Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!

Coming soon - 4000 new vibe coded agentic AI harnesses.

I'm not pro Israel, especially not after this report, but your point is silly. The US has sold billions in defense weapons/tools to prevent rockets from hitting Israel. Gaza did not have access to the same defenses. That is why the outcomes look different.

Either way, I don't live in a place where laptops were pushed to teens, but I do know uni teachers who told me some horrifying tales about freshmen, like ones who could not understand how to submit a doc on moodle, as in they would write it on google docs, take a photo on the phone and submit that.

I've heard that anecdotally from college professors and I've seen it in my zoomer friends.

And if they don't need to read, write, or do math in their adult lives, it's likely something has gone horribly wrong for the human race and the only way out is to learn to read, write, and do math.

As a marginal choice I'd rather every kid know how to write a good opinion piece on current events, or a technical document closer to RFCs, than writing some fiction.

Of course, even better if we fund and train them to do both.

Technical writing is 'how', and that's being absolutely consumed by AI. When AIs can build anything, the question of what we should build and why is the most important.

Eg Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will eat alive nearly anything written today, it accurately critiques a future it never saw like a laser beam cutting across time. Few if any works today possess such original and enduring foresight.

This is especially true as a generation of people are now getting deskilled by AI. Even if we have the writers capable of such feats, we likely lack the audience for those works because that requires a societal sophistication we may have lost. And so those works may never be adequately appreciated to let them ever break out of this little moment in time.

I understand the arguments for an educated population being a public benefit worth paying for. But we are spending enormous funds to produce an uneducated population. Some states now offer two high school diplomas. The traditional diploma doesn't mean anything anymore so now they have a "Career and College Ready Diploma" that is supposed to mean something. Why do we pay to fund a diploma that is meaningless?

What if we fund unlimited tries at K-6, and we fund 7-9 then 10-12 for people who earn the privilege with good marks? Then we can talk about funding 13-16 for people who keep earning the privilege. People who don't earn the privilege to advance can retake classes. Or they can move on with life as an uneducated person. We just skip the pretense of secondary education for them. Private schools can take up the challenge if they want to take a swing at people who haven't earned public funding.

That all seems radical and harsh. I just put it out there to spur your thoughts on reform.

Yes.

But, the point of my post is that funding should not go to the underperforming public school systems and their unions. Instead parents should be free to purchase the education that delivers the most value for their dollar in a freemarket. But, because I do believe we should educate the kids of poor / low income parents, IMO we should still have public funding (a form of redistribution). Voucher systems is one such way this can be enacted.

> Can we require people to pass proficiency tests before we fund their education past the 6th grade? 8th grade...

IMO Kids should not be defunded for the failings of the adults around them. I do not believe it's basically ever a child's fault up to ~18-21 they are simply a product of the choices of the adults around them. Normal psychology says once someone is an adult then they may not be at fault, but they are responsible to handle and take care of whatever their childhood may have unfairly burdened them with...

But whether the failure be the child's or the adults', a child who hasn't learned multiplication and division should not be thrown into an Algebra class. That is just more failure on the part of the adults. The child should first be given another chance to learn multiplication and division.

None of my post was aimed at defunding the student. I just think that any money spent buying third-grade reading level books for somebody who doesn't know the alphabet should not be wasted in that way. Instead, the money should be spent teaching (and re-teaching) the alphabet. The same goes for Algebra, etc. I'm all for teaching as many people as possible Algebra and Geometry and Physics and Chemistry... after they have gained the foundation they need to learn those subjects. This may require more funding, not less.

Vouchers sound good if you don't think about it with any real veracity or intellectually serious rigor, but (in America) are basically a shitty partisan scam. They're basically universally used as a method to divert tax funds to schools that would otherwise be unfundable via taxes (eg. religious or discriminatory).

Why do we think parents are actually capable of choosing the "best" option, and why wouldn't 100% of parents choose that option? Parents are famously bad at making decisions, as illustrated by home schooling, religious dogmatism in private schools, parents trying to opt-out their students from scientific and health education, and the general history of parental intervention in public schools.

