You are arguing the current situation. If you are a family with two or three children, the cost is $24k-$96k per year for schooling for a taxpayer just for K-12 system. You are forced to work, but one parent is working entirely to pay just the official schooling costs. If you decided to homeschool, now you have worst of the both worlds: you pay taxes and you forego one income in the family. Of course only some people can afford it, mostly driven how terrible the school is. Moving children out of that system makes homeschooling more advantageous on the margin, which actually saves taxpayer money.
Of course there is more in it. If you have stay at home mum, you save on other costs such as cooking and delivery, cleaning plus the person can still do some gig or part-time work, especially via unofficial channels such as bartering. On top of that you have other advantages: my wife researched discounts, she researched obscure government dotation schemes not even related to kids. It takes time and effort to do that and in fact saved us a lot of money. The whole system is incredibly perverse.
georgioz
1d ago
Stay at home with kids means less usage for other things such as preschool and other programs, so it is to put private alternative on more competitive footing. It could actually save taxpayer money.
georgioz
1d ago
What does “dead” mean? Lots of artists still employed at video game and animation studios, lots of artists still taking commissions on patreon and the like, etc.
It is already a dead career. Just one example: email as technology was invented in 1970s. By late 1990s the email was basically default communication option for businesses. But it took another two decades for paperless office to become reality. I remember stories even in 2010 when there were people literally printing emails and creating paper folders from that. It all ultimately stopped probably after COVID as the electronic communication finally got accepted even by most backward companies.
The AI will be much more quick. All the infrastructure is already there. People are used to digital communication, they are used to outsourcing from god forsaken countries and all that. In a sense it does not matter if you outsourced your art design to somebody living 1000 miles away with whom you communicate via chat, or even in India. It is a very small step to outsource it to to OpenAI, iterate on the design via chat or voice session and get the product. Maybe I am wrong and it will not take 5 years, but maybe 10 or 15 years. But the writing is on the wall.
Am I the only one who thinks the proposal is excellent, and that it is an inherent good to support families (even if its limited to more traditional ones)? Its probably better for us to support some families than not?
I think that if anything, this is even underestimated. For instance the cost for educating students in K-12 system ranges for $12k in Mississippi to $32k in New York per year. So in a sense if some family does homeschooling with children having regular retesting, they should get the same support - as in such a case the family literally saves tens of thousands of dollars for taxpayer. And I'd like to see the tests having the same standards as let's say lower quartile in public schools. By the way with the current results of let's say New York public schools, 40%+ of students would fail if they were homeschooled.
Now we live in an insane system where we need dual income family, where the salary of a women with three children does not even cover the cost of their preschool or K-12 education, and the result is that there is almost 50/50 chance that they will score well belove the required grade level. The efficiency is horrendous. I think this proposal goes well in hand with age old starve the beast proposals.
georgioz
2d ago
It is much worse than age old Christian Democrats vs Social Democrats duopoly, in which the losing party would hold these positions to control power. It was designed to give the government legitimacy, to appease to voters voting for losing party so they viewed the system as legitimate and at least somewhat under control, it fostered participation at least in this form of oversight.
The current Brandmauer system is banana republic "winner takes all" democracy. It is much more dangerous than just simple duopoly, even more dangerous than what is now seen in US.
georgioz
2d ago
A lot of platitudes about the ideals of democracy completely gloss over the "two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner" part. If your electorate is sufficiently homogeneous (all sheep, or even all wolves) this isn't an issue, but in practice a heterogeneous democracy really depends on a shared sense of liberal civic values: voters need to accept that nobody gets blasphemy laws, or they'll keep voting for them.
There always were blasphemy laws in place, in fact we probably live in an era of highest moral panic of hate speech, where saying magic words such as f-word or n-word in recent case can get you to jail. Not to even talk about bans on social media platforms, getting fired from work etc. It is arguably stronger than being told you are commie during Cold War or actually blaspheming against God before then.
And worse, there isn't even broad agreement on what "a shared sense of liberal civic values" should be.
