The Legos were being sold to fund the college education of the old man's young descendants IIRC. So, like the killing, the alleged issue is a corporation stealing from a young man, actually.
By law, they monopolize up to half of a child's waking life for more than half of the year. This time commitment requires that parents put at least one meal, a substantial portion of the child's physical development, and almost all of their intellectual development (and, by extension, a substantial portion of their behavioral development) in the hands of the school.
If educational institutions are not taking seriously their potential influence on the social outcomes of their students, they're completely misunderstanding the practical mantle they've taken on. And so have you.
That's one philosophy, sure. My philosophy is that schools that graduate students who are illiterate and innumerate have failed, no matter what rhetoric they put out about equity and social problems.
(There are limited situations where it does make sense, logistically, for schools to provision social services. E.g. meals for students who don't have access to steady food sources. But those are relatively uncontroversial, as opposed to curricular and classroom management practices that make sacrifices of schools' educational integrity for a theoretical goal of equity, while failing to even deliver that.)
> schools that graduate students who are illiterate and innumerate have failed
I don't disagree.
But at the same time, it's also important to ask: was that child offered to learn and apply themselves in the same, stable environment as a child from a more wealthy upbringing? If the answer is no, that child was done a disservice. If the answer is yes, and they still fail, obviously don't graduate them...
The goal shouldn't ever be "Just pass everyone" it should be making sure that every child has the same opportunity and circumstances to succeed.
> every child has the same opportunity and circumstances to succeed.
If you’re 18 and can’t read/write/math there is no opportunity to succeed, giving them a diploma doesn’t change that. At some point the child is just out of time no matter the circumstance.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that, "A school shouldn't pass students who haven't attained grade-level mastery," and, "Schools have an obligation to support the development of children beyond their basic academic achievement," were mutually exclusive. I certainly didn't state that.
12th Grade: AP Calculus, C average, one D quarter (in the middle of my parents' divorce, onset of body dysmorphia/dysphoria, college entrance applications, senior research practicum)
College Sophomore Year: Applied Calculus, aced, highest final score in the class
Post-college self-study: Failure to advance
Circumstances affect performance.
>so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something
Within the wider historical scope, in America, specifically: yes. Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that. That's why it's systemic. A cold summer day doesn't negate the existence of climate change.
In what situations would you attribute effects to concrete, near-term causes instead or abstract, historical ones? In particular, why do you attribute academic success in some areas to historical racism instead of (presumably) modern poverty? In other words, given a cohort of poor kids and not poor kids, which outcomes of each group would you assign to historical racism and why? In particular, would you expect different groups to perform better or worse after controlling for things other than race and experiences of racism?
Wrong premise. Near-term and historical causes are intertwined, inexorably-linked. Both cohorts are the result of historical racism. Hence,
>Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that.
I would expect the continued, sustained, and unburdened efforts to address and undo the effects of the policies and behaviors that make up what we know to be and have been systemic racism are necessary in order to remove historical racism as a cause of contemporary circumstances.
If understand you correctly, your answer to my question would be "never", that is, you would always attribute some blame to historical causes. Okay.
I am left with more questions, however. To paraphrase your final paragraph, you expect that efforts to undo the effects of past racism—those effects which we collectively call systemic racism(?)—is necessary to snip that past racism from the causal chain to present ills. But I'm left wondering if this language of systemic racism is even particularly useful in describing the situation.
That is, it seems the manifestation of this framing is to address these downstream effects (poverty, etc.), none of which are inherently racial, but affect educational outcomes. But it seems to me that framing the problem nonracially and focusing solely on the proximal causes of educational issues has the same (or better!) manifestations as the racial framing.
In short, I feel the systemic racism framing is unproductive, because in a prudent implementation it merely adds discussion of distant causes, while identifying the same social issues to address. In an imprudent implementation, it would not only cloud the field with historical discussion, but distract from important proximal issues which don't fit the historical frame, while at the same time alienating people who feel excluded or infantilized or condescended upon based on their immutable characteristics, which is scarcely outweighed by a possible ethnic rallying effect which could boost participation.
