this. There's counter evidence though. Did you know a small fraction of disability claims are approved? You do now! Turns out we're not "extending [our] empathy for everyone that walks into their doctor's office".
> And Hale County is clearly a case where this fraud is broadly present.
This isn't my claim. My claim is (again): the narrative that these programs incentivize and facilitate freeloading is false. If there's no job literally in America that you can have, I don't think going on Social Security Disability is freeloading. I'd love to engage on the quote I posted ("Since the economy began its slow, slow recovery in late 2009, we've been averaging about 150,000 new jobs created per month. But in that same period, almost 250,000 people have been applying for disability every month.") but you've not responded to it at all, probably because it's devastating to your argument.
> You have presented your argument in the best way to try to lump the fraudsters in with the rest of the empathy-deserving recipients.
I do think these people (like all people) deserve empathy, but again that's not my claim. I'm making the claim I am because if you disagree with it, you'll ratfuck (or shutdown entirely) these programs such that they don't actually help people. When I talk about all the dynamics around aid programs, it's because I want people to understand the dynamics around aid programs, not to sneak freeloaders in through the back door. Elsewhere I posted "The overall point here is that if we let criminals and a very small number of freeloaders sour us on these programs, we literally let kids go hungry; we literally let them die of preventable illnesses; etc. etc. It is absolutely bonkers to me that we are making this tradeoff." Do you disagree? It's hard for me to imagine a rational person disagreeing.
> When Hale County has 1 in 4 adults on disability, it is beyond evident that the system is not working as intended.
Agree! The whole NPR series explains it. You should read it!
> Yes, it is distinctly clear that some of those adults should be getting jobs.
Again:
- For most of those people there aren't jobs
- There might be jobs but they're shit jobs that don't cover their bills or health insurance
- They actually in many cases _do have jobs_
Again, you should definitely read the NPR series you're citing over and over again (lol).
> Even if freeloading is unsolvable, the moral hazard exists.
Correct. Now:
- design an aid program without moral hazard or
- decide moral hazard is OK or
- decide it's OK for kids to literally die entirely of preventable causes
My main intention in my argument was to convince you that moral hazard exists in current social welfare programs. Judging by your statements, you were already aware of this, but rely on discussion points that deny it exists. Starting off an argument with such a clearly untrue line of discussion sets up pretty poor grounds for an honest talk.
That's all I intend for this. There's room for agreement on some other points, but I doubt it would be a productive conversation when you deny the existence of the downside tradeoffs of your preferred policies.
It existing is a necessary and desirable part of any rational system. If it didn't exist that system would either be too complicated as to not help those that need it and/or cost more to implement than is saved by eliminating the fraud. The correct amount of fraud is non zero: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
> It seems apparent to me that your attitude toward individual level accountability is one that denies agency of the individual and ascribes their moral failures as a result of societal-level problems. After all, there is no moral hazard when individuals have no moral agency to begin with.
Yeah! I do think people are 99% defined by the systems and scenarios they exist in, whether that's a government, a school system, a culture/society, a family, etc. You can see this all over, but my favorite example is when people from deeply misogynistic cultures move to Western countries, within a few years their views moderate. It's hard to find a more deeply held moral belief than the fundamental roles and identities of men and women, but it changes and quite easily.
Or with the Hale County example, I'm not at all surprised that as the economy failed that community they noped out of it. Reading through the NPR stuff, you'll get a good feeling for how they rationalize it (I don't think Hale County is especially beset by freeloaders) and their dissatisfaction with it. A world where people are strictly adhering to codes of morality isn't one I've ever experienced.
I'm not saying people never do moral or ethical things, and I don't think you can fully understand the world if you don't include morality/ethics in your thinking. But in the aggregate, this isn't how things work.
I disagree with regard to Hale County. Freeloading behavior became tolerated. The tacit endorsement of it became a cultural norm and it further discouraged productive economic behavior. They have the good fortune of living within a country large enough that one lagging region can be supported by the economic productivity of the country- something that comes at the expense of the other taxpayers. If they generally have the capability to support themselves but are instead choosing not to because it's easier, then they are freeloading.
If Hale County existed as an independent economy with no transfer payments to it, I wouldn't judge its population negatively. Or, if they were using the system of unemployment benefits as intended (as opposed to the system of disability benefits), then I wouldn't judge its population negatively. These systems were each established for their own purposes and twisting the intent of disability benefits to achieve personal gains is shameworthy. The fact that the people interviewed have to rationalize it is evidence that they are aware that what they are doing is shameworthy.
I think your arguments still are relying on misdirection around certain words- especially words that come with negative judgements against people that are suffering. i.e. the poor cannot act upon moral hazard, or the poor cannot be freeloaders. Well-intended moral judgements can still cast shame upon the poor- if you are poor, yet capable of working to improve your lot, and choose in the long term to rely on the involuntarily-given (taxed) aid of others, that is shameworthy. The preferable outcome would be to adapt, and to make your own way in life without taking from community resources. The whole community does better this way.
I literally googled "what do people buy with ebt" and got a list [0] with actual information that seems very reasonable. If you're gonna participate in the conversation, please do better than this.
The grandparent is hidden but your link has the following as the thesis statement:
> As a result, data show that sizable portions of SNAP dollars purchase nonnutritious foods, such as sugary beverages and ultra-processed foods, which can lead to poor health.”
Correct me if I'm wrong, but "sugary beverages" and "processed foods" are, in fact, food? Items which contain calories that are vital to sustaining life? And food stamps are intended to buy food with?