Yes. I recently argued that Culture War is in fact a religious war. There is no sense of liberal civic values, because there is huge disagreement about values, which is domain of axiology and theology. And so we live through culture war raging religious conflict of highly incompatible religions and ideologies.
On the other hand, this seems like a slippery slope that draws into question what citizenship even is. Making it possible to kick out people recognized as citizens seems like a dangerous Chesterton's fence to tear down. For one, it gives the government the ultimate power to kick out citizens it dislikes. This seems like a real danger to a democracy where people are supposed to have disagreements and come to agreements through dialogue. It also draws into question what it even means to be German in the first place. Would anyone be safe if such a law was allowed?
You do not have to pose this as some theoretical thing. There are precedents, including my own motherland where I was born: Czechoslovakia. After the war in 1945 then president Edvard Beneš promulgated decrees that did as follows:
- Decree No. 12 in June 1945: stripped all Germans, Hunagrians and traitors of the nation of their agricultural land
- Decree No. 33 in August 1945: automatically stripped citizenship from Germans and Hungarians, except for those who could prove that they remained loyal to Czechoslovakia during war.
- Decree No. 108 in October 1945: stripped the above of all property without compensation.
And just to remind you, this was exiled allied antifascist democratic government prior to 1948 communist coup. This was all done in the middle of ethnic cleansing and remigration of over 3 million Germans and 100,000 Hungarians from Czechoslovakia (around 20% of the population), many families lived in these lands 500 years+. To this day these decrees are nonegotiable pillars of Slovak and Czech law including Amnesty law 115/1946, which established that any atrocities or crimes during expulsion were pardoned. All of them were reaffirmed by Czech and Slovak judiciary and parliamentary powers as late as 2000s as untouchable. Both countries still exist, they are part of EU and NATO although these decrees were in contention by Austria, Hungary and Germany during admission process. And EU obliged and put their legal experts on it and declared that nations have sovereignity over citizenship and that basically bygones should remain bygones for political expediency. Maybe you may have visited Prague and stayed in expropriated house from some unfortunate German family, while some nice local Czech tour guide gave you lecture on history of Czechs and their famous beer introduced by Bavarian brewmasters who are now long ethnically cleansed from the country. The End of story.
I think remigration and denaturalization can be done no problem even if it seems insane now. In fact, the blueprint is there from COVID era - all it takes is for a country to declare sufficiently supported state of emergency and universal human rights, civil rights, constitutional protections, international law and everything else stops mattering. I am not saying that it is likely or something like that, but in current day and age I do not think it is outside of realm of possibilities. For instance you have countries like South Africa who do the same but in silent mode - expropriating property, open racial and ethnic discrimination and you barely read about it. Apparently South Africa is upstanding member of UN, WTO and international community. Another tolerated genocide and ethnic cleansing is that of Serbs from Croatia during allied supported 1995 Operation Storm in context of Yugoslav wars despite Geneva Conventions, international law, human rights and all the rest.
Having something like that is not a totally outlandish thing to imagine. And it does not necessarily have to have any domino effect even 80 years later down the road.
Technically this is of course possible. For instance Hamas won 44% in 2006 elections in Gaza, the coalition around Hezbollah won 40% in 2022 Lebanon elections.
Of course this only shows the fragility of the our democracy™ sometimes also known as liberal democracy. It is always appeal to majority but with the caveats of human rights. Majority builds legitimacy - e.g. here they will say 55% are not AfD. While human rights are there as a grounding for moral argument for unpopular policies. So trans and naturalization of immigrants are human rights, and thus part of our democracy™. If unelected EU bureaucrats rule by fiat, it is under the veneer of human rights or sometimes The Science™ etc. - even if they literally subvert democratic norms, try to ban opposition parties etc. It is democratic from where they stand in their worldview.
