That's the L1 though. With an H1B you can get another employer, but the problem is that it has to be done in a narrow period of time, and the other employer has to be willing to sponsor the H1B.
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
Your alternatives are mixing the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt yourself or buying them premixed as Krusteaz, which doesn't contain buttermilk or oil. Neither of these involves more or less dirty dishes than the other. At a guess, the premixed stuff costs US$4/kg, while if you make it yourself, it's US$1/kg. You can mix up 5kg pretty easily in a few minutes, say 10 minutes, saving US$15, which is an hourly wage of US$90/hour, tax free.
Possibly you have more remunerative things to do with your time, like writing code for your startup or grinding Leetcode for your Meta interview, which plausibly have higher expected value than US$90/hour. But many people don't. For them, buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke.
Myself, I haven't made pancakes in a while, but at some point I switched from Krusteaz to just mixing the ingredients from scratch on the spot.
No, that’s incorrect. Krusteaz Complete Buttermilk Pancake Mix (which, at least where I live, ten miles from Krusteaz HQ, is the only “Krusteaz” anyone cares about) contains flour, sugar, dextrose, baking powder, salt, starch, soybean oil, and buttermilk. Unless I’m using enough of it to justify buying an entire canister of powdered buttermilk - which, by the way, is not cheap, and probably throws that $1/kg calculation off - I can’t mix it up in a shelf-stable way. And if I am using that much of it, I can get it in bulk for ~$2/kg.
Even if your math had been accurate, it’s breathtakingly condescending. If you live in a modern society, and you want to buy pancake mix (pancake mix! of all the inoffensive products!) you should get to buy the damn pancake mix.
In that case it's plausibly a good deal, and of course it would be extremely deplorable to try to take away people's ability to buy pancake mix, or smoke, or drink Coke, or drink Everclear, or snort cocaine. People are almost always better at making the choices that are best for themselves than anyone else would be, because they both know more about themselves and care more.
But that doesn't mean they're necessarily good at it, and explaining how to get better at it is the opposite extreme from being condescending. Condescending is, "Oh, you wouldn't understand," not, "Here's an demonstration of how to work this out for your own situation, which you'll be able to understand," which is what my comment is.
Maybe you think it's condescending because everyone already works out hourly wages for thriftiness-directed activities, but I can assure you that your friends are very unusual if you think that.
Sorry, I still think an off-the-cuff “buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke [unless you’re rich]” is condescending, especially when coming from someone who presumably is not a domain expert, and has not in fact done the relevant math. If it turns out you work for the USDA developing the Thrifty Food Plan, or something similar, I’ll retract my comment.
I'm not a domain expert in Krusteaz, and I certainly have a lot to learn about thrift, but I've been living on an income of under US$8000 per year for over a decade, so I do know a lot of things about thrift that not many people do. I think I probably also qualify as a domain expert in self-destructive choices!
Then you’re certainly a domain expert in making that kind of calculation, so I do retract my comment. I do not, however, retract my assertion that nobody in a modern society should have to make that kind of calculation to such an extreme. $8k/year is hardcore, and if you’re doing that successfully, I both tip my hat to you and am a little horrified. I hope you’re doing it because you want to and not because you’re forced to.
I made some bets, metaphorically speaking, that didn't pay off, or took a long time to pay off. I'm not sure they were bad bets, given what I knew at the time, and it's been very educational at least—especially about the central question of why so many people in modern societies live in such scarcity. To an enormous extent it's structural issues, which I think you could sort of sum up as insufficiently capitalist societies.
Hopefully I'll be in much better shape materially soon! I've just overcome some big external obstacles.
How is dumping a cup of Krusteaz and water into a bowl producing more dirty dishes than adding flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt to the same bowl? A couple measuring spoons?
The upside of having the ingredients is that you don’t need to specifically plan for pancakes. You can make them at the drop of a hat, along with many other things, as long as you keep the staples on hand.
My mom always makes pancakes from scratch, and she seems to have them together in just a few minutes as well. Last time when she asked if I wanted some, I said I didn’t want to be a bother, and she went on about how easy they are.
By the time I’ve soured some milk (to take the place of the buttermilk in the mix) and measured out the oil, I’ve spent five minutes and used a pyrex measuring cup or two that I didn’t otherwise need. That’s apart from getting out the kitchen scale, dragging out the dry ingredient canisters, taking the time to weigh or measure everything… I just don’t get it. Why do I have people telling me I should dirty even one extra dish? Or spend even five extra minutes? All so I can, what? Be proud of my homemaking skills? I’d rather be coding a side project, thanks. Your mom is more than welcome to make her pancakes from scratch. I’m glad she enjoys it. Personally I prefer Krusteaz. I do not understand why I am getting pushback on this.
I'm not pushing back at all, especially since I made two pancakes from Krusteaz this morning. What I like about Krusteaz is scaling down to 2 small pancakes without thinking about the proportions.