I'm not sure what point this link is trying to make.
Just roll it into property taxes and call it a day. This is not a political issue in my mind, but a basic humanity issue. A child with hunger pangs isn’t focused on learning, if you can’t cover the basic need, the rest is a waste. The haves, selfishly don’t want to help subsidize the have nots. Which I get, BUT these are kids, we as adults should leave them out of it, sack up, and deal with it.
You are correct, my dad was a civil engineer, he very much could afford it. I guess he thought high end alcohol and golf were better expenditures. I found it interesting that the article mentions a lot of the debt isn’t from the lowest income brackets.
> Just roll it into property taxes and call it a day.
It's what my district does and the benefits are obvious - there's no "gimme your lunch money" kids who have it hard at home & trying to supplement their diets.
The school even hands out a free breakfast, which serves as monitored childcare for the parents who need to drop their kids off before 8 AM, to get to work. The highschool also gives out double servings for kids who come off the morning sports practice sessions.
The cynic in me says the biggest beneficiary will be the US Army, who can reliably look for a stream of well fed kids from families which aren't doing well enough to pay for college.
There are fundamentally two different things going on here.
One is whether kids should get fed.
The other is how this is paid for.
The approach of "the child is charged like anyone else buying a thing and hopefully their parents have given them money" is easy but has obvious problems that we're talking about.
However we can split these problems up, one is saying that we will just feed the kids as a flat statement. Then the problem is how to pay for it.
You could have state level taxes, but that's not the only option. On the other end of the spectrum you could send a bill to the parents - this is at its core the same as charging the kids in the best case but avoids issues where people don't give the kids the money. You could do that but have programs to only charge the more fortunate. You could do it by taxes on income, you could do it by income but only if you have kids. You could do it with property taxes.
All have various benefits and drawbacks, as what's "fair" is arguable.
However that is all distinct from whether the kids get fed.
> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. In your case, it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload.
I say this as an IT worker making what most would consider an absurd amount of money and pays 0.55*absurd money in taxes, a dad, a human, etc... what the fuck does any of this matter.
If a child is hungry, the only concern is feeding that child. A child is, pretty much by definition, incapable of fully caring for themselves. If their parents fail to care for them, we have various mechanisms for the state to step in in their stead up to and including taking them away and giving them to someone else.
"Sorry, Johnny, your dad has the money to pay for lunch but chose not to so we're punishing you with going hungry until he wises up."
Full stop no.
If a child is hungry, they get fed. Politics can dictate that adults who are less valuable deserve to starve to death. Politics can dictate that adults who can afford to feed their child but choose not to need to be punished, taxed more, or anything else.
But we, as a society, have the means to ensure that no child ever has to go hungry. Every decision that leads to hungry children is offensive, and anyone choosing to punish adults by starving their children is a monster.
Downvote, flag, or come fight me. I'll die on this hill: Neglecting children is bad and anyone who could help and doesn't is at fault.
exactly. if you want to play hardball, then send a bill to the parents. send a debt collector if you believe that they have the money. but don't withhold food from the children. i mean we might as well bar children from school if their parents don't pay taxes. it's really the same thing.
I agree the child should be fed, but we also need to think about the other wide of this.
It sounds as though the dad in this case was able to pay but refused to pay. What sort of person puts their own child through this to make a point? It is neglectful or abusive.
You know there are countless parents that abuse their kids, physically, emotionally, sexually. They rape their kids and strangle them until they pass out. They hit them in places where bruises aren't visible. They break bones and threaten the kids with death if they dare tell anyone or show their injury or pain.
Why do we suddenly need to especially think about the other side of this because tax money is involved? Now we need to care?
You know, we say “don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good” a lot for technical problems but it’s far more critical here. A child from a failing home has a lot of problems and it often takes a long time to solve them, but we can for a trivial amount of money ensure that child isn’t malnourished because they get breakfast, lunch, and in many Title 1 schools, dinner. Many of the other problems of poverty, neglect, or abuse are much harder to solve – e.g. sending a child to foster care might be the solution for abuse but it’s slow and has plenty of risks of its own – but this one is easy and cheap to fix while we work on the hard problems.
Of course that is not all, how on earth did you get that impression?
Doing something to address a problem doesn't imply that nothing else will be done and that this one thing is expected to solve the problem entirely. I didn't think this needed explaining.
>A child is, pretty much by definition, incapable of fully caring for themselves.
This is disrespectful to the intelligence of children.
>we're punishing you with going hungry until he wises up
Not giving people free things is not a punishment.
>as a society, have the means to ensure that no child ever has to go hungry.
Giving away free food is not the only way to achieve that.
>Every decision that leads to hungry children is offensive
I disagree as there may be times where it is fine. This statement to me is equivalent to saying that we shouldn't make children feel sadness or pain. These are just parts of living. People will naturally experience them and later move on.
>punish adults by starving their children
Schools do not starve children. While yes schools prohihit people from leaving, school only last for a part of the day before they are released, and parents can pickup a child at any time. In order to starve someone you need to block access to food for a very long period of time.
I'm not sure where to even begin with this, but a large part of why free school lunches exist is that there are many kids in abusive or simply desperately poor families who do not get fed properly, meaning that the school lunch may be the only decent meal they get.
> Not giving people free things is not a punishment.
This is absurd. Kids don't have money to purchase what they need, so parents have a duty to feed, clothe, house etc them. Intentionally not providing children what they need, like food, is abuse, period.
>meaning that the school lunch may be the only decent meal they get
"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."