In the end I think this liberal consensus is nonsense from their own standpoint, especially if they lose both legs. If they lose majority, they lose legitimacy. However the rights discourse is also based on the very same pilar. Slogan housing is human right or even asylum is human right depends on enough people shouting and more importantly enforcing it. There is no objective grounding, it is not as if such a right was found on an asteroid floating around Jupiter or whatnot. As soon as people start mocking it and refuse to uphold it, it stops being a right. In fact the same erosion happened to article 12 of Universal Declaration of Human rights (right to privacy of correspondence) and now every state and their underling browses through your correspondence for fun. So why not article 14 about asylum - just give the same caveat that asylum is technically there, but it only covers airplane ticket to Rwanda or French Guayana or whatnot.
In a reverse, ban on mocking The Prophet is nowhere near universal human right, but it practically became one by virtue of threat of violence if broken despite it never being marked as such. In a very same secular logic, human right is just a strongly worded law or custom with accompanied attempts to convince or shame and blame or even threaten people into accepting it.
This is not how it works in practice in multi-party parliamentary democracy:
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There are long-standing political norms of giving opposition posts related to control of power. They are lead various oversight or budget comitees, there are constitutional provisions where substantial minority of MP can start procedures such as compel investigations, summon ministers to explain stuff etc. There is considerable power given to opposition - doing away with it is exactly in line with what is usually called as tyranny and Trumpian norm-breaking. This is BTW already happening, which creates interesting and dangerous precedent including constitutional court rulings etc.
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Voting is nowhere near unanimous. MPs travel, they get sick. Many laws come not from EU and not from state government, there are procedures of how to introduce votes for amendments to laws etc. In practice, many laws require much more than just agreement inside coalition.
In practice such a rainbow coalition is hell to manage - you have to have coalition of greens (Die Grünen), literal commies (Die Linke), pro-business libertarian party (FDP) as well as Christian democrats (CDU/CSU). It is vastly different from US, where each House Member or Senator has to have 50%+ votes. In Europe the most radical lunatics can get 5% and get into parliament. They are structurally not dependent on some governing body like DNC or RNC, they are dependent on their own donors and voters.
If you construct such a coalition, they have hardly any overlap, they have vastly different opinions on things like budget, taxes, regulation and literally everything. It is impossible to present a program that would not cross some red line of some party. So even if they are disciplined, they don't get anything done and it increases power of opposition. If they get together and get something done, it then crosses red line of some party thus angering the party base and voters. It is lose lose situation.
georgioz
6d ago
I agree this is a hard pill to swallow for society which desperately wants to believe in tabula rasa, but that doesn't mean it becomes acceptable to treat individuals as their racial averages is their destiny.
I mean how could you not do that? You will always evaluate individuals based on some standard: you are a good student - for an inner city black man. You are an excellent basketball player - for 5'3'' Asian. The baseline of average is always there and tabula rasa nukes the universal baseline from orbit.
In a sense the DEI crowd is more honest here. They at least know that there are these huge disparities and they want to equalize them here and now with hope that power of representation and reeducation will erase them in the future. It is classical liberal position that is unattainable - even 150 years after emancipation the blacks are not doing well. Heck, it may take another 150 years of access to equal opportunity to fix it, nothing else to see here. That is why the liberal consensus was so easily hacked by Social Justice crowd - it plays on their hidden assumptions.
georgioz
6d ago
I believe it was the famous The Control Group Is Out of Control where he compares quality of psychology and parapsychology papers - where parapsychology studies phenomena like telepathy etc. He deliberately used parapsychology as a control group, as the modern papers use the same methodology as psychology papers. And unsurprisingly, parapsychology fares quite well. If it was not for the fact that parapsychology is so suspicious of a field, these papers would be part of our scientific arsenal and would inform host of policies and self-improvement programs as the psychology does.
georgioz
6d ago
All 3 of those stances are, in some sense, political. They're political positions. However, I feel like there's a big difference between the first two things and the third; in the first two, my private life gets constrained. Maybe I don't mind if I'm going (/not going) to church already. But, in the first two cases, I'm clearly losing some freedom that I'd already have today.
You are just assuming your position. You are throwing moral and metaphysical words such as "private life" or "freedom". What are they, how are they justified, why are they valuble, why should they be protected and elevated? I will give a steelman of somebody from either camp:
- Pro-Church: "Everyone must become Catholic; tithes will get taken out of paychecks with other taxes; people get fined for missing church."