Why would some schools take $X per student and generate better outcomes than others? They won't and the secret is that private schools will charge more than the voucher price to produce better outcomes, but then you've essentially drained the funding of a public good to subsidize a private school that some students won't be able to attend.

As a thought experiment, can we use a voucher system to fund alternative fire or police departments? Can I apply my voucher to an FDA with a properly credentialed head? Or are schools the only "monopoly" run by the government we should break up.

It seems obvious that vouchers could be spent at schools that have entrance exams and don't let students in just because their parents choose the school.

The public school system mostly sucks in most states (pending any nonsense with ICE hopefully resolving itself eventually, if you have to send your kids to public school the Minneapolis suburbs are excellent), but private alternatives with similar costs per student also mostly aren't better. One sticks out in my mind from recent history (somewhere near Redwood City) with a habit of hiring subs all year to reduce costs, literally not teaching the kids anything, and firing teachers who tried to fail students. The effect is, somewhat predictably, even students who try don't learn anything, and the ones who don't try know that they can get away with anything that won't put them in prison.

Regarding a voucher system, I'm not sure I care one way or another (I care a little -- it'll mean more money going to con artists masquerading as schools without improving education for basically anyone), but it's just putting lipstick on a pig. If you have the means and ability then homeschool and hire PhDs and other professionals to fill in the gaps. If you don't, for the price we pay per student you're stuck with large classrooms or crappy EdTech (or both), and if you don't spend enough 1:1 time with your kids then even a good school won't matter anyway for most students.

Mind you, of all the things we could spend our tax dollars on, I'm strongly in favor of anything which would actually improve education. I'd happily sacrifice most everything else to 10x education spend if somebody came up with a good argument for why it would help. I just don't think vouchers will do the trick, especially if we're pointing to the teachers union as the particular efficiency they're using to drive cost effectiveness.

Parents don't know best. Parents are the problem here.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-with...

Also, https://teacherquality.nctq.org/contract-database/collective...

Teachers unions are highly influential.

In popular imagination, perhaps. It’s not the sixties anymore.

    DEFAULT_BRANCH=$(git remote show origin | sed -n '/HEAD branch/s/.*: //p')

    git branch --merged "origin/$DEFAULT_BRANCH" \
      | grep -vE "^\s*(\*|$DEFAULT_BRANCH)" \
      | xargs -r -n 1 git branch -d

Particularly for basic needs like housing,food,clothes... Like what if instead of giving a charity $100 we created 41c per month? of UBI (roughly the cashflow from investing that same $100). Yes it would seem too little today, but in time it would be massive because it would never dissipate.

IDK, just my musing while claude takes, err does, my job.

There’s nothing people hate more than lasting charitable foundations. They take them to court so that they can crack them open and wank away the entire fund in 6 months.

There was one which was supposed to pay off the entire national debt. They cracked and spaffed it.

Another was supposed to end piracy. Cracked and spaffed.

You could save a million people a year, but that won’t save you from being cracked and spaffed. They’re already rubbing their trotters at the thought.

The UK is full of long lasting charitable foundations. Many attached to schools and universities, but the highest profile example is probably the National Trust and its collection of historic buildings.

Isn't that intrinsic to what a charity is? They don't have customers, they're not trusts set up on behalf of someone else specific, they're a tax exemption with an ideological mission.

(still short on named examples in this subthread)

Edit: A great example that comes to mind for me is Wikimedia. They beg for money every year telling you that it's to keep Wikipedia running, but not only do they have enough money to keep running for years, not only is running Wikipedia not their main expense, but they redonate some of that money to other nonprofits. Even if you agree with the missions of those other nonprofits (which are not in line at all with the mission of Wikimedia), you're trusting that an organization that already lied to you about where the money is going is making good choices with that money.

UK libel laws are no joke here, and coupled with the abandonment of basically any public subsidy for legal expenses of normal people, it means most people (me included) are not going to name names.

Sounds like the solution is to stop trying to make something like that work in an environment (country) which sounds setup to prevent those sort of efforts. There are lots of countries out there, some are surely a better fit.

One big issue is that it's a PR problem; most people don't really understand it. They'll look at the non-profit and say "why does that need to raise money, it's rich". You saw this a lot with Harvard in Trump's recent funding war with it, say.