17 Comments
Jul 23Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Appreciate your efforts to bring free value to us and to keep a high standard by not overinvesting in writing that won't pay off in terms of ideas-to-time ratio.

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Jul 23Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

I would be interested in reading some of the “fails to reject the null hypothesis” essays you generate. You could have an interesting discussion of what other evidence would help sway things, etc.

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On school voucher systems: I was educated in public schools before they spent so much time trying to support the egos of problem kids. I have no problem with vouchers being used to provide a tax break for parents opting for private schools because I believe in free enterprise. Teachers and administrators that can’t compete shouldn’t be in the education business. Parents who want their kids to be successful will find a way to provide good education for them, but schools should also be able to bounce kids who aren’t serious about being there, or who can’t make the academic hill in front of them. That is life in the real world, after all the official schooling is over. Following high school, I sought the best college education I could afford (no loans) and used that as a springboard for graduate and post-grad work at two of the premier universities in the country.

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I have to admit, “keeping out the problem kids” seems worth the price of admission, especially in some areas. Schools basically refuse to discipline for normal things.

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author

Yes and yet you have to have some place to send problem kids. Now maybe you can educate problem kids with the same amount of money, and maybe different styles of schools can educate different kids better. A school for the deaf might not need a lot more money to educate a deaf kid whereas a public school might need more because the accommodations are more specialized.

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Part of the solution too is to end normal schooling for some kids earlier. Many problem kids are not so much insane as they are simply not suited to academic endeavors and would do better in a votech or apprenticeship, or perhaps even a military academy style school. By 14-16 some could even start working.

Special needs kids are, as you point out, a different sort of situation, with possibly their own specialized schools working better in some cases, or just accommodation in standard schools.

The actually insane kids are a different problem, usually dealt with by the legal system by 14-16.

I will note that your response seems to imply that "putting kids somewhere during the day" is a big and necessary function of schools. I would argue that bundling babysitting/confinement and education was a huge mistake when it comes to both the mission of education and the wellbeing of children. Decoupling those roles is easily done with different types of schools as mentioned above, allowing children to work more at younger ages, and even just setting up semi-educational day care/holding pens for those with no academic aspirations but who need to be somewhere till mom picks them up. The is no reason to try and bundle all that into a single institution, and doing so invariably will undermine the higher order goals in order to meet the lower ones.

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Absolutely correct. The pressure on wages, preventing a working adult from earning a 'family wage', forced many couples into a job each (or more than one job for that matter, each). Thus profits maximised and a small but significant section of society is easily demonised, a percentage of which is constituted by kids who cannot cope without parental supervision. And don;t give me any bullshit about parents choosing complementary working patterns as if more than a select minority have any choice whatsoever in these matters.

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The problem feels like (notice my admission of not having data) a combination of Education majors being influenced by Leftist professors and a serious need for tort reform.

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My short analysis of school voucher systems:

-More choice is always better

-People may want to change schools for a variety of reasons

-The money thing is not simple to figure out, but not impossible either

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Why would you surmise that both sides would be offended by the idea that social welfare and open borders are incompatible? That used to be a bipartisan belief! Where the sides disagreed was which of the two we should have.

That fell apart when the Blues decided that open borders was the key to election dominance, and that the fiscal nightmare could be put off or ignored with MMT hand-waving. Now they want both, and they need to be offended by the contradiction.

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author
Jul 23·edited Jul 23Author

Blues don't like walls and Reds don't like welfare. :) The thesis of the article was going to be "to create a super awesome welfare state, start by building walls."

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I mean, you've basically just rediscovered paleoconservatism here. Pat Buchanan would say exactly this, if you could slip him some truth serum. Charles Murray is very sympathetic to this, it's why he's so insistent on breaking the particular societal taboos he breaks.

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I was visiting private schools down in Florida last week. Even setting aside the Covid/woke discrediting of public education, the simple fact is that the private schools seem to make the kids happier and more well adjusted. They are also way more convenient, flexible, and friendly to parents. Most were free or near free with the modest ($8k) voucher.

Sure, no schooling can change test scores (IQ). So what? There is a lot more to school than that.

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founding
Jul 29·edited Jul 29

When they say the tranq zombies are local, typically they are using a very very generous definition of "local". Did you move to San Franshitsco from out of state, possibly be homeless for a while, then sleep on someone's couch for a week? Congratulations, you're now a "local" by the definition of the homelessness quangos! It's a big, bald lie - but it keeps the grift flowing.

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I applaud your quality control, and you may not be lacking for ideas to write up, but I’ll throw one in the hopper anyway:

The (supposed?) internal migration in the US leading to the Great Sorting of liberals and conservatives into increasingly polarized Red and Blue states. The internal migration is probably relatively straightforward, but I think the change in voting/election results is perhaps not as straightforward. I wonder if a bigger driver of election results isn’t urbanization. I live in AZ, and I can’t help but notice what looks like a correlation between urbanization in the Phoenix and Tucson areas and the state’s shift to electing Democrats (who now hold all statewide offices that matter).

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author

If you have intriguing links talking about this share them and I'll read them, but I'm not sure what the angle would be on that sort of article unless it was talking about sorting out the civil war boundaries.

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Loved this insight - would be cool maybe to see one of these failures as an article with a deeper dive into why it failed - sort of like debunking yourself. Not often but once in a while it might be fun to see how/why you discover that you can't support the claim.

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