By giving away food you are getting people stuck in a bad situation. Preventing a reconfiguration of people's lives. A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustaining themselves on a single daily handout.
>Kids don't have money to purchase what they need
Again you are underestimating the abilities of kids. They are capable of providing value to others and consequently receiving money or goods that they need.
>parents have a duty to feed, clothe, house etc them.
But this duty is not because their children don't have money. The duty is because they are family. I wouldn't expect a patent to take in every homeless person to their household because they don't have money to purchase what they need.
>Intentionally not providing children what they need, like food, is abuse, period.
I think it's more complex. Parents have power over children and using that power they can restrict what they do and make it impossible for them to acquire what they need. To me this restriction is what is abusive and it would apply to anyone else. If you locked anyone in a room and denied them water, that would be abuse.
> By giving away food you are getting people stuck in a bad situation. Preventing a reconfiguration of people's lives. A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustaining themselves on a single daily handout.
You realize this is a completely invented statement of faith, right? It has no data or research supporting it.
> >parents have a duty to feed, clothe, house etc them.
> But this duty is not because their children don't have money. The duty is because they are family.
I'd like to live in a society where we extend this duty to the society. It is the parent's duty foremost, but we as a society should see this as our duty as well, at the very least for our children (and let's think of it that way, we are in this together, at least when it comes to our children).
> A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustaining themselves on a single daily handout.
I'm with you as far as the principle of personal responsibility is concerned, we are all better when everyone contributes, and I agree that we should teach our children this principle. However, the whole reason that, even legally, we don't treat kids as adults is that they are not adults, cannot and should not be held to the same standards. Withholding the basic necessities of life is not the way to teach this principle.
It doesn't even work consistently. I'd argue that many of the people that are fraudulently taking advantage of welfare programs are doing so because they were taught, as kids, that society doesn't care about them. So why should they care about us? Why shouldn't they take advantage of whatever they can? I'm not justifying this position, or even saying it is logically sound, but kids are not adults. If withholding school lunches is your method for "teaching responsibility" it is really ineffective.
Just feed the kids. We're not giving them free Xboxes. We're keeping them healthy and alive so that they can learn.
If you don't provide lunches for the children then their parents need to pay for them anyway. Just tax more if you don't already have a budget, this isn't a case where there would be radically different spending patterns without government intervention.
This is why we have taxes. Because we can assess how much each person can afford to pay, and then make collective decisions that can't be made by inefficient free market mechanisms.
As someone whose family fled from the ex-socialist state of Yugoslavia (well I guess the state itself was socialist, and the ex- part applies to the country itself, but you get what I mean) - who is very much against socialism - this is an absurd connection to make. We're talking about making sure kids have something to eat at the school they go to every day, not giving the workers the means of production. Not everything has to have a profit incentive, and not everything that doesn't make profit can be classed as socialism.
As member of post communist country, I see rising taxes, centrally planed economics and growing financial dependence on state, with losing individual freedom by amount of regulations, as threat.
I was reacting on taxation praising. Note that author of article act voluntary, which is morally acceptable. Taking wealth from people and relocate is not.
> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother.
I quite frankly don't care about that type of arguments anymore. If someone wants to be a bad person they are free to do so. I don't care, it should not stop the 95%, or more, that want to do the right thing.
We continuously make more and more convoluted rules, which are a nightmare for decent people to navigate, but which are just ignored by the assholes. I don't care about fighting the assholes for what is minor amounts, if it means overburdening good people with rules which weren't meant for them anyway.
Moving it to taxes essentially does the same thing. The assholes weasel their way out of paying their fair share, while those who want the best for society and everyone is stuck paying the full amount.
Treat it as the common good and societal investment it actually is, and fund it from central taxation like plenty of other countries do. Problem solved!
> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother.
So what? Assuming you have a progressive tax system in the first place, the people that are capable of paying are, in fact, actually paying for the service in any case. Why charge them again?
> So as long as you're going to charge for lunches, you need to have some kind of enforcement mechanism.
Yes, and one of the reasons for free universal public programs paid for by progressive taxes are often better than means-tested programs is that enforcement isn't free (and neither, in the case of school lunches, is handling money for payment for the people that your means-tested free lunch program now means are required to pay for the service) so you end up spending a whole lot more between payment processing and eligibility verification and enforcement than you save by excluding the people actually paying for the service by higher taxes from receiving the service.
his dad did pay… he paid the schools entire budget. you cant just throw the whole system into chaos where people are expected to pay in several different ways and then they turn the tablet around and aggressively ask for a tip. without a clear, simple and singular source of funding it just becomes an excuse for corruption. and here we are, being told that we are inhuman monsters for not subsidizing a bloated tumor of administrators. how about the administrators downsize and take 100k home instead of multiple hundreds of thousands? why arent they subject to any of this scrutiny?
> it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload.
But it went a step further. He didn't want to pay either way, so the poster was in exactly the same situation as the poor kids.
If we're scared to help people who need help, because there's a small chance that someone else may benefit as well, we've lost as a society. Just raise the taxes and give it to every kid.
I'm sorry but I lived in France and this didn't happen. We had to pay for the food (~3€), and if you didn't had the money (basically because of low resources), then it was free. People that could pay payed, and people that couldn't didn't.
Your anecdote is a great example of how inequality leads to crime. And the systems that are in place to "punish" the "unequal"/"un-privileged", results in high effort ways that punish the "privileged".
