they are saddled with more problems that they can reasonably care about and broader issues like privacy drop off of their radars because they've never had it
It's the classic racism/classism combo... a lot of taxi drivers are foreigners for example because it can be a stressful and low-paying job at the end of the day.
Yes, oddly compared to taxis my experience in the US with pedicabs is that they're almost all white men driving. More of a freewheeling low responsibility type of job rather than providing for a family type situation. I wonder what sort of social shift resulted in this?
If it's anything like the sport of bicycling in the USA, for a long time it's been a sport of caucasians, this is changing a bit but it trickles all the way up just from a sampling of who represents the USA at the Olympics and World Championships. Possibly a combination of the high cost of entry with the clique-ishness and the sport requiring quite a bit of free time and the support or money to have that much free time. Not talking about kids riding around the neighborhood but people who continue or start riding as adults, so not a social shift at all but existing demographics.
The US spends billions and billions of dollars trying to police problems instead of spending the same money on addressing the root cause... collectively there's enough money to make this country an absolute paradise, but we're all acting like crabs in a bucket.
It's sad that there was no one in this decision chain calling out this absolute waste.
They even spend the most on minorities: "Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724... (see Table 1 for details)
(I admit I don't understand the deep wisdom behind presenting absolute differences in amounts, and omitting the amounts themselves, but from the rest of that article, and from the 1st link, we can see that per-pupil spending is in the $10k+ range, so a difference of $200 is negligible. In other words, it would be unfair to call Black and Latinx students privileged because of this.)
Whatever the reason for the sorry state of US education, lack of funding isn't it.
It's often lack of everything else conflating the issue: if you don't fund healthcare, early childcare, mental health services, etc... you can't put it all on education to correct later. Not to mention a lot of the funding doesn't even make it to teachers at the end of the day, who despite these numbers are still having to go out and buy supplies with their own money.
You can see anecdotes from teachers all across the country that they're expected to do more and more parenting-related tasks just to keep classrooms from complete chaos.
I don't know how fixable that one is via just spending: There's a significant component of just selecting for student quality, interest in studying and parentally funded support when a student is struggling. It's a non-trivial part of the US' love of sprawl: Fewer kids of different levels of means will live near you. So when parents say they buy a house for "good schools" they aren't just saying funding per student. And yes, we have this too even in areas without a significant racial component. Making sure only very expensive houses are around you, and keeping housing prices up, has an effect on schooling, even if just by selecting for kids of parents that can afford the big houses.
Ultimately the American parent is paying for the kids education either way: Either by buying a more expensive house near said "good schools", or by paying a private school, which is allowed to be selective in their admissions and match students. Making all schools actually be about the same is not just a matter of funding them equally, but you'd have to end the student segregation (even when it's in legal ways(, which is quite the challenge.
For instance, around me, there's some really bad school districts that end up grabbing very large mansions. But what happens there is that none of the kids of people living in those mansions actually go to public school. So while it might not be economically difficult to up the funding of the schools near poorer neighborhoods, I don't even necessarily think that they will get the same outcomes for the same funding: The selection component is going to change performance.
Tying property taxes to school funding is designed to cause this outcome, it's not a mistake. The majority of US history involves actively harming the poor through policy.
A common myth - federal and state governments supplement school funding to roughly equalize per-pupil expenditure. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357203
when you look at averages on a state level it appears this way, but locally in cities you can see significant disparities within the same school districts based on zip codes — there are public schools in Boston and NYC that have endowments larger than the total budgets of a dozen other schools combined
The study [1] doesn't look at state-level averages, but uses school-district-level funding and demographics data.
> there are public schools in Boston and NYC that have endowments larger than the total budgets of a dozen other schools combined
Table 1 from the study also includes funding standard deviation data (the "SD" column). The highest one is $765, meaning that 99% of schools are within 3x that amount around the mean. There may be outliers like you say, but they are statistically irrelevant.
Iowa has the second highest cancer rate in the country.
Their leading solution?
Increase tax on cigarettes.
Not 'increase tax on cigarettes to increase early detection initiatives' or increase tax on cigarettes to increase screening subsidies', just 'increase tax on cigarettes so that the state has more money and poor people have less money'.
