I am pessimistic that the reason it is so high is because someone making $220k per year said "yea but what about me, I have to pay for childcare too..." The number should be significantly lower. Anyone making a combined $200k a year has other options and opportunities, the immigrant family making $60k combined does not. This feels like a policy designed to "help" the poor but also benefit the rich..
San Francisco’s measure will make childcare free for a family of four making less than $230,000 a year, or 150% of the area median income, and offer a 50% subsidy to families earning less than $310,000 a year, or 200% of the area median income. Previously, free childcare was available to families earning less than 110% of the area median income.
But.. why not flip that on its head. Make it free for people UNDER $50,000, and a sliding scale up from there. I get that it's San Francisco, one of the most expensiv4e places in the country to live, but $230k is much, much too high. I get it: You make $200k a year and have four kids and you have expenses, and daycare is expensive, etc. but this should be for the MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERED of parents who don't make, nor can ever hope to make, anywhere near $230k.
I'm all for free child care but the parameters and numbers of this are insulting.
They film us on the street. They film us at traffic signals, from law enforcement vehicles, and drones, parks and even through our doorbell cameras. I don't mean this glibly, or in its entirety, but the big screen watching your every move in 1984 seems not too far off..
And now with the advent of highly capable LLMs, we don't even need humans watching and listening. The data streams can be captured, analyzed, summarized, for any behavior, mention, suspicion, or hallucination of undesirable activity. In a population inured to masked agents snatching people off the street domestically and
semi*-autonomous drone strikes abroad*, our future doesn't look rosy.
This is the key realization which is missing from talks about AI dangers.
Total surveillance used to be impossible because the government needed people to spy on other people. They needed to find somebody willing and pay them.
Now it can be automated.
The war won't be humans vs an AI controlling robots. It'll be humans vs the government and rich people controlling AI controlling robots.
Larry Ellison, major asshole and big ally of the current authoritarian regime:
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place.
Ellison, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Luckey, Zuckerberg and many of the tech oligarch assholes want us to live in their surveillance state.
They're currently making good progress. What will you do to help stop them?
And so plebians vs patricians turns into citizens vs entrepreneurs.
It's not just about who owns the means of production anymore, it's about who owns the means of surveillance (the so called AI).
Two thousand years and humans have learned nothing. Power and money still lead to more power and money which lead to abuse, which after decades gets so bad it leads to revolution. Except this time they want to make revolutions impossible. So they _have_ learned but common people have not.
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on
These people live in fantasyland bubbles, powered by their unshakeable belief in their own intelligence and "hyper rational" nonsense.
People already film themselves committing crimes. There are a great many people who, over and over again, make decisions in the present that will have strongly negative consequences in their own futures.
"If we watch people they won't do bad things." Sure, in some other universe maybe.
It's funny because they were constantly recorded at epstein's island and yet not on their best behavior...
Recording isn't enough you also need follow-up and if there's anything we've learned over the years is that the police are going to follow up on somebody throwing their soda can into Ellison's yard but not breaking your front door.
I don't follow the logic, Hollywood has taken money directly from Chinese investors. Major infrastructure projects, major companies, auto manufacturers, have all taken money from Chinese investors. This feels more like a hip piece.
I can't tell if you're playing devils advocate, but in Texas, many students speak Spanish as their first language, we also have students and other parts of the country whose first language is not English. Some of those make up the majority, if not overwhelming majority, of some of these schools. I think it's naïve to assume that they can be taught the same as the rest of the country. There's also students with attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, autism, disabilities, and all of that is best handled the local level so they can serve the local students. I get why some people prefer federalism and education, it allows for greater federal control. But clearly it's a disservice to students, or else the testing would show it.
The en vogue 'Supreme Court always sides with the Administration' is a lazy and inaccurate take. (That's usually used to justify 'And that's why I don't need to spend time looking into the actual details and just give up')
If people actually took the time to read the opinions [0], they'd realize...
1. Many of the 'allow the administration to continue' rulings are overriding stays, rather than actual decisions. Those cases are still pending in the courts and will eventually end up back at the Supreme Court.
2. Of the actual Supreme Court decisions, the news typically gives the most dumbed-down, hot take version.
3. Even to people without a legal background, much of the decision or dissent is written in plain English, attempts to lay out the rationale, and can be read by anyone with a secondary education.
> (That's usually used to justify 'And that's why I don't need to spend time looking into the actual details and just give up')
Just FWIW, giving up wasn't my point at all. I'm just not particularly optimistic that putting anything in front of the current SCOTUS bench will result in a lot of welcome rulings. That doesn't mean we don't seek legal remedies; it just means we need to plan for them to not work out and act accordingly. I'm heartened by the amount of work people are putting in at the state level and getting appropriately creative with bending the rules — for instance, the recent effort to redefine corporate powers at the state level in order to obviate _Citizens United_.
Yeah, they're cops. Cops aren't going to arrest other cops. Their superpower is being the people who are supposed to enforce the law, if they decide to break it who is going to stop them?
What section of US law they're activated/deployed under determines whether or not they can legally be used in an internal law enforcement capacity.
And generally speaking, federalized forces (either active or NG) cannot ever be used as law enforcement.
Hence why, despite the posturing and marketing of 'sending the military in', this administration is specifically using federalized military forces only in non-law enforcement capacities (and then encouraging the freed up state/local law enforcement to focus on law enforcement).
The national guard was illegally deployed over a fake emergency, but AFAIK the troops themselves did not perform any additional constitutional violations.
> Uncle Sam has the biggest military on Earth. State troopers wouldn’t last longer than the time to deploy
This is civil war. In a civil war there is no Uncle Sam. Just human beings from different states and of different political persuasions who need to decide what they do with their firepower, and whose orders they obey.
Congress and the judiciary are misbehaving as well, otherwise either one could easily put a stop to the destructionists. In fact one might say the manic demented guy barking orders at the rest of the executive is just a deliberate attention-drawing point of a much wider conspiracy.
That's not true at all. Congress could remove Trump in a week if they weren't complicit. SCOTUS could put a stop to much of the stuff he's doing if they weren't complicit.
I don’t believe they’d leave with their own in jeopardy. However, we’re deep into uncharted territory here so hard to say definitively how it would all go down.
I'd say it's high time for state governors to start deploying their National Guards to keep order. The federal gangs are deliberately stirring up chaos to create new pretexts for the assertion of federal control. In addition to the obvious problem of the masked kidnap gangs undermining public trust and order, there have been many reports of groups of vehicles with federal plates forming moving blockades on highways, assaulting motorists, etc - seemingly whatever they can do to try and create confrontational situations. A straightforward guess is that these aren't even yesterday's officers with a nominal desire to uphold the law and go home at the end of the day, but rather loser militia types that have been quickly deputized to go into "blue states" and create problems for their perceived enemies.
Deploying Guards would also be a good way to start building some institutional momentum for defending our country - preempting following illegal orders (like what happened in CA), sussing out traitors in the chain of command, and mitigating the dynamic where much of traditional state law enforcement is sympathetic to the destructionists.
I think this has less to do with policy and more to do with grocery economics: They will raise prices until the public stops buying - basic economics. They've raised the prices and have zero incentive to reduce them. What are you going to do, grow your own food? Buy local?
One of their recruiters, a fellow named Josh, hounded me for months to join Meta, and we went back and forth about the merits, the chance to work on something huge, but when he boiled all down.. it was the money. Meta pays a lot for the people they want, and that just wasn't enough for me.
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