My uncle was running a number of fast food restaurants for a franchise owner making millions. His statement about this topic is simple, "they are not living wage jobs ... go into manufacturing if you want a living wage".
I don't like my uncle at all and find him and people like him to be terrible human beings.
If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business. I, too, could become fabulously wealthy selling shoes if someone just have me shoes for $1 so I could resell them for $50.
> If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business.
Let's consider the implications of this. We take an existing successful business, change absolutely nothing about it, but separately and for unrelated reasons the local population increases and the government prohibits the construction of new housing.
Now real estate is more scarce and the business has to pay higher rent, so they're making even less than before and there is nothing there for them to increase wages with. Meanwhile the wages they were paying before are now "not a living wage" because housing costs went way up.
Is it this business who is morally culpable for this result, or the zoning board?
But in that case they are successful; they're just not paying very much relative to the cost of living as a result of someone else's imposition of artificial scarcity
There are certainly elements of this. And there are also elements like my city, where some of the more notable local business owners and developers are all _way too cozy_ with the City Council and Planning/Zoning Boards (like not just rubbing shoulders at community events, fundraisers, but in the "our families rent AirBnBs together and go on vacation together) which gives them greater influence.
All that being said, though, Robert Heinlein said once:
> There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
> And there are also elements like my city, where some of the more notable local business owners and developers are all _way too cozy_ with the City Council and Planning/Zoning Boards (like not just rubbing shoulders at community events, fundraisers, but in the "our families rent AirBnBs together and go on vacation together) which gives them greater influence.
But now you're just condemning the zoning board and their cronies as it should be, as opposed to someone else who can't pay higher wages just because real estate got more expensive since it got more expensive for them too.
> Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
Which is basically useless in this context because when costs increase you could apply it equally to not raising the minimum wage (the individual has to suck it up) or raising the minimum wage (the small business owner has to suck it up). Meanwhile neither of them should have to suck it up because we should instead be getting the costs back down.
Can we use the same argument for all of the businesses that are only surviving because of VC money?
I find it rich how many tech people are working for money losing companies, using technology from money losing companies and/or trying to start a money losing company and get funding from a VC.
Every job is not meant to support a single person living on their own raising a family.
That's what VC money is for. When it comes to paying below a living wage, we typically expect the government to provide support to make up the difference (so they're not literally homeless). Businesses that rely on government to pay their employees should not exist.
That’s kind of the point, a mom and pop restaurant or a McDonald’s franchise owner doesn’t have the luxury of burning $10 for every $1 in revenue for years and being backed by VC funding.
Oh and the average franchise owner is not getting rich. They are making $100K a year to $150K a year depending on how many franchises they own.
Also tech companies can afford to pay a tech worker more money because you don’t have to increase the number of workers when you get more customers.
YC is not going to give the aspiring fast food owner $250K to start their business like they are going to give “pets.ai - AI for dog walkers”
In that case they probably shouldn't be running a McDonald's. They aren't owed that and they shouldn't depend on their workers getting government support just so the owners can "earn" their own living wage.
Yet tech workers are “owed” making money because they are in an industry where their employers “deserve” to survive despite losing money because they can get VC funding - funded by among others government pension plans?
I find it slightly hypocritical that people can clutch their pearls at small businesses who risk their own money while yet another BS “AI” company’s founders can play founder using other people’s money.
Classically, not all jobs are considered "living wage" jobs. That whole notion is something some people made up very recently.
A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances... and if it does, the owner has a strong incentive to automate it away.
> A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances
The majority of minimum wage workers are adults, not teenagers. This is also true for McDonald's employees. The idea that these jobs are staffed by children working summer jobs is simply not reality.
Anyone working for someone else, doing literally anything for 40 hours a week, should be entitled to enough compensation to support themselves at a minimum. Any employer offering less than that is either a failed business that should die off and make room for one that's better managed or a corporation that is just using public taxpayer money to subsidize their private labor expenses.
A teenager is presumably also going to school full time and works their job part time, not ~2000 hours per year.
If we build a society where someone working a full time job is not able to afford to reasonably survive, we are setting ourselves up for a society of crime, poverty, and disease.
Last time I tried Entity Framework it was slow. Replaced it with Dapper and a simple custom migration system. This took database validation and seeding from 10 seconds to less than 2 seconds during startup on low powered hardware with SQLite. The queries created by Entity had pointless cascade of multiple join statements.
I have been reaching for GO with simple tooling and HTTP back end. .NET is useful for other solutions.
I have had too many issues with their frameworks, like WPF, needing to implement Win32 hacks. Example, .Net 9 was the first Windows version that properly returns all network interfaces. Older runtimes only expose Enabled NICs. I still have to maintain Windows 7 support for some solutions.
I just went the other way and tore all my Dapper + SQL and repositories out of a big project and switched it all to EF Core 10. Not noticed any change in performance but dumped thousands of lines of unnecessary code. I like the tighter code, but you definitely do need to keep your eye on the "magic" of EF to avoid it doing anything goofy that isn't easily visible.
We use newer Entity Framework (Core) in a few large projects with zero issues.
Even have Dapper and moving away from it as it brings nothing to the table but strings and bunch of SQL.
ef core is great for simple queries and modification of your data while using the changetracker.
You can use AsNoTracking/Projection to perform similar like dapper for queries.
When using command query seperation you can also use dapper for queries and ef core for commands.
We are also running into more and more performance issues with EF. There are ways to tune it but I am not sure if it’s worth learning this for EF or if it’s not better to just go for straight SQL. Seems MS has this tendency to create abstractions that then don’t work 100%. I see this with .NET too. Often you have to go down to Win32 for apps that are tightly coupled with Windows and hardware.
US actually provided child care to mothers employed during WWII. [0]
Richard Nixon vetoed the bill that would have expanded it out to all families. [1]
Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole with a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness. AKA The rich keep getting richer.
For what its worth, the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children, citing a study from Quebec.
> The trio published their first study in 2005, and the results were damning. Shifting to universal child care appeared to lead to a rise in aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity among Quebecer children, as well as a fall in motor and social skills. The effects were large: anxiety rates doubled; roughly a third more kids were reported to be hyperactive. Indeed, the difference in hyperactivity rates was larger than is typically reported between boys and girls.
They basically make the case that childcare is extremely difficult and requires a lot of attentive care, which is hard to scale up in a universal way.
In Norway every child has a right to a barnehage place (kindergarten). It's not free unless you are poor but it is very affordable at a maximum of about 3 000 NOK per month, about 300 USD, for five full days a week.
Children in barnehage learn to be social and cooperative, resilient and adaptable. They play outside in all weathers, learn to put on and take off their outer clothes, to set tables, help each other and the staff. They certainly do not fail to gain motor skills. It's not just child care and every barnehage has to be led by someone with a qualification in early childhood education although no formal class based instruction takes place.
So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?
You should talk to some people with kids then. I can't find the source, but I think the US national average is something like $1500/month for <40 hour/wk daycare. That doesn't account for child-to-sitter ratio differences, or cost of living differences either.
A few different friends around the country, not in big cities, have cited >$5K/month as the cheapest they can find for full time daycare.
It's significant enough that families with multiple children are often cited as being unable to have both parents with careers, because the cost of childcare far exceeds what one of them can make in their career.
To be fair, this makes some sense, you're effectively paying for a portion of a child care professionals career, plus the shared overhead for facilities and supplies. If you have a decent (<8 children per professional) ratio and have 2-3 kids needing daycare, you're paying for 25-30% of someone's direct salary, plus overhead. Very few people make so much more than a trained professional that they could afford to shell out that much.
It's actually cheaper now. the numbers I quote were from when my children were in barnehage many years ago. But remember that is the maximum one would pay, it's graduated according to your income. The rule now is not more than 6% of household income and not more than about 130 USD per month. Also remember that this is eight or more hours per day five days a week in a facility that doesn't only look after your children but also teaches them how to be independent, resilient, social, etc.
Could you get private child care for 300 USD per month?
> Think of the Perry and Quebec experiments—two of the most widely cited in the early-education literature—as poles at either end of a spectrum
Even The Economist acknowledges that its a single study in a single province which runs contradictory to other studies. That they turn that into headline article says more about The Economist and readers of The Economist than it does about universal child care.
> the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children
I expect nothing less from the Economist, of course.
