The direction of society lately

[bironi]

Where we're at.
Me, me, me, more, more, more.
Money, money, money, money.

[ides1056]

Jclay- I tell friends I give us 30 years, tops, and they think I am kidding. I will witness the end of the world. What a time to be alive.

[thollandpe]

Of the two I’d pick healthcare as the priority to fix. Education costs are soaring but even some version of “expensive” education, in which educators are well paid, could be sustainable if we weren’t also strapped to the rock so that healthcare costs can feast on our innards.

Indeed. Back in the Bush/Cheney days I was alarmed at rising energy prices and the bite they were taking out of the average family (like $4,000 a year more, just in direct energy costs) and decided to look at my own major expenses to see what inflation had done.

It was healthcare costs that had bitten us hard, even though I always had good employer-provided insurance. The bite was way bigger.

[vertical_doug]

Jclay- I tell friends I give us 30 years, tops, and they think I am kidding. I will witness the end of the world. What a time to be alive.

Where we're at.
Me, me, me, more, more, more.
Money, money, money, money.

I think it has been this way since at least the Bronze Age collapse. Our current migrant problems are just the latest examples of the 'Sea Peoples' from 3200 years ago. The bronze age rulers were pretty good hoarders when it came to luxury.

Rome didn't collapse, it just sort of tore itself a part into ever smaller and dumber pieces for 200 years. After Ceasar, and then Augustus became Emperor, Rome did not peak for another 200 years until Trajan and Hadrian. It was the next 200 that were hard.

So if Trump becomes an autocrat, the good times are just starting unless of course, US peaked under Obama, and we are already in the hard part.

[j44ke]

Of the two I’d pick healthcare as the priority to fix. Education costs are soaring but even some version of “expensive” education, in which educators are well paid, could be sustainable if we weren’t also strapped to the rock so that healthcare costs can feast on our innards.

We don't spend enough on education if we have still have stupid people running the government.

I think the US spends something like $13K per kid per year on public education? What's the cheapest annual tuition for a private school - schools that can kick stupid kids out to maintain their high standards. Meanwhile $13K per kid per year for public schools that are required to educate every kid who comes through the door.

I think defense spending is the giant sucking sound on almost everything that we'd like to do but can't because it is "too expensive."

But we're eliminating the department of education instead.

[Saab2000]

We don't spend enough on education if we have still have stupid people running the government.

I think the US spends something like $13K per kid per year on public education? What's the cheapest annual tuition for a private school - schools that can kick stupid kids out to maintain their high standards. Meanwhile $13K per kid per year for public schools that are required to educate every kid who comes through the door.

I think defense spending is the giant sucking sound on almost everything that we'd like to do but can't because it is "too expensive."

But we're eliminating the department of education instead.

While it’s impossible to defend the actions of this president, it’s not as if the D of E has been effective at producing good metrics. Or at least it’s super inconsistent. I live in a suburb of Chicago known to have very good public education. Other parts of the country have piss poor public education. These are ultimately local decisions with local funding (property taxes are high where I live - schools are well funded) and local outcomes.

I don’t support attempting to eliminate the D of E but the metrics don’t seem to support the idea that we have consistently high quality national educational outcomes. Am I misguided or misinformed?

[Scott G.]

[snip]
I don’t support attempting to eliminate the D of E but the metrics don’t seem to support the idea that we have consistently high quality national educational outcomes. Am I misguided or misinformed?

The US education system works exceptionally well if mom & dad are well off.

https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/...3022#446994207

[echappist]

The US education system works exceptionally well if mom & dad are well off.

https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/...3022#446994207

While it’s impossible to defend the actions of this president, it’s not as if the D of E has been effective at producing good metrics. Or at least it’s super inconsistent. I live in a suburb of Chicago known to have very good public education. Other parts of the country have piss poor public education. These are ultimately local decisions with local funding (property taxes are high where I live - schools are well funded) and local outcomes.

I don’t support attempting to eliminate the D of E but the metrics don’t seem to support the idea that we have consistently high quality national educational outcomes. Am I misguided or misinformed?

Up to a point (or in this case, a general band of per pupil spending), there’s a pretty significant correlation between money spent and outcome. Any more spent (say in $1k increment) afterwards gives decreasing returns.

In my neighboring school district (for Madison, a college town of 300k), the per pupil spending is consistent throughout, but the schools with catchment in neighborhoods with high proportion of well-educated parents (not all of whom highly paid) have much better educational outcome. Think children of professionals, university professors, and grad students. Education spending doesn’t explain the difference; nor does parental income/wealth when it comes to children of immigrant grad students vs children of low- to middle-income citizens. Rather, parental involvement and expectation have much higher correlation than income alone.

As such, I would caution against using wealth/income as a substitute for parental involvement. It’s a good first order correlation, but there are more to it (not to mention children afflicted with “affluenza” and couldn’t be arsed to learn). Nonetheless, how to get parents more involved (or alternatively provide a suitable substitute thereof) does have a monetary component. Ensuring parents are actually earning a livable wage, ensuring that parental working hours that are consistent (as opposed to the zero-hour scheduling used for lots of service sector jobs), and providing suitable after-school opportunities to those children from families that has no access to the foregoing can all improve educational outcomes.

[j44ke]

While it’s impossible to defend the actions of this president, it’s not as if the D of E has been effective at producing good metrics. Or at least it’s super inconsistent. I live in a suburb of Chicago known to have very good public education. Other parts of the country have piss poor public education. These are ultimately local decisions with local funding (property taxes are high where I live - schools are well funded) and local outcomes.