If we extend your anecdote to normalizing petty crime, and the likelihood to extend to adulthood -- not paying for school lunches now may be a great way to increase paying for school lunches when a person is sent to prison for vagrancy / petty crimes (repeatedly, and will never be able to dig out of the prison/debt hole)
While I wholeheartedly agree that no child should ever go hungry and school lunches should be free (from a EU country, this isn’t even a thing here), if you call people subhuman, we can't be friends, nor acquaintances.
Subhuman is a rather severe (and incredibly reductionist) judgement. Sure, being anti-free lunch for children is morally objectionable… but they’ve failed to probe that line of reasoning. They’ve encountered a bug, but instead of debugging it, they’ve closed their IDE and walked away.
Sometimes an honest conversation—with carefully placed, introspective questions—can be revealing to all parties. When we use our tongues to learn about others and build them up rather than tear them down, we’re actively making the world a better place. When we resist the tendency to judge others, we’re actively bettering ourselves.
This, and there’s something all-too human about ignoring or even basking in the suffering of others, including children. Pretending it’s somehow less than human to be on that side of things feels a bit head-in-sand.
A certain amount of ignoring human suffering is positively required to exist in the modern world, otherwise it would be an impossible-to-defend-against exploit to walk up to happy people in the first world and say “ten thousand children die every day from lack of access to clean water”, because then you would permanently alter or ruin their life.
FWIW this is true on Earth today.
It is required to turn a blind eye to slavery and oppression and hunger and thirst and preventable death and disease otherwise it would be impossible to have any semblance of a happy life in the good parts of the world, because the scale of preventable human suffering is both epic and, thus far, neverending.
> ... and school lunches should be free (from a EU country, this isn’t even a thing here)
I'm from another EU country (the Netherlands). Primary schools do not provide any lunch or other food whatsoever, secondary schools might have a canteen selling some snacks or low quality fast food. But everyone is basically expected to bring their own or go out/home for lunch.
Yes, we had the same system when I went to school in a (relatively low-income) expat (Indian) school in the Middle East. But nowhere was a child expected to leave the break hungry - I saw firsthand a teacher ruthlessly scolded by the grade supervisor (who was a GOAT all-round) because she found a student still eating after she had arrived at the class, and sent him to stand outside as punishment.
Another time, a teacher paid for a student's meal because he lost the change he was given by his parents to buy food from the canteen.
And another time, the school canteen just giving away free food at the end of the day to whoever wanted it, because there was no point in them keeping it around.
It's honestly unbelievable that a first world country would let its children go without lunch because even third world countries do not let that happen. I have seen schools in rural Africa that don't let their children starve - in fact, giving a midday meal (and some to take home afterwards) is a way to ensure school attendance.
No one is starving in the netherlands. There's a difference between offering a canteen but charging for it with some able and some not able to pay, and a general expectation that all bring food from home. Many Dutch, German, etc companies will also not have canteens but rather people bring a sandwich or last night's leftovers from home. The standard warm meal is the evening meal.
Also read the book "Superschool" about what was one of the worst schools in one of the poorest areas of the Netherlands, where there were loads of kids going to school hungry, dirty, and without basics like a coat.
Sorry, your throwaway remark just rubbed me up the wrong way. The Netherlands is not the socialist utopia that some people make it out to be, we just have bike lanes, sorta-legal weed and superior bread / cheese.
I wasn't talking about the Netherlands per se, but wanted to pinpoint that alternatives exist in places other than the US, which ensure that no kid starves. In fact, my comment was an add-on to yours, as we followed the same system as you guys do in NL.
He's absolutely right. As someone whose society suffered very heavy losses from the Nazis, this is the first thing that came to my mind when I read the root comment. It's like posting swastikas online and then dismissing concerned replies because "it's a Buddhist sign, what are you on about?"
I am glad to read this. (I am the originally - bit snarky - commenter about your use of the word, and do indeed live in Germany) .. my snap reaction my not have been worded the best it could have been :)
Except in this case the victims (the hungry children) are not the ones being labeled that. Also the word subhuman is in the dictionary (I checked Webster's) with zero reference to the war.
And "n*gro" is the Spanish, non-slur word for "black" but yet we can't use it because US people dislike it. Slavery and such. Cultural sensitivity goes both ways.
> And "n*gro" is the Spanish, non-slur word for "black" but yet we can't use it because US people dislike it. Slavery and such. Cultural sensitivity goes both ways.
Webster's dictionary:
plural Negroes
1 dated, often offensive : a person of Black African ancestry
2 dated, often offensive : a member of a group of people formerly considered to constitute a race (see race entry 1 sense 1a) of humans having African ancestry and classified according to physical traits (such as dark skin pigmentation)
Note the "offensive" warnings. Now let's see subhuman:
: less than human: such as
a: failing to attain the level (as of morality or intelligence) associated with normal human beings b: unsuitable to or unfit for human beings
subhuman living conditions c: of or relating to a taxonomic group lower than that of humans; the subhuman primates
In the case of subhuman, Webster's dictionary does not give any warning. And there is no reference to any wars.
Don't try to make people say things they are not saying.
In this case the intended meaning was clearly:
"failing to attain the level (as of morality) associated with normal human beings"
Like you, probably, I got a very systemizing brain and had trouble understanding this for decades. What the dictionaries say about the words does not matter - what is offensive to other people does not follow any system, but their feelings. And that means its arbitrary and you have probably no chance to know it ahead of time.
I agree. There is something less evolved about their sense of humility.
One day it's someone else who can't afford lunch, another day it may well be you or your kids. In a rational society, where we all unanimously acknowledge the fragility of our respective positions, I believe even the most simple rational human would agree that the basic needs to live must be met for all.