If you read more closely, the issue wasn't that universal child care is bad, but how it's implemented is important (of course). Not to mention that a host of other factors could be contributing to the study's findings. For example, it could be that mothers spending less time with their children is detrimental to their development. Few people would argue with that. But let's examine why mothers are working full-time in the first place -- largely it's because families can no longer be sustained on a single income. And _that_ is more likely the root of the problem than "universal childcare".
The problem is that the word ‘childcare’ can mean anything from a one on one nanny looking after a child to an after school club where it’s just one adult and the kids just do whatever they want with no guidance at all.
You can’t really compare them without a better definition.
Not if the samples are skewed. For example, the people who get the care are from stable environments with financial means. After universal childcare is implemented, we start measuring these things in the broader population that has fewer access to resources generally.
The assumption here is that only people with means got care and were surveyed. I am not sure that this is the case. Moreover, you can correct for those factors, and, I assume, any statistician worth their salt are.
Given the reproducibility crisis, particularly in the social sciences, I wouldn’t put too much weight into the skill or honesty of the people doing that work (and statisticians they are not - more like people with a humanities background who take some statistics courses and then do numerology)
"To address the growing demand for ECEC spaces as the cost of care went down, the province saw an expansion of both for-profit and unlicensed home care providers. Data from the aforementioned longitudinal study indicated that 35 % of center-based settings and 29 % of home-based settings were rated as “good” or better quality, compared to only 14 % of for-profit centers and 10 % of unlicensed home care providers. Furthermore, for-profit and unlicensed home care settings were more likely to be rated as “inadequate” than their licensed counterparts (Japel et al., 2005; Japel, 2012; Bigras et al., 2010). At the same time, Quebec experienced a decline across various child health, developmental, and behavioral outcomes, including heightened hyperactivity, inattention, and physical aggression, along with reduced motor and social development (Baker et al., 2008; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2013). These findings underscore the challenges of maintaining high standards in the context of expansion associated with rapid reduction in the cost of ECEC."
"Meta-analyses have, quite consistently, shown targeted preschool programs—for 3 to
4-year-old children—to be effective in promoting preschool cognitive skills in the short run, with effect sizes averaging around 20–30% of a standard deviation (Camilli et al., 2010; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). There is also some meta-analytic evidence of persistent effects throughout adolescence and early adulthood on outcomes such as grade retention and special education placement (McCoy et al., 2017). The same is true for universal preschool programs in cases where structural quality is high (i.e., high teacher: child ratios, educational requirements for teachers), with effects evident primarily among children from families with lower income and/or parental education (van Huizen & Plantenga, 2018).
There are, however, notable exceptions. Most prominent are quasi-experimental studies of Quebec’s scale-up of universal ECEC subsidies (Baker et al., 2008; Baker et al., 2019; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2017), covering children aged 0–4. These studies found mixed short- and long-term effects on cognitive- and academic outcomes (for example, negative effects of about 20% of a standard deviation of program exposure on a Canadian national test in math and reading for ages 13 and 16, yet with positive effects of about 10–30% for PISA math and reading scores; Baker et al., 2019). Consistent with effects of universal ECEC being conditional on quality ..."
The van Huizen & Plantenga citation at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727... has bullet points "The results show that ECEC quality matters critically.", "The evidence does not indicate that effects are fading out in the long run." and "The gains of ECEC are concentrated within children from lower SES families." In more detail it also cites Baker et al 2008, with:
"In fact, the research estimating the causal effects of universal programs is far from conclusive: some studies find that participation in ECEC improves child development (Drange and Havnes, 2015, Gormley, Gayer, Phillips and Dawson, 2005), while others show that ECEC has no significant impact (Blanden, Del Bono, Hansen and Rabe, 2017, Fitzpatrick, 2008) or may produce adverse effects on children's outcomes (Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2008, Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2015). As societal returns depend critically on the effects on children's outcomes (e.g. van Huizen, Dumhs, & Plantenga, 2018), universal child care and preschool expansions may in some cases be considered as a promising but in other cases as a costly and ineffective policy strategy."
I take the fact that child care is not some kind of super new thing and exists in well run countries without their kids being behind, worst behaved or more aggressive then American kids.
Agreed. If we could fund universal child care so that the ratio of caregiver to child was more like 1 to 2 or 1 to 5 or even 1 to 8 in extreme cases, then the lack of attentiveness would not be a problem.
Okay but you do understand that what you're suggesting costs the full salary a woman (because of course it would never be men asked give up their careers) could earn for the family and the economic gains that come with it. Back of the napkin calculation is three trillion dollars of value lost annually. And that's before the knock-on effects of such a massive recession. Household income will drop by 30-40% across the board because you're daft if you think men will be getting a raise. So there goes the demand side too.
Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.
It doesn't cost the fully salary of the woman, it redirects it to something that can't be captured by large scale economics. Which, if you're trying to break the backs of the uber wealthy, is an excellent way to do it.
> Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight
This, along with the language of the supposedly "pro-male" camp ("why shackle yourself to someone who will just rough you over for most of your paycheck later and leave") are both approaching marriage wrong. If you're trying to achieve a good that cannot be had individually (a happy marriage) then both sides have to freely give 100% of what the shared good requires. Marriage cannot work as a Mexican standoff between two parties who are trying to take as much as possible from it without giving anything in return.
Dangerous? Yes. It's the most dangerous thing you can ever do, to take yourself in your own hands and offer yourself to another.
You go first then. It can be a you cut I choose type thing with gender roles.
Because let me tell you dude I and every other woman is picking the men's package in this deal. You go ahead and be a 50's housewife if you think it's so good. We've had the option to choose if we want that terrible life for 40+ years now and "fuck no" won in a landslide.
Do you know how depressing it is to find out that both my mom and my mother-in-law squirreled away money in a secret bank account just so they could have the tiniest bit of financial independence separate from their husbands. And keep in mind these are men who they both love dearly and are still married to to this day.
Hold on - you're conflating "traditional housewife with zero financial independence" with "choosing to be the primary caregiver for your own kids." Those are not the same thing.
The fact that your mom and MIL needed secret bank accounts isn't an argument against raising your own children - it's an argument for financial transparency and shared accounts in modern marriages. And yeah, we should absolutely have that.
But here's what you're missing: plenty of women (and men!) are choosing to be primary caregivers today because we have the choice now. It's not 1950 - it's 2025. Nobody's talking about giving up bank accounts or financial independence. We're talking about prioritizing raising your own kids over outsourcing it, when that's financially possible.
It's hard as hell, it's undervalued, and it's not for everyone. But acting like everyone who makes that choice is deluded? That's just as dismissive as the people who think all women should be doing it.
The conclusion is that adding women to the workforce competed with men’s wages at least as much as it did add to the economy. Taking women out of the workforce to do family and domestic tasks will be supportive of male wages, counteracting the effect you mention.
>Okay but you do understand that what you're suggesting costs the full salary a woman (because of course it would never be men asked give up their careers) could earn for the family and the economic gains that come with it.
Women do not generally want men to stay at home and take care of kids. Women also demand that men make more money than themselves. For women, the period between the kids being born and going to school full-time is like a kind of sabbatical. If they're lucky enough to be able to not work a job during that period, that is.
>Back of the napkin calculation is three trillion dollars of value lost annually. And that's before the knock-on effects of such a massive recession.
That sounds absurdly high. I think you need to revisit your calculations. Even if it was the real number, perpetuating the species is worth more than corporate bullshit meetings or whatever.
>Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.
There were some unfortunate circumstances in the past but they are way overblown. Most people with a little sense know that it would be preferable to be able to live on one income, and that men and women alike wish for that kind of prosperity to return. It might come along with occasional problems, but what we face now with ever-increasing costs of living and awkward questions about finances and family roles is not great either.
> Women do not generally want men to stay at home and take care of kids. Women also demand that men make more money than themselves. For women, the period between the kids being born and going to school full-time is like a kind of sabbatical.
Domestic labor and being primary caregiver for children is not, in any way, like a sabbatical.
It actually is like a sabbatical, especially with all the modern conveniences of appliances and cars. When I hear women whine about domestic labor I have to mention that single men and women do practically the same labor, for themselves alone, and washing clothes or cooking is much easier to do for multiple people than for one person. It isn't 3x as much work to keep house for 3+ people as it is to keep house for 1. Women who stay home for kids invariably watch lots of TV and maybe do three hours of actual recognizable work per day max. I'm sure there are some who insist on maxing out everything they do, cooking fancy meals and doing elaborate activities that they truly hate for the sake of the kids, but this seems rare.
