Now with that out of the way, lets hear your suggestions.
A lot of this comes down to "how do we fight poverty and the dysfunctional culture creating/resulting from it".
Full Scale social engineering solutions that might work would also be deep into "we shouldn't trust the gov to do this".
Give judges the ability and mandate to take children from dysfunctional homes (which is often going to be poor homes) and put them into orphanages or functional relatives. In addition to other problems, this will look racist as hell.
A less heinous solution would be mandatory birth control implants on young teenage females, with it being reversed on request of both prospective parents. So every kid will at least start with two parents having responsibility for them.
This fails your rule of "fix everyone who is alive right now" and also has other issues, including again looking really racist.
If we're not going to do that then we're stuck fighting various symptoms of poverty. Try to deal with children constantly exposed to violence by getting a lot more serious about arresting and imprisoning the young thugs creating it.
End the war on drugs. Encourage school tracking even more than we do now, i.e. remove disruptive children from the classroom. Encourage school choice so interested and/or functional parents have the ability to do something other than flee.
Get really serious about getting rid of school corruption (i.e. adults behaving badly) so school money actually makes it to the classroom. That includes giving the principal the ability to hire and fire people without the union creating problems.
I've seen charters do well with elementary age kids with one teacher per ten students rather than one per 20 or 30. They pay for that by not having gym or busing.
If you want to really break the budget then we need four or five adults per disruptive child but while that's the Hawaii program in a nutshell I don't see how to pay for that.
One of the massive problems in all this is the total lack of cooperation from my personal clan. In theory you break up that 0% school and put one disruptive kid in every classroom over a very large area.
Thing is what's good for that kid is going to come at the cost of my kid having to deal with it and there will be serious push back.
I'm sure I'm missing some others, get rid of lead pipes, etc.
Chip: There exists no place where school choice has resulted in universal literacy;
And there you go. The bar for "success" is raised impossibly high when you have no idea how to pass that bar either.
School choice would make things better for individuals. Like tracking it would also encourage people interested in their children's success to NOT flee districts that start to fail or just when it fails their kid.
We'd still have the usual things which move us to universal literacy, including mandating school.
Chip: As for the rest, just point us to a working model somewhere,
RE: Global Warming
Various countries have implemented nuclear power at scale, including our own.
France currently gets about 70% of their energy from it. The big difference in France is they designed one plant and then used that design for all the others rather than make each of them a one off.
It doesn't deal with cars but just removing coal plants from the power grid would be a massively good thing.
RE: Health Care
Lasik/Plastic Surgeries are examples and
We have lots of examples of how markets work in general.
RE: Homelessness
We're supposed to think that our massive political restrictions on the creation of housing have nothing to do with not having housing? Seriously?
Like with some of the other suggestions, this is not a one size fits all solution for everyone in all situations, but it is a step in the right direction. For some of these issues it would be a massive step.
Anti-Zionist seems pretty anti-semitic on the face of it. If you're "opposed to ethnostates" then there are scores of Islamic (etc) ones and I've yet to see someone oppose their existence.
RE: 1860 v 1881
That was from Google's robot and I'm not going to bother figuring out why it thinks that.
This was your idea, to install a tracking system, remember?
We already have tracking systems.
High level High schools don't put the serious students in the same calculus class as the "failed pre-calc and not interested in learning" students.
The problem comes from low functioning schools where the non-serious students are a majority of the class.
Doubling down on tracking systems and being open and honest about their current existence would just be taking advantage of what works.
Conservatives have no idea... what to do to do about schools.
You have ideas in front of you, i.e. tracking. There is also school choice, which for all the talk on how it can't work has worked for me personally.
"Can't work" seems to be short hand for "unions don't like them and some kids get left behind in theory". The Liberal solution seems to be "give more money to unions and pretend there is a solution".
Conservatives have no idea... what to do to do about health care.
Make HC providers advertise on price and have only one for that service. I.e. fix the system so we have markets.
Conservatives have no idea... what to do to do about climate change.
Nuclear power.
Conservatives have no idea... what to do to do about crime.
Jails. End the war on drugs.
Conservatives have no idea... what to do to do about homelessness.
Remove NIMBY's ability to prevent the creation of housing.
Very true, but in 10th grade I didn't know which one I'd need. Worse, this is foundational, learning how to think.
The amount of math I need as a Software Engineer is very limited. However imho the type of thinking that learning math develops is a must have for the trade.
Total victory over Egypt and Syria is impossible. Gaza is possible. Lebanon only jumped in because it looked like Israel was going to get total victory there.