I think I need to provide a concrete hypothetical to tidy up. Consider a cohort of struggling students in Virginia, say, old coal town. The sociologist correctly identifies historical racism as a factor in some of the students' issues. So they... what? Acknowledge it? What for? They begin their real work addressing (somehow, idk) the homework environments kids have, their encouragement to succeed, the parents' support, school supplies, whatever. And race comes into the calculations exactly... never. I imagine it would be very disturbing if it did. "We're gonna help the black kids first because Jim Crow happened and that means they need it more." Well... maybe! Why make the approximation? Just focus on the proximal causes and get a precise prescription, no need for rounding.
>You're arguing that teaching calculus in public school is a form of eugenics.
If that's your assessment, then you are, ironically, yourself proof of the failure of the American education system. (If you were educated in it. If not, you're proof of the failure of whatever system you were educated in.)
There is no reasonable read of the previous message that could lead the to conclusion that that was its argument. None. Zero.
So it goes. Wage theft dwarfs the amount lost to street-level theft, robbery, burglary, etc., combined. The economic stimulus from correcting even a portion of annual wage theft would represent complete coverage of those violent thefts - economically-speaking, there would be no reason for criminals to carry them out. Why rob a gas station to get your drug money? Everyone around you is making enough extra at work that bumming a dollar here and there covers it. That sort of thing.
But good forbid we actually correct a major social ill at the expense of the people who profit from it.
Exactly. And even worse is that crime itself is firmly rooted in politics.
Example: You work at walmart, as a cashier. You drop a $100 bill on the floor and pocket it from the till. You're caught, cops called, and you are arrested.
Example: You work as a manager at the same walmart. Store manager says labor costs are too damned high. So you go in on 10 employees, and edit their timecards to cut $100 from each of them, totaling $1000. IF you are caught, police will not respond. Instead, it is a "civil matter".
This is a bit dated chart, but its still very much correct. https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-... But notice the wage theft types are all "civil matters", and the non-eage theft are heavily criminally prosecuted. And who does those? Predominantly poorer people.
We also see criminality differences between charges of freebase cocaine versus crack cocaine. Crack was what black people smoked, so sentencing was like 10x of freebase.
When you start looking at how laws are apllied, its almost always the same pattern: those at the top are a civil matter. Those who report to the top are a criminal matter. Those at the bottom are "charged with the fullest maximum punishment".
Right. Though I want to focus on a specific aspect of your hypothetical (which is essentially real):
If the manager hadn't stolen $100 from the cashier, there would have been a MUCH weaker incentive for the cashier to steal themselves.
This is the crux around which everything else turns: we are effectively post-scarcity, as far as production is concerned. As a society, we purposely create theft, and debt, and the associated desperation and crime, as a matter of policy. As a choice.
If you were eradicate wage theft, you would essentially eradicate the internal logic of street theft, in the vast majority of cases. We could just... not have theft. But by not prosecuting wage theft, we, as a society, have decided that we condone and even need theft.
(Meaning that it's not just business school indoctrination, but a dynamic they've been raised to expect and uphold. Fixing it isn't simply about convincing them of the folly of their approach, because you're attacking their personal sense of self in doing so. Which, I'm to understand, is a no-no, professionally.)
Yes, it confirmed that the key was conveying a complex and intentional artistic vision through the gameplay. If a game is effective, but removing the gameplay makes it ineffective, then, as a game, it's art.
Ikaruga and Journey should be mentioned in the same conversation. More recently, Undertale and Death Stranding, pick up similar conceptual throughlines ("choice" and "connection", respectively), albeit in less elegant ways, owing to their expanded scope.
Ikaruga mentioned! Don’t even get me started, that game consumed my life for nearly 2 years when it came out for the GameCube. The emptiness I got when I finally achieved a 1CC only to quickly fill that hole with an obsession with scoring afterward… that is a feeling that has only been achieved by a number of games I can count on one hand.