Kids can be annoying, but they can also be a lot of fun. Having the luxury of being able to spend months on end with them, without worrying about money, is a luxury that unfortunately is on the decline. But it is still more attainable that most realize.
> When I hear women whine about domestic labor I have to mention that single men and women do practically the same labor, for themselves alone, and washing clothes or cooking is much easier to do for multiple people than for one person.
That last part is very much not true, perhaps especially when children are involved.
> Women who stay home for kids invariably watch lots of TV and maybe do three hours of actual recognizable work per day max.
Maybe if you are very bad at recognizing work.
> without worrying about money
Not earning money in outside labor is not the same as not worrying about, and managing, money.
I don't have a citation but I have eyes and I see how real parents in my life have gotten by. Besides, even if it is somehow more work than 3 hours per day, it is probably close to that amount and far more enjoyable than most jobs. If you count sitting around watching your own kids play as "work" that demands "compensation", I feel bad for you.
Wait, do you have kids yourself? Childcare days with my 2yo are much more draining than most work days. It's never a case of just sitting and watching.
The other way to interpret GP is that we could implement long-term government-funded parental leave, especially if (!) the cost was comparable to universal child care. This could go to either parent, not necessarily the mother.
I mean, that is an advantage to people who push for that. That way the woman is made completely dependent on man and cant leave no matter how bad the situation gets. If you want men to be head of households then lack of female employment is an advantage.
Of course men to get simultaneously resentful over having to work while women done and spend their money each time they buy something, are not super thankful all of the time cause people are not, but that is not concern to those people either.
Protect from what? Themselves and other men? Why do they have to provide while women are being made helpless and dependent?
> Things worked this way for thousands upon thousands of years and led to our species being amazingly resilient
It led to high domestic violence against women. Even normalized one where being the wife was considered just being a man. These are very much correlated with lack of opportunities for women to get earn and live independently. Too many men were using the "protection" as an excuse for being the primary danger in their women's lives.
Bud, "your" people are "getting replaced" because they’re not fucking enough. Pounding your chest about "low-IQ" immigrants and masculinity won't help: they still won't fuck until they feel they can afford the lifestyle they want, regardless of who you feel the "burden of proof" is on. Enjoy seeing -- gasp!! -- a whole lot more brown faces with scary names in the future. (As always, the kids will be alright, regardless of whatever scornful glances they might catch from insecure adult "men".)
Want to raise the next generation of humans in a healthy, humanistic way? Then you go fucking do it, Mr. Big Man. Otherwise, let us do the sensible thing of having universal child care and go back to your racist rat hole.
Someday your woke kids will read your comment and will be mortified.
Reduce military spending by 20% and problem solved. Literally.
It's not that we don't have the resources, they're just poorly distributed because we're more interested in subsidizing our bloated defense industry than citizens and their children.
Yes, that's why I thought they'd cheer it. When the state provides day care, more Moms work and contribute to capitalism more than the cost of the day care.
The financials of childcare don't really make sense to me. YMMV depending on your situation, but childcare costs are basically equivalent to my wife's teacher salary. And because of our tax bracket, it'd actually be CHEAPER for her to quit her job and take care of 2 kids full time, vs getting paid teach like 20 kids. There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression, but it seems broken that there's a decent financial argument for leaving the workforce.
That either means that childcare is too expensive or teachers don't get paid enough (probably both tbh)
I feel like a lot of folks don't actually do this math, and don't realize that they're essentially just working to pay someone else to watch their kid.
> That either means that childcare is too expensive or teachers don't get paid enough (probably both tbh)
It's not necessarily either one. If you do it yourself, you reuse the existing home instead of needing a separate building with its own rent, maintenance and security, the children and the adult watching them wake up in the same place instead of both having to commute to the childcare building, you have no administrative costs in terms of hiring, HR, accounting, background checks, etc. By the time you add up all the additional costs, you can easily end up underwater against doing it yourself even if each adult in the central facility is watching more kids -- and that itself is a cost because then each kid gets less attention.
Yip. Oddly enough, this has a lot of economic parallels with cooking at home vs eating out. For a silly example, you can make an Egg McMuffin for a tiny fraction of what you'd pay at McDonalds for one. Yet McDonalds (franchise, not corporate) operate on single digit profit margins. Why?
Because when you buy that Egg McMuffin you're not just paying for it. You're paying for an entire building of workers, the rent on that building, their licensing fees, their advertising costs, their electric costs, and much more. When you make it at home you're paying for nothing but the ingredients.
So it creates a paradoxical scenario - you're getting charged way more for stuff than if you made it yourself, but yet somehow you're not getting ripped off.
It doesn't. You still need someone to commute to where the daycare is because they don't live there, transaction costs related to payment processing, and that's often illegal if you do it for money because of zoning ordinances etc.
Those facilities also often don't qualify for subsidies like this because it allows all the people doing it themselves to claim the subsidy. Either you take care of your own kids as before but sign up as a daycare that only your own kids attend to get the subsidy yourself, or you find someone else who takes care of their own kids and then each sign up to watch the other's kids when you each actually watch your own. And you rightfully should be able to get the subsidy if you're doing it yourself, except that then it gets a lot more attractive to actually stay at home, which the government doesn't like because it makes the program more expensive and corporations hate because it reduces supply in the labor market.
Sounds like barter to me. There are some benefits, the kid expands their social life, the parent gets to fulfill career needs, etc. There may be issues, but shouldn't be thought of in completely negative terms.
We're talking about different age ranges here. For 0-3 years, especially infants, the attachment research is very consistent primary caregivers matter enormously for development. A 1yo doesn't need to "expand their social life" they need secure attachment. The socialization benefits you're describing kick in later, around 3-4 years old.
Daycare typically won't take a kid until potty trained, so at least 2 and a half or so. At the early ages, it's only a few hours a day as well in my experience.
I don't think daycare is necessarily a net negative. I just don't think many families have thought the calculus through.
There are free ways for kids to expand their social lives (library, park, etc). Career needs can obviously only be met by working, but then the follow-up question is, building a career for what purpose? If the purpose is for self actualization then that's one thing, but if the parent has no desire to actually grow their career and just wants the money, then that's a different math problem.
Childcare is expensive because it's an industry captured by PE and in usual fashion they've increased costs while decreasing quality.
The caretaker watching your kid and the 20 other kids certainly isn't making the $20/hr they are charging to watch your kid. Even though they are doing all the work. Even their managers aren't typically making much money. It's the owner of the facilities that's vacuuming up the profits. And because the only other competition is the weirdo lady storing kids in the cellar, it's a lucrative business.
My wife did childcare. It's a major racket. Filled with over worked and underpaid employees and grift at every level. But hey, the owner was able to talk about how hard it was for them and how they actually got a really good deal on their porche (not joking) which is why nobody got raises.
It's a low skill job with a lot of young people that like the idea of playing with kids/babies around.
Seriously. There’s a reason all our kids’ preschool teachers never return from maternity leave. The pay isn’t enough to pay someone else to watch your baby while you work. And this school is already an expensive one and is a nonprofit so the money isn’t going to some Mr. Moneybags investor. The economics of childcare are broken.
The financials of leaving the workforce rarely make sense to me.
> There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression
There's X years of lost income, lost retirement savings, lost raises and bonuses ( depending on career ), lost promotions, lost acquisition of new skills which will keep the stay-home parent up to date with the modern workforce once they leave.
Teaching and nursing are still women dominated and famously supportive of women going back to work or starting work after staying home with the kids. For every other career path, good luck. How many people here would hire someone who'd be out of the workforce for 5, 10, 15 years without a second thought?
This analysis is incomplete for a couple of reasons:
1. any universal childcare scheme will involve groups larger than the median at-home familial group. Avery is watching ~1-2 kids, but if those kids are at creche, they are in a group of (say) ~4-5.
2. In much of the country, a) is financially out of reach for many couples due to cost of living generally being based around two-income households.
Varies by state and age? My very red state does not allow a group of 40, full stop. The largest group allowed is for 3-year-olds, with a 1:15 adult:child ratio. For younger children, the ratios and group sizes are smaller.
I was off on the 4-5 though. Ratio for < 1 yo is 1:6.