- Anti-Church: "Religion is banned; there's an excise tax on Church donations and we'll pass regulations to prevent services from happening."
- Small Government: "Everybody must become libertarian, we must enshrine moral value of "liberty" and "private life" in our law as the the highest policy. Government has to care whenever any of these things are in danger and ban tithes or various taxes.
When I read the NPR Article I'm seeing the title: "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy" and I find myself looking for a satisfying answer to what, precisely, does the the Nerd Reich wants to mandate / prohibit me from doing in my actual day-to-day life?.
You just need to read the article, which basically boils down to the "our democracy" rhetoric of The New Left. The way their democracy is endangered is as follows:
- More power to CEOs and corporation to establishes special economic zones etc.
- Dismantling federal regulation and bureocracy via activities like DOGE. Dismantling various policies and structures such as US AID.
- Promote cryptocurrency and other ways of evading government ability to follow money trace, excise taxes etc.
- Create political coalition among Gray and Red tribe to purge Blues from position of power in order to enable their prefered policy.
The thing is that when the new left talks about democracy, they are not talking about some technicalities. They mean that true democracy is only achieved if their preferred policies are implemented. Therefore any pushback against their policy big and small are dangerous - be it political defeat of Democrats in San Francisco, dismantling of US AID up to dismantling the Federal bureaucracy. That is all.
Sure, I got all that. But in the end the father was inconsequential unlike Harry's mother who was key to the whole story. And even the stepfathers had their own agenda. Dumbledore literally had plan to martyr him, Snape had his own issues, Black was more like an uncle etc.
Harry is an orphan. It's hard to parent from beyond the grave.
Lily managed to do that: via memories and her protective spell fueled by motherly love. Harry's father was ultimately a disappointment and his best qualities were to correct his boyish toxic masculine ways, marry Lily and then leave the story.
Voldemort is turned villain by his mother, with it implied that her using magical rape on her lover combined with her weak abandonment of her child caused Voldemort to be born without the ability to love. Voldemort murdered his father out of disappointment with his legacy, not because his father was a bad man (he wasn't very nice but that's because Rowling has trouble with aristocrats, not men).
As for Voldemort's mother Merope, this is absolute twisting of her story in the books. She is a victim, abused by her cruel father Marvolo, impoverished and left alone by everybody dying in childbirth giving life to Voldemort. She is no evil slave owner who loves to torture people, including let's say poisoning her naive husband who loved and nurtured Riddle to take his money, and who created Voldemort by wizard superiority Nazi indoctrination or whatnot. That would be the twist I am looking for.
Instead, she is of course a victim, she was shunned by Riddle's aristocratic muggle father, who saw her and his son as an embarrassing mistake - literally mocking her and telling her she is a tramp - and who let her and Riddle die, not even knowing that he has a son. It is Voldemort's father who is behind Voldemort's hatred of muggles, why he literally uses the ritual to purge his half-blood away and why he has such a boner to create pure blood society. Voldemort's mother conveniently died after his father abandoned her in order for Voldemort to become a villain, he did not get the dose of Lily-like motherly love because of his deadbeat father. In fact the act of patricide of hated father and grandparents, reneging on his patrimony at 16 was the first instance when Voldemort created his first Horcrux out of the family ring. Absence of his mother also led him to not exactly hate her, but disrespect her for "muggle weakness" where he was flabbergasted how a witch could succumb to such a ploy. But it was not exactly hatred like he held toward his father, it was just disrespect created by absence of corrective motherly love exacerbated by systemic abuse in orphanage - not in terms of actual physical abuse by wicked female staff who would give him to child molesters or whatnot - they were just overworked and underfunded, so any emotional damage on Riddle was there by virtue of being isolated from nurturing motherly love.
I'm deeply non-feminist but even then you seem to me to have this very shallow idea of what men are allowed to be and do, and what constitutes character and virtue. That might be a feminist trope but even broken clocks are right twice a day.