Demand for cigarettes isn’t static. If you make them expensive enough, demand falls. Lower demand means less smoking which means less cancer.
The only real risk with pigouvian taxes is that if you raise them too high, you can foster the development of a black market, which comes with its own set of negative social consequences.
Sure, lower demand does indeed reduce smoking, and a reduction in smoking might decrease cancer (iirc that's really hard to prove as an isolated variable given that those who give up smoking tend to make other lifestyle improvements that could also account for the difference).
My point is that the solution is such a blunt tool. Given that smoking rates aren't relatively high in Iowa, smoking alone cannot be the major contributor to their relatively increased cancer rates. Were they to smoke more than any other state and also have high rates, I could maybe see it, but that's just not the case.
Even if smoking rates were high and and increasing the tax were a solution, I'd still suggest that it's rather lazy to only do that given that tobacco does not cause a majority of cancer.
You could do the same thing in a different direction and be equally relatively ineffective by, for instance, decreasing tax on sunscreen, or subsidizing healthy foods or gym memberships.
Given that stress contributes to cancer rates, you could decrease the cost of mental health, run a de-stigmatizing campaign, force all corporations to finance therapy with independently verified therapists etc.
There are so many many things that can be done that would likely be better than attempting to decrease an already low smoking rate.
I understand that you were trying to make a different point so forgive me for derailing this conversation but this is important and I want to be emphatic.
Smoking incontrovertibly and substantially increases your risk of developing cancer. 85-90% of lung cancer cases and a substantial number of other forms cancers of can be attributed to smoking. There are a lot of ways to study this (you can look at people that never started smoking, not just people who quit). Yes, these studies are correlational (we don’t do RTCs on things that can kill you) but they are very high powered and are designed to account for confounding variables. The entire reason we’ve seen a decline in cancer mortality in the US since the 90s is largely attributable to falling smoking rates beginning in the 70s. And while much fewer people smoke, roughly 1 in 7 still do. Encouraging them to find another way to feed their nicotine addiction, and discouraging young people from ever picking up the habit, would save a lot of lives still.
The entire reason we’ve seen a decline in cancer mortality in the US since the 90s is largely attributable to falling smoking rates beginning in the 70s.
I don't think this is true, do you have any evidence? I would think mortality rates going down is mostly due to advances in treatment. Especially since the majority of cancer types are not caused by smoking.
To bad lowering smoking doesn't reduce costs. It is just a straight up regressive tax. Smokers mostly die around retirement age which means they skip the most expensive healthcare costs, age related care, and smoking itself disqualifies people from having many procedures that are common otherwise.
Smoking is at historic lows [1] (~10-15%). Screening doesn't stop smoking, poor people will still be poor, smokers will still smoke, although GLP-1s may fix this [2] [3] (certainly, if this proves out, use cigarette taxes to help pay for GLP-1s for everyone to impair the dysfunctional reward center loop). There doesn't seem to be political will to simply ban cigarettes, so here we are. Making cigarettes expensive for poor people who smoke destroys demand, no? Otherwise, we accept the cancer rates for their choice and freedom to smoke knowing the consequences (~5k deaths/year in Iowa from this risk).
> There doesn't seem to be political will to simply ban cigarettes, so here we are.
A simple ban will work as well as prohibition of alcohol did. There will be a black market. Sure, producing tobacco is a bit more involved then producing liquor, but for smuggling there are enough options.
The attempt is to raise prices and do marketing against smoking as well as preventing ads for smoking. So that over time the interest goes down and when looking at numbers of smokers that seems to work in some regions.
Of course tobacco lobby has a lot of money and tries to prevent all measures.
Smokers know the score by now. It's time for society to stop coddling them. Tax their asses to the Moon, call it reparations for all the smog and stentch they subjected the rest of us to for generations.
Smokers already pay far more in sin taxes than the average persons entire lifetime medical costs, and also smokers cost less than the average person in medical costs because smoking disqualifies them from many procedures and they don't live until they are 90 when they need expensive hip replacements and 30 medications a day.