Anyway, this is all to the point that it's nothing like the 1-2 in in-home care. There's a reason nannies are associated with richer people.
Bullshit. Most US states have strict staff ratio limits for properly licensed daycare facilities. The exact ratios vary by state but typically this is something like 1:4 for infants up to 1:14 for school-age children.
> The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".
It's worse than that, because it's not the same work. In Scenario B the person watching the kids isn't their parent so they don't have the same bond or interest in the child's long-term success. It also introduces a lot of additional inefficiencies because now you have trust and vetting issues, either the child or the person watching the child has to commute every day so that they're in the same place because they no longer live in the same house as each other, etc.
My SO spent a few months collecting the neighbour's daughter along with our own from kindergarten and in exchange the neighbour would make dinner for us. This arrangement started because the neighbours' shifts didn't align with kindergarten hours.
At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
> At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
How is this bad?
Both your and their family benefited directly in terms of trading responsibilities and indirectly in building relationships between daughters and neighbors.
What I meant to say is that not only is this labour completely unrecognised as contributing to the overall economy, it's essential labour, without which other, measurable work could not be performed.
Bottom line is that the ways we measure economic output are deeply flawed.
It’s not measured in GDP but it is measured. For example right now it’s estimated that household production is around 23% of GDP. So quite sizable.
Part of the reason it’s not included in GDP is just that it’s not reliable to measure precisely so it’s not as valuable as a statistic for making monetary and fiscal policy decisions.
I have a suspicion a lot of the “why did wages stop keeping pace with the growth of the economy?” problem is because real productivity hasn’t been growing nearly as fast as our measures of it. But the measures are tied to ways for capitalists to extract more money, so that fake-growth does make line go up for owners. But there’s not nearly as much more actual work getting done as one might think from the numbers.
I mean what, 10ish% of our entire GDP in the US, and IIRC that’s generously low, is being throwing in a fire from excessive spending on healthcare for effectively no actual benefit, versus peer states. And that’s just one fake-productivity issue (though one that affects the US more than most). But our GDP would drop if we fixed that!
It's inflation IMO. Wages started stagnating in the 70s which is exactly when the USD became completely unbacked (due to the end of Bretton Woods), enabling the government to go endlessly deep into debt, which we proceeded to do with gusto, sending inflation skyrocketing.
Somebody who's earning 20% more today than they were 5 years ago would probably think they're on, at least, a reasonable career trajectory. In reality they would be earning less in real terms than they were 5 years ago, thanks to inflation.
In times of low or no inflation it's impossible for this happen. But with inflation it becomes very difficult for workers to really appreciate how much they're earning, and it enables employers to even cut wages while their employees smile about receiving a 2% 'pay raise' when they should be raging about the pay cut they just took.
It's not just about the economy, it is about freedom of choice. What does Max and Avery feel about their careers? Would they rather be working or watching kids? If one parent has to stay home, that might mean having to give up a good career.
No one should be forced to choose between a career and kids, unless the goal is falling birthrates.
In Scenario B the government gets to collect more tax revenues, and also has additional levers to influence certain behaviour (the government will tax you, but give you a tax break if you do Y). Also, the government can make your labor worth less by printing money and increasing inflation.
Child rearing is the most economically important task a mother can do, it's just not compensated for fairly. The wrong thing to do is ensure the parents are working for low wages + have children raised by low wage workers.
“Oh, certainly, you could produce quantities of infants — although it would take enormous resources to do so. Highly trained techs, as well as equipment and supplies. But don’t you see, that’s just the beginning. It’s nothing, compared to what it takes to raise a child. Why, on Athos it absorbs most of the planet’s economic resources. Food, of course — housing — education, clothing, medical care — it takes nearly all our efforts just to maintain population replacement, let alone to increase. No government could possibly afford to raise such a specialized, nonproductive army.”
Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. “How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they’re not necessarily impoverished, either.”
Ethan, diverted, said, “Really? I don’t see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.”
Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. “Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren’t added in. They’re counted as free.”
Ethan stared. “What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don’t the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?”
“I believe” — her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness — “they call it women’s work. And the supply usually exceeds the demand — non-union scabs, as it were, undercutting the market.”
Right, and that's exactly the point. It was extended family and close community, not institutional strangers. Grandma watching the kids while mom works the fields is completely different from dropping an infant at a commercial daycare center with a 1:6 caregiver ratio. The "it takes a village" argument doesn't support modern daycare, it actually undermines it. Those historical models were built on trusted relationships and continuity of care, not economic transactions with rotating staff.
We've strayed pretty far from the original topic here, but the reality is that the US military is literally running out of working aircraft because they're so old. The average age of USAF aircraft is now about 28 years. The fleet was allowed to decay and not substantially recapitalized during the GWOT. Many of the fighters in the combat coded inventory aren't even allowed to hit their original 9G maneuvering limit any more due to accumulated airframe fatigue. Now we're paying an overdue bill.
And let's please not have any uninformed claims that somehow cheap "drones" will magically make large, expensive manned aircraft obsolete. Small, cheap drones are effective in a trench warfare environment like the current conflict in Ukraine but they lack the range, speed, and payload necessary to be useful in a potential major regional conflict with China. And the notion of relying on AI for any sort of complex mission in a dynamic environment remains firmly in the realm of science fiction: maybe that will be feasible in a few decades but for now any really complex missions still rely on humans in the loop to execute effectively.
Sure, that is a problem. Ironically the best solution from an overall expense management standpoint is to drive economies of scale by building more and retiring older units on an accelerated schedule to cut maintenance costs. Keep production lines running continuously instead of periodically starting and stopping. The F-35A, while badly flawed in certain ways, is at least relatively affordable due to high production volumes.
Oh yes it’s about time the US enters another war so we can justify even more military spending and less spending to improve the livelihood of the people.
Just kidding we are already doing that with Venezuela.
You're really missing the point. If we're going to have a military at all then we have to constantly keep building new combat aircraft (and other weapon systems). The old ones wear out and become obsolete. Ironically this is the best way to prevent a major war, through deterrence. (I do think that attacking Venezuela would be stupid and pointless.)
I don’t really dispute that, to loop around to the start of debate, you’re not building an F-35 with unskilled labor. This isn’t automotive workers riveting B-17s together.
Main battle tanks are probably less useful in the future of armed conflict due to the effectiveness of drones.
Spending on childcare means we need to offset those debts with other revenues.
We have close to full employment, so I'd argue that freeing up labor isn't as strategic as other categories of spending.
It all depends on what you want to prioritize. For the long term health of the nation, these areas seem key for continued economic resiliency:
- pay down the debt so it doesn't spiral out of control (lots of strategies here, some good, some bad: higher taxes, lower spending, wanton imperialism, inflation, etc.)
- remain competitive in key industries, including some catch-up: robotics, batteries, solar, chip manufacture
- if we're going for a multipolar world / self-sufficiency play, we need to rebuild the supply chain by onshoring and friendshoring. This means the boring stuff too, like plastics and pharmaceutical inputs.
It's because it runs like a business that we're able to enjoy a high standard of living.
If the economy stops growing, or worse, degrades, everyone will suffer incredibly. Job loss, investment loss, higher cost of living.
There's a wide gulf between childcare for none and childcare for all.
I'm an atheist, but some of the cheapest childcare is at churches. Orders of magnitude cheaper than private childcare because they already have the infrastructure for it. I've had affluent people turn their nose at the idea of Christians watching their kids. But there are entirely affordable options if you're not being choosey.
I don’t understand the conjunction of “the state should not subsidize childcare with taxes” and “the church should subsidize childcare with underpaid labor and tithes.”
The economy will stop growing eventually. Nothing grows forever. If we have built our society around the notion of perpetual economic growth, we have already accepted that "everyone will suffer incredibly", and we're only arguing about which generation will be the one to bear it.
I'd argue that that's the wrong goal. Ideally, families can afford to live off of one salary so that mothers could choose to continue to care for their children if they wanted to do so.
Currently, very few families are privileged enough to live off of one salary. Both parents need to work in order to make ends meet.
I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, or that free childcare isn't a good interim solution. But important to keep the end goal in mind.
Yeah, that's why I said it wasn't an easy problem to solve. No need to let the infeasibility of a perfect solution get in the way of a possible, yet however unideal solution.
I mean, a lack of cheap housing is also a policy failure.
Also, there's already massive interference with the economy, all the time, every day. It's just hard to see, and the working class doesn't benefit from it. Housing isn't just magically expensive by some law of nature.