You have a lot of really good points and I find the entire line of logic persuasive.
I also expect the "worse case" to be pretty close to the expected case. That includes Lee's prediction that the refugee camps keep pushing for a RoR into Israel proper.
I think we're in "equality" territory there, and that's not going to happen.
Big picture I suspect we've long reached diminishing returns on all this. You get the educational result that your parents and culture want.
If they aren't willing to step up to advocate for you, then you're at risk. Success isn't impossible but it takes a lot of effort from the kid himself.
Israel is killing tens of thousands of civilians. That's part of the whole "brutal war" package, especially with human shields.
They think a brutal war is justified. The rest of the world thinks there is no situation where you get to kill tens of thousands of civilians and this is genocide.
A level of violence that high will include the occasional ass hattery.
You have strong arguments and I agree with a lot of your points.
However if elections were held right now in the West Bank, Hamas would easily win. A less internally brutal and less corrupt Hamas would always win.
If Israel pulls out, then we need to expect it's going to keep many of the settlements and it's also going to "mow the grass" in the WB like in Gaza and Lebanon.
It's deranged for the Palestinians to do this to themselves, but it always has been. If 20% of our country can believe Trump's obvious lies then it's reasonable for a higher percentage of them to believe they can win.
The real question is whether Israel going to war occasionally and doing to the WB what it's doing to Gaza is really a better solution than this corrosive settlement thing.
The purpose of schools is to help my kid(s) and make her life better. Ideally that means "reach their potential". I don't understand why other parents refuse to own that answer, it's clear and what a lot of us believe.
RE: there must be students who are at the bottom of the distribution – that is, bad at school
Not my kid. When I have had my kids start to fail at school and/or had the school system drop the ball, I've stepped in.
RE: “Should the best teachers teach the best-performing students or the worst?,”
They should teach my kid. If that's a bad match then we do something else.
RE: promote social justice while they’re young
I'm not opposed but it's not my problem so these efforts need to not get in the way of my kid.
RE: endless controversies like those concerning the SAT
The SAT is a messenger. Disliking the message doesn't change the reality.
RE: the key mechanism through which society moves people out of poverty and promotes equality
Having parents who focus on their kids success is a massive advantage that the school system can't equalize.
Chris: I don’t think the right of return requires that the people be scattered.
All of the serious players who would have to live with this strongly disagree with you.
No one there wants an non-ethnic state, they just disagree on whether it will be Jewish or Islamic.
Realistically if Israel becomes an Islamic republic, then it won't end well for the Jews. Just like it didn't end well for them in any of the surrounding states.
North: Compared to that the talk about rights of return is just that- talk. It’s useful only as an excuse to not resolve the West Bank.
Sure. We should sit down and give the Palestinians a chance to make peace again.
However they made it clear the Trump peace plan was totally unacceptable because it would have the Right of Return only to the Palestinian homeland and not destroy Israel.
So Israel would need to pull out without a peace deal like they did in Gaza (and maybe Lebanon) and run the risk that they'd instantly see terror camps set up.
So... we'd have to hope real hard that the PA would be corrupt enough to be bought off, be find being totally unpopular, and competent enough to put down Hamas (etc) without Israel's help.
There is an ethical difference between saying there will be no peace unless a country is destroyed and it's people scattered and there will be no peace unless that doesn't happen.
On “From Freddie: The Basics: School Reform”
Now with that out of the way, lets hear your suggestions.
A lot of this comes down to "how do we fight poverty and the dysfunctional culture creating/resulting from it".
Full Scale social engineering solutions that might work would also be deep into "we shouldn't trust the gov to do this".
Give judges the ability and mandate to take children from dysfunctional homes (which is often going to be poor homes) and put them into orphanages or functional relatives. In addition to other problems, this will look racist as hell.
A less heinous solution would be mandatory birth control implants on young teenage females, with it being reversed on request of both prospective parents. So every kid will at least start with two parents having responsibility for them.
This fails your rule of "fix everyone who is alive right now" and also has other issues, including again looking really racist.
If we're not going to do that then we're stuck fighting various symptoms of poverty. Try to deal with children constantly exposed to violence by getting a lot more serious about arresting and imprisoning the young thugs creating it.
End the war on drugs. Encourage school tracking even more than we do now, i.e. remove disruptive children from the classroom. Encourage school choice so interested and/or functional parents have the ability to do something other than flee.
Get really serious about getting rid of school corruption (i.e. adults behaving badly) so school money actually makes it to the classroom. That includes giving the principal the ability to hire and fire people without the union creating problems.