I feel those who take an opposing view are often blind to their own vulnerabilities and misunderstandings.
this is ridiculous. I'm a socialist and I believe that people should have far more of life's necessities provided to them by the state; I think supermarkets should be nationalised; I think water and electricity should be free up to a limit. on the other hand, this "people disagree with me about something sensitive so they're unevolved and/or subhuman" lark is childish as fuck and completely hypocritical
people think things for a reason, and it's rarely because they're sociopaths or they're unevolved or they're stupid, and assuming that it is lazy and uncritical
No, there, at least in the USA, a large amount of very dumb people. They also tend to be quite sadistic as well, thinking 'those people' deserve the sadism and torment.
This percolates through our whole society, one case of which is this scholastic food 'debt'.
And also, during some of Biden's years, there was a few years of free school lunches. And was also summarily cancelled. Even democrats have this pervasive 'those people don't deserve X'.
you're proving my point. people think these things because, as you say, they're instilled in the American national mentality. it makes sense to think that's wrong, it makes sense to think people should think for themselves and try to engage their empathy circuits for people not in their immediate family, but it's taking it a million steps too far to say they're subhuman or unevolved, and it's not helping anything anyway. perhaps it was too far to say that it's rarely because they're stupid though
A less evolved sense of humility (as I originally put it) does not equate to stupid. They are far from stupid - they are ruthless consumers of every scrap of advantage they can get, including the best education, food, clothes to name but a few things. They believe they deserve that advantage.
In fact, they see the person who can't afford lunch as stupid - after all, an intelligent person should at least be able to get lunch - it's so easy! What they don't realise is how much each person is impacted by their own starting position in life (which, I believe to be random), and how that in turn impacts where they are now.
Many "privileged" people lack empathy, because they believe the tables can never turn. They don't even want to entertain the thought. They believe their privilege is a birthright. In some cases, they are probably correct; they will enjoy privilege for their entire lives. But in exceptional circumstances, they will be caught out, and their opinion will undoubtedly change.
So, it's not stupidity, it is willful ignorance. History is full of such examples, some more chilling and devastating than others.
I feel like you're not actually replying to the things I said. I added that they may be stupid as an afterthought given that I value challenging societal norms highly as a signal of intelligence. the main points were elsewhere
How so? You said my comment was ridiculous because I was implying stupidity or a lack of evolution in the general sense, but my comment concerned the evolution of their humility, not their evolution in general. My last comment simply clarified that.
"My dad believed that because he paid taxes he shouldn’t have to pay the school to feed me."
I understand this is not what is meant here... but in a sense he's right. In a normal society where everyone pay taxes and they are well spent, it should be indeed the Government that's in charge of feeding kids at school
He’s right but if everyone around you tells you you’re wrong, you’re also in a very bad spot.
If your kids are hurting because you stand on the moral high ground… you get your cigs stolen from, by your children no less. All for the psychological comfort of being right.
You could say he was right, just early: this is also known as very wrong in e.g. financial markets.
Taxes aren't magic, you pay some money and receive some services. It's obviously possible to fund meals with tax money, but would he accept a higher tax rate to cover for it?
I would accept one fewer aircraft carrier to fund school lunches for the foreseeable future.
Also, food cost is effectively artificial. We literally pay farmers not to farm to keep prices viable for market games. Instead of doing that, the government could buy a fraction of athe excess for school systems.
And yes, I'd accept taxes on par with non-trashfire countries if they resulted in the society and services of those countries.
Absolutely, and more states are starting to realize this. Covering basic needs for the most vulnerable is a cornerstone of community and a sign of success.
This is wild to me. In Estonia school lunches are free for everyone, paid by the taxpayer. Doesn't matter if you are poor or wealthy, everybody gets the same food.
In the Netherlands we packed our lunches or we cycled home to eat lunch with our parents and then cycled back to school. Lunch was one of the most favorite times of my day. A break from school during school hours. What a treat!
Meanwhile, in Texas (~2005), we weren't even allowed to leave the building to eat on the patio outside in high school.
Something I thought a lot about when I moved to Mexico and saw kids leaving school at lunch to wander out and eat lunch together in the surrounding part of the city.
Too much dangerous liability to allow going outside during lunch hours in a wealthy part of Texas, but not in Guadalajara, Mexico and nor of the world. Sigh.
In Indiana (mid 90s), we had an open lunch policy in high school. This meant we could all leave campus, so long as we were back by the start of the next class. It was great and we had many choices for quick lunch nearby. I remember picking up something fast, but eating lunch at a park with friends often. The small amount of freedom (and trust) was very nice.
Sadly, I think they stopped allowing that the year after I graduated.
I had that in Southern California. It lasted until two years after I graduated, when a student brought a gun to school and started shooting. The school administration which had ignored multiple warning signs with that student decided open lunch was a security risk.
> Meanwhile, in Texas (~2005), we weren't even allowed to leave the building to eat on the patio outside in high school.
> Too much dangerous liability to allow going outside during lunch hours in a wealthy part of Texas, but not in Guadalajara, Mexico and nor of the world. Sigh.
Do you think it actually was or is the US just really strict about this?
I think there's just liability creep in the US that over time leads to zero-tolerance policies that win over, say, adult discretion.
For example, in the same high school, I had an unopened beer can on the floor of my car from the weekend, and one of our golf cart parking lot cops saw it while doing her window snooping. And I got sent to reassignment school for a month and a minor in possession charge even though various people in the faculty thought it was unfair that I couldn't just dispose of it and go on my way since I was a good student who clearly wasn't intending to drink at school.