Sure it goes to everyone, but I think that's okay. Some parents would still choose to both work, and use their monthly check to pay for daycare. I think the important thing is freedom to choose.
I do think we need to encourage raising children specifically, but if UBI is assigned regardless of age, then that effectively works out to the same thing - parents will just use those checks for childcare costs, and having more children would translate to more checks.
Yeah, it turns out that things like free health care, adequate food, good schools, and all that other socialist mumbo jumbo is actually good for productivity and the economy, too.
I grew up in Norway, that while it doesn't have UBI does have a safety net that meant the notion of ever living in poverty was just entirely foreign to me growing up, and for me at least I think that made it easier to take the decision to leave university and start a company.
The risk of ending unemployed was just never scary.
This was a worry for me when leaving my full time job in 2022 to work on open source. Our OSS project was able to pay rent, but was concerned about healthcare costs for my partner and me (NY state has extended COBRA coverage, but it's extremely expensive). My co-founder lives in Australia, which has free basic health care, so he was up for leaving his job before I was.
Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.
It takes a good idea and a willingness to take a risk to start a business. I don't think that risk aversion is what's stopping new businesses, there are a lot of people who do a lot of what I consider too risky.
Instead, what I wonder is how many new businesses wouldn't be viable under a tax structure that provides ubi and health care. Not to be dismissive but that's definitely a concern in a world replete with fledgling businesses that mostly fail.
Yeah this is sort of the reaction I had. Removing "risk" with UBI and free healthcare and free childcare also removes the filters for a lot of people who would be bad at running a business. If you don't have the stomach to take the risk and do the work to make your idea a success, then maybe you shouldn't try.
We don't need millions of more failed businesses as the result of giving everyone UBI.
Why do you need people to make big risks livelihood to do business? People from affluent environment start businesses the most often and they dont really risk all that much. They know they will get help if it fails.
In fact, successful businesses started by people who can return back to good jobs if it fails are completely normal thing.
The data on UBI isn't out there, but it is notable that countries with similar tax rates to the US manage to have universal healthcare and more expansive safety nets. Some examples: New Zealand (tax rate ~30% less than the US), Korea, Switzerland, Australia, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Norway.
Americans really should be asking why we're paying a significantly higher tax burden than New Zealand and not getting similar services as part of the bargain.
Put another way: the US is incredibly rich compared to other countries. Our poorest states have higher GDP per capita than most rich countries. And our taxes are not particularly low. Our social issues are 100% about how we choose to allocate our shared resources. The good thing is we can always choose to make different choices.
Switzerland has mandatory healthcare insurance and subsidies for low income earners. The insurance is provided by private companies. It's not really universal healthcare system like in most EU countries.
Private insurance can work out fine if regulated well. In USA you have regulatory capture that makes services expensive. Impossible barriers to entry coupled with terrible regulation on price transparency and a lot of cartel like behavior.
New Zealand effective taxes rates are generally higher than the US, not lower unless you're doing something odd like comparing based on average local wage.
Switzerland, the Netherlands and Japan all use the Bismark model (contributions for insurance), so taxes don't really reflect the cost of universal healthcare.
The issue in the US is not an allocation problem. The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country. We're just so inefficient with our spending that we only manage to cover a fraction of our population with it.
> New Zealand effective taxes rates are generally higher than the US
US tax rates are complex due to local variance and other factors. Tax rate on the median NZ income appears to be ~30%. Tax on median US is lower, but state taxes can add significantly. There is not a neat divide between red states & blue states here; Alabama & Georgia have state income taxes, for example.
> The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country.
Several of the UBI pilot studies included new venture creation (including solo self-employment, not just classic business creation) as part of their measurements. The last few I looked at had zero difference in new business creation between recipients and control group.
A lot of the UBI trials have actually had disappointing results. The arguments usually claim that it’s not a valid test because it wasn’t guaranteed for life, or the goalposts move to claim that UBI shouldn’t be about anything other than improving safety nets.
Unfortunately I think the UBI that many people imagine is a lot higher than any UBI that would be mathematically feasible. Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it, far beyond what you could collect from the stereotypical “just tax billionaires” ideal. Try multiplying the population of the US by poverty level annual income and you’ll see that the sum total is a huge number. In practice, anyone starting a business would probably end up paying more in taxes under a UBI scheme than they’d collect from the UBI payments.
I actually did the math for US once, calculating how much more tax it would take to give everyone minimum wage. The resulting tax rate would certainly be fairly high, but not excessively so; several European countries have higher brackets today, and their economy doesn't collapse.
But also, are you accounting for all the means-tested welfare that such a program would replace?
> But also, are you accounting for all the means-tested welfare that such a program would replace?
Multiply the US population by the poverty level annual income ($15.6K) and the resulting number is higher than all US federal tax revenue combined. In other words, tax rates would have to more than double across the board.
Subtracting out existing social programs barely moves the needle. Are you sure you did the math, or were you just assuming?
Yes, I did the math. Wish I still had the spreadsheet.
It's not as simple as multiplying the population. The point is that if everyone gets that check, then you can raise the nominal tax rate much higher but still get the effective tax rate (i.e. income - tax + UBI) in reasonable territory. As I recall I actually went all in and also made it a flat income tax to see how much the UBI offset would work at making it effectively progressive, and that also works out.
The "classical" UBI argument from a liberal point of view (classical liberal, not US liberal) has typically been that UBI would lower the complexity and by extension cost of welfare by removing the needs to means-test. In Europe, UBI was typically more likely to be pushed by (by our standards) centre-right parties.
For this reason, UBI traditionally was seen negatively by the left, who saw it as a means of removing necessary extra support and reduce redistribution.
Heck, Marx even ridiculed the lack of fairness of equal distribution far before UBI was a relevant concept, in Critique of the Gotha Program, when what became the German SPD argued for equal distribution (not in the form of UBI), seemingly without thinking through the consequences of their wording, and specifically argued that "To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal".
Parts of the mainstream left today has started embracing it, seemingly having forgotten why they used to oppose it.
FWIW I'm far left and in favor of UBI, but one thing to keep in mind is that while it's a simple concept, details (i.e. amounts paid and amounts taxed) matter a lot. There's no reason why UBI can't be redistributive if one desires it to be so - you just use more progressive taxes to fund it.
And, of course, reducing the complexity and cost of welfare ought to be a left wing talking point as well! Again, it depends on what you do with the savings - sure, it can just be taken and used elsewhere, or you could maintain the spending but raise the bar on how much UBI provides.
> Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it
Or cutting other things to pay for it, in addition to smaller tax increases. And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
Honestly, my biggest concern with it is that people will (rightfully) worry that it won't last more than 4-8 years because the subsequent administration will attack it with everything they have, and thus treat it as temporary.
> And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
That's a major claim. Which places under UBI (or in one of the experiments) has that manifested?
> And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
We have a decent idea of the velocity of money of households at different income levels on the basis of how likely people are to spend all their money vs. holding on to them in ways that may or may not be as effective at stimulating economic activity.
In that sense it is not particularly hypothetical.
In terms of whether people will be more likely to e.g. start a business, that part is a lot more hypothetical. There have been some trials where there seems to have been some effect, but others where it's not clear.
That effect seems very much hypothetical. But that was not part of the classical argument for UBI, and I don't think it's a good idea to use it as an argument for UBI.
America is #3 in the world in per capita public education spending (Luxumberg being #1). Which is the education system I always see Europeans maligned as producing “dumb Americans”.
Why is the production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services (aka, the economy) the highest priority?
Well, mostly because it's required to keep the vast majority of people in society alive and the effects of disruption are only second to war in terms of potential for misery.
It’s not, but we seem to have to keep convincing business people that they’re part of society, so it helps to be able to appeal to their pocketbooks, too.
Have you seen comparisons between American and Canadian productivity? It’s definitely more complicated than just socialist leaning government programs make the country more productive.
Not everything is measured in "economic output", not to mention that metric itself doesn't make any sense when comparing countries of vastly different size, population etc.
Life is not about checking off boxes on how much free stuff you can hypothetically get from the government either. That has tons of costs and risks just like everything else in life. It’s all relative.
Trust is irrelevant, families gain the after tax income of working mothers but society gains not just the pretax value but the actual value of work generated. Thus subsidizing childcare and moving the needle to align society’s benefits and family benefits is a net gain without the issue of trust being involved.
