In America rent and healthcare are two big expenses that you can't escape from. You could live in rural areas and then you don't have a job or you do but you're spending most of your income on car expenses.
I think the person you're replying to is referring to the fact you highlight, that money is the qualifier for who lives better or worse, as part of the scam.
Should the impoverished just pull themselves up by their bootstraps harder?
Conversely, do people who reject materialistic tenets of society deserve lower quality education?
It could be that those doctors and CPAs are just following in other peoples' footsteps, following life paths prescribed for them. As a poster below mentioned, they aren't necessarily the happiest people.
Isn't part of what we're talking about is that what is considered "normal" is up for debate, and some people choose something off the beaten path of the high-powered career-oriented lifestyle? That they're diversifying the focus of their waking hours instead of putting in overtime to the man to pay insane rent, and finding out that it is gratifying?
That's not precisely true. Because we live in a democracy, citizens of local governments can collectively vote to levy additional funds for local schools. I agree that federal and state funding should obviate this, but there's nothing intrinsically undemocratic about the current system. (Unfair or badly designed != undemocratic).
Some of the best public schools in the nation exist where I grew up in the Minnesota suburbs. They served trailer parks and public housing the same as the doctors and lawyers. But they also passed levies to increase their own taxes year after year.
It is unfair, and wrong, that Minneapolis inner city schools don't have the same funding, but the vibrancy of the well funded public schools was a consequence of local, effective, democratic political action.
Yeah, it's a tough problem. I did Americorps work in some of the poorer elementary schools in St. Paul, and one of the biggest problems those schools face is that they have very high special needs burdens that they have to meet before they can deal with the general population, and those are incredibly costly. That said, I completely agree with you that there are a lot of problems facing students in Northeast Minneapolis that hurt outcomes that have nothing to do with funding.
I mean at the end of the day, kids like myself had well-educated parents who read to us every night, did math problems with us, and provided the scaffolding for learning long before we hit school (most of primary education was a waste, at best review). There's no substitute for that.
The experience of tutoring badly off kids in poor neighborhoods was one of the more heartbreaking experiences of my life. The inertia in the students is palpable after about age nine.
That said, I still struggle to call the distribution of effective resources "equitable," and I'll happily foot a tax bill to double education spending until the generational poverty problem is mitigated to a much greater degree (although I suspect non conventional methods might have better returns).
At least within states, they more or less are: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2... ("When federal dollars are included, just five states are spending less in their poorest districts than in their wealthiest. Nationwide, the average disparity drops from 15 percent to less than 2 percent.").
Spending’s not the problem. Income just happens to correlate with having kids who aren’t disruptive and (are made to) care about education. The money itself isn’t the main reason for different school outcomes.
> If we were a democracy, rich neighborhoods wouldn't have better schools.
If we were a democracy, you'd be able to have more choice in how your children were educated. Switching schools or otherwise opting for more innovative educational approaches would be much more viable.
People buy into school districts because that's, bottom line, the only way to have a say in your kids' education.
Democracy isn't just about choice. It includes access, privilege and equality.
I think the imbalance in school district efficacy has more to do with classism and a "just universe" than anything else. The betters should have it better.
Could it be that the wealthy in those locations predominately send their children to private schools. Public schools aren't a priority for the super rich.
I’m sure it’s a safe bet. However, 20 years is a long time. And, 2037 will be as different from 2017 as 2017 was from 1987. I suggest hedging your bet by raising kids who are flexible and adaptable.
For instance, when I was a kid, parents who wanted their kids to have a ‘better future’ knew that college degrees were the sure thing. And, we all know how that turned out. 20% of my close high school friends are now low-wage post-docs with $100k in debt.
Yah the strategy of a cheap house doesn't work as well if you have children who need an education. Most of the areas partly expensive (in high demand) because of the excellent local schools. In being expensive the schools then get even more money. Unless education funding is distributed uniformly I can't see this changing soon.
Sound advice for adults w/o kids. Schools matter though and you don't want to have to worry that they can't play outside due to safety. Real concern in some places with cheaper housing.
My wife and I picked a low cost locale, allowing us to pay off our mortgage by mid 30s. This also allows her to be a full time parent, and we're home schooling (two kids). Also, our neighborhood is very safe (low cost housing does not equal dangerous automatically).
