
The Rise of Extreme Daycare - tokenadult
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/business-economics/rise-extreme-daycare-working-24-hour-children-school-93860/
======
vidarh
The US looks more and more like a third world country. The descriptions of
working situations in that article are horrifying.

~~~
alkonaut
This.

"working poor" is an oxymoron in comparable countries. Like it should be. I'd
be laughing at it if it wasn't so bloody tragic. How is this not a top
political issue?

~~~
fpgeek
Well, the people caught in this trap can find it difficult to take time out of
their schedule on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, not to
mention the many other hoops they may have to jump through in order to be
counted politically.

~~~
alkonaut
This is just the next tragedy. Register in order to get to vote? People (100%)
not having ID's? Why not issue ID's to everyone and just be done with it?
Passports would be good...

Early voting seems to be possible in most states, and with at least 4 days of
voting before the tuesday, most people should be able to do it. How can it not
be a requirement for all states to provide early voting?

~~~
gambiting
I am not from US, but as someone explained this to me - issuing everyone
national IDs like we have in EU would be incredibly hard if not
impossible,because there is not one certain way to establish if someone is a
citizen or not, so a lot of people in US would perceive such attempt as being
a discriminatory one.

~~~
VLM
"because there is not one certain way to establish if someone is a citizen or
not"

Only about half the states require citizenship to vote, this can be trivially
verified on wikipedia. Its technically illegal at the federal level to vote in
a federal election if you're not a citizen but that's only enforced
politically "making examples of" and voter intimidation purposes and so forth.

It seems among the young HN participants, or maybe foreign participants, there
is culturally almost no understanding of whats federal and whats state level
in the USA. I would assume this is an intentional goal of the educational
system, to make control of the population simpler. There is also an
undercurrent of those who actually understand this simple fact not saying
much, because "everyone knows" that you get 50 states into a big pile,
anything you say about them can and will be wrong in some minor detail in one
state and your entire argument will be viciously attacked because being only
98% right is the same as 0% right.

There is also at least a three step game being played where the first step is
"demand ID to vote" rather than the existing "we trust you" system. The second
step is state ID is technically free if you have the documentation required.
The third step is making the documentation required change annually and
sometimes be very expensive, almost impossible to obtain and you can always
blame the victim for not having all the right paperwork.

My wife doesn't have a "real id" because it would just cost too much and be
too much of a PITA to fix, so when a "real id" level license is required to
vote, she'll be disenfranchised from voting. Eventually it will be enough of a
PITA for her to obtain the docs she needs and we can certainly afford it, its
only $100 or so, but that's a weeks labor for other social classes... very
much intentionally.

~~~
gambiting
Like I have said in my own comment - I am not from US. For me, the very
concept of non-citizens voting is.....bizarre. Also, the problem with US
citizens not being just given IDs is also bizarre - when people in my country
turn 18, they just collect their ID for free at the nearest government office,
and that ID can also be used as a passport for travelling inside the EU,
negating the need to ever pay for a passport for most people. It certainly
does not seem to be difficult, because everyone is registered as a citizen
from birth, unless someone becomes a naturalized citizen, so they are also
added to the national database. In the States I understand the difficulty is
that there is no such database - people can be Americans without having
paperwork to necessarily prove it, and so demanding such paperwork is seen as
discriminatory. Am I correct?

And no, as a European I very frequently do not understand what is governed on
your federal or state level. In fact, this separation has never ever been
mentioned in my own education,and I only know of it because I frequent places
like HN.

~~~
VLM
"For me, the very concept of non-citizens voting is.....bizarre"

Its that taxation without representation thing, still an issue two centuries
later, if you pay taxes, even just road taxes via gasoline for your car, you
get to vote on who spends the tax money ... More practically we use voting as
a propaganda technique to calm the voters... "we don't have an oligarchy or
dictatorship, you get to choose between two carefully chosen (by us, not you)
candidates, and they do have different PR firms... see? thats real freedom so
stop complaining!"

"Also, the problem with US citizens not being just given IDs is also bizarre"

We've historically had problems with J Random Criminal walking up to the
counter and asking for someone else's ID and then doing very bad things with
it. My own mother supposedly bought a truck in Texas last seen at the border
crossing to Mexico, that's only 1000 miles away. Culturally we have a lot of
people who work on commission and don't really care about much other than
collecting that commission check. We could have .gov bankroll the substantial
costs of identity paperwork, but 1) technically you're not supposed to throw
away your birth certificate, so the guy who "lost" it should have some skin in
the game, so bill them $100 and 2) Obvious voter suppression. At least poor
voter suppression. Also aside from cost its a confuseopoly type of situation..
profiting off people being confused. Another thing we're really into
culturally.

"demanding such paperwork is seen as discriminatory"

By a subset of the population with a political axe to grind, yes. Everyone
else (maybe 80% of the population?) sees it more as common sense other than it
has been used for oppression, stopping people on the street and only demanding
papers from certain racial groups.

"this separation has never ever been mentioned in my own education"

Join the club, which unfortunately includes most Americans who've lived here
their whole life and don't understand which laws are local, state, or federal.
If you think our laws are confusing, try the building codes some time (ugh).

This also is comical because there is a cultural meme on HN that "we" all live
in SV or Manhattan even though most of us actually do not. Like us two. So
someone will comment about electrical codes for 3-phase wiring for the NAS in
their basement in Mountain View as if the whole country works the same way,
which it certainly doesn't. Or voting, which is regulated by state.