The same is true of quality public education etc, however creating US vs THEM narratives are politically powerful even if they don’t actually reflect reality.
Because YOU are paying for those benefits and they aren’t. If you truly don’t see how offering something for free would attract all the freeloaders, increasing the load on those who work, there’s no saving you.
What I am describing is you literally saving money.
If a government can convert a 1k outlay into 1.1k of tax revenue that same month you aren’t actually paying for those benefits you are getting a little revenue instead of zero revenue. Due to their debts operating across such long timescales people make the same basic argument for things that take longer to see positive returns, but daycare is a very short loop.
Can they convert $1K outlay into $1.1K of tax revenue the same month?
Given New Mexico's tax rates, it seems like it would be difficult to do so.
It looks like the program will cost about $600M next year. In order to generate more tax revenue than it costs, it would need to increase personal income somewhere on the order of $12-15B of personal income, taxable sales, business profit or some combination.
Now, a fraction of that will come from the childcare workers. Some may come from stay-at-home parents or parents working part time going to work, but given they say it'll save on the order of $12K/year/family, a family would need to increase their income by about $260K/year in order to pay $12K in extra state income taxes.
It's rare to see spending programs actually pay for themselves. Mostly when politicians talk about a program paying for itself, they preform verbal slight-of-hand, arguing that $x will come back as $x*y in economic activity. That is, of course, a lie, but no one calls them out the fact that economic activity ≠ taxes.
It doesn’t matter if New Mexico’s state government recuperates its revenue it matters if New Mexico’s citizens are better off. As such federal, state, and local levels are worth considering not just state taxes, including changes in other outlays such as healthcare subsidies. Effective tax rates on marginal income often exceed 50% for American families even ignoring the income stream from daycare workers and facilities etc. US Government spending being 40.5% of GDP those kinds of marginal tax rates should be expected.
Now as a low population state implementing this at the state level means most of that federal savings/revenue helps people outside of the state, but that’s the issue with implementing such programs at the state level rather than an issue with the type of program itself.
you are talking economics. you have to realize America is weird inherently racist country. Enough people here will rather be economically worse off as long as it means their taxes are not being used to support "those people"
How does it make sense to suggest your taxes are going to support something when it’s profitable?
I doubt many people would say they want to raise their taxes to cancel program X because it also helps people they don’t like. You could be right, but I think the more logical conclusion is they are simply being misinformed.
Simplest way to increase total absolute output is always to stop providing intake.
Obviously, this fails almost immediately; operative word "almost". Definition of "almost": longer than a moment. Definition of moment:
As it happens, high-trust societies have just spent the better part of a century teaching their constituents to "live in the present", atop half a millenium of teaching them that time is a thing linear, discrete, and properly scaled for decision making.
Ergo: if the time between doing something stupid and realizing you did something stupid is longer than your attention span, you're a perpetual motion device.
This is the big reason other countries have free or cheap childcare. People who have kids want to continue earning money, and people who earn money want to have kids. It can be easily justified using only an economic productivity argument.
Very few other countries have free childcare. In Europe I'm only aware of Slovenia and a couple others. Canada doesn't have anything close to the universal system that's in New Mexico.
In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?
Also even if it is cheap, children can attend it few days a week, staying sick at home almost every week for a day or two. Not every employer can tolerate such worker.
> In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?
Norway. The maximum price for barnehage (kindergarten Norwegian style) is 1 200 NOK per month, about 120 USD, but never more than 6% of the household's income. Every child is guaranteed a place. Families with low income get 20 hours a week 'core time' free. Children can attend from one year old until they start school at five or six.
> a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness
The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice. Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
(Immigrants to the US arrived with nothing more than a suitcase.)
> Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole
The high level point is idealism not grounded in historical facts and probably not worthy spending time and going deeper with criticism, because full rebuttal isn’t some expert knowledge - ChatGPT can do that for you. America of 1800s is everything but libertarian paradise and is not truly exceptional. Industrialization in Europe increased prosperity while building welfare states at the same time.
1. The immigrants came by the boatload from Europe to the US. Not the other way around. The Titanic was built for that purpose.
2. The immigrants were the poor of Europe, not the wealthy.
3. The US middle class and upper middle class and the wealthy came from those poor people. I can't think of any American wealthy families that came from the wealthy of Europe.
4. The height of Americans increased dramatically from 1800 to 1900. This is only possible by plenty of food being available. Visit Fort Henry and look at the uniforms of the 1700s. They look kid sized.
5. The uniforms of Civil War soldiers look teen sized. You can see them for yourself in the Gettysburg museum.
6. In WW1 when the US Army arrived on the scene, the Germans were shocked at their height and high quality plentiful food, and then knew they had lost the war.
7. The US supplied all the Allies in WW2 (including the USSR), provided the shipping fleet to do it, floated two navies, one for the Atlantic and one for the Pacific, and simply buried the Axis under the weight of all the hardware it made.
8. The Wehrmacht relied on horses.
9. The European middle class did not have cars until after WW2. The pre-war US filled the country with Model T's for everybody.
10. My grandfather started out shoveling coal in a steamer (a dirty, rotten job). By the turn of the century, he had his own middle class home, and later a vacation home and a couple cars.
Where did you get these facts? Some are extremely cherrypicked, and some are outright false.
> The Titanic was built for that purpose.
It was built to compete with Cunard's Lusitania/Mauretania. While immigrants did board it, elite travel was prioritized.
> The US middle class and upper middle class and the wealthy came from those poor people
False. Those in the top one percent of wealth holders, approximately 3% are European and Canadian immigrants [1].
> The uniforms of Civil War soldiers look teen sized. You can see them for yourself in the Gettysburg museum.
Exagarated at best. Many of those who fought in the war were as young ar 14 [2].
> In WW1 when the US Army arrived on the scene, the Germans were shocked at their height and high quality plentiful food, and then knew they had lost the war.
Do you have a verified source for this? In Erich Ludendorff's memoirs he attributes defeat to logistics / shortages, but does not note the physical stature of US soldiers.
Looks like list of arguments for a beer talk at BBQ party on 4th of July. I mean, are you seriously using „Wehrmacht relied on horses“ as a proof of American exceptionality?
What society mass-moved individuals from menial work to better work?
Many societies have made generational improvements: children raised with more opportunity, but I'm not aware (hey, I'm ignorant of a lot) of any that moved significant numbers of menial laborers themselves up significantly in standard of living besides the USA post-WWII or new technology (electricity, plumbing).
Parents usually sacrificed so their children have better lives, not themselves. The USA is currently an interesting example of the opposite.
I haven't heard of mass movements of farmers into professional work late in life. The immigrant story of America is the parents sacrificed for their children to do better. Why would existing citizens want to bring in large number of unskilled people and give them better jobs than themselves? I'm not aware of such generous circumstances working out.
Well, that‘s not related to this specific conversation, but industrialization in socialist states did that in a number of cases. Soviet Union between 1950s and 1970s has seen significant growth and by various accounts achieved up to 5x improvement in purchase power compared to Russian Empire at its peak, in 1913 (how much goods could a worker buy for their salary, not including welfare, which was obviously superior in SU). I‘m not saying socialism is good, the price paid for that was terrible. And anyway my argument wasn’t that there were better societies, just that America of 1800s was ugly place to live even for many white Europeans (and let’s not forget that 60% of the time in that century there existed slavery). People went there not because it was great (and not everyone went there, many German settlers chose opposite direction, moving to Wild East, helping colonial expansion of Russian empire). It was just marginally better than certain places in Europe with its wars and famines.
> America of 1800s was ugly place to live even for many white Europeans
Not when compared with the rest of the world.
Life in pre-Colonial America was pretty hard. Building a civilization by hand from wilderness is a tall order, and life was short. But after 1800, life improved by leaps and bounds. You can see this in statistics of average height.
As for the Soviet Union, I recall newspaper accounts from the 70s and 80s that if you were traveling there, be sure to load up your luggage with blue jeans. Blue jeans were in high demand and would fetch a nice profit. And how many Soviet consumer items do you have in your home?
