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Here in the Netherlands immigrants are starting to protest about their near slavery conditions.

As time goes on you have to start importing people from further afield.





That's one reason for the corporate backing of globalism. It's sold as "mobility", but what it actually means is having the upper hand. It's not about a lack of "talent". It's about a lack of a pool of people who will put up with their crap.

Consumerism rewards this process, because the glut of mediocre goods remains cheap.


That's essentially the entire reason illegal immigrantion and the H1b program exist. They are both in precarious positions that allow them to be treated as indentured servants, forcing them to tolerate conditions Americans never would.

None of it is about talent, it's about giving companies the ability to abuse employees, with a nice side of wage suppression.


I thought that was one of the reasons why several US states are loosening child labor laws, they will put 14 year olds to work in Amazon warehouses and on the assembly lines.

Is there no obligation to attend school in these states?

That’s an interesting topic. In most states, homeschooling is almost meaningless because there are no required assessments to demonstrate student proficiency in any subject. And 11 states don’t even require a parent to simply notify the state that they’ve pulled their kid out of school.

And yet home-schooled students widely outperform government-schooled students, both during homeschooling and in college GPAs.

Yeah, but it's not that simple, they certainly don't seem to outperform students of comparable socioeconomic background attending a more c https://gaither.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/new-ray-study-of-ho...

That's because there are roughly two types of home schoolers, and they're at opposite ends of the achievement spectrum. The high achiever cohort are the ones you see who outperform students in their GPAs, SATs, and get into highly selective colleges. The others don't even finish HS much less apply to college so you don't hear about them.

Sure, I don't contest that. Parents can definitely fail to educate their children properly at home. Students in government schools suffer from the same problem though.

The point is that the average result appears to be better.


My point was that the average result doesn't account for the lowest performers because they're not even included in those scores that are being averaged. It's skewed towards the high performers.

> And yet home-schooled students widely outperform government-schooled students, both during homeschooling and in college GPAs.

I'd love to see your citations on that.

Because my impression is that, precisely because of the lack of regulation in many states, homeschooling has bimodal outcomes.

Some children turn out better (read: those of wealthy, educated parents with extra time to spend on educating) while some children turn out much worse than even the worst public schools (read: kids of religious/political-indoctrination parents and/or ones of limited socioeconomic means/time).

At minimum, it seems pretty reasonable to have homeschooled kids take the same milestone tests as public school kids, in order to objectively measure if their teachers are doing the job well.

You know, considering (a) it's a decision children aren't empowered to make for themselves, (b) there are a lot of crazy-as-fuck parents out there, and (c) it's something that will define the rest of kids' lives.

"Oops, my bad" in the event of poor outcomes won't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Ref to start: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI


> I'd love to see your citations on that.

Yeah, sure. Here are the popular studies on the subject: https://nheri.org/academic-achievement-and-demographic-trait...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15582159.2015.99...

https://nheri.org/a-systematic-review-of-the-empirical-resea...

If you look into these you'll see people arguing against Ray's studies saying "the population is overly white, overly married parents, and overly Christian, it doesn't represent potential results for the wider population". That's definitely true, but it's also a fact of the home-schooled population that those groups are wildly over represented, and the results of that actual population being called "meaningless" is what I was responding to.

It is fair to argue that home-schooling isn't a panacea, and wouldn't work for everyone. I never intended to say it would. I did include the second study which is specifically about black American home-schooled students and their results.

As for the rest of your post, I understand your opinion, but don't share it.


> I'd love to see your citations on that.

The guy you're replying to only posts simple takes to derail conversations. He doesn't have citations.

Comparisons like his don't make sense. There's no dividing line between government-schooled and home-schooled in real life, there's a range of connections and dependencies. There is no friction or animosity between Government Education as an institution and people who homeschool. Their goals align.


> Comparisons like his don't make sense. There's no dividing line between government-schooled and home-schooled in real life, there's a range of connections and dependencies. There is no friction or animosity between Government Education as an institution and people who homeschool. Their goals align.

I'm not sure what I said that made you think I'm arguing against this point. Government Education is absolutely necessary and a common good. It's a bare minimum that keeps a lot of children from a life of total ignorance and squalor.

I do think that government education has some pretty major flaws, but I didn't say anything to setup some zero-sum competition between the two approaches. I was replying to the statement "In most states, homeschooling is almost meaningless because there are no required assessments to demonstrate student proficiency in any subject", which is a bit ridiculous and, in context, is trying to paint home-schooling as some backdoor approach to child labor.


Put the 14-year-olds on shift after school, put the adults on shift during the day. The teenagers won't have time to do homework but the schools aren't funded well enough to ensure a quality education anyway.

> the schools aren't funded well enough to ensure a quality education anyway

The US spends more per pupil than every other OECD country except for Luxembourg, and exceeds the average by over 50%. If US schools aren't funded well enough, essentially no one is.


> The US spends more per pupil than every other OECD country except for Luxembourg, and exceeds the average by over 50%.

Not accurate in the context you're saying it.

You're probably conflating US K-12 spending (low) with post-secondary spending (high)?

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...


> US K-12 spending (low)

Your source there still puts US K-12 spending in the top-5 worldwide.

The allocation of said spending clearly isn't optimal, but there is plenty of money at a high-level


Educational spending in the US is individual to the state, and even more locally within school districts within states, so it makes no sense to look at it from a national average

Bizarre; why are their outcomes relatively poor?

Wild guess: maybe most of the spending goes to the school football team?

It doesn’t work that way

Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought in America there’s no obligation to attend school ever, because you can just be homeschooled and then take the GED? I think it’s dumb but I don’t know for sure.

It's complicated. There's a broad requirement that you receive a K-12 education. There's also a huge amount of pushback against most things that would infringe personal freedoms, so "I'm handling that myself, go away" is permitted but the exact details vary between states.

At least where I grew up if you drop out and don't file all the necessary homeschooling paperwork the police will visit you.


It's a sort of a grey area, and varies a lot by state and which way the political winds are blowing.

Miss too many days of government school because your family are poor and you had to help your parents put bread on the table? The truancy officer may show up to arrest you.

Announce you are homeschooling your kids to avoid liberal indoctrination? Sending your kids to work in a factory? A-ok in a number of states.


Hopefully we find extraterrestrial intelligence soon.

Anything intelligence enough to find us, or be putting out signals we can find with instructions on how we can reply in a reasonable number of human lifetimes, is intelligent enough to stay well hidden for us lest we infect them with our stupidity!

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has to contact us"

-Bill Watterson (via Calvin & Hobbes)


Maybe they need to invent a time machine to start getting immigrants from different time periods?

Slightly tangential: there's an excellent Norwegian TV series based on the premise of suddenly appearing immigrants from earlier time periods, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beforeigners.

and a south park episode for ones from the future :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobacks




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