With all due respect, why in the world does 28k sound like a reasonable number for care of a single child? That's more than many people make at a full time job.
An enterprising person, great with children, would see an opportunity to make 72k a year to watch three kids. And another might offer to do it for 60k, and so on.
Regulations prevent that, and kill the free market. Now everyone pays a crapton to some facility where the owner jumped through all the hoops to get certified, while hiring minimum wage people to care for the kids. Not that some aren't great, but is it really a better system?
Reality shows that the outcome are centers with a television on 24/7, or where kids are given drugs to sleep. That's not the exception but the rule. That's why inspections and licensing came in.
The longterm costs of that -- crime, mental health, etc. -- explain why subsidies make sense. Every rich country has universal public education for a good reason.
Market forces, as you point out, will drive your enterprising person making 72k out-of-business very quickly, and the market becomes a cesspool.
I have so many thoughts on this from my own life experience. Latchkey kid, YMMV.
When I was a child, it was normal for neighborhood moms who didn't work to just watch kids for favors or a nominal fee. My memories are fuzzy, but I seem to mostly remember watching daytime TV soaps and eating PBJs probably more often than a child should.
Now that I'm older, I'm flabbergasted by regulations and costs for simple daycare. I've met numerous people who spend more on childcare than they make in a month. Not to sound trad anything, but that just doesn't make any financial sense to me.
I've no idea what the solution is. NM recently announced free child care, interested to see how that plays out. For everyone else... there's gotta be a saner solution.
In my kids' lives, I've spent about $160k on childcare. So crazy to think of how hard we've worked to not be with our kids. I'm going to guess my parents spent under $10k in all of my childhood, inflation adjusted.
This model doesn't really make good sense. On one hand, I'm glad my wife and I can have careers. On the other, I doubt I would care much if we lived in a society where we didn't need to so badly. $160k of childcare doesn't pay for itself.
That I don't know exactly if it's just one on one, as I've not read up on it when it's a more personal relationship.
I do know that my own wife, who was home all day watching just one child, was open to taking on more for free, but regulations around it made it way more of a headache than it was worth. There are laws about how many kids you can watch, how long you can watch them, licensing, child to adult ratios, state visits, etc.
Basically, if you wanted to be open to watching 5 kids for a working day, doing so would be illegal in every state I've lived in.
Every state has regulations and laws that at face value most people would agree with, but together end up in a system where you have to pay thousands per month for a facility to watch a child.
That's perfectly legal where I live, but... There are no friendly neighbours with that kind of time on their hands. My entire townhome complex of 34 units (ranging from 2–4 bedrooms each) has only one single elderly woman who's retired. Everyone else is young people in their 20s (working), or families with their own kids and—in all families but one—two working parents.
Probably only kicks in for paid providers. There would be all sorts of laws around safety (making sure the areas are child-proofed, no dangerous items (knives, guns, medicine), background checks, temperature maintenance, emergency plans, etc.).
I have no idea what you're ranting about. 0ad is fantastic. I've never played Fallout, but it seems you want it to release versions like that? Why? It's not a version/story game but an iterative design on the same game.
This will never change until CEO pay is tied to long term performance. Why not make it 5 year lagging?
The whole problem is that CEOs have zero incentive to care about the longevity of the company. They want share price to go up now, make their money, then cash out.
It's easy to blame the CEOs, but they're just doing what's smart for them. We need to change the definition of what that is.
It didn't force people to change insurers, it forced insurers to change their policies, which ended in about 4 million people getting cancellation notices.
The answer isn't one a lot of people are willing to talk about, but personally, I don't care.
The problem isn't "businesses", it's other Indians. They take entire tech orgs over, then only hire each other. They make up bizarre reasons why US workers won't fit while spamming H1B applications.
Before you grab your pitchforks, or try to dox me for racism one, please understand it's not all Indian people, obviously. There are so many in the US, and the majority are good people. But there's an extremely clear pattern that's emerged that you'd have to be blind not to see.
The pattern I’ve seen emerge is that the only successful candidates just happen to be of the same ethnolinguistic background as the hiring manager. Merely being Indian is not enough.
I suspect this has happened to me at least once. I was a shoe-in, checked all of the boxes, recruiter was saying they really wanted me, and then for the final interview they brought in a mid level guy who asked me questions unrelated to the role (purely a Data Engineer role but he was asking me about the intricacies of ML models). All interviewers were Indian. I would wager they ended up hiring another Indian guy for the role. I would imagine this happens to people of color all the time so I don't "mind" in that sense. The bigger issue to me is U.S. citizens unemployed because roles are filled by H-1B people (which is difficult to prove, but the evidence seems to indicate).
We'll never know what actually happened, but I suspect they had to choose between me and an Indian guy and by throwing me ridiculous questions in the final interview, they had evidence to whoever (their boss, HR, me, the recruiter representing me) that they passed on me because I didn't know enough about a subject area and therefore I wasn't a good fit for the role. I can't capture the full interview experience in a Hacker News comment but I realize the information presented isn't a dead-giveaway case of racism.
I am well aware that it could've just been that A) their requirements for the role changed mid-interview process, B) they didn't like my personality or I came off as an asshole, C) the mid level guy didn't want me as their "superior" for a non-racial reason or D) Other. But I think it's dangerous to just write off any suspected racism and blame something like personality or soft-skills. Racism is disproportionately detrimental to people of color, but it's still wrong when it's directed towards a white person.
> They take entire tech orgs over, then only hire each other.
No. It is stupid politics to blame Indians or other Asians for this when they are just following company policy to hire cheaper labour. Like it or not, H1B Asians (in IT) are hired because they can be exploited - they work cheaper and longer hours than their American counterpart ( US companies save nearly $100,000 per H-1B hire as workers earn 16% less: Here’s why demand stays high - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/us-compan... ). Blaming immigrant Asians for this kind of exploitative politics that exists because American businesses lobby for it is irrational. (Also, do not forget that America is a country of immigrants. The H1Bs also act as a "vetted" immigrant pool from which American citizenship can be given). By demanding $100,000 to hire an H1B, the Trump administration has now tweaked this policy to make it costlier for businesses to hire them (and force them to seriously consider AI). But immigrant workers are still cheaper and can be made to work longer hours.
In other less racially charged terms, we can see the West also as having a serious addiction to dignity culture. Take Australia, for example. You will easily get into fisticuffs with your average Australian whose dignity you affront, through any means.
The only reason you see Indians is because Indians knly hire Indians. It can’t be anything else.
Completely unrelated, have you walked into a non nuclear/biomedical engineering engineering department in any IS college in the past 2 decades? I’m guessing those are also filled with Indians because their managers are insisting that only Indians can study engineering.
Actually it can and almost certainly is multiple things - not just that Indians prefer to work with other Indians (by the way this phenomenon isn't exclusive to Indians).
Interest rates are normal or even low. The situation of interest around 0% for years was an extreme anomaly never seen before. Since 1973 interest rates were almost always above 5%, and the only moments they fell under 3% they created the 2008 boom and bust.
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