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Comment Re:So many things that contribute to this (Score 1) 215

The problem is that it's more than choice, but selective exit. The costs of those left behind are greater, such as the costs of Special Education.

If a kid leaves a school, how does that increase the costs for all the other kids in the school?

The fact that the public school budget is reduced when the kid leaves. Duh.

Conveniently those religious schools won't have to accept people with disabilities.

Maybe. But so what?

Since it costs more to deal with students with disabilities, the religious schools selectively leave those students to the public schools. But take away the money. Therefore, expenses per student go up when the private schools selectively siphon off the ones with disabilities, which the law says that public schools must accept.

...

That's the value proposition for public education and that makes a lot less sense when the ask is for your child to be religiously indoctrinated instead.

But not all private schools are religion-based.

About three quarters are. The money for school vouchers is overwhelmingly going to religious schools.

Comment Re:Rich folks want to be vampires (Score 1) 93

do you think marx said to have communism you need to murder people? He said exactly that. If "the people" (and communists like talking about "the people") wouldn't accept communism, it was the state's duty to bring it at the barrel of a gun.

Marx did not say that, nor anything like that.

I believe you are confusing Marx with Mao, who said "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." (in "Problems of War and Strategy" (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II.)

If you can't distinguish Marx from Mao, you really shouldn't be commenting on what Marx (or Mao) said.

Comment Re:I can't see how food storage can be 100% automa (Score 2, Interesting) 43

There should always be at least a few people on-site at any of these locations. So why are these things on the internet?

The person on-site at a grocery store at 2 in the morning is the security guard. The security guard is not likely to be tasked with monitoring the freezer temperatures, and wouldn't have the slightest notion what to do if the temperature is wrong.

Comment Re: But, how? [Re:Is basic income looking better y (Score 1) 88

There are only three ways to fund a government: extracting cash from foreign nations (war / tributes), extorting taxes from citizens (income / tariffs / VAT) and debt engineering (monetary / fiscal policies and platinum coins for some reason)

Almost.

A government can also own assets, and gain money in the form of rent or sales. (An example of this is a toll road.)

Comment Re:But, how? [Re:Is basic income looking better ye (Score 1) 88

Probably through inflationary spending, but some people tend to forget that inflation is just a sneaky form of tax.

Correct. Inflation is, in fact, a tax on money.

In the situation of inflation, the people who are conservative with money put their wealth into other assets than cash.

Comment Re:Sorry for your loss (Score 1) 112

That sucks the kid offed himself, but lets be honest, if someone wants to kill themselves, they will always find a way.

Sometimes, sometimes not. If you point somebody suicidal to real psychiatric help that takes them seriously, yes, it can help. Sometimes it will only help temporarily, and they will just postpone it until later, but sometimes temporarily is enough, and if you can get them over the bad patch, they can be turned around.

Giving them a tutorial in how to a whim into a plan, though, that doesn't help.

Comment The superior tech won (Score 1) 56

Beta had superior quality but for years it had inferior time per tape, so even on a purely technical basis it was a mixed bag.

Exactly. Beta couldn't put a whole film on one tape, so the VHS, which COULD put a movie on one tape, won.

Nothing mysterious about it. For videotape, the most important criterion of "superior" means "able to put a movie on a casette". The superior technology, by this critetion, won.

Comment Crash and burn, or rise and conquer (Score 5, Insightful) 56

"Someone's gonna get burned there, I think. Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money."

Yep. Most of the AI companies will crash and burn; it's inevitable. A small percentage will go on to billions and billions of dollars, and ten years from now everybody will be saying "we shoulda invested in that AI firm when it was still affordable, we woulda been rich!"

Comment Re:Wake me up when we have chargers... (Score 1) 103

I've never heard of anybody being mugged at a charging station, and a quick google search doesn't give me any examples in the news.

There is such a large campaign to disparage electric vehicles that I expect that this has ever happened it would have been trumpeted all over.

On the other hand, a quick google gives me a plethora of news stories about people mugged at gas stations (although there are a lot more stories about the gas stations themselves getting robbed) https://www.google.com/search?...

So, no, you seem to have it opposite.

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