~~~
gambiting
Thank you for such thorough explanation.

I will add one more thing to this discussion:

" if you pay taxes, even just road taxes via gasoline for your car, you get to
vote on who spends the tax money"

Interesting you say this, because this is one thing that should work like this
in EU, but it doesn't. As a EU citizen living in a country that is not the
country of my birth, I am in a situation where I pay all the taxes like
everybody else, I pay income tax, I contribute to national insurance, pay road
tax with my petrol, once I get old I will receive a state pension from this
country, the whole deal - I literally don't pay anything in my home country
anymore, so from the "tax" point of view, I am no different than any other
"citizen" of the country I currently live in. However, I cannot vote in
parliamentary elections of this country, because my passport has the wrong
country on it, even though for all other purposes it doesn't(and in fact, it
by law cannot) make any difference as long as we are inside the EU.

------
tokenadult
"Marisol works 29 hours at each of her jobs. This is common. If an employee
works more hours, her employer is required to provide health insurance."

This is just one example of how poorly drafted the Affordable Care Act is. The
lobbyists who wrote the bill (remember, the President provided almost no
leadership on the detailed provisions of the bill while it was in Congress)
ignored the certainty of elasticity of demand for labor by employers. If it
becomes more expensive to provide full-time employment, because of a mandate
to provide health insurance to full-time employees, then employers will offer
fewer full-time jobs and more part-time jobs with few enough hours not to
trigger the health insurance mandate. The drafters of the Affordable Care Act
forgot Economics 101, or maybe never learned economics at all. "The first
lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy
all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first
lesson of economics."

~~~
extra88
Or they knew exactly what would happen but went with it anyway so they'd have
a bill that would actually get through the Senate. If you assume employer-
provided insurance (which is bad but what the U.S. has), what's the
alternative? Any part-time number you pick, some employers will schedule
people just below it so if someone works even one hour, they get covered? How
do you then sort out which of multiple employers actually provides insurance?
Short-sighted, penny-pinching employers will always look for a loophole, if
they couldn't get out of it by reducing hours, they'd do something like call
each worker a "contractor" and not employee.

~~~
fulafel
To answer the "How would you you...", you enable the employee to sue if they
are artificially given less than full work-hours. It's not a hard thing to
prove if there's a nontrivial part time work force. These being the odds, the
companies don't try to pull it off too often, even if the court cases would
mostly come from ex-workers.

------
veb
I have so many feelings about this article. I feel so much sadness for the
parents who need to use these kind of places, but yet I feel happy that the
kids have somewhere to go and that the parent(s) can pay for it.

I still don't like it much. The article's projections just left my head
shaking.

Someone needs to tell these programmers/marketers that there's a wee factor
called "humanity" that they need to use when creating their algorithms. I wish
it was as easy as that. :( Could someone enlighten me around this? I'm not in
the US, and I have a hard time even thinking about everything being open
24/7\. (New Zealand is where I reside)

Though, the people who run these wee centres are doing some selfless work.
Absolutely amazing, and good on them for doing it. It makes me happy there's
still people like that around. (I realise not everyone would be like the
daycare in the article but I'd like to think so.)

~~~
jessaustin
_I 'm not in the US, and I have a hard time even thinking about everything
being open 24/7\. (New Zealand is where I reside)_

I'm not surprised! When I worked in NZ for a few months, years ago, I found
very few businesses open outside of "business hours". This made e.g. grocery
shopping a challenge. A few touristy places were open on Saturday morning.

Please don't take this as a criticism; run your country however you want to
run it. It's just that cultural differences go both ways, and the other side
looks weird no matter which direction one is looking.

~~~
veb
We used to have a 24/7 grocery store in Dunedin! ;-) Now it shuts before
midnight. You'll find in the major centres like Auckland or Wellington that
there'll be more of those open 24/7... but I can't think of anything else.

Mind you, banks that shut at 4.30pm are kind of annoying for many people and I
can't blame them (even though my wife is a banker). There's only _one_ small
branch open in a city of 140,000 people on a Saturday. No other banks open in
the weekends here at least.