I mildly disagree with your take but it's still mindblowing how I can read some random political flame on HN and it's WALTER FUCKING BRIGHT. Your one of my tech heroes, so cool to spot you on here. If this were real life I'd ask for a selfie to prove that this happened but maybe you could, idk, sign a message with your PGP key so I can prove I interacted with you
LOL, thanks for the kind words! I just happened to like working on compilers, as few programmers will touch them. If you're ever in the Seattle area, we have a monthly D Coffee Haus where we drink and talk about languages, compilers, airplanes, cars, and physics. All are welcome!
> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice.
Approximately 25,000 americans gave their lives in the revolutionary war. Every signer of the declaration of independence was signing their own death warrant should they have lost to the strongest military in the world. This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
> This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
I recommend reading the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and if you really want to get into it, the Federalist Papers. I don't recall any of that advocating free food for all, UBI, free healthcare, etc.
What do you think patriotism is, if not "community sacrifice"?
GP's point is that you are playing fast and loose with words here, so much so that your point doesn't make sense. "Community sacrifice" is a much broader category than those few policies you dislike.
when you say 'individual rights', you should be honest about which classes of people that was referring to. By the way, don't be so defensive, the working poor are being absolutely crushed by capital right now, your guys won!
were blacks considered men? did it include women? it feels like you're purposely ignoring history
Btw ~40% of the people i've met in homeless outreach have full time jobs, taxes are not what's keeping them homeless. In china 90% of the population own their homes, I'm sorry but the all that libertarian shit is such an obvious myth to protect the rich. Every country I've ever visited with more redistributive policies has a substantially better quality of life
Yes. The people who wrote the Constitution were well aware of the conundrum, but were faced with the reality that they could not form a union without allowing the slaveholders to continue. In essence, they kicked the can down the road, which resulted in a catastrophic war.
> did it include women?
Yes. Whether the word "men" means exclusively men or men and women depends on the context.
> taxes are not what's keeping them homeless
You're suggesting that taxes don't have effects beyond just paying the money. When a businessman is taxed, for example, that means he has less money to invest in his business, which means fewer jobs, fewer purchases of plant & equipment, slower growth, higher prices, etc., all of which negatively affect the rest of the economy, including poor people.
> that libertarian shit is such an obvious myth to protect the rich
America's rich people came from poor immigrants. The same for America's middle class.
> Every country I've ever visited with more redistributive policies has a substantially better quality of life
Have you ever looked at the size of government spending on redistribution? The US abandoned libertarianism in the early 1900s.
> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms ... during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
Woah! The US was founded on occupation and slavery. How do you think millions of people were able to move up out of poverty? Because the US was abundant in land and natural resources, which during the 1800s we stole from the native Americans and exploited in large part with slave labor (at first, later pseudo-enslavement as sharecroppers).
Yes I know about that theory. But it has problems.
When the US was founded, half of the states were slavers, the other half free. Guess which half prospered? The free North! Which stagnated? The slave South.
Did you know that the Slave South was unable to supply their troops? They were largely barefoot. The reason they were in Pennsylvania was to raid a shoe factory (but got smashed at Gettysburg instead). Towns and cities and industry sprouted up all over in the free North, not so much in the South.
The Civil War resulted in burning the South to the ground. Poof!
As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?
There is no connection between resource rich and prosperity.
> There is no connection between resource rich and prosperity.
This is false, and easily disproved by history. I don't have time right now to go through it point by point -- but will try to when I can get to it.
It's indisputable that had the US been resource poor -- in arable land and exploitable resources -- it would have never become a powerhouse able to not only sustain millions of incoming immigrants from Europe, but ultimately make them prosperous. And it got that arable land and exploitable resources by driving out the local inhabitants and stealing their land--that is not a "theory". The fact that much of the early economy needed to catapult the US to the top by cotton and tobacco, which was harvested by slaves and powered the factories in the non-slave states, is not a "theory" either.
> Guess which half prospered? The free North! Which stagnated? The slave South.
The slave owners were very prosperous. The majority of the population was slaves and they indeed were by definition impoverished. No need to build infrastructure for a slave population, no need for much in the way of cities either. The factories in the north were powered by the raw materials from the south. (It's the reason the North accepted the Slave south in the first place and later went to war to keep them in the Union.) The US got rich the same way the European countries became so prosperous in the 1600-1800s: occupying other lands that were resource rich, and extracting their resources, and where possible, using slave labor.
Edit: If you're talking about the _modern_ economy, then yes, I would agree with you to some extend. And you use the example of Taiwan -- which was impoverished by the way until 60 years ago. But remember this conversation is about "the founding the US" -- that's the economy being discussed, not one where TSMC emerges.
> Did you know that the Slave South was unable to supply their troops? They were largely barefoot. The reason they were in Pennsylvania was to raid a shoe factory (but got smashed at Gettysburg instead). Towns and cities and industry sprouted up all over in the free North, not so much in the South.
Guess where the north got their cotton to make those shoes? The south. The textile industries of the north would've never gotten their start without cheap cotton made possible by slavery.
> As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?
Every South American nation that tried to raise itself out of poverty had their government overthrown or their leader assassinated with the help of good ol' USA. Japan/S. Korea/Taiwan industrialized because USA decided they needed strong allies to counter Russia/China. Check out the grand area plans. Africa was colonized, exported millions of their people to slavery, and is continually destabilized by the west (corporations, world bank, IMF, etc) to perpetuate resource extraction.
The poor is kept poor so the rich can get richer. Why is food so plentiful and cheap? Slave labor. Read Tomatoland for a taste. Why are clothes so cheap? People are working for pennies to make those clothes. Why doesn't the iPhone price rise with inflation? There are millions of poor rural Chinese pounding for a chance to work at inhumane conditions for a few dollars a day. You think they make enough to pull their families out of poverty? Nope, it's mostly foreign companies that are reaping the bulk of the profit while continually pressing their costs (labor wages) down.
I disagree with Walter here but the US wasn't founded by urban immigrants. There's a difference between pioneers, like the Mennonites in Mexico, and immigrants, like digital nomads in Mexico. The former are almost always more popular than the latter.
Our politicians are unpopular because they do nothing to help us, and when they explicitly help us it's framed as lazy poor people looking for handouts. It makes no sense.
Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start, with a 30% chance of rejection" approach.
> Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent
It’s complicated. Having 1% fraudulent recipients despite having very thorough and deep vetting processes should be a clue that fraud is a big problem.
The fallacy is assuming that the fraud rate would stay the same if we removed the checks. It would not. The 1% fraud rate is only what gets through the current checks. The more you remove the checks, the higher the fraud rate.
When systems remove all fraud checks, the amount of fraud is hard to fathom if you’ve never been on the side of a fraud detection effort.
There's a couple of fallacies embedded here. For example, that there is a thorough and deep vetting process that is also impartial (vs being invested in denying benefits).
Also the assumption that an application that is denied == fraud. Programs are incredibly complex, and requirements are a moving target. I can imagine someone going to renew based on their understanding of the program, and inadvertently being flagged as fraud because some requirement changed (which in turn might have been incorrectly conveyed because the requirements are complex and even state staffers may not understand them all).
Some of this is down to the DOGE definition of "fraud, waste, abuse" as "anything we do not like." Using that definition, you can find fraud anywhere.
Unfortunately the US doesn't have a high-trust society anymore, so paperwork is a necessary evil to prevent malicious foreign actors from wiping us clean. (See: the recent Somalian autism claims scams in Minnesota).
It probably starts when one of the only two viable political parties stops undermining everything possibly good in this country in their effort to prove government doesn't work.
The fraudulent provider(s) bribed parents to get their kids diagnosed autistic. As, a result, autism diagnoses of children in this community are ~3x the background rate:
Interesting, my understanding was that the Somali parents were mad that their children’s autism, which wasn’t presenting the same way as the kind of standard Rain Man type of autism wasn’t being characterized correctly.
You were very wrong. Might want to consider where you get your news.
"Often, parents threatened to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks. Several larger families left Smart Therapy after being offered larger kickbacks by other autism centers."
These can simply be different groups of Somali parents, for what it's worth. Presumably some Somali kids are truly autistic and not participating in the fraud scheme.
"The total amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) improper payments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was an estimated $10.5 billion, or 11.7% of total benefits paid."
There’s no reason to assume it would be as low as 10% without strict checks. It could easily be 90% or more. We already see big regional difference for tax and medical fraud which likely reflects different enforcement levels and knowledge about how to skirt them.
But you're not going to get 5-10% fraud. Already there is significant disability fraud way past your 1% number even in our strict system. e.g. there are counties in the US where almost 1 in 5 working age adults is on disability because they are supposedly too disabled to work.
Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.
Washington state employment department lost $645 million in a matter of weeks in spring 2025 when they reduced fraud detection. Normally they spend $2-3 billion a year. Making some wild projections, that's 77% fraud rate?
Neither major US political party has a great track record here. On balance, I prefer one over the other, as I'm sure you do too. But they're both pretty far off from my ideal set of policies.
We put massive public funding into vaccine. We also seemed to fund healthcare a great deal (now being pulled back as ACA subsidies expire). Covid was the basis for a lot of short term emergency measures in early Biden, even late Trump I, admins.
After seen this I interested in a map of each person to assist with knowing who they are, who they worked for during the email date, and who they currently work for.
Currently using the dkarhttpd route with rsync. Everything is stored in a custom directory so that older version can be retained. Pacoloco looks interesting.
That is not 100% correct. Apple is slowing closing in the walls on a general purpose computer and preventing the bypassing of Gatekeeper with the execution of unsigned applications to _protect the children._ [0] [1] [2] [3]
I started moving to using GO and Fyne for cross-platform GUI tooling. GO 1.21 supports Windows 7 with Fyne. Ya still have to support Windows 7 for work. No more wasting time with managing a Windows installer.
QT Framework is still one of the best for cross-platform desktop applications when speed is key.
Like I said tooling. Means that the User is well defined where Accessibility is not an issue. The tooling I creating is for people that have to engage with physical equipment; from replacing parts to making sure a motor is working properly.
Kingston stopped making the one I really liked. A truly small microSD to USB adapter that could fit in a wallet. This was perfect for always having a USB drive around and not taking up space in your pocket.
You can get pretty darn tiny USB sticks, if you let go of the metal keychain requirement GP had (some of these work with a thin lanyard, think pocket camera strap).
You have to pay me to use Windows and Microsoft products.
There are so many alternatives that have higher standards. I keep having regressive issues with Visual Studio. The OS quality has been continually degrading. Microsoft is even pushing to have a @microsoft.com account on their Windows embedded IoT variants. There should be no reason an embedded OS requires an online account nor that XBox and other useless features baked in.
I wont event touch how bad the User Experience has become in their Office products and how much of their products have inconsistent key combinations. Ctrl+F ...
I can imagine your pain points, albeit luckily they do not overlap with my use case.
I'm not sure about the alternatives with higher standards though, and I say it as someone who operates two MacOS machines, a windows and an Omarchy one
They all have pros and cons, it's perfectly fine if we have different experiences.
Look at a registry with Microsoft vs Gnome. Microsoft is a kludge of a setup were Gnome is well defined. Microsoft is a guessing game and the wording is often a contradiction. Gnome actually gives descriptions of what the property means and what select settings will do. Microsoft does not even defined the meaning in some document. These properties often have to be reverse engineer.
Microsoft tried competing against Google's Chromebooks with a low cost Surface laptop. These laptops had such low hard drive space that they pushed a Windows update that disabled the auto backup of the registry. The update affected ALL Windows installations and not just Microsoft's low quality hardware. A corrupt registry without a backup requires Windows to always be reinstalled.
Microsoft's design for localization is to push the content into strings resource with-in a DLL. This requires the application to be re-compiled for any changes to the translations. A simple text file disconnected from the application binary per language is better off. This allows for the client to modify the translations without the need of the developer. Example would be having the application install fr_FR in AppData and the user being able to edit the translations or create a custom one and store it in the User's AppData with their cultural changes. This allows for full customization without needing direct access to the developer or source of the application.
Applying localization to .NET changes how the the data convert logic works. Means that a string conversion of "1.5" will fail and throw exceptions if the localization is set to using a language where "," is the separator in a decimal system. It gets worse when the application communicates with a 3rd party application and the data types must be constant for one localization. Quality would be to allow to only present the localization while storing the and processing content in a standard language independent of the user's selected.
Microsoft does not properly document the configuration settings for their configuration files. If they do, it quite rare. I will search the Internet for a setting in their solution file (.sln) and nothing will come up. Or it might but point to a Git comment with the setting and no meaning what that variable will do. BSD and Linux applications will create MAN pages for the application and a MAN page for the configuration file contents and provide the user with meaning.
Look at Windows vs Gnome. Press the Windows / Meta key and type _shutdown_ and press enter. Windows will open Edge, not your default Web Browser, and provide an Internet search about shutdown. Gnome will bring up a dialog with a 60 second counter to confirm you want to shutdown the computer. Gnome is quality user experience while Windows rejects the user's request to use Chrome instead of Edge and provides a search result instead of an action this is common on all computers.
Microsoft segregates applications into two groups console or GUI. They do not allow for an application to be both. A quality OS does not segregate and allows application arguments to dictate if the application should run in console / command line mode or as a GUI. Even if you try to hack a GUI into a custom made console in Windows, the STDIN and STDOUT become broken.This is why Windows applications need more code and extra work for logging.
High standards it to provide software that is well documented and uses simple means to configure the software while rejecting the attempt to force the user to use YOUR application and accept that the user's default applications should be used instead.
As for the rest I don't really author code for Windows machines, I write code for unix machines via WSL 2.
I prefer Windows as a desktop machine over linux for several reasons: better window management, personal preferences, compatibility with both worlds (windows and linux), way more software available, etc.
As I said in the previous post: I'm not here to convince you that Windows is a better development machine.
And my background is cross-platform development from desktop to embedded to full stack to back-end and front-end.
I learned that even though you can write an application in _WPF_ you should still learn other frameworks. Often people stick with what they know versus learning what they don't. The tooling and framework to use for a solution should be around the problem and not what you know. A hammer drives a screw but is also the wrong tool to use for the solution. I have learned new programing languages and frameworks because they fit the problem better than what I already knew.
Here are the images of how Windows 11 the shutdown issue:
Even typing _shutdown pc_ and pressing enter did nothing except closing the Start Menu.
One of my greats annoyances with Windows is that Microsoft Anti-Virus will lock the file for scanning. This means I have there is a chance of having to re-run an InnoSetup script compile because Windows is canning a XML file. Happens quite frequently with GIT repository management. Waiting and having to re-run tools because of this is a waste of time.
Desktop Environments are like a person choosing which Bourbon they like. For me the best Bourbon, beer, wine ... are the ones I have not tried. Some people stick with Jack Daniels their whole lives.
> Microsoft is a kludge of a setup were Gnome is well defined.
I also thought that for a long time, but you should open the Group Policy Editor one time. Each property has some paragraphs for description. When you look at the interface and the structure, it looks like the Registry with pretty labels.
> Windows will open Edge, not your default Web Browser, and provide an Internet search about shutdown.
You are holding it wrong! Type Super-R, this won't open the web search. (This is broken for all other programs, since no program puts itself in the PATH on Windows.)
Yes Windows / Meta + R = run dialog. A person needs to know the exact command name and parameters for _shutdown.exe_ to use it. DE like Gnome removes the need to know what actual command is being run to perform; shutdown, restart, logout, and lock screen.
Group Policy is only a small percentage of the Register. _gpedit.msc_ is only useful for manual local computer management or mass deployment for an Active Directory environment. It does not allow for creating a configuration file. In order to apply policy settings direct registry keys must be manipulated, extract, and applied to an installer application. This means referencing the spreadsheet that maps GP setting to Registry key and value. [0] Microsoft seems to dislike configuration files and prefer the Registry. Configuration files are easier to backup, share, and edit with a simple text editor. Registry needs an special tooling.
Microsoft has inconsistencies of how to store values in the registry when it comes to lists. Some times it is a value key per item; _item 0_ = _..._, _item 1_ = _..._. It might be a delimited separator like a space used to store DNS addresses assigned to a NIC. Worst is a more complex binary format that requires reverse engineering, such as the Internet Explorer compatibility URL list.
FYI, Windows != Meta key. Meta is commonly labelled Alt on IBM/Windows keyboards. The vendor neutral name for the Windows/(Open) Apple/Command key is 'Super'.
I find all these Popup Assistant Bots as bad User Experience.
No, I don't want to use your assistant and your are forcing me to pointlessly click on the close button. Some times they event hide viable information during their popup.
They seem to be the reincarnation of 2000s popups; there to satisfy a business manager versus actually being a useful tool.
I don't like my uncle at all and find him and people like him to be terrible human beings.
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