From what I understand, some of these predators are knowledge?

> Why is it so hard to pull a card out of your pocket?

Because I haven't carried a card for years now. I couldn't even tell you where my physical credit card is.

I guess this is very geographic dependent. I live in a country where only maybe 80% of merchants accept Visa/Mastercard (and thus only those can accept Google/Apple Pay) so I need to either carry a card for our domestic payment card infrastructure–or carry cash in order to be able to transact with any shops.

My first name is "Save" in Spanish and Portuguese, and apparently people think they are saving documents when they send them to that gmail address. I have received medical records, employment documents, so many photos, insurance information, you name it.

"Sorry Timmy, I know you're hungry but giving you a school lunch portion would actually be a false solution. It would do nothing to fix the neglect you experience at home, especially over weekends and summers."

"It's not that I don't want kids fed, I would just rather that kids go hungry than feeding them with the inefficient and corrupt system that I imagined."

A few of you will die of hunger, but these are taxes I am not willing to pay.

If we're doing this, let's look at the other extreme as well: We give all people, including children, nothing as they are expected to take responsibility for themselves. No education, no services, no law enforcement, no roads, nothing at all.

These are both obviously silly examples. The 'Where do we draw the line?!' answer can in this case be answered with 'On the side that feeds hungry children'.

> If we're doing this, let's look at the other extreme as well: We give all people, including children, nothing as they are expected to take responsibility for themselves. No education, no services, no law enforcement, no roads, nothing at all.

In that case, people will always self-organise such structures anyway. Even amongst the most failed of the failed states, eventually you will end up with at least someone claiming to be the chief law enforcer (of whatever kind), someone to look after the kids (i.e. education) while the rest works to provide for food, and some sort of fire brigade.

It will just be many orders of magnitude more inefficient than what a large government that governs more than a few dozen to hundred people can establish.

All the more reason for using schools to feed children who may be abused and starved at home.

Yes, but is that all you do? One meal a day does not solve the problems of an abused child.

You know, we say “don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good” a lot for technical problems but it’s far more critical here. A child from a failing home has a lot of problems and it often takes a long time to solve them, but we can for a trivial amount of money ensure that child isn’t malnourished because they get breakfast, lunch, and in many Title 1 schools, dinner. Many of the other problems of poverty, neglect, or abuse are much harder to solve – e.g. sending a child to foster care might be the solution for abuse but it’s slow and has plenty of risks of its own – but this one is easy and cheap to fix while we work on the hard problems.

Of course that is not all, how on earth did you get that impression?

Doing something to address a problem doesn't imply that nothing else will be done and that this one thing is expected to solve the problem entirely. I didn't think this needed explaining.

That really is someone else's problem. The best the school can do is feed and support the child and report the abuse to the relevant authorities.

> I'm in favor of free school lunches for kids. But I'm very annoyed with the strawmanning in this thread. For example, it seems like a strawman to say that people who are against free school lunches "want kids to go hungry". Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state.

If parents are responsible then the children of the parents who can't or won't provide will go hungry. That is a fact. You may not _want_ children to go hungry but if you advocate for that system then you are absolutely okay with a number of children going hungry.

When I was in school we paid for (very fairly priced) school meals while the poor students were subsidized. It was handled pretty discreetly as well, I don’t think any kid was shamed for it, plus kids have a million ways to find out who’s poor anyway if they’re into bullying. So pretending the solution is binary is ridiculous.

Hell, my college education from Stanford, including room and board and a very modest allowance, was entirely covered by a university fund, no strings attached, while the rich kids paid in full. If $65k a year can be selectively waived (from a very rich institution, yes I’m aware, but I’m talking about the model), no way you can’t do that for a small portion of school lunches.

Look into the expression "perverse incentive". Maybe he doesn't want people so thoughtless they'd make children without being able to feed them to do so?

Also, too many Americans blindly praising socialism without knowing its consequences in the deep end. It's not all rainbows and butterflies.

Pray tell what horrible consequences you expect from feeding children to ensure they don't go hungry.

Crickets!!!

I find it such a weird take to call feeding children at school socialism with grave consequences but taxpayer funded mandatory education isn't.

This is the thing to me. I'm sympathetic to the concern of people taking advantage of others, but if the government is forcing children to be there (which we are), and already having to bear the cost of funding these schools generally, we really should include the cost of basic nutrition for all students as an operating cost, just like the electric bill and teacher's salaries.

1) Only a very few people are expected to be able (time and competency) to give a general education to their children, unlike feeding/housing.

2) Let's be real, it's not just socialism/charity, one of the major reasons for compulsory education is shaping malleable young minds (for good or bad, mind you).

And presumably you want them shaped in the best possible way, which is hardly possible if children are hungry or undernourished.

1) If they don't have time or competency then surely they can pay for the services of someone who can. Most people don't have the time or competency to grow their own food but we still expect them to purchase their food from someone who can.

2) The state taking money from people by force in order to mandate the shaping of malleable young minds sounds like exactly the kind of grave consequences of socialism you fear.

i don't think you understand what socialism is. government assistance programs are not socialism.

As much as I'm in favour of such programmes, they are in fact social welfare and part of the social welfare state.

It's not absolute public ownership of all means of production. But within the continuum between reactionary caveat emptor lessez faire private absolutism and fully automated luxury gay space communism, it's a nudge or two toward the latter.

And an unarguable good, I hasten to add.

This is a "do use" list, so recommended services.

If you're already a competent developer, I think that's a reasonable expectation of impact on productivity. I think the 'life-changing' part comes in helping someone get to the point of building things with code where before they couldn't (or believed they couldn't). It does a lot better job of turning the enthusiasts and code-curious into amateurs vs. empowering professionals.

> turning the enthusiasts and code-curious into amateurs vs. empowering professionals.

I'm firmly in #2. My other comment goes over how.

I'm intrigued to see how devs in #1 grow. One might be wary those devs would grow into bad habits and not thinking for themselves, but it might be a case of the ancient Greek rant against written books hindering memorization. Could be that they'll actually grow to be even better devs unburdened by time wasted on trivial details.