Learning about history is a touch demoralizing when you realize we've been fighting this same fight basically since the beginning of civilization and the concept of wealth
I yearn for a day that wealth hoarding is seen as the detriment to everybody that it is and is abhorred instead of admired. Displays of wealth in a world with so many sufferiny disgusts me... i wish I could bottle and distribute that perspective.
In Australia, the people won. There was communism for 60,000 years because the people had the will to make their world better. And then the white people came in their boats and planted a British flag.
Displays of wealth in a world with so many sufferiny disgusts me
I was thinking the other day about how a friend once pointed out someone carrying a handbag that sells for $10,000. I'm like... send that person straight to therapy and community service. That's so much money on something a $100, tops, bag could do.
A Birkin bag is 20,000 and is supposed to just be some simple "carry all" tote that costs basically college tuition and some people have multiple. I dont know how they can justify that to themselves.
When they blow an amount of money that could permanently change your life ... on some snobby bottle of wine ... that they probably couldn't differentiate between a $10 bottle of wine if you subjected them to a blind taste test ... and then they only drink half of it and throw the rest away.
No we don't. Thet pay us, and with that they own most of us. Most people just want a salary, if that means they have to kill poor people, that is what they do
Eliminate standardized testing? Sir, things like not having centralized education standards like that is why half of Americans don't know about the native genocides, many of them read below a 7th grade level, and a lot of them place creationism on the same tier as fossil records.
Standardized testing is great for math and reading and very basic science.
The criticism is that it makes teachers "teach to the test". And that's very true. But if the kids aren't fucking getting it, that's a problem regardless of whether we have the tests or not. Getting rid of the tests just hides the problem.
It's not too dissimilar from this administration's ideas to kill climate change data.
It sets a minimum standard. Bad teachers teach to the test. Good teachers go above and beyond that. But at least the bad teachers have a minimum standard to meet.
I'm guessing he was trying to say how to educate, not what. Not every human being learns in the same way and different people need different teaching methods.
Even so, I'd limit that to a list of scientifically proven methods
My guess this is a combination of the OP being more sheltered that he or she thinks and the phenomenon where people are in favor of abstract concept like "education" as long as there's no discussion of what exactly that means, but actually disagree vehemently about the specifics.
I definitely don't believe that they've personally spoken with tens of thousands of people about politics. Most politicians can't even say that unless they count giving a speech in front of hundreds of people as talking to each one individually.
Sure, and that's exactly the distinction I'm drawing. This person is presenting themselves as if they've conversed with that many people and there's just no way that's possible unless you use that term very loosely.
But that's what I mean. Most people are in favor of the abstract concepts, but when it comes time to implement them there will be a Democrat plan and a Republican plan.
Who pays for the housing? Where is the housing built? Which groups are eligible for the housing? As soon as you have specific answers to questions like that, you'll find whatever answers you have to be very divisive.
(I mean, look at San Francisco - it's extremely hard to build housing for anyone there, even with a Democratic monopoly on local and state governments.)
But look what actually happened when Obama tried to implement a much more modest reform of the health insurance system - it would be an understatement to say many people were not happy.
It comes down to voters being against the policy, unlike what the OP claims. You think those voters were fooled, but they probably think you were fooled and they gave the Republicans 63 seats in the House of Representatives and 6 seats in the Senate in 2010.
Have tax brackets as we know them, but more brackets with one final bracket: As soon as you reach, say, 10 million dollars in net worth, taxes on income and anything that increases your wealth go to 100%. Anything over it also gets taxes 100%
This way nobody gets to be filthy rich.
Governments get huge influxes of funds that they then use for a large socialist system. Universal free healthcare, free education for anyone that wants it. Free housing where needed, universal basic income, you name it
Governments can fund independent news foundations that in their turn fund news organizations with the most important rule that news always must be as factual and unbiased as possible
Since nobody can be filthy rich, or dirt poor, its hard to bribe people because people are fine with the money they have
Worried about people hiding wealth? Make all financial data public. All of it. If nobody can go over 10 mil anyways, who cares that it's public
Since nobody can be filthy rich, nobody can be filthy powerful, which is good as power is the root of all evil for humans. Want to wage a war? Good luck with that without power to push for that
Since nobody will be dirt poor, most crime will disappear. Scams will disappear because incentives for those things will be gone
Most people would never hit the line, and they'd be fine. The few workaholics under us will be able to get "rich" and hit that line:
10 mil gets you a very nice house and car and some investment money for a company maybe
Want a bigger company? Get more investors. This practically goes to the point where companies are owned by the employees
Governments can also fund independent investment foundations where needed for bigger companies but I'd keep companies limited in size too, let's say 1 billion dollars in net worth max.