I don’t support attempting to eliminate the D of E but the metrics don’t seem to support the idea that we have consistently high quality national educational outcomes. Am I misguided or misinformed?

Incomplete. We don't just give each school the same money and tell them to run with it. Inequity in education is part of our nation's history. The inequity of district to district funding in most school systems is embarrassing. And even if that equity is corrected, some districts require so much infrastructure repair and restaffing, they'd still be way behind. Many schools districts that serve the majority of the poorer neighborhoods within a school system actually require MORE money to manage the wider range of students they are required to educate.

Schools have traditionally been funded based on property taxes of the districts they serve. Given the history of economic and racial inequities in American real estate, that just transmits those inequities to school funding. School funding systems that re-inscribe inequities have been judged unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (Brown v. Board,) but reform of funding formulas for individual districts moves incredibly slowly due to counter efforts to make historical deficiencies stick. Public schools perhaps had their apex moment in the years before Reagan. Afterwards, the mantra of "neighborhood schools" and then later magnet schools or honors schools started diluting the product. Then school vouchers. And the insertion of standardized testing scores as a measurement of a school's worth (how much funding they should get as a reward) as an instructional institution. BTW the best predictor of a student's scores on those standardized tests is the wealth of their grandparents (Harvard Study done by Lani Guinier et al.) Plug that into your property tax calculator.

Public schools are only as good as the federal state and local governments will allow them to be. And even then the courts must hold all of the above in compliance with the Constitution. But that's a slow process of compliance, and even the Supreme Court seems unable to decide consistently whether inequity in a school system is economic or ethnic, because it can't be one and the same right? Meanwhile, another generation or two or three of kids are lost opportunities.

The public schools underperform because the economics are not done with equitable math. There have been years and years of resistance to sharing taxes revenues broadly - rather than only at their point of origin - so that every kid truly has an equal chance to succeed. And that's all about our continued denial that race and class (which are inseparable in an historically slave-based economy) shape almost everything in this country, including progress and improvement.

[72gmc]

Once upon a ride, after reading a story about a teacher strike, I had a kooky idea that goes roughly: defense is always funded, an educated electorate is an active form of national defense in a nation founded on "we the people"*, so could there be a way to fold the department of education into the department of defense and at least solve the funding issue? Perhaps via a compulsory service requirement a la Switzerland? Or is that just a path to a military nation?

*I realize this is an ideological stance that some would find argumentative, with lots of state vs. federal debates ... I don't ride long enough to solve all of these problems myself.

[j44ke]

Once upon a ride, after reading a story about a teacher strike, I had a kooky idea that goes roughly: defense is always funded, an educated electorate is an active form of national defense in a nation founded on "we the people"*, so could there be a way to fold the department of education into the department of defense and at least solve the funding issue? Perhaps via a compulsory service requirement a la Switzerland? Or is that just a path to a military nation?

*I realize this is an ideological stance that some would find argumentative, with lots of state vs. federal debates ... I don't ride long enough to solve all of these problems myself.

How about:

https://www.teachforamerica.org

https://americorps.gov

[thollandpe]

Teacher Loan Forgiveness (Federal Student Aid, an office of the U.S. Department of Education)

Under the Teacher Loan Forgiveness (TLF) Program, if you teach full time for five complete and consecutive academic years in a low-income school or educational service agency, and meet other qualifications, you may be eligible for forgiveness of up to $17,500* on your Direct Subsidized and Unsubsidized Loans and your Subsidized and Unsubsidized Federal Stafford Loans.

* How about making this amount something closer to the actual debt that a young teacher is actually carrying? Of course simply not canceling the program and the department that runs it would be nice.

[vertical_doug]

We don't spend enough on education if we have still have stupid people running the government.

I think the US spends something like $13K per kid per year on public education? What's the cheapest annual tuition for a private school - schools that can kick stupid kids out to maintain their high standards. Meanwhile $13K per kid per year for public schools that are required to educate every kid who comes through the door.

I think defense spending is the giant sucking sound on almost everything that we'd like to do but can't because it is "too expensive."

But we're eliminating the department of education instead.

1934 Upton Sinclair 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it'

[takashi]

whiskeyleak?

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03...smid=url-share

"Officials Included Journalist in Group Chat on Yemen Attack Plans in Extraordinary Breach"

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed war plans in an encrypted chat group that included a journalist two hours before U.S. troops launched attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen, the White House said on Monday, confirming an account in the magazine The Atlantic.

[72gmc]

^^^ saw that, though I'm not (yet) an Atlantic subscriber so I didn't see the whole story. I wonder where the chief of staff is in all of this? Assuming the chief of staff is actually allowed to do chief of staff things in this administration.

[takashi]

my god these are stupid reckless people

[BBB]

Bunch of bike nerds agree that the public purse probably should be applied to education and health.

Meanwhile, the Felon in the White House complains about an official portrait, and his underlings include a journo in a group chat discussing national security issues.

Put the bike nerds in charge.

[j44ke]

Everyone has hit the reply-all button accidentally, right? Besides Signal is encrypted. No one ever cracks encrypted stuff like Signal.

https://thehackernews.com/2025/02/ha...d-devices.html

[Tom]

I cannot believe these guys aren't using a completely closed system that nobody has access to. Idiots. But, of course, that'd cost a few bucks and Uncle Elon would say nyet.

I have five dollars that says Putin is reading all their texts real time.