Meanwhile my dad said just decades earlier he kept his BB rifle in the bed of his truck when he drove to high school in Houston. Something that would probably get SWAT called on you if they found it in your truck by the time I went to high school.
Their experience is not universal as I also went to High School in Texas in the early 2000's and not only were we allowed to eat on school grounds, if you were old enough to have a license you could drive off campus for lunch as long as you were back before the next period.
Yeah this is the part I don't understand; if a family can't afford a school lunch, can they afford a packed lunch at least? The concept of a school even having the facilities for a full lunch only became a thing in tertiary education for me, before that it was at best a hot snack or some soup. But this is Dutch 90's privilege to a point, elementary school was in cycling range, we had an hour and a half of lunch break, and I had a stay at home parent. Secondary school was only a few hundred meters further away than elementary school. Tertiary was in the next town over, 20 minute bike ride.
Either way, it made no economic sense to pay for lunch, so for most of it I had some sandwiches, this was the norm for most people. I'm nearly 40 now and still (should) bring a packed lunch to the office, because going out for lunch costs €10,- easily. If I went to the office every day like in the Before Times, that'd be around €200,- a month or €2400 a year, which is A Lot.
> if a family can't afford a school lunch, can they afford a packed lunch at least?
More can, but American poverty is harsh for people who haven’t seen it. There are kids who don’t have stable living conditions (my wife has had students who rarely sleep under the same roof two nights in a row, one school in the district had a homelessness rate around 40%), or who might not have access to a refrigerator or rodent-proof storage, or who have abusive/mentally ill parents who don’t give them enough food, withhold it as a punishment, or think that enough Jesus will cure an allergy or other medical condition which means they can’t eat some things, etc. Social services may eventually catch up to this at some point but they’re chronically underfunded even in blue states and that can take a good chunk of someone’s childhood.
At this point, we have over a century of studies concluding that one of the easiest ways to improve education is to make sure kids aren’t hungry and the cost of doing so is cheaper than almost anything else (free glasses probably win there) so, like OP, I basically treat this as a litmus test for human decency.
Read the HN guidelines. I didn't downvote you, as I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, but it reads as a sarcastic snarky comment [1].
It's bread, butter and cheese. Not dry bread and cheese. I didn't eat that as a kid though, I hated cheese when I was young.
The quality of the bread varies, depending on the views of the household. The way I grew up everyone favored white bread but me. I always ate brown bread.
Nowadays, I come to the US quite often and it frustrates me that there's almost no supermarket that sells a good loaf of bread. A lot of bread has added sugar and I don't even want to know what other stuff they add to it. I'm not a fan of the bakeries either as the bread they make tastes alright, but not for $8. So whenever I'm in the US, I make my own bread, because even after a first try, it was better [2] (by an American baker. It's not that they can't - it's just that affordable nice bread is not a pervasive thing in the US).
And if you genuinely think it's dry bread and cheese. You're wrong, I know what dry bread tastes like. Done well, it's called toast.
My school lunch was bread with butter and a fried egg.
Hey, I'm Dutch and that was indeed a snarky comment coming from my own experience. Sorry that it's a big deal for you, or others it seems. That wasn't the intention.
Brown bread is the superior one; white bread just feels like a snack, it doesn't last. Just not the whole grain, seedy, or extra dark ones, plain brown is fine.
The effect of what you argue for would be 1) to make innocent children who have no control over whether or not their parents are too poor to fund education for their children suffer, and 2) to seriously negatively affect society as a whole by reducing the education-level of the public.
Society needs children to remain functioning and stable as people age and can't sustain themselves, and so from even a purely selfish angle, funding the welbeing of children and ensuring that having more children is viable to ensure an ongoing supply of labour to keep society functioning is the rational choice.
Parents would find a way to pay to stay out of jail, same way they do today in finding food to buy their children, or housing, or insurance for their car. Living in our society is not free. Reproduction isn’t either. Socializing the costs of an individual choice to have a child or 8 is not morally defensible.
Not everyone in society cares about and values the supply of labor for the functioning of the next generation. It is fundamentally immoral to use force to compel us to fund your genetic and demographic objectives.
If you think that socializing the costs of children is morally correct, why stop at education? Children need clothing and food, why do we not use tax money to provide free clothing and food to all children (instead of just the poor ones)?
Education could work similarly if you believe that; people able to afford to pay for their children’s education should have the obligation to do so, critically, just like every parent does now for food and clothing. Those that are legitimately unable to pay for their child’s education could then be subsidized.
There is a real problem in our society of people having children (and pets) they cannot reasonably afford to appropriately care for.
Forcing other people to subsidize their poor decisions is morally repugnant; which is completely independent of the suffering of children. In fact, if you believe children going hungry or uneducated is bad, you are also invested in solving the problem of people having children they cannot afford to support. (Support of course including the costs of education.)
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 interests just to harm others.
You're not forced to fund anything - you can leave, and find a society that won't make you.
If you disapprove of being asked to contribute to society as a whole, I'd be all for giving you the right to excuse yourself from society, including all it provides. What you can't expect is the ability to selectively opt out of responsibilities and still be free to enjoy the benefits of that society - it goes two ways - it'd be immoral to force society to provide you with benefits and access if you're not prepared to accept the responsibilites that comes with that.
> If you think that socializing the costs of children is morally correct, why stop at education? Children need clothing and food, why do we not use tax money to provide free clothing and food to all children (instead of just the poor ones)?
If parents don't, most civilized countries that can afford to does in fact provide assistance to cover these things, because in most places people find it deplorable to let children go without.