That being said, and on topic with the article... it'll be much easier for a
single mum to stay at home with her kids and collect money from the govt,
rather than to work nightshift at a supermarket most likely. I don't even
think we have these extreme daycares in NZ. She may not get more money than
someone who stacks shelves, but it's definitely much better than her losing
out on her children growing up or the children missing their only parent from
their lives.

Many parents like this will normally go back to work once the kids start full-
time school, but still receive maybe $100 for accommodation help if they're
not making enough. I like this a lot better than them having to be in the same
circumstances as the women in the article.

(I know men fall into this too, I just used women as an example as the article
primarily did)

~~~
jessaustin
_I don 't even think we have these extreme daycares in NZ._

They're not the norm in USA either. As TFA implied, this is not just a failure
of the state (although it is that), but also of the social structure. The
single parents described have no one to whom they can turn. I know a family
(parents not married, but together for a _long_ time) that had a hard time
over the summer. They camped in a state park for over a month. (The younger
son loved it.) The good news is that now both parents are working,
incidentally at jobs that allow them to still eschew daycare. (Not that
daycare is bad for other families; this is just an indication of this family's
views.)

My time in NZ was almost entirely in Wellington, and was over a decade ago, so
maybe everything is different now. One challenge for me was living and working
downtown without an automobile. When walking absolutely wouldn't work, I found
the buses to be less convenient than buses I've ridden elsewhere.

------
fwn
It is a great tragedy that there is the need for such 24h daycare services. -
Both for children and parents.

Speaking about parents: I really wonder how they got to this point. Clearly
creating two children while in need of two low paid jobs seems like the
opposite of a risk averse strategy.

~~~
RobAley
I used to feel this way before I had kids, I'm now of the opposite mind.

Having kids is a fairly fundamental part of being a human being (imho, ymmv),
just below keeping yourself alive.

If everyone had to wait until they could afford kids before having them, many
people would be too old to reproduce by the time they could (if ever).

This is a function of the wealth inequalities in our society, not the fault of
those parents specifically. While it's easy to blame some of them, we get need
get societies house in order first.

~~~
zo1
Individuals not having a support-structure in place to help them take care of
kids (i.e. family) is both a symptom and a cause of individuals having
children that they can not take care of. If they struggle to take care of
their children, then they'll probably struggle to help their children take
care of their own children.

I'd posit that this is endemic to our "credit/loan" society, where everyone
feels the need to have things that they can't (yet) afford. If they just hold
off on their self-indulgence for one generation (or x-amount of years) until
they can afford to have that item, then they will improve the lifestyle of
their following generations by an unmeasurable amount.

~~~
RobAley
For most people who struggle to afford their kids, its not other indulgences
that cause it. There is a whole section of society who work hard but can't get
by.

------
parennoob
If you have a bunch of single people raising kids on their own, something like
this is bound to happen.

"Diana and Ivette’s mother, Marisol, for instance, is raising the girls on her
own, working at a supermarket from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. and at Home Depot from
6 to 10 p.m., six days a week. "

"This clock has highlighted weakness in our social networks. In 2013, 28
percent of children were living with a single parent; 77 percent of those
single parents are mothers."

Sounds like at some point, people are going to have to make a specific choice
between raising kids on their own (potentially) or not having them at all; and
vote for Governments that favor the policy they prefer.

~~~
guard-of-terra
How can we as a society survive if most people decide to not have kids at all?

~~~
parennoob
Adoption? Immigration?

The US is supposed to be a nation of immigrants, after all.

~~~
guard-of-terra
If you rely on immigration from 3rd world countries to replenish population,
you'll become a 3rd world country.

Do you really want that?

~~~
tokenadult
The United States has always relied on immigration from worse-off countries to
grow strong as a country. The immigrants come here and become Americans. Only
a minority of today's Americans are descended from immigrants from Britain
(indeed, only a minority of my own ancestors were from Britain), but almost
everyone here is English-speaking and American in cultural outlook. This is
how immigration works: people become acculturated to the new country, even
with very high rates of immigration.

~~~
guard-of-terra
I would speculate that it won't work anymore. When economy is bad and only
unsustainable wages are available for work, immigrants will stop assimilating
and start to create 3rd world within 1st world. I think it already happens.

------
josh_fyi
Notice the 29 hour-a-week job? Healthcare, anyone?

~~~
socialist_coder
Terrible. People working 2 part time jobs at 54+ hours a week and still no
health care benefits, while corporate profits and executive pay continue to
increase.

I think this 29 hour per week loophole was supposed to be fixed in the ACA but
it was one of the things that got left on the negotiating table.

~~~
viggity
what negotiating table? The dems didn't need (or get) any republican support.
The whole thing was done behind closed doors "we need to pass it so you can
see what is in it". All from the "most transparent" administration in history.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
They needed every single Democratic vote to pass it in the Senate. Many
concessions were made to get some of the more conservative Democratic senators
on board.

------
GrinningFool
Something about psmag.com makes firefox very sad.