Not shackling yourself to a high cost of living area and all of the trappings that go with it allows you a crazy amount of options (our burn rate is under $24k/year with my income many times that).
Yeah, and I think that is why these cities mentioned in the articles are attractive. Low cost while still being acceptable for children. You can't find that though in the major metro areas. Cost almost always translates to safety or school quality.
That assumes you can find a job where the housing is cheap, and you won't end up with as much money. Some things are not cheaper in poor areas like flights.
I question the assertion that allowing things to fail like big banks or China would be bad in the long term. And this is economics, which like religion, isn't an exact science so neither of us know for sure.
Can you point to an example where such things happened and the result was not calamitous? I can't think of many happy endings to stories that involve massive bank runs, which would presumably be what happened when big banks started failing.
I haven't done standup in 6 months and I just feel generally better. Where I work you just report to the tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks. So much nicer than daily standups. Could you imagine other professions doing what we do?
>Could you imagine other professions doing what we do?
I worked in advertising before a tech startup and the whole rigmarole of standup, agile, scrum whatever felt like being back at school to me. Couldn't really understand why as professionals people couldn't be trusted to just get on with their work and know whats going on.
Had a chat with a colleague and mentioned this is the first place I've worked where you had to do this stuff and they couldn't believe it wasn't what was done in literally every workplace (this was their first job out of uni, but they were 3 years into it).
Where I work you just report to the tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks. So much nicer than daily standups.
This might work for some organisations, products or development styles. In my team of five, over a two or three week period we might have delivered half a dozen customer-facing features or changes, and the team will generally be working quite collaboratively on those. It would not be feasible to 'report to a tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks'.
Could you imagine other professions doing what we do?
Yes, and I think in some cases they would gain a lot from it.
Are your developers children who won't work together unless they are micromanaged by a lead?
Obviously not, and as I pointed out earlier it's clear that different organisational styles can work well for different teams and that's fine – please don't lower the tone of the conversation like that. My development team are experienced professionals, and because we are organised in a different manner does not mean that we are 'children'.
I'll give you some background which will maybe clarify our particular structure (that's not to say that there are no alternatives). My current project team is five people – three developers including me, a product owner/manager, and the 'head of development' who works across multiple project teams and serves in the organisational/administrative/scrum-master role. There is no 'lead' to report to, and while our 'head of development' is nominally the line manager of the development team, she is not responsible for product delivery and is there to provide general support and problem-solving rather than take progress reports.
We have a daily stand-up which lasts around 5 minutes (the other two developers are exclusively remote); 'sprints' last two weeks; each sprint starts with an hour-long planning session in which we as a group figure out the priorities with input from the product owner, figure out what technical work is required, and break it into deliverable and testable features. Then we go away and work for two weeks, demo what we did to the wider company, and spend an hour together doing the whole retrospective thing where we review what went well/bad/needs more work.
Everything is collaborative; I don't have to 'spend 1-2 full days together so we can "go deep"' with anybody, because all interested parties are consistently involved in the process. It works well, doesn't involve micromanagement, and everybody is happy. Obviously this is not the only way to run a team, but it's also not invalid or childish.
I'm sure you can understand that I'm kind of tired of bad teams with bad process blaming it on 'Agile' when their real problem is that they have poisonous developers or other underlying issues.
> Are your developers children who won't work together unless they are micromanaged by a lead?
This is black and white thinking. It depends on the personality type, but many developers have a tendency to go down research rabbit-holes or to think only about the tech and not about the business.
Therefore, a more frequent calibration to business goals may be necessary.
Well, I saw sales and HR do stand ups and retros mustered by the agile officers. It was imperative that scrum must fit all. Scrums of scrums everywhere. The agile singularity was reached.
I went from being the most anxious, scattered mind person in the room to the most calm and focused. I went all in - 4 hours a day for over a year. But it's made a huge difference. It's given me many insights into life - one of which is that you ultimately choose whether you want to be happy in life.
I don't know how Amazon succeeds if those rates are true. My experience has been that any company with a turnover like that is going to have a ton of tech debt.
You said there's no way to rationalize it, but it depends on the person. For some becoming more mindful allows you to see bad mental habits that may contribute to the anxiety. Once you are mindful of these you are empowered to change them.
