Bay 12 Games Forum

TomeNET

There's also MUDs and suchlike.

 

Rough numbers are rough, but seriously, it should get the bloody idea across. Also note that what I said used instead. Fund several dozen schools or hire 75k teachers.

Some numbers from federal funding to charter schools I picked up recent was 6k a head for students (in south florida), which, yeah, is about 180k for 30 kids. That extra 3-4 billion wouldn't be supplanting current funding, but adding to it.

Basically, let me put it this way. It doesn't cost 100 million to run a single school for a year*; including teachers salaries, maintenance of all sorts. 4 billion would run more than 400 schools. I think that would be worthwhile, given that it would reduce the military budget by under a percent.

I have trouble hammering that part hard enough, I think. Under a percent. Less than 1/100th of the military budget. In exchange, over 400 schools fully funded.

E: Just to re-emphasize, this while the US is facing an almost endemic education problem and almost every damn thing I hear from any teacher or person working administration in public schools is about running into budgeting issues. The US has an education problem. It's also the preeminent military power in the world. I could see giving a (massively g'damn) little from the latter to help with the former a bit.

*The 6k per student, assuming full funding, is 12 million for a 2000 student school.

It was very clearly a hate crime, yeah, and the fellow got convicted for a hate crime. So there's that, ayuh.

And if we compare an occupied house with an occupied church, or two empty ones?

Would depend on how the church was being used. Church is still a church if 'occupied' just means 'there's a dude squatting in it'. Some folks convert churches into homes, business buildings, etc. Church is a style of building as much, if not more, than a function of one. Also what you mean by 'empty'; in the sense that there's no one there right now, or in the sense of an abandoned building. Former, in that case, would be worse than the latter.

Beyond that, depends on how much the building cost. Churches usually cost more to construct than your average house (Which smacks of either hypocrisy or heresy for some religions, but that's neither here nor there, I suppose.). From a strictly material point of view, you're usually doing more damage wrecking the former.

Then, it'd depend on whose house it was. Burning down the dalai lama's place of residence would be different from burning down, say, mine, as an example. It would also probably be worse than burning down some number of churches-of-equal-occupancy-status. The same might be said for a particularly effective doctor or scientist, depending on their accomplishments.

Last part, I guess, would be the status of the church. There's (active) ones in my area that a significant portion of the population would cheer from being burned down. They can be as much a source of dissension and strife as community building, sometimes. You'd probably not value a widely reviled church as much as a widely appreciated one (Though it depends on the reasons for each, of course. Hence the probably ).

Multi-variant situation! The answer is 'depends'

I'm not sure why we're ranking crimes at the moment, other than explaining why burning a church is different than burning other buildings.

Because it's fun! The original burning subject didn't even have anything substantial to do with the building being a church, really. Community center would have had the same effect (possibly more) in some areas.

I has a bucket of tea.

* The Merchant Of Menace sips.

This is awesome

Bucket? I've done tupperware bowls, but never buckets.

... full five gal, or something smaller?

Jr. Don't forget the Junior

S'one of those minor neat things, I actually had a teacher (WWII vet, taught philosophy of history) that shared a class (German, iirc) with MLK. Teach remembered being blown out of the water by King, grade wise

... last century, yeah. It was. Not very common nowadays, though. Maybe every second or third year you'll hear something about it happening.