But when I'm on the ball, pancakes from scratch are really not much more trouble. My trick is that precise measurements don't matter. I eyeball all of the measurements into a big measuring cup, and it works just fine. From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway. How would humanity have spread to all corners of the world, if they had to weigh the ingredients for their pancakes?
> From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway.
I believe this is where the cup measurement came from. Baking is all about ratios, so you could take any (drinking) cup you happen to have and use it to measure your various ingredients, as the ratios will all work out by using the same cup.
I recently saw a very expensive chef’s spoon that was supposed to be a perfect teaspoon(?) and had various other features. It was sold out. Out of curiosity, I went into my drawer, pulled out my normal spoons I eat with and compared them to what my measuring spoons held. It was the same. I just use my normal spoons to measure now. Good enough. I can then use the spoon to eat with, depending on what it is.
That is a good point - scaling down to pancakes for one is a great use case for mixes.
As it happens, my preference for Krusteaz is not all convenience; they’re also what I grew up eating, and they’re still my favorite. I bake a lot from scratch, mostly cookies and bread with the occasional cake, and pancakes are the one thing I never make from scratch because I’m tired of trying everyone’s mom’s amazing recipe and finding it meh. (I’ll gladly spend a weekend morning making these amazing waffles, though: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/light-and-crispy-waffles)
I agree precise measurements don’t matter at all if you’re not too particular about how the finished product comes out. If you have strong preferences about how your baked goods taste, or you want to be able to communicate a recipe to someone else in a reproducible way, that’s when precise measurements start mattering. Kitchen scales were commonplace in England by the Victorian era, so it depends on your definition of “modern.”
The main issue with a premix is like the article. It’s fit for a single purpose. I only make pancakes from scratch, admittedly I use baking powder and regular whole milk instead of buttermilk and baking soda. But the benefit is those staple ingredients can be used for all sorts of other recipes. I’m not going to bread chicken with Krusteaz. A premix can’t be adjusted either such as for altitude. Premixes and single use kitchen gadgets are areas where corporations really seem to have done a good job marketing that their products are more convenient than the readily available alternatives.
I don’t know how big the market is for high altitude. The adjustments above 3000m / 10000 ft mean that box mixes are no easier than from scratch. The mix has too much baking powder or soda.
In the UK we eat pancakes (crêpes) once a year (for some reason). It takes me no more than five minutes to make the batter from scratch. I do it the night before so it's ready to go, but you don't have to. I use one bowl. I imagine if you did it more frequently you'd become even more efficient than I am.
I do make crêpes from scratch, on the rare occasion I make them. They’re simpler than buttermilk pancakes, with fewer ingredients, and it is a one-bowl operation.
It’s not. I’m a mom with two kids at home, I write software for a living, and pancake mix is one of the staples in my pantry. Why this is so bizarre you would think it ironic, I have no idea.
I looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.
Childcare doesn't end at 1 year though. If you look at public schools as child care, most don't start until kindergarten (about 5 years old). What do you do for the remaining 4 years? And during summer break? And after-school care? This program covers all of those.
Forcing parents back into the workforce early is unfortunate and does need to be addressed. However, this program seems to be addressing a different and still vital issue.
> This entire structure is set up to keep the boss happy while a stranger raises your child during their most formative and vulnerable years.
I can agree. I had grandparents to take are of me. During a family emergency I stayed with a friends family for a few weeks. We had a lot of people in our family and friends to step up who were all located in the same city.
Now everyone moves a thousand miles away from their existing support networks for a tech job.
How is your solution any different from the US student loan policies that have increased the price of college in the US? Won't subsidizing demand with a stipend significantly increase the price of what it can be spent on?
We kind of do both in Germany. I say "kind of" becaue that year of parental leave (14 months total, shared between parents as desired) is capped at the lower of 1800 EUR/mo, or 2/3 of previous year's net monthly salary - that was significantly lower than either of our net pay, but we did it anyway.
And once the little guy was a year old, daycare for not quite enough hours to work full time (7am - 4pm) was a mere 500 EUR/mo, and would have been less had we not been a 1.5 engineer couple. It drops to 200 EUR/mo when the kids turn three. For awhile, Bavaria was considering giving a rebate to families who didn't use preschool, but then I think they realized that the people whose minds would be changed by an extra couple hundred Euro per month in their pockets were a lot of the people who this rather conservative state really, really wanted to have send their kids to preschool as soon as possible.
This goes hand in hand with very strong protections for parents choosing to work part time. My employer had to allow me to drop to part time for up to three years (prorated salary, of course), with an option to extend it until my kid is eight.
Result? I'm still working in the same department and position I was before the kid, but spend several hours a day with him.
He took to daycare like a duck to water and still loves preschool; it turns out that my little guy is way more social than either of his parents.
strong protections for parents choosing to work part time
how long ago was that? i thought i read that the right to work part time is now universal, that is after some time in a job you can just request it, and it can't be denied, unless there are some special circumstances (and i think small companies are exempt too), children or not.
