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[Vector]

I'm having a pretty rough time of it psychologically and finally had to go on antidepressants, but feel like I left the teaching field at exactly the right time. The rhetoric from parents angry about their kids being home is chilling -- lots of anger about remote learning and feeling that the kids aren't at risk, so it's ok if teachers get sick and die. Unfortunately every professional educator knows that diseases tear through K-12 schools like wildfire and that there are waves every single year of teachers getting put down by the flu, even *with* the shot. Plus there is a teacher shortage already. I'd be more inclined to be sympathetic to parents if I thought there was a chance that people were going to do everything in their power to protect teachers, but look at what we have handed our medical personnel . . .

Anyway . . . I feel really lucky that I can stay home, even living alone, but I'll admit that the mental wear and tear has been pretty bad so far.

[wierd]

The issue is the heavy dependence that the general population has on school systems as combination "education + Daycare".

Learn from home gives the education portion (with varying degrees of success), but does not cover the daycare portion, and that is making parents very insane/stressed.


The fact that certain political figures are treating this international emergency like a game of political football, trying to score points--- rather than actually putting that shit down, and working toward the common collective goal of preventing the worlds population getting nuked from orbit, and then having the surviving demographic have a decidedly non-zero fraction that has long lasting health problems from the pandemic, which will be with us for DECADES to come--- means that people are strapped for cash (because "They would make more on unemployment than being employed!!!! HORROR!!!!", and "Big companies need to be shielded from the legal liabilities of forcing people to come to work in the middle of this international healthcare emergency, because THE MONEY HAS TO BE MADE! FUCK HUMAN LIFE! No Covid relief until corporations can run roughshod over the populace!!"), cannot afford to lose any income at all, and thus have zero resources to deal with the stay at home requirements.

They are naturally angry and frustrated by this, but are venting at the wrong people.

It's not the educators that they should be angry with, it's the likes of Lich McConnell, holding up the necessary support they need to be able to stay home without all the financial stresses on top of the normal ones you get when trapped in a house with rambunctious kids.

[martinuzz]

Dependence on daycare is indeed an issue we're facing right now.  But how should that be fixed?  Force all women to quit their jobs and chain them to the kitchen so they can watch the kids?

I mean, for some jobs, I guess it's possible to bring your kids to work when schools close.  But there are many workplaces where that simply isn't possible.

Examples: 
"hey junior, how was your day?"
"it was terrifying. I went to dad's workplace at the slaughterhouse and watched screaming panicking pigs covered in blood being thrown into boiling water alive"


"hey junior, how was your day?"
"it was horrible! I went with mom to her workplace, she moderates facebook for unwanted posts. We watched kiddy porn together all day there"

[MrRoboto75]

Dependence on daycare is indeed an issue we're facing right now.  But how should that be fixed?  Force all women to quit their jobs and chain them to the kitchen so they can watch the kids?

I mean, for some jobs, I guess it's possible to bring your kids to work when schools close.  But there are many workplaces where that simply isn't possible.

Examples: 
"hey junior, how was your day?"
"it was terrifying. I went to dad's workplace at the slaughterhouse and watched screaming panicking pigs covered in blood being thrown into boiling water alive"


"hey junior, how was your day?"
"it was horrible! I went with mom to her workplace, she moderates facebook for unwanted posts. We watched kiddy porn together all day there"

Ideally a dual income wouldn't be mandatory to provide for a family.

[ChairmanPoo]

Dependence on daycare is indeed an issue we're facing right now.  But how should that be fixed?  Force all women to quit their jobs and chain them to the kitchen so they can watch the kids?

I mean, for some jobs, I guess it's possible to bring your kids to work when schools close.  But there are many workplaces where that simply isn't possible.

Examples: 
"hey junior, how was your day?"
"it was terrifying. I went to dad's workplace at the slaughterhouse and watched screaming panicking pigs covered in blood being thrown into boiling water alive"


"hey junior, how was your day?"
"it was horrible! I went with mom to her workplace, she moderates facebook for unwanted posts. We watched kiddy porn together all day there"

I think those would be really binding parent-child experiences

[Eschar]

In DF, perhaps.

[wierd]

Dependence on daycare is indeed an issue we're facing right now.  But how should that be fixed?  Force all women to quit their jobs and chain them to the kitchen so they can watch the kids?

