My wife was a Title I teacher high school for a while, there was a LOT of pressure to “pass” kids out of the system for that sweet Federal money and other lets say, “political” reasons (like internal/local level, not left/right stuff). And she absolutely did her best to get them to pass on their own merit, but there’s only so much you can do if students don’t have the prerequisites + culture and motivation.

Which language? I've found Claude very good at Elixir test coverage (surprisingly) but a dumpster fire with any sort JS/TS testing.

Well this gave me some fun ideas for AI image generation. There goes the rest of my afternoon, thanks!

Those can listen to database changes and aren't separate services to set up, keep online and pay for? Neat (and news to me)!

Except if you disconnect for any reason, you will miss changes. If you want to break out services into different servers, clients will still be crossing the streams to listen. Database schema changes must be coordinated properly. Basically, you are taking one database to rule them all model which comes with massive drawbacks and inserting additional capabilities into it.

Sure, if you are tiny, will forever remain tiny, then whatever, ignore this Ops person.

Please check out the linked libs, this is not true (and dig deeper into Erlang/Elixir). The schema change issue can be tricky, however.

One of the things I like about some of the overseas malls is they have places designated for kids to run around and play. I've even seen that as a common amenity in restaurants (play room).

Well, this doesn’t exactly check out when you compare to countries and cultures who already give children these freedoms and have the built environment to support it (transport, walkability, parks/spaces to play, etc). They are not only “just fine”, but their children are generally much more mature and confident (as in skilled), than their Anglo counterparts.

Care to list a few examples that aren't Anglo?

France, Netherlands, Denmark, former commie block come to mind. It was one of the things that really stuck out to me: how mature/well behaved and independent/confident the children were there (for the most part). There's even books on the topic (Raising Bebe, The Danish Secret to Happy Kids) which I was not aware of until after spending a lot of time in those places. At lot of it has to due with the built environment - kids can literally walk out the front door to parks and stuff unlike in suburban places, but also culture.

Thanks for the WalEx mention!: https://github.com/cpursley/walex also, there’s https://github.com/sequinstream/sequin if you want something more robust that already works with connectors and smokes debezium in terms of performance and is simpler to operate.

Btw, the WalEx repo has some useful links to articles about the Postgres WAL

As if wind, solar arrays, hydro, transfer stations aren’t?

It's difficult to export culture when the receiving cultures don't speak the language, don't share religion, etc. US has a big benefit of being part of the Anglophone world going back to it's founding and more recently with Western European dominance from WW2 where basically everyone there knows some level of English. Also, don't forget China has suffered from great "humiliation" for the last few hundred years and hasn't been in much of a position to export much of anything until recently. Furthermore, the main reason the US has absorbed some SK and Japanese cultural things is we brought them into our neoempire.

It is also the way we keep score in America.

Kids in America are hopelessly addicted to Tiktok but that doesn't count as a cultural export.

Most the items in people's homes are made in China but that doesn't count either.

Chinese rappers could be dominating the pop charts and we would just say rap was invented in America so that doesn't count.

All the American kids could be learning to play the guzheng and we would just say we invented a new American style of playing the guzheng, doesn't count.

K-pop from Korea, Anime / mangas from Japan, are example of asian cultural worldwide successes

Having a school lunch in a "poor" former eastern block country as a guest was really eye opening. It was actually good, fresh made borscht, veg dishes that tasted good (wasn't steamed)! Like, I would order and enjoy it at a restaurant level no-bad. Who knew that was even possible? From what I can tell, a non-crappy school lunch is the norm all over Europe. Why can't America have that?

Unfortunately it's far from the norm in Europe.

In the Netherlands there's no school lunch available. Families need to provide it to their children. The norm is just bread and cheese sandwich and milk, doesn't matter how rich you are. That's what most adults eat for lunch too.

fwiw, bread and cheese in the Netherlands kicks the crap out of what is often called "cheese" in the US. However, the situation has at least improved over the past decade if your budget allows it.

The usual truth is that labor costs more in the US than it does anywhere else. A lot of things are just what you get if you have cheap labor. As an example, all over South Asia you can get top-notch personal cooking and cleaning on a daily basis. In the US you cannot. It's because everyone is rich in the US. The embodied cost of labor in everything you get is quite a large fraction.

The median household income in Poland is a quarter that of the US.

The labor costs more because other assets cost more — namely, housing, food, clothing.

Indeed. And wet roads cause rain.

You can't afford to have people cook food here, just reheat it.

"can't afford" in this case is a choice to spend the absolute minimum possible on school lunches.

And despite spending basically nothing on that lunch, we still charge kids for it

The public blamed the "lazy" lunch ladies of course but the public was the one voting down the school budget to actually pay them to cook. The actual people doing food service have as much agency over the menu as the teen behind the counter at mcdonalds. Those exact same women WERE cooking real food a decade ago. That's how long they had been doing that job.