I've seen charters do well with elementary age kids with one teacher per ten students rather than one per 20 or 30. They pay for that by not having gym or busing.
If you want to really break the budget then we need four or five adults per disruptive child but while that's the Hawaii program in a nutshell I don't see how to pay for that.
One of the massive problems in all this is the total lack of cooperation from my personal clan. In theory you break up that 0% school and put one disruptive kid in every classroom over a very large area.
Thing is what's good for that kid is going to come at the cost of my kid having to deal with it and there will be serious push back.
I'm sure I'm missing some others, get rid of lead pipes, etc.
"
Chip: There exists no place where school choice has resulted in universal literacy;
And there you go. The bar for "success" is raised impossibly high when you have no idea how to pass that bar either.
School choice would make things better for individuals. Like tracking it would also encourage people interested in their children's success to NOT flee districts that start to fail or just when it fails their kid.
We'd still have the usual things which move us to universal literacy, including mandating school.
Chip: As for the rest, just point us to a working model somewhere,
RE: Global Warming
Various countries have implemented nuclear power at scale, including our own.
France currently gets about 70% of their energy from it. The big difference in France is they designed one plant and then used that design for all the others rather than make each of them a one off.
It doesn't deal with cars but just removing coal plants from the power grid would be a massively good thing.
RE: Health Care
Lasik/Plastic Surgeries are examples and
We have lots of examples of how markets work in general.
RE: Homelessness
We're supposed to think that our massive political restrictions on the creation of housing have nothing to do with not having housing? Seriously?
Like with some of the other suggestions, this is not a one size fits all solution for everyone in all situations, but it is a step in the right direction. For some of these issues it would be a massive step.
"
We already have “universal literacy” for people who don't insist on making bad cultural choices and inflicting those choices on their kids.
We're insisting both that they be allowed to make those choices and also that there be no impact on their kids.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/7/2024”
Anti-Zionist seems pretty anti-semitic on the face of it. If you're "opposed to ethnostates" then there are scores of Islamic (etc) ones and I've yet to see someone oppose their existence.
RE: 1860 v 1881
That was from Google's robot and I'm not going to bother figuring out why it thinks that.
On “From Freddie: The Basics: School Reform”
This was your idea, to install a tracking system, remember?
We already have tracking systems.
High level High schools don't put the serious students in the same calculus class as the "failed pre-calc and not interested in learning" students.
The problem comes from low functioning schools where the non-serious students are a majority of the class.
Doubling down on tracking systems and being open and honest about their current existence would just be taking advantage of what works.
Conservatives have no idea... what to do to do about schools.
You have ideas in front of you, i.e. tracking. There is also school choice, which for all the talk on how it can't work has worked for me personally.
"Can't work" seems to be short hand for "unions don't like them and some kids get left behind in theory". The Liberal solution seems to be "give more money to unions and pretend there is a solution".
Conservatives have no idea... what to do to do about health care.
Make HC providers advertise on price and have only one for that service. I.e. fix the system so we have markets.
Conservatives have no idea... what to do to do about climate change.
Nuclear power.
Conservatives have no idea... what to do to do about crime.
Jails. End the war on drugs.
Conservatives have no idea... what to do to do about homelessness.
Remove NIMBY's ability to prevent the creation of housing.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/7/2024”
Zionism: political movement for the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in the area of Palestine, since 1860
What does "anti-Zionist" even mean in 2024? Israel shouldn't exist?
On “From Freddie: The Basics: School Reform”
This is time-consuming for the parents,
Yep. All of my daughters had me read "10 Apples on top" until they could read it. I seriously emoted to make it interesting.
We also did random Aesop's fables which were more educational imho.
When they got older they did some vapid Vampire Romance which was effectively Potter... although they did Potter too.
The older girls were somewhat flabbergasted that the younger girls got the same treatment and the same emoting with the same book.
"
Very true, but in 10th grade I didn't know which one I'd need. Worse, this is foundational, learning how to think.
The amount of math I need as a Software Engineer is very limited. However imho the type of thinking that learning math develops is a must have for the trade.
"
If you don't learn to like math/logic and be good at it, then it's hard to see how you become an Engineer / Accountant / Programmer later.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/7/2024”
Total victory over Egypt and Syria is impossible. Gaza is possible. Lebanon only jumped in because it looked like Israel was going to get total victory there.
"
You have a lot of really good points and I find the entire line of logic persuasive.
