I have some insight into this, and it might be possible that with good intervention the ongoing costs are low... That being said, in our current system the cases that are severe enough to be in public housing easily cost 10 times that...
What's the alternative? Most cars have similar interfaces, and few are what I would want; but if you have already decided to buy a new "luxury van" (fill in your preferred type and trim), then you don't really get much of a choice.
> but if you have already decided to buy a new "luxury van"
Is that not a choice? That's the confusing bit. People talking about these like they've been held at gunpoint to consume luxury vehicles.
My sense is that car/automobile purchases are just so ingrained as default necessities that the idea of not having one either is or seems to be unthinkable.
Yes we actually want to take from everyone and give to disadvantaged people, we should do this as a society because even crudely implemented it is a good first approximation of capturing externalities shareholder value fails to.
Spending any tax money on programs designed to only help "DEI" causes is racist.
From rich to poor I see as ethical, but there are current programs that are gated on race. This is taking from all to give to a chosen race, all DEI practices should be eliminated from government actions.
There are very boring things that have been done in the past to increase diversity, like making sure recruiters actually went to black universities to recruit, instead of... mysteriously skipping them. Technically that cost something, but basically negligible.
The problem cases are after that, when people get upset the numbers didn't change as much as they hoped, and decide to go do fiddle with the hiring process.
The US has spent tax money to enslave and police Black people, exterminate Native Americans, deport Mexicans who were sometimes American citizens, and force Japanese American citizens into internment camps.
Does a government carry any moral responsibility to right its previous wrongs? If so, what sort of policies would that look like?
Trying to apply the same idea of history to something as abstract as a government, as to an individual is impossible.
The current people and their representatives did not do those things, so acting as if you are doing the right thing by implementing policy that advances one group over another is immoral. It's just inventing a fictional justification, no better than dark skin being a mark of sin.
> Spending any tax money on programs designed to only help "DEI" causes is racist.
DEI has only one cause, and that is avoiding discrimination on non-germane axes, particulalry by subtle, non-obvious means, such as relying on biased funnels.
wrong, it doesn't avoid discrimnation, it enforces it. companies are doing stuff like 'must include candidates from <minority race> for open reqs at grade XX or above'
Those companies (I'm having trouble finding any current ones, though there are few notable past examples that have been shot down in court) are doing DEI wrong.
The last two places I've worked (one a university) had DEI goals of hiring the most qualified person for the job, without regard to race, etc. The whole point was to stress the "without regard to" part.
We do collect data and try to correct imbalances by making sure our candidate pools have good coverage (i.e. they aren't discriminatory). But every offer we extend goes to the most qualified candidate, without regard to race, etc., to the very best of our ability.
It's also more comprehensive than just hiring and race.
For example, one goal is that a student in the National Guard with a side job gets the same shot as one unemployed living with their parents. What can you do to help facilitate that without reducing the impact of the program?
There's evidence that spatial reasoning is important for learning Computer Science. There's evidence that men and women can both develop spatial reasoning skills. There's evidence that men in general get more practice than women in this regard, potentially putting women at a disadvantage in the program. What can you do to help level that playing field without weakening the material?
Lastly, coming out against DEI programs whose goal is to hire based solely on merit and not race or other factors... not a good look. So you might want to specify which kind of DEI you're really against.
This aligns with my experience with a couple of DEI (or similar) programs at large tech as well. Coupled with really basic training that amounted to "Unconscious bias exists and it can happen to you, make sure you judge candidates by their performance and nothing else", which always seemed pretty reasonable to me.
International competition is the interesting thing for me, if we can prove a 4 day week in any form would be similarly efficient, that could give a great incentive to hiring the top talent and convincing them to migrate to the nation's that standardized it.
If it turns out that it's less efficient in the long run, then it would cause the whole nation to fall behind, reducing total comp possible, and leading to the most capable leaving.
Alternatively, international worker solidarity should be the model we work for, as we did with the current 5-day work week. It was neither productivity studies nor economic competitiveness that solidified the 5-day work week, it was workers demanding it under threat of violence and agreeing (or being coerced) not to break strikes even internationally.
Throughout human history, this has always been the only model that has ever brought social progress. Voting for more enlightened leaders sounds nice, but the reality is that massive pressure from working people (in the form of actual strikes and violence) has been the only thing that has actually worked. Not to say that it has always worked: even when the riot is not successfully suppressed , it can be co-opted into bringing in even worse regimes and problems (see Russia, China).
That model worked when people were much more equal in output, before the ambitious could leverage skills and tools to become an order of magnitude more productive than average.