I mean, for some jobs, I guess it's possible to bring your kids to work when schools close.  But there are many workplaces where that simply isn't possible.

Examples: 
"hey junior, how was your day?"
"it was terrifying. I went to dad's workplace at the slaughterhouse and watched screaming panicking pigs covered in blood being thrown into boiling water alive"


"hey junior, how was your day?"
"it was horrible! I went with mom to her workplace, she moderates facebook for unwanted posts. We watched kiddy porn together all day there"

Ideally a dual income wouldn't be mandatory to provide for a family.

Further, the notion that it must be the WOMAN who stays home is obsolete, and needs to be trashbinned.  House-husbands are totally a thing, and many studies have shown men are just as capable as women as childcare providers.

It's just a hotbutton for feminist support bandwagon summoning to insist that it must always be the woman who stays home.  Feminisim has made sufficient inroads that this is not the case-- House husbands are a thing now.

Update your rhetoric.

Whoever makes the most money should continue working, and the other should pick up the slack.

[MrRoboto75]

House husbands are a thing now.

Barely?  Assuming they even pay your household enough to run with one income, men are still barely perceived as even capable of basic housekeeping, much less giving a shit about offspring.  Media still portrays dads as borderline braindead.  A dad taking care of their kids is going to get jokes about how their "babysitting" their kids "so the mom can take a break" instead of doing the basic job of being a parent.

[wierd]

And purpetuating the incorrect narrative assists with that, HOW exactly?

Parents will do whatever makes the most sense in their specific situations.  Especially when there are very real financial crunches.

this is HOW it becomes mainstream. 

[McTraveller]

The difficulty is in how exactly to change the narrative in a practical way.  For a short period of time, when the two-breadwinner household first started, those households that could do that saw a massive increase in income.  The sad reality, though, is that over time the general economy came to absorb that extra income so that now the "important" things have priced in that second income.  "Important" things being housing, health care, utilities, transportation, and education.  Those items have prices that increase rapidly but decline slowly; markedly different from commodities like food, clothing, and gasoline.  Put another way: when demand for food / clothing / luxuries / gasoline drops, the price drops almost immediately.  So when people have income-altering events, prices for food and such tend to change rapidly.  Housing, education, and healthcare though - well those prices tend to be locked in.

Most of this I put on the finance system - if it was not so difficult or expensive to refinance a property, rents/mortgages could change price much faster in response to economic shocks, allowing people to stay in their homes.  I think this is probably the lynchpin to it all, because if everyone in the society stops being afraid of losing their homes - typically the highest "fixed" expense in most people's budgets, then they would perhaps be more willing to have their salary / wage change in more realtime to deal with economic shocks than we are today.

You gain economic stability by building in margin, not by having a government willing to print money.  This is not to say that printing money may not be necessary as a last resort, but it really should be a last resort.

Now, how to build in a margin - in hospital capacity, in housing, in education - that's what I want to see us do after we get through the next 12 months.  And not just in the US, but worldwide... there is just no margin any more.

The trick will be how to build those margins in without making it too cost prohibitive - you don't want to charge people money for not having money (that's a huge source of many societal woes, but that's for a different thread...).

[Starver]

My personal experience had my father forced out of his job (industry issues) while I was still at school and my mother had a part-time career of her own (a handy hold-over from before my parents' marriage, and then me) that she could expand so the roles easily reversed. We were comfortable enough off on (either) single income[1], so far as I could tell, but that was from beyond-menial levels of income, possibly wise annuity investments from the original paypackets. A number of years later on, a separate industry downturn initiated by the government (and leaving my family unaffected, possibly even if it had not changed state beforehand) caused many other families in our area to lose their breadwinners and I don't really know how well they coped on average (with the 'handout' pot both more divided and effectively cut) but that was the start of a period of downturn that lasted at least a decade (probably more, with ripples to this day).

Maybe you can discount the "family of sixteen who have never ever worked given all-inclusive accomodation worth a million" and the "single mother works five jobs and struggling to pay both food and heating bills" as outlying failures of the system that need sorting out, but the middle-ground balance is probably also skewed.


