Producers have power, but they are not omnipotent. Individuals still have a lot of choice in their energy use. You can drive an EV or not at all. In many places you can choose to buy 100% renewable or install rooftop solar and make your own electricity. You can use a heat pump instead of gas/oil heating. Fossil fuel producers won't emit if people don't buy their products.

It costs close the same for the school to teach a class of 30 students as a class of 20 students. If the school gets $10,000 per student, it has $300k for a class or $200k. There are economies of scale. It's why public schools are so militant about attendance - they lose money if they lose kids/attendance. Especially in rural areas where a local public school is already barely viable, the vouchers may lead to their closing. The only options for those parents may be religious academies (of a religion they may not belong to) or online schools of questionable quality. That's why the main opposition in Texas was actually from rural Republican districts.

If public schools are "overcrowded" then that's due to a funding deficit or mismanagement. It's not an inherent quality of public schools. I can say that my children's elementary school is not overcrowded. It is excellent, and considerably higher quality than the religiously affiliated preschool they attended.

The tax cut comes in a rebate. If you were already spending $20k/yr for your kids to attend private school, and they pass vouchers, you now effectively receive a $10k tax rebate. It makes plenty of sense to pay property taxes regardless of whether your kids attend school. I also pay taxes for roads I don't drive on, courthouses I don't use, and firefighters I don't call. Education is a public good. Even if I've never needed to call the fire department, I benefit from it existing. Even if you never send kids to public school, you benefit from having a literate population and workforce.

Even $2k would be well beyond what a truly poor family could shell out as a difference. Besides, there are places like Arizona that do have a well-established voucher market and the impact on student achievement has been poor. What has happened is that private schools of questionable quality (often in strip malls and the like) have sprung up to hoover up that money. Moreover, private schools typically lack the same accountability for student progress as publics.

Early studies on vouchers showed improvement for the kids who left because those studies looked at small pilot programs. The only kids who were leaving were from more motivated and better off families. But in places where it has been implemented statewide, the impact on achievement has been quite poor. The money tends to go to families that would go private anyways makes it just a tax cut and schools of questionable quality. Then, public schools lose economies of scale and end up in a funding death spiral. The end result is wealthy families get a tax cut and poor families are forced to choose between an underfunded public or a poor quality private.

The high performing private schools typically cost multiples of the best public schools. The highest private school in my town costs over $30,000 a year. Vouchers in my state are capped at $10,000. No "poor kid" is making up that $20,000 difference with a voucher. There are schools that you can attend for $10k, but they are typically worse than the average public school.

I wasn't disagreeing with you.

The Roman empire declined over the course of over 1,000 years. While people say Rome "fell" in the 5th century, the empire (and Roman civilization) didn't go away entirely until Constantinople was taken over by the Ottomans in 1453.

U.S. Salaries are higher as are real estate costs. It may not necessarily represent a more intensive investment in education. U.S. has a lot of variation. Teacher pay in New York City will be more than double Oklahoma.

02 likely had a similar deal in the UK.

I think the key for Netflix is that it still needs to have studio production values. If they just paid youtubers, it would basically become youtube, which is a different business model.

I wasn't trying to rag on Adam Sandler. His early movies are classics, even if they aren't exaclty high art. His stand-up is amazing. But a lot of his Netflix stuff (including titles like Happy Gilmore 2) is just content churning.

There's a world of difference between mainline denominational schools (i.e. Catholic or Episcopal schools) and some of the homeschool "Christian Academies" that are primarily offered to parents of kids who do not want their kids exposed to mainstream thought.

Perhaps your Christian curriculum failed to teach you about confirmation bias and the fact that the plural of anecdote is not "data."

It was possible to barely cover Algebra II in my public high school, but only if you were on the lowest academic track. The gifted track had kids doing BC calculus Junior year. The next step down by senior year. Even assuming your kids are not failing to take advantage of more challenging classes, it does not follow that your experience is universal.

I also sincerely doubt that your kids are actually being formally thought that religious institutions are filled with hateful racist people. Most public-school teachers don't even want to have to mention religon, because they know the second they do parents like you were be in their face no matter what they say.

That was because the early iphone was exclusive to AT&T and there was a baked-in carrier subsidy with that price. $399 wasn't the true economic price of the phone.

It hits different when someone physically comes to see you and say "aye aye sir!"

I lived in London for a short stint. Its transit situation is dramatically better than anywhere in the U.S. (even New York City) because it actually has a reasonably comprehsnive rail network for inter-city travel on top of its tube and bus system.