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 without, both of whom can afford what is needed, pays for the choices of the family that opted to have children.
It’s all too easy to obscure the moral issue here, which is that people who don’t have or want children are being forced to pay for the education of the children of parents who very well can pay for their own children. That’s like making everyone in a city, regardless of car ownership, pay into a public automobile insurance fund that covers anyone with a car (including luxury cars).
I'm not conflating anything. We subsidize the education of everyone because it is important to society and to the children to ensure that all children are educated. Because society then mandates it because an educated workforce is essential to the functioning of society that you too depend on, it is natural that society also shares the burden of paying for it.
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.
It is important to society that cars be insured and that buildings be built to safety standards, also.
We don’t subsidize those things, we make the people driving the cars and building the buildings pay for it.
Everyone in society benefits from those requirements.
Your arguments here as to why the childfree must pay for the education of children they did not produce doesn’t really hold water. I benefit from the hotel I’m in being built to fire code, yet it doesn’t make sense to build private hotels with tax money.
Why does it make sense for children to be educated with tax money? Children need food, too, and we don’t buy their food with tax money. Why education?
I think every child should get a hot, nutritious breakfast and lunch at school at taxpayer expense. But I'm also [edit] s/smart/reasonable enough to know that people who disagree with that aren't "subhuman."
There is no "basic test of humanity" and pretending their is is tribalistic bullshit so you can feel superior to other people who disagree with you.
hypocrisy
/hĭ-pŏk′rĭ-sē/
noun
1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings,
or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
2. An act or instance of such falseness.
>I consider how someone feels about free school lunch, a basic test of their humanity.
I'll bite (pun alert).
It isn't about free handout, it's about ROI. The valid counterpoint to free lunch for children is any program can become grossly mismanaged because of "think of the children". There are recent stories of unhealthy and expired food being served to children that made them sick. Moreover, what they are getting can be something that puts more bad-calories than good into them (processed, high in corn-syrup). While I agree that no child should go hungry, can you both understand and not disagree this isn't a fire and forget problem? Taxpayers need their hard-earned income only going into high nutrition food; food that will not exacerbate the nationwide obesity problem!
I'm sorry, I'm all for discretion with what we feed kids, but that is not a valid counterpoint to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are many consistently worse side effects of not giving growing children food that outweigh whatever you think processed food does.
I could have, and did on occasion, but that would have required my dad to go buy lunch food and keep it on hand. But he didn’t need to do that… the school needed to feed us!
I did learn around 7th grade that I could steal his cigarettes and sell them. I guess he did pay for more lunches than I realized, now that I wrote this.
The fact that you think this is a seriously practical suggestion shows that, very fortunately for you, you have no idea what goes in a household like this. I say this with sincerity, it's a good thing that you don't realize the problem with this suggestion.
Agree - if my 10yo son was in charge of getting his own food for school from our well stocked fridge, I know he'd struggle to get any kind of balance.
I know from friends in education who see kids come to school who have had to try to find food to bring in. I live in a relatively well off area but kids still come to school with stuff like just dry bread or a single cereal bar as there just isn't anything to hand for them to bring in for school - looking after their kids welfare isn't a given for a sad and sizeable minority.
Do you think Canadians are subhuman? We don’t do this and there’s no issue. The school is not a replacement for bad parenting. I bet you’re the type of person who still believes in food deserts.
In my country you pay for school lunches as a local tax (and assistance is available for low income families). Children are always fed. Parents are the ones with the debts and the garnished salaries.
It's honestly heartbreaking - not just what you went through, but how normalized it was. That kind of survival mode shouldn't be part of any kid's school experience
It is classically American to say "I pay taxes. They should use that to solve the problem" while paying so few taxes that it could not possibly solve the problem.
Contemporary politics is turning every proposition into the most polarized argument conceivable. Which is exactly what this comment is doing. And it is in fact against the HN rules of conduct.
Except this isn’t a political issue, it’s humanitarian and basic empathy. Never said anyone should be removed from earth, that’s quite the projection, but go on.
Basic empathy, except for those folks you disagree with. Maybe they just lack an perspective? Maybe you just need to point out one or two things and they understand?
A few days ago you posted comments where you questioned whether it was appropriate to apply lessons from the Holocaust when interpreting contemporary state policies, and that some Wikipedia "spree" convinced you that it wasn't appropriate.
This likely means that you consider current starvation campaigns with exterminationist aims more defensible than 'der Hungerplan' and Vernichtungskrieg of the Holocaust. To me this makes you "one of the baddies". The attempt to exterminate the palestinians or the attacks on sudanese refugees and civilian infrastructure or the bombing campaigns against civilian targets in Yemen are, in principle, at least as indefensible as the starvation tactics of the german eastern advance during WWII.
Those responsible should ideally be brought to the ICC or related tribunals and tried for their crimes. You disagree, judging from your comments in that thread.
"There are numerous conflicts worldwide where one side is trying to systematically destroy the other population, civilians and all. Whether they are exactly the same or how you define that is pretty secondary to that fact."
To which you responded:
"Whatever. Since my last Wikipedia spree on that topic i feel such comparisons are highly inappropriate."
This was in reply to this specific context:
"It's interesting we always talked about the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials when talking about accountability, as if similar atrocities aren't currently happening."
Now, what would it take for you to change your mind and to start agreeing that contemporary crimes of deliberate starvation and exterminationist policies should be tried in an international court or tribunal?