I also expect the "worse case" to be pretty close to the expected case. That includes Lee's prediction that the refugee camps keep pushing for a RoR into Israel proper.
On “From Freddie: The Basics: School Reform”
I think we're in "equality" territory there, and that's not going to happen.
Big picture I suspect we've long reached diminishing returns on all this. You get the educational result that your parents and culture want.
If they aren't willing to step up to advocate for you, then you're at risk. Success isn't impossible but it takes a lot of effort from the kid himself.
"
We have solutions for how to make low achievers functional. At scale those solutions break the budget and/or are not workable for other reasons.
Thus the constant hunt for a more workable (i.e. cheaper) solutions.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/7/2024”
Israel is killing tens of thousands of civilians. That's part of the whole "brutal war" package, especially with human shields.
They think a brutal war is justified. The rest of the world thinks there is no situation where you get to kill tens of thousands of civilians and this is genocide.
A level of violence that high will include the occasional ass hattery.
On “Hurricane Milton: Live Stream, Updates, and Discussion”
Trump stopped him from getting the nod. DeSantis showed a lot of leadership and competence in all this. The GOP went with the lesser candidate.
And we didn't see much here. A little wind and rain.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/7/2024”
You have strong arguments and I agree with a lot of your points.
However if elections were held right now in the West Bank, Hamas would easily win. A less internally brutal and less corrupt Hamas would always win.
If Israel pulls out, then we need to expect it's going to keep many of the settlements and it's also going to "mow the grass" in the WB like in Gaza and Lebanon.
It's deranged for the Palestinians to do this to themselves, but it always has been. If 20% of our country can believe Trump's obvious lies then it's reasonable for a higher percentage of them to believe they can win.
The real question is whether Israel going to war occasionally and doing to the WB what it's doing to Gaza is really a better solution than this corrosive settlement thing.
On “From Freddie: The Basics: School Reform”
The purpose of schools is to help my kid(s) and make her life better. Ideally that means "reach their potential". I don't understand why other parents refuse to own that answer, it's clear and what a lot of us believe.
RE: there must be students who are at the bottom of the distribution – that is, bad at school
Not my kid. When I have had my kids start to fail at school and/or had the school system drop the ball, I've stepped in.
RE: “Should the best teachers teach the best-performing students or the worst?,”
They should teach my kid. If that's a bad match then we do something else.
RE: promote social justice while they’re young
I'm not opposed but it's not my problem so these efforts need to not get in the way of my kid.
RE: endless controversies like those concerning the SAT
The SAT is a messenger. Disliking the message doesn't change the reality.
RE: the key mechanism through which society moves people out of poverty and promotes equality
Having parents who focus on their kids success is a massive advantage that the school system can't equalize.
On “Hurricane Milton: Live Stream, Updates, and Discussion”
I can see the trees dance in the wind. I'm also 120 miles South and East from the expected ground zero.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/7/2024”
Chris: I don’t think the right of return requires that the people be scattered.
All of the serious players who would have to live with this strongly disagree with you.
No one there wants an non-ethnic state, they just disagree on whether it will be Jewish or Islamic.
Realistically if Israel becomes an Islamic republic, then it won't end well for the Jews. Just like it didn't end well for them in any of the surrounding states.
"
North: Compared to that the talk about rights of return is just that- talk. It’s useful only as an excuse to not resolve the West Bank.
Sure. We should sit down and give the Palestinians a chance to make peace again.
However they made it clear the Trump peace plan was totally unacceptable because it would have the Right of Return only to the Palestinian homeland and not destroy Israel.
So Israel would need to pull out without a peace deal like they did in Gaza (and maybe Lebanon) and run the risk that they'd instantly see terror camps set up.
So... we'd have to hope real hard that the PA would be corrupt enough to be bought off, be find being totally unpopular, and competent enough to put down Hamas (etc) without Israel's help.
"
There is an ethical difference between saying there will be no peace unless a country is destroyed and it's people scattered and there will be no peace unless that doesn't happen.
"
Judge sentences defiant Tina Peters to 9 years
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXqkOM5Vbbw
"
There is a massive contradiction between "we demand a robust Right of Return and refuse peace without it" and "we don't want a massive war".
However both of those things are correct.
The problem is when you say "we need a robust RoR" you are also saying "Israel needs to be gone" (what Lee said).
Various groups hide that from themselves and/or others. Others try to live the reality and destroy Israel.
"
Agreed.
"
It's a fringe in the American Further Left.
If we're talking about the Arab street in the surrounding countries much less Gaza/WB, then it's pretty mainstream.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.