I am non-feminist and moreover I am a Catholic. I ascribe to virtue ethics that are the same for men and women in full, be it seven heavenly virtues or their counterpart of seven deadly sins. I hold men and women to be of the same ontological value and dignity and all the virtues and sins apply to them both. However men and women are not interchangeable due to physical nature, I'd say that ranking of the virtues is different for men and women.
What feminist and even broadly modern literature does is either explicitly or implicitly is ascribing to feminist power structure story, standpoint epistemology stemming from hierarchy of oppression where virtue and sin is not decided on personal agency, but on systemic effects. So women being nasty and nagging is okay, because it is just giving valuable piece of information to men from superior standpoint of female lived experience. This is especially jarring as in most fantasy and sci-fi setting they are supposed to be equal in power of violence either through magic, stat points etc. But they still retain their oppressed nature and men still have the privilege to be put down. To tie it to my previous examples - Hermione preparing her plans and then grabbing Ron and Harry to teleport them without their consent or knowledge is okay. If it was the other way around, it would be seen as problematic stripping of agency.
As I said, it is a very disruptive element for boy or male stories. As soon as there is even some powerful and competent female character, it changes the interpersonal dynamics. Even if she is 100 times more powerful, she still glares at men, and has no problem to punch down. Even if the female character is equal or even weaker, she engages at tone policing, as it is implicitly assumed that men have to walk on eggshells when expressing their points. Suddenly orders have to go through committee making sure nobody was emotionally hurt, either before the decision or there will be talking about it afterwards. You will never see a true banter such as if a female character rolls her eyes with some snarky comment and hero would shut her down. Or even mildly "offensive" comment such as Harry saying "Shut up Hermione and do as you are told". There is inherent tension there, even in Harry Potter if he tells both Ron and Hermione to shut up, there is immediately some internal monologue about his guilt of how he almost made her cry or some such nonsense.
Which is completely lacking in boy/male literature where the hierarchy is much more defined, it changes via action, and banter is really there for play and tension relief not for psychotherapy session afterwards. As I said previously, in modern literature it easier to follow a format where you write character such as Conan with all his lines and just turn him female. Suddenly (s)he can berate a rescued princess for being childish dork, tie and gag her if she is annoying etc. The Ellen Ripley treatment who was originally written for male named Martin Roby, and they changed him to Ripley specifically for subversion points without rewriting any line. That is the "non-feminist" things that I notice.
The fact that this is so ingrained in all modern writing, television and movies is the main point. It is definitely not so even in literature as late as 1960s. That is why some commenter above accused me of not wanting women in the books. It is not that I do not want women there, but it is exactly because in modern writing the authors cannot help themselves and bring about all these themes that are hard to unsee.
By the way to me it seems interesting how many people have such a different understanding of the books like here with Voldemort. It is really fascinating.
Of course it is, as I argued above it is because it is worse from the both systems. You still pay taxes for public schools but opt out for every single benefit starting from free lunch to free babysitting basically. For lower middle class or poor there is no real choice, they either put their children into public schools or lose half of their dual income including taxes that is there to support the necessities.
The proposal is there to at least partially offset this. How insane it is to have $20k taxpayer money per year to educate 6-10 year old children on basic things, while the school system fails to teach them anything. You can pay $10k to parents, have them organize pods and the rest and check if the results are at least comparable to public schools. Government saves half the costs on taxes and children stay with their mothers and pods.
By the way there is also another alternative for more business savvy people. Just fund one of the famous "learing centers". Rake in money from public funding, give parents some kickback and just profit not only from "education" but also from free lunches and the rest of it. That is the no-brainer arbitrage of the current insane system. People are up in arms and disgusted when they find such a fraudulent schemes by Somalis or other communities in Minnesota who do that under veneer of leftist blind eye policy. But this is literally what is right now happening in the public school system such as New York: just huge money siphoning scheme where teachers, teacher pensioners and various contractors extract money while not teaching kids reading or math and not even giving any kickback to parents. That is the true travesty.
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