[1] The problem, it seems to me, is that when people are earning more on 'unemployment' than if employed, it's because wages for jobs are too stingy, not that the benefit is too generous. The government involved in providing such relief for sure isn't likely to be two or three times overgenerous for a standard case, yet we're frequently met with the idea that those who are avoiding such reliance (or otherwise excluded from it) are taking on two or three simultaneous careers. Even if that's because it's a fraction of a working day each, those who end up doing enough fractions to end up as a whole would surely be better in a single (flexible to needs) whole-day position if they prefered rather than effectively sharing N whole jobs between roughly N people effectively working for the whole working day, even if that means the employer can't get exemptions to mandatory in-work benefits (sick-pay, holidays, etc) they would normally be required to give.

[wierd]

The difficulty is in how exactly to change the narrative in a practical way.  For a short period of time, when the two-breadwinner household first started, those households that could do that saw a massive increase in income.  The sad reality, though, is that over time the general economy came to absorb that extra income so that now the "important" things have priced in that second income.  "Important" things being housing, health care, utilities, transportation, and education.  Those items have prices that increase rapidly but decline slowly; markedly different from commodities like food, clothing, and gasoline.  Put another way: when demand for food / clothing / luxuries / gasoline drops, the price drops almost immediately.  So when people have income-altering events, prices for food and such tend to change rapidly.  Housing, education, and healthcare though - well those prices tend to be locked in.

Most of this I put on the finance system - if it was not so difficult or expensive to refinance a property, rents/mortgages could change price much faster in response to economic shocks, allowing people to stay in their homes.  I think this is probably the lynchpin to it all, because if everyone in the society stops being afraid of losing their homes - typically the highest "fixed" expense in most people's budgets, then they would perhaps be more willing to have their salary / wage change in more realtime to deal with economic shocks than we are today.

You gain economic stability by building in margin, not by having a government willing to print money.  This is not to say that printing money may not be necessary as a last resort, but it really should be a last resort.

Now, how to build in a margin - in hospital capacity, in housing, in education - that's what I want to see us do after we get through the next 12 months.  And not just in the US, but worldwide... there is just no margin any more.

The trick will be how to build those margins in without making it too cost prohibitive - you don't want to charge people money for not having money (that's a huge source of many societal woes, but that's for a different thread...).

The issue, is that margins are "Lost opportunity".  If people save money, (eg, create a margin for themselves), then that is money that a retailer feels that they could be extracting.

There are only so many ways to assure that people are able to successfully develop and maintain such margins;

1) Mandate it by law, and impose wage garnishments to accomplish it. (with special support systems for the impoverished)
2) Apply downward pressure on the economy by setting artificial price caps (Capitalists especially hate this.)
3) Probably the least effective-- Impose a different restriction on retailers to limit their advertising presence, so that people are not being actively mind-controlled into blowing money inappropriately. (eg, reduce pressure to "keep up with the Jones's)
4) Provide some form of tax incentive for people who create such margins for themselves, that has real benefits.

Or, some combination of the above.

Laisez Fair capitalism of course, DESPISES all of them, because ALL of them will prevent the capitalist from extracting that "lost opportunity".

[JoshuaFH]

"But wierd," says the Capitalist, "how am I supposed to afford my mega yacht, a yacht so big it doubles as a floating pier for my smaller yachts, if I can't extort the working class for every penny in their pocket and every pained drop of sweat from their brow? Surely God intended for me to have my mega yacht, and therefore I'm entitled to exploit to my heart's content, surely."

[McTraveller]

Somehow you just have to convince the "capitalists" that the margin itself has value, so is not a lost opportunity.  I think one way to do this may be to count insurance payments as income that cannot be offset by the loss they cover.  Of course big companies that rely on externalized costs of "no margin" hazards won't like this idea.

The other thing is to seriously start promoting laws that severely limit rent-seeking.

(Incidentally, this is one reason I don't like the word "insurance" in "health insurance."  Yeah part of it is catastrophic event coverage, but the rest of its uses is markedly different from what insurance is supposed to do, and we really could separate them.)

[Frumple]

"But wierd," says the Capitalist, "how am I supposed to afford my mega yacht, a yacht so big it doubles as a floating pier for my smaller yachts, if I can't extort the working class for every penny in their pocket and every pained drop of sweat from their brow? Surely God intended for me to have my mega yacht, and therefore I'm entitled to exploit to my heart's content, surely."

"How are you still talking, Capitalist," wierd mutters bemusedly, working to dismantle a mega yacht into smaller, less wasteful ships, "after being cooked and eaten? This is the most vocal indigestion I've ever had!"