Medical costs? Okay, how about paying for the smog and stench?
$200 per pack, increasing yearly. That'd probably be about right. You should have quit years ago. If you started smoking anytime in the past 50 or so years, after being taught in taxpayer funded schools not to smoke, then you should receive an additional one-time fee of a hundred thousand dollars, because genuinely fuck you.
I think that one's pretty clear cut, people giving themselves cancer are a financial drain on everyone else. Both the supply and demand side should be punished.
Iowa's tobacco use is relatively low. If tobacco were the primary problem (as indicated by the focus of the solution), you'd expect Iowa to use more tobacco than most or all states.
Given that their utilization is so low, it cannot possibly be the leading contributor.
Reducing an already low use of the product is a dumb place to start and a worse place to stop if your goal is to decrease the cancer rate.
If your goal were to reduce the cancer rate, you'd focus on something about your population that is contributing to the higher cancer rate.
You could just as easily claim, and still be just as opinionated, that a system is what is intended to be (intentional design theory), or that a system should be what it ought to be (normative systems theory), or that a system should evolve to fit the purposes of it's environment (structural functionism), or that there is no fixed purpose and that purpose is instead decided by social consensus (social constructivism).
A motivated reader might notice that the above systems thinking models each align with various schools of thought/philosophical schools. Idealism, telologism, constructivism, etc. This highlights the assertion that there might not be any one correct system of thought given one's stance on Truth, in that certain said systems might believe that they are the One Truth but could not logically demonstrate to the others that they are as such.
The US spends ~$1T/year on its military but states it cannot afford universal healthcare, childcare, education, efforts towards affordable housing, etc. Observe what the system does, not what it says it does. Agree this is just my opinion, as a scholar of systems field reporting observations. Am I wrong? I am always open to being challenged and wrong, in my quest for the Truth. "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" as the song goes.
within a profit-driven economy, problems are simply profit centers to exploit for short-term revenue. solving those problems removes short-term revenue streams in favor of long-term stability, which of course would lead to long-term revenue streams... but who has time to wait?
"But I don't WANT to make this country an absolute paradise. I WANT to enforce a racist and classist social hierarchy and keep the labor class distracted and divided so that they can't organize and mount a legitimate campaign against capital interests."
A relative of mine works for a school district in the Chicago area. What should they do? Not take note of people's residence? The whole reason they do is because they used to not. Then people took advantage of it. And the people that take advantage of it typically cause problems for the district. Everything is racist and classist. But wanting a diverse school district to thrive? No that's the real problem. I guarantee Alsip is more diverse than wherever you are writing from. The irony. [0] https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/district.aspx?districtid=...
No. From the article: According to the school district, her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.” | Her response, according to the article? "No I'm not." Real trustworthy. People in the Chicago area lie all the time. There is more to the story and I do not have the information. My relative sees this all the time.
> However, to this day, despite providing all required paperwork including her driver’s license, utility bills, vehicle registration, and mortgage statement, the Alsip Hazelgreen Oak Lawn School District 126 has repeatedly denied her daughter’s enrollment.
She provided all the documentation the district requires of her. Her car being at a different local over the summer is not proof that she does not live in the home in the district.
This is like two pathologies of america combined: the automated policing is too heavy handed, and a car is for some reason taking priority despite a bunch of supporting information indicating otherwise
did you notice in the part you quoted where _the school_ says "you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries"?
so, her taxes fund the school. therefor her child has the right to attend the school. simple as.
(also from the article: "[...] providing all required paperwork including her driver’s license, utility bills, vehicle registration, and mortgage statement")
Naturally the reset happens before most cells have grown, part of the trick in doing it with grown humans is doing so without destroying existing tissue or causing cancer.
It's almost like trying to change the flavor of a cake after it's been baked. Significantly easier to swap out ingredients before it's that far in the process.
it started before that, the openai president donated 20mil to trump the month prior... ellision and kushners also pretty heavily involved with openai and altman is tight with peter thiel
the whole public debacle was planned, the tos isn't stopping the pentagon from doing anything (as we seen with openai now)
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