This way, no powerful companies that will fuck over customers. No powerful companies to lobby governments to fuck over the people. You will no longer have these too big to fail companies either. Better 5000 1 million companies than one 5 billion dollars company
We can even keep capitalism as we currently have it because capitalism is basically free trade. Trade all the crap you want, its fine, as we now have simple basic limits to the system. No need for changing systems ehatbeill guaranteed cause shitstorms
Yes, the 10 mil is rather arbitrary, and should be subject to inflation and so on, but you get the basic point. I'm sure an economist could come up with better limits, and I'm sure we'll need to add some details here and there, bit the basics is simple.
The hardest part of this is that you'll probably need to implement this world wide all at the same time, and you'll probably want to have all countries using the same currency (which would also simplify the crap out of so many things)
Here is the thing, all of that money is fictional. It doesn't exist in the real world. All that stuff the fictional money buys does exist though, and possession is 9/10th of the law.
The problem isn't that the filthy rich are rich. It's that they are powerful because they are rich, because that's capitalism.
It's not about redistribution of wealth, it's about redistribution of power. Money = power.
The problem with schools is they don't have the power to set curriculum and teach the way that works without interference from governments, who are controlled by the filthy rich.
My wife is an administrator at a public school, and as such I know a lot of teachers.
I've yet to meet any that say the limiting factor on their decisions is government interference.
I'd say the thing I hear most with regards to limiting their ability to teach/choose curriculum is how litigious American society is. The schools are so afraid of being sued they bend over backwards to every whim of the parents.
Little Timmy is stabbing the other kids? Better have it documented over a 18 month span with 57 different ways you politely asked him not to. Then maybe we'll consider moving him to a tougher placement.
Oh, you want to teach the Odyssey? Susie's mom thinks Zeus is actually Satan in disguise, so you have to pick something else or we'll be sued for promoting devil worship.
And then you have EdTech corps pushing snake oil so hard that admins are buying it up left and right and forcing it into the classroom against teachers' wills.
All that to say, it's a big, multifaceted problem, but the core of it isn't money. The US spends more per student than almost any country in the EU. It has some of the highest per student spending worldwide. It's not helping, and it's not because the government is interfering.
First off, as someone who has known a lot of teachers:
None of them think their administrators are competent or speak entirely freely around them. Not that the problems she hears about aren't entirely valid, just that she isn't and won't get the whole story
The application of the law is the government. The fact a teacher can be even inconvenienced for teaching something heretical like 'the guy who wrote this liked him some twinks' or 'the number zero exists' is a function of government overreach, subcontracted and made more politically palatable by decentralizing it a bit, but government power is applied, and its favored-tax-status religions are the ones wielding it.
As for shit admibs buying garbage: yeah. Yeah if I buy a solid gold case and a cloud aggregated dildo that vibrates based on cost movement of a financial derivative of RAM manufacturers, its not going to make my computer have more RAM. You do need to actually spend money on education to improve education outcomes.
A lot of that spending goes into incredibly bloated admin staff and suspiciously high admin salaries.
And most of that is because, of course, admin are the ones who decide how the money gets spent. And, being admin, they always have admin's issues front and center and their first thought is to spend the money to address those issues.
Yep, they are a leech, but the government civil servants are taking nothing compared to the corporate interests who pay a few of those civil servants to look the other way while they steal the lion's share in exchange for being "service providers".
If you say 'educated qualified teachers aren't allowed to teach and we are spending the whole budget on grok tokens' you can spend money on education without improving outcomes. This is true.
But generally, if you pay for teachers facilities and things like textbooks chosen by people who know the subjects, you get better outcomes literally as far as any society in history has ever tried.
There's also some peripheral stuff like nutrition programs, enrichments like field trips, fancy org design shit and tech toys that are good when done in good faith and can provide really exceptional returns but can go off-mission in various ways that don't improve educational outcomes as much, where returns do not scale to an unlimited degree, or shit can be applied in a detrimental way. This is why a hypothetical competent administrator would be very useful, though I'm more likely to have an opportunity to be gangbanged by unicorns than ever meet one of those who works around education.
41 replies
No war but the class war. It's us against them, and we outnumber them.
Learning about history is a touch demoralizing when you realize we've been fighting this same fight basically since the beginning of civilization and the concept of wealth
I yearn for a day that wealth hoarding is seen as the detriment to everybody that it is and is abhorred instead of admired. Displays of wealth in a world with so many sufferiny disgusts me... i wish I could bottle and distribute that perspective.
In Australia, the people won. There was communism for 60,000 years because the people had the will to make their world better. And then the white people came in their boats and planted a British flag.
Disappointing how often "and then the British showed up" is followed by "and then, everything went to shit."
I was thinking the other day about how a friend once pointed out someone carrying a handbag that sells for $10,000. I'm like... send that person straight to therapy and community service. That's so much money on something a $100, tops, bag could do.