It’ll never work today, because there’s too many people in too many industries who outperform the average worker 10:1.
Collective bargaining is quite unfair to those people and they’ll never accept it.
I very much doubt that is the problem. Lots of people would be happy for their more productive colleagues to get more money, if anyone asked them.
It's much more often managers who don't want to have this type of employee, because they fear for their positions or other similar issues. In particular, this happens via the absurd practice of refusing to give significant raises year to year, forcing the best workers to leave for a new company, taking all of their hard earned organizational knowledge.
Not to mention, I'm not talking about collective bargaining for salaries. This is about an economy-level change, not a company level or even industry level change. And it would benefit the best workers just as much as the worst.
People choose where they live, and should bear the cost relative to the amount of risk they chose to take.
Government funding is not a magical blanket that somehow makes it moral to take from someone who made good decisions and give to another who made poor ones.
I get that we're on a tech forum but the vast, vast majority of people in this country don't have the financial ability to just move wherever they want. I'm not saying that means that Floridians shouldn't worry about this, but this bootstraps narrative is ridiculous. Everyone here makes substantially more money than the average Joe.
Agreed in general, but is it reasonable to say to people living in multi-million dollar houses on some of the world's most coveted real estate that they are should assume the risks of it? Or move?
The dutch aren't insured against a dike breaking (Which has its own history).
But the dikes have been collectively maintained through laws and regulation from a local semi-democratic system for 800 years (separate from government). It was a necessity as 1 delinquent could screw up everything.
The point is that the costs (to build the dikes) are fully internalized by the people who live there, rather than being cross-subsidized by people far away.
This is more a matter of market rules than an inherent property of insurance; currently we do not let insurers get sufficiently granular due to some assumptions about wider social benefits of a less individualised system.
This might be reworked to allow for fire resistant designs to be a factor.
Average people aim to provide a good a start for their kids as possible; average aims to avoid public school if possible. You now only have a set of people defined by behaviour or ability too poor for private, parents who don't care, or ones with no options...
Basically it's opting out of being around the dregs
I'm not sure what your point is. All parents want to send their kids to the best schools. They buy expensive real estate for this reason. There is a very clear, unspoken reason why parents want to avoid poor areas for schools.
SF has a lottery system. This means all kids in the city are mixed. Unfortunately, my experience was absolutely horrible for learning.
The cost and timeline to evaluate quality is completely different; I can get multiple opinions for my possessions, and utilities are fairly objective to evaluate (and the cost to do so is small relative to the scale of the operation).
Schools are limited for choice, expert evaluation is limited, outcomes are potentially unclear... That's before you get into issues with the politics of a teacher or problem students.
some people feel better when they think they're in control, despite the fact that the outcome could be even worse. The ability to have control gives the reassurance that the outcome is going to be acceptable (without evidence).
Even further than that, individual evaluations of ‘better’ can meaningfully vary. Not everyone has the same metric of success here and I think there are many reasonable yet distinct evaluation criteria.
In the US, the most likely cause of someone being wealthy is that their parents were wealthy.
But almost every wealthy American tells a story about how they did it by themselves, ignoring the schools that they attended, the services which were available to them, the people their parents associated with, and the ability to make high-risk investments because they had a built-in security net.
Yet economic mobility, measured in terms of the likelihood that you die in a different income decile than you were born into, is lower in the USA than almost anywhere else in the developed world.
How to reconcile? It's fairly easy ... there aren't that many millionaires. The US has a society, culture and economy that allows for their occurence perhaps "better" than most other places. But this doesn't reflect the likely economic pathway that most of the population experiences in life.
The deciles are much further apart and the ceiling is massive. Compare the medians of all the countries (the US is at or near the top) then compare the 90th percentile and the US is heads and shoulders over the next highest.
Which proves that talking about millionaires is no longer that socially relevant thanks to inflation. Somehow ten-millionaire doesn't have quite that ring though.
There are many examples of Australians that have started middle class or even poorer and become wealthy (multi millionaires, a few billionaires) through their own business efforts.
What's lacking is a general habit of boasting about this, being wealthy, letting others in the country (ie. yourself) know about it.
You can find first generation pretty wealthy Australians in trucking, factory ownership, real estate, mining, warehouse volume sales, etc. Of those the ones most likely to be flash about their cash would be the real estate crowd, success in house sales is hard to come by without prominent self promotion.
Sure, I don't disagree that they exist as people, but as prominent stories in the culture they generally don't; outside of Lindsey fox I can't think of any...
Real estate wealth is a bit prominent, bit doesn't really have the same tone as designing or building something, more a reflection of our current dirt obsession.
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