Funny enough, I enjoy Death Stranding for many of the same reasons that I enjoy arcade-style games: routing, resource management, and failure that feels meaningful, as well as the satisfaction of successfully executing a plan. The story is pretty cool too, but the gameplay is what I really like.
IIUC Japanese budgets are different. They spend comparatively less on housing and transportation than Americans. The Anglosphere in general has somehow developed a rather toxic status quo when it comes to that first basic need, with everything else only being slightly cheaper.
I would rather pay 15% more on goods and 30% less on rent.
> I would rather pay 15% more on goods and 30% less on rent.
Exactly. Housing and the housing market in Japan is an interesting beast. Based on my limited understanding as someone who has sort-of briefly looked at buying a home in Japan, houses are not really financial investments. For example, compare house prices in Japan (including the land) with a house in Australia.
Indeed, Japanese houses are designed to be disposable. Likely a result of them being built historically out of wood and paper and the abundance of wood.
Japanese "disposable houses" was a policy implemented after WW2, to rapidly rebuild the country as well as keeping a lot of people employed. And indeed a house has traditionally dropped faster in value after purchase than even cars.
And this policy has also meant that houses haven't been insulated, and very often haven't been strong against earthquakes, the latter is kind of baffling in this earthquake-prone country (the Noto earthquake on Jan. 1 2024 flattened large areas of houses, with nothing left standing). It's only gradually, through certain code changes implemented a couple of times post-1980 that things are improving. But it was as late as just a few years ago that the Japanese government hesitated, and in the end didn't implement certain new building standards, because that would put a LOT of makers out of work as they didn't have the competance to build to those standards. But this has finally changed, with the latest update a year ago.
I have to take issue with the ".. out of wood and paper". Because that's not the cause. There are buildings here literally a thousand years old and built of wood, still standing, after centuries of sometimes unbelievably big earthquakes. And wooden homes built properly these days handle earthquakes as good as anything else. It's not the material, it's how it's done which matters.
Source: Researched a lot of house building companies the last couple of years. Some of them, building wooden houses, have been in business for a long time and haven't had a single house as a victim of earthquakes for half a century, with the occasional exception where the earth has literally flipped over. Nothing can handle that. But "ordinary" earthquakes? All still standing. There are photos around showing certain houses alone on a field of flattened buildings. These guys.
It's not just that. Houses are a consumer good instead of an investment, yes, but a large percentage of Japanese people live in apartments that are built to last and be renovated (because they ARE investments).
The difference is partly the attitude towards houses, but it also has to do with how difficult it is for foreign investors to speculate in the market, the ubiquity of public transit (which makes accessibility as a value-driving feature mostly moot), the way the building code precludes a "missing middle" (or "missing cheap place"), and other features of modern Japanese society that are alien to Americans (and Canadians, but weirdly not always to Britons).
The point is that there are lots of ways to chip away at the affordability issue. It's just that ALL of them necessarily attack RE investors' ability to exploit their property to the fullest extent possible.
One last anecdote: South Korea is similarly situated to Japan, but is also facing an extreme affordability crisis. So, there is the suggestion that NONE of the material aspects matter if the owner class is determined to wring every cent out of you. The changes disincentivize gouging, but in the end, you just have to have property owners willing to acknowledge housing as a an affordable necessity and not a profit center built on the backs of a captive audience...
Most teens do homework, but I'm sure they also despise it, too. And it's been known for years that the industrial school pedagogy is backwards; readings/lectures should be done at home, problem sets should be done in class. But we keep doing it the wrong way because entrenched interests prefer it that way.
They are not about actually "doing things", they are social validation, particularly the part where the people with resources/capital enjoy your company and give you what you need to live a dignified lifestyle in exchange for it.
But acknowledging and acting on this would destroy the leverage the useless-but-likeable have in terms of being able to get paid, and that the owner class have in terms of getting people to pretend that they like them/validate their often cruel and avaricious choices and behavior.
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