A Birkin bag is 20,000 and is supposed to just be some simple "carry all" tote that costs basically college tuition and some people have multiple. I dont know how they can justify that to themselves.
When they blow an amount of money that could permanently change your life ... on some snobby bottle of wine ... that they probably couldn't differentiate between a $10 bottle of wine if you subjected them to a blind taste test ... and then they only drink half of it and throw the rest away.
Filter filter filter!
No we don't. Thet pay us, and with that they own most of us. Most people just want a salary, if that means they have to kill poor people, that is what they do
Eliminate standardized testing? Sir, things like not having centralized education standards like that is why half of Americans don't know about the native genocides, many of them read below a 7th grade level, and a lot of them place creationism on the same tier as fossil records.
Standardized testing is great for math and reading and very basic science.
The criticism is that it makes teachers "teach to the test". And that's very true. But if the kids aren't fucking getting it, that's a problem regardless of whether we have the tests or not. Getting rid of the tests just hides the problem.
It's not too dissimilar from this administration's ideas to kill climate change data.
It sets a minimum standard. Bad teachers teach to the test. Good teachers go above and beyond that. But at least the bad teachers have a minimum standard to meet.
I'm guessing he was trying to say how to educate, not what. Not every human being learns in the same way and different people need different teaching methods.
Even so, I'd limit that to a list of scientifically proven methods
you'd miss out on a lot
perhaps "scientifically proven to not be actively damaging" would be better?
My guess this is a combination of the OP being more sheltered that he or she thinks and the phenomenon where people are in favor of abstract concept like "education" as long as there's no discussion of what exactly that means, but actually disagree vehemently about the specifics.
I definitely don't believe that they've personally spoken with tens of thousands of people about politics. Most politicians can't even say that unless they count giving a speech in front of hundreds of people as talking to each one individually.
You can speak to tens of thousands easily enough if you have the platform for it.
But you can't Iisten to tens of thousands. There is no real conversation going on there.
Sure, and that's exactly the distinction I'm drawing. This person is presenting themselves as if they've conversed with that many people and there's just no way that's possible unless you use that term very loosely.
The polling backs up OP's general idea. These are very popular opinions when disconnected from party talking points.
But that's what I mean. Most people are in favor of the abstract concepts, but when it comes time to implement them there will be a Democrat plan and a Republican plan.
Well, which republican and/or democrat plan includes "give all people safe housing" or "make healthcare free at point of use"? Etc.
As far as I know, none of them.
Who pays for the housing? Where is the housing built? Which groups are eligible for the housing? As soon as you have specific answers to questions like that, you'll find whatever answers you have to be very divisive.
(I mean, look at San Francisco - it's extremely hard to build housing for anyone there, even with a Democratic monopoly on local and state governments.)
Still, "everybody should get Medicare" is a pretty straightforward concept, and that's the level of specificity we're talking.
But look what actually happened when Obama tried to implement a much more modest reform of the health insurance system - it would be an understatement to say many people were not happy.
That was the companies fighting back, firing up the propaganda machine, forming people's beliefs on one side or the other. It wasn't about the facts.
If it was, you would just build a public healthcare system.
It comes down to voters being against the policy, unlike what the OP claims. You think those voters were fooled, but they probably think you were fooled and they gave the Republicans 63 seats in the House of Representatives and 6 seats in the Senate in 2010.
We live in a gatekept society. Bring the gates down
World wide wealth caps, implemented though taxes
Have tax brackets as we know them, but more brackets with one final bracket: As soon as you reach, say, 10 million dollars in net worth, taxes on income and anything that increases your wealth go to 100%. Anything over it also gets taxes 100%
This way nobody gets to be filthy rich.
Governments get huge influxes of funds that they then use for a large socialist system. Universal free healthcare, free education for anyone that wants it. Free housing where needed, universal basic income, you name it
Governments can fund independent news foundations that in their turn fund news organizations with the most important rule that news always must be as factual and unbiased as possible
Since nobody can be filthy rich, or dirt poor, its hard to bribe people because people are fine with the money they have
Worried about people hiding wealth? Make all financial data public. All of it. If nobody can go over 10 mil anyways, who cares that it's public
Since nobody can be filthy rich, nobody can be filthy powerful, which is good as power is the root of all evil for humans. Want to wage a war? Good luck with that without power to push for that
Since nobody will be dirt poor, most crime will disappear. Scams will disappear because incentives for those things will be gone
Most people would never hit the line, and they'd be fine. The few workaholics under us will be able to get "rich" and hit that line:
10 mil gets you a very nice house and car and some investment money for a company maybe
Want a bigger company? Get more investors. This practically goes to the point where companies are owned by the employees
Governments can also fund independent investment foundations where needed for bigger companies but I'd keep companies limited in size too, let's say 1 billion dollars in net worth max.
