One thing I despise about ChatGPT is how it goes on 4 paragraph tangents about how slight details are wrong, and then always ends with a paragraph of bolded fucking text rephrasing some statement in my original question, but with a huge amount of hedging to exclude minute counterexamples.
> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
From both someone involved in raising kids as well as someone who knows a lot of teachers: none of the involved parties want that. Schools are at best for teaching, but never for raising.
I feel like you must have a very restrictive definition of what constitutes “raising” kids if we’re omitting the place where they spend the majority of their waking hours and the people most of their social universe is based in.
We’ve had a live experiment with this during COVID and it’s pretty clear that kids raised solely at home by their parents fared way worse. Not just on academic metrics, but basic conflict resolution or social skills.
This is one of those comments where I get your point, but have a couple of big "uhm actually"s :point-up: :nerd-face:
I wouldn't think that COVID is a good indicator as this was in no way typical home-schooling. The vast majority of kids were going to school "online," and not schooled by their parents. They were also largely confined indoors with their families all day and all evening.
I'm having trouble making my other point without slipping deep into trying to define "raising," so I'm just going to hit "reply" here.
I didn’t mean home schooling specifically but the assertion, and the general sentiment, that parental input is the only determinant that matters when it comes to the development of children into healthy and well-socialized adults. The family isn’t an island it’s something that exists within its society. The people in it also have communities outside the family—including complicated social groups, people coming from different cultural and subcultural norms, and complicated bureaucratic systems and institutions—that they have to learn to interact with an thrive under. School is a critical part of teaching and socializing them to navigate that even beyond the specific curricular stuff. And beyond school lots of other stuff kids interact with is having a hand in teaching them what to expect of society and what society expects of them.
Raising almost all children in these government socialist barracks is so dystopian. What you call "worse" conflict resolution and social skills I call superior confidence and autonomy. People today are oversocialized.
I respectfully disagree. Yes, parents should raise their children as in be present in their lives and help them grow and shape themselves. However, schools with the rules, social engagements, and learning is also a form of raising. Teachers, especially in elementary school, are extremely influential for young kids. How teachers behave when somebody is bullied, how they handle questions, basically how they handle anything, forms the minds of young children.
Is it the sole responsibility of a school to ensure well raised (for whichever specific definition of “well”) children? No. However, they are a large factor in the raising of children.
School was an escape from my home life, but it could never fix my home life. As a child who had no ability to determine what constituted "normal" in order to escape my situation, the only real solution for my home life was for me to be born to different parents. I doubt any amount of legislation would have accomplished that.
That's why I think it was a huge mistake to make teachers mandatory reporters. The idea was that they'd report people neglecting or abusing their children, but what happened is the more egregious cases usually learned to just do a half-ass "home schooling" instead so the child never sees a mandatory reporter and then situation is even worse because now the kid has no escape, no access to doctors, etc.
> Capitalism has defined ‘health’ itself as a capacity to submit oneself to labor
People keep mindlessly saying this but I have never seen evidence for it. Before money was ever invented the idea was already there that if you're healthy you can sustain yourself. All 'capitalism' did was saying "and most people nowadays perform abstract services in trade for an abstraction of a promise of a pinky swear saying "if you trade this pinky swear to me you'll get some food".
It's not 'economic systems that are fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently', it's a fundamental reality of life. Either you are capable of getting enough food for you and your family, either directly by farming, gathering or hunting, or you are not.
We have plenty of food because of capitalism (particularly the fact that we have plenty of incredibly cheap food grown by a tiny fraction of our population).
You're missing my point. Shortage and conflict is the default. It's not a fault unique to capitalism, and to say that it's its fault is missing the mark.
I'm not saying it's an ought situation or even an is situation; it's that I disagree with his diagnosis of what causes it.
Well right now there isn't a food shortage so what should we do while there isn't a food shortage? Should we perhaps say, that we only jettison the disabled people once we're actually running out of food and are forced to make a tough decision about who to keep alive, instead of doing it 20 years in advance just because there might be a shortage one day?
Whether we as a society support those who cannot productively contribute is orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalism itself has nothing to say about what we do with the increases in productivity. You can see this in many developed countries, which have wealth and surplus thanks to their capitalistic markets, but they also have high taxes and a strong safety net.
> Capitalism itself has nothing to say about what we do with the increases in productivity.
No, it has a lot to say about that. Our system encourages self-interest and maximizing profits, and that is what businesses do. Increases in productivity increase how much there is to skim off the products of said productivity. To them, using it for reasons outside profiteering is an immoral and wasteful. All the biggest players are aligned on this, and they are desperate to get another droplet of productivity by spending their money and power in all the right places. Corruption, favoritism, advertising, propaganda, monopolism (to accrue as much leverage over people and governments as possible). This is the default state that the system leads us to, it's not orthogonal, this is its natural outcome.
The counterexamples are countries that have found ways to counteract this influence in spite of the incentives. Usually it takes the right culture, as well as strong and competent government that looks out for their citizens. Capitalist absolutists rightfully see that all of this hinders their progress, so the fight between the 'make money at all costs' and 'we need to look out for other people' will always continue. If you don't fight it, you get something akin to the modern US.
Capitalism means resource allocation is primarily decided by billionaires. Why would they give resources up in any way that doesn't make them even richer?
Right-libertarianism means a system where everyone has maximum liberty including the liberty to take away each other's liberty (as opposed to left-libertarianism where we don't have that liberty) but capitalism means a society where liberty is proportional to capital.
No capitalist actually wants free and fair competition. A pure free market isn't the most efficient and productive means of making a profit, and they're in business to make as much money as possible.
What gets aspired to under the guise of "free market capitalism" is deregulation of the market in the ways which allow businesses to exploit consumers without consequences, such as lowering of environmental regulations or safety standards, but regulation when it hinders their competitors and lets them entrench their market position. Free market capitalism fails because of simple human nature - greed doesn't optimize for ethics, so neither do markets.
Any ideal system that simply expects people to act rationally and ethically en masse is doomed to fail, which is why capitalism only works when regulated and in the context of a society with strong social cohesion and a safety net because certain things like education and healthcare shouldn't be subject to free market dynamics.
Absolutely. It's a gray area though when you become partially able to support yourself. I think this is what the article is pointing out. You have to come to grips with this grim economic reality and it's hard and your future prospects are almost entirely based on where and to whom you were born. The author is simply lucky that they have a safety net. If you are lucky enough to have time to prepare for these things, you can build your own. If you don't prepare, given the opportunity, that's a 'you' problem.
Capitalism reinforces individualistic cultures. The reality is humans aren't so different from ants or other social insects. Individuals don't instantly die when alone, yet we survive better and longer together.
> Well not everyone has the privilege to buy new books, especially course-mandated books that the professor "coincidentally" wrote and costs hundreds of dollars.
Do you even understand what you sound like?
"Writing in something you own is vandalism because poor people".
We could also fit more people in if you crushed everyone, dehydrated them and stored they remains in huge compressed cubes. Efficiency is not all we want
"Hey guys, good news! You will all be made redundant by AI and we, some intellectual elite who somehow think we're not going to be affected by AI think you're going to be happy about it!"
I don't think so. Trump is exceptional compared to political tradition for a very long time, as evidenced currently by most developed world leaders shunning his illegal war campaign. In fact, who else can be comparable?
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