To you, what is it that makes the Holocaust so very special? To a large extent it was perpetrated in the same manner as the genocide against the circassians, and to an extent in the same manner as the genocide against the herero and nama peoples. In your mind, was the Holocaust just the killing by poison and that's why you don't see any contemporary cases of similarity?
> Now, what would it take for you to change your mind and to start agreeing that contemporary crimes of deliberate starvation and exterminationist policies should be tried in an international court or tribunal?
Nothing, because that's already my opinion.
> What is it that makes the Holocaust so very special?
The name.
So this has been a trivial misunderstanding on terminology, and you kinda went full flak on me. Someone else got their point proven.
To a lurker scanning this thread, this comes off as “I’m more interested in semantics and winning an argument than condemning abusive and antisocial behavior.”
That's akin to a straw man, as shown by the quotes above. You clearly claimed that contemporary genocidal processes are "highly inappropriate" to compare to the Holocaust. This in response to someone using the Nuremberg trials as a frame of reference for suggesting that contemporary exterminationist criminals should be held accountable.
But it's great that you've changed your mind since then.
Maybe that unhappiness leads to you managing to better keep "garbage interpretations" at bay the next time you engage with a topic that touches on atrocities.
They said that implicitly by choosing to debate a trivial sentence designed to impart the reader with the sense of importance that this principle holds for the OP. This kind of tone policing is a tactic designed to pull you away from the original argument.
Or maybe they just don't think wishing ill upon someone for having a different world view than you or I is an reasonable thought?
I think school meals should be free, I do not wish harm to anyone who disagrees on that. People disagree all the time, I don't start calling them subhuman
When the other side is advocating for children to starve, then yeah, fuck them. There is no point in being charitable to people incapable of the most basic decency.
The OP wouldn't have starved. There appears to have been food in the house the OP could have taken, but the OP didn't because he wanted his father to, in his words, "buy lunch food." You'll note that he says his family could afford food, but that he dad wouldn't pay for school lunch specifically because he thought the government should pay for it.
The previous poster didn't want to bring the food that was in his home because it wasn't "lunch food," so he justifies how he stole from his father, his classmates, and local businesses. And now he's going to judge other people's humanity by whether or not they agree with his stance that he was entitled to the kind of lunch he wanted, and call people subhuman if they disagree.
I'm someone who's in favor of the government providing free lunches, but this discussion shows why caution is needed. To many people will ignore the actually events that happened and start manufacturing catastrophes, then say that because of their fabricated scenario anyone who isn't in favor of what they want is a horrible human being, or that they were justified for harming others.
Why would he resort to scrounging around for food, looking through lost and found, and eventually stealing from the grocery store if there was food available at home for him. Because there was all this amazing food at home that wasn't "lunch food" is your conclusion? Every conclusion that follows is only logical if you go with a completely nonsensical assumption. If OPs Dad was willing to let his kid starve daily I wonder what his punishment would have been for eating his Dad's food.
> Every conclusion that follows is only logical if you go with a completely nonsensical assumption.
He specifically said that his father had enough money, and the issue was specifically paying for school lunches. Unless they literally woke up in the morning and went out for every breakfast before school every single day, and came home and ate a restaurant every single night, and went out to dinner three times a day on the weekends for every meal, and his dad literally didn't even keep a scrap of food in the house for himself and the fridge was completely empty, then there was food in the house.
It should be obvious which of those assumptions is "completely nonsensical."
> If OPs Dad was willing to let his kid starve daily I wonder what his punishment would have been for eating his Dad's food.
He specifically says he stole his dad's cigarettes many times and resold them.
Are you trying to claim that he would have gotten in more trouble for eating food from the fridge than for stealing his dad's cigarettes and reselling them? You're correct that there are many nonsensical assumptions here, but you seem to have missed which ones those are.
Yeah, some people need to be fought, they can't be reasoned with. One clear sign that they aren't open to reason is that they want other children to suffer while they and their children don't.
We don't necessarily have to kill them, we could fight them by other means, like general strike or by destroying their property. Disowning them of their privileges or social status typically causes them to change their positions on policy.
Or you could just have gotten a job? I think your anger is misdirected here. Be mad at the politician and their supporters who decided that you shouldn't be allowed to work. Despite what they may believe, kids need to eat too and as we all can plain well see living on either the government or parent teat for too long turns them into layabouts.
So basically nothing is changing, because in theory any of those agencies could have sold those in the past and some did. Now it’s just centralizing control… kind of ironic for a decentralized currency.
Some comments seem to really focus on the idea that legal letterheads have weight. Which may be true but in this case it doesn’t much. Many states have made rules making it hard to get your money back from these entities(especially the state itself since they get to keep the funds if left unclaimed) so you have to ask for it in a certain way, use certain language, provide certain proof/data etc. but as long as you follow those rules you’ll get your money back… they kind of operate on the idea that you won’t. no one is going to engage their legal council to avoid paying smaller amounts because the means don’t justify the ends, would you pay $250/hr to avoid paying $150? Lawyers are expensive even in-house ones.
Bingo. The system isn’t built to help you—it’s built to exhaust you. It banks on the idea that you’ll get frustrated, give up, and move on with your life. That’s why precision matters—right language, right proof, right tone. And yes, the legal letterhead can have some psychological weight, but the real power move? Showing you know the rules and aren’t rolling over.
As for companies lawyer-ing up over $150? Exactly. No one’s paying $250/hr to dodge that—so a formal, well-structured demand letter forces their hand. It’s the legal equivalent of bringing a clipboard into a store—you look official, so people assume you are.
The game is rigged, but at least we can rig it back in our favor.