This way, no powerful companies that will fuck over customers. No powerful companies to lobby governments to fuck over the people. You will no longer have these too big to fail companies either. Better 5000 1 million companies than one 5 billion dollars company
We can even keep capitalism as we currently have it because capitalism is basically free trade. Trade all the crap you want, its fine, as we now have simple basic limits to the system. No need for changing systems ehatbeill guaranteed cause shitstorms
Yes, the 10 mil is rather arbitrary, and should be subject to inflation and so on, but you get the basic point. I'm sure an economist could come up with better limits, and I'm sure we'll need to add some details here and there, bit the basics is simple.
The hardest part of this is that you'll probably need to implement this world wide all at the same time, and you'll probably want to have all countries using the same currency (which would also simplify the crap out of so many things)
This is just a telling of the rich a-holes having won the class war.
Here is the thing, all of that money is fictional. It doesn't exist in the real world. All that stuff the fictional money buys does exist though, and possession is 9/10th of the law.
I will say, spending on public education doesn't actually seems terribly proportional to outcomes.
The major city near me is pumping well over the national average into their schools/teachers, and still show some of the worst numbers in the nation.
I think the problem may be a bit more complex than "just throw more money at it."
The problem isn't that the filthy rich are rich. It's that they are powerful because they are rich, because that's capitalism.
It's not about redistribution of wealth, it's about redistribution of power. Money = power.
The problem with schools is they don't have the power to set curriculum and teach the way that works without interference from governments, who are controlled by the filthy rich.
My wife is an administrator at a public school, and as such I know a lot of teachers.
I've yet to meet any that say the limiting factor on their decisions is government interference.
I'd say the thing I hear most with regards to limiting their ability to teach/choose curriculum is how litigious American society is. The schools are so afraid of being sued they bend over backwards to every whim of the parents.
Little Timmy is stabbing the other kids? Better have it documented over a 18 month span with 57 different ways you politely asked him not to. Then maybe we'll consider moving him to a tougher placement.
Oh, you want to teach the Odyssey? Susie's mom thinks Zeus is actually Satan in disguise, so you have to pick something else or we'll be sued for promoting devil worship.
And then you have EdTech corps pushing snake oil so hard that admins are buying it up left and right and forcing it into the classroom against teachers' wills.
All that to say, it's a big, multifaceted problem, but the core of it isn't money. The US spends more per student than almost any country in the EU. It has some of the highest per student spending worldwide. It's not helping, and it's not because the government is interfering.
First off, as someone who has known a lot of teachers:
None of them think their administrators are competent or speak entirely freely around them. Not that the problems she hears about aren't entirely valid, just that she isn't and won't get the whole story
The application of the law is the government. The fact a teacher can be even inconvenienced for teaching something heretical like 'the guy who wrote this liked him some twinks' or 'the number zero exists' is a function of government overreach, subcontracted and made more politically palatable by decentralizing it a bit, but government power is applied, and its favored-tax-status religions are the ones wielding it.
As for shit admibs buying garbage: yeah. Yeah if I buy a solid gold case and a cloud aggregated dildo that vibrates based on cost movement of a financial derivative of RAM manufacturers, its not going to make my computer have more RAM. You do need to actually spend money on education to improve education outcomes.
Admin itself is a problem.
A lot of that spending goes into incredibly bloated admin staff and suspiciously high admin salaries.
And most of that is because, of course, admin are the ones who decide how the money gets spent. And, being admin, they always have admin's issues front and center and their first thought is to spend the money to address those issues.
Yep, they are a leech, but the government civil servants are taking nothing compared to the corporate interests who pay a few of those civil servants to look the other way while they steal the lion's share in exchange for being "service providers".
All you have to do is look at Portland or Seattle to see what throwing money at problems actually solves (hint: not much).
Yep, there are plenty of corporate leeches in the education system siphoning money away from the kids and teachers. That's part of the theft.
If you say 'educated qualified teachers aren't allowed to teach and we are spending the whole budget on grok tokens' you can spend money on education without improving outcomes. This is true.
But generally, if you pay for teachers facilities and things like textbooks chosen by people who know the subjects, you get better outcomes literally as far as any society in history has ever tried.
There's also some peripheral stuff like nutrition programs, enrichments like field trips, fancy org design shit and tech toys that are good when done in good faith and can provide really exceptional returns but can go off-mission in various ways that don't improve educational outcomes as much, where returns do not scale to an unlimited degree, or shit can be applied in a detrimental way. This is why a hypothetical competent administrator would be very useful, though I'm more likely to have an opportunity to be gangbanged by unicorns than ever meet one of those who works around education.
https://youtu.be/KLXUAmZ7J5E