About two years ago - it is possible that the policy has been loosened since then, but I'm not in human resources.
The really strong protections are the first three years after a child is born - you have to be allowed to work anywhere from 15 to 30 hours/week, and be allowed to change it with a few weeks' notice ("Elternzeit" - covers both parental leave and this part time working arrangement).
I had to give a reason for wanting to do the next five years part-time, but "child" resulted in no further questions. I had to commit to only being allowed to work part time, and for the weekly hours I requested for those five years; my employer could choose to accept a request to change them or to go back to full time before the five years is up, but they're not legally obligated to.
ah, right, there are two independent regulations. i forgot about Elternzeit which includes a lot of flexibility in adjusting your worktime as needed, whereas the other regulation simply allows you to request a fixed reduction of your worktime. which is a change of your contract, whereas Elternzeit isn't.
This sounds like something I would have written before I was a parent.
And please remember: not everyone's family situation is the same. There are single parents, all kinds of employment scenarios, chronic illnesses or disabilities, sick parents, income differentials, and on and on and on.
Your single data point about what worked for your situation does not necessarily apply to everyone else's situation.
I think you're talking about parental leave which is a different thing and another area where the US falls short compared to other developed countries. This is to provide care for your kids after you would have gone back to work in any regular scenario until the kids are old enough to start school.
As a parent I’m going to disagree with your disagreement.
I was lucky enough to get months of parental leave initially. I am glad I got it but at the same time I don't buy the tender, formative, vulnerable stuff too deeply. They're poop and vomit machines that nap and have very, very little interaction with the world around them. The primary benefit was for me to not have to work while deeply sleep deprived.
As my first got a little older I felt incredibly guilty dropping them off so I could go to work but that feeling very quickly subsided when I realised just how much they were thriving with the company of knowledgable teachers and bunch of peers their own age to interact with.
I still get plenty of time with my kids and we enjoy our time together immensely. And they also enjoy their time with their friends at nursery/preschool. “Stay at home with parent” isn’t actually that common when you look back historically. Childrearing has almost always taken a village.
I wonder if there is room for disruption here. Like, a NextDoor for childcare. I guess that's just group chats with your neighbors who have kids, but many people don't even know their neighbors. Maybe this is something that needs to be solved organically, not with an app.
Your presumption is that the parent is the only appropriate person to guide a child as they absorb their world. I disagree. I think teachers and peers play a valuable role too.
(In fact, judging by the way you conduct yourself online I’d say the more influences t your child has beyond you the better)
More importantly it would give parents options:
- stay home with your child and take the income
- hire a babysitter
- hire a better babysitter by adding a little cash
- take your child to daycare
- take your child to better daycare by adding a little cash
If the government also runs daycare centers that adds another option of taking your child to gov daycare. It also forces the gov and private daycares to compete.
The current policy penalizes people on the margin-- maybe an extra $500/mo would get your child much better daycare, but you're stuck between (likely) low quality government care, or losing a huge chunk of income to solve the problem yourself.
>I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years.
Or just learn from the best proven strategy -- 3 years maternity leave, free childcare from the year of 3, early retirement for grandparents who can be bothered to stay with kids so parents can have some time off.
That of course would be totally haram and communism, so instead the policy is to have immigration from places, but that is also totally haram and communism.
The western idea of individualism and the villification of the lower-class has really fucked American society. "I don't wanna pay taxes for [insert thing that doesn't benefit me]" or "if you're poor it's your fault" in a country where costs of basic necessities like medical care, insurance, food, housing, school, are skyrocketing is insane to me.
I thought everyone had the right to life, liberty, and property, but it seems like if one can't afford to live then they are just left by the wayside.
Honestly reading comments in these types of news on HN makes me lose some hope in humanity. People are actively against anything that's not helpful for them and salivate at the idea of somehow profiting on top without a care for the human needs underneath it all.
They cite government inefficiencies when they just want to "fix them" by pocketing the difference.
It's depressing how much capitalism propaganda is deeply ingrained in so many supposedly smart people.
Yeah the govt has its inefficiencies, but an inefficient program that helps people is better than no program at all. So what if it means that I pay a few extra (hundred, thousand) dollars a year in taxes? If that's the cost for housing people, I'd gladly pay it.
And as if the appeal to humanity weren't enough, how about the fact that it'll keep the streets of SF and other cities cleaner?
It's a pretty nice consolation prize considering the almost total lack of parental leave in the United States. When someone throws me a lifeline I'm not going to complain that it isn't a certified life preserver.
> provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home
That is also several times more expensive. With child care, you can divide one worker’s salary over multiple kids. You are talking about paying a salary for each kid.
These are complementary, not opposing policies. You can have funded childcare and longer parental leave funded by the state. I live somewhere that has both (not in the US, perhaps obviously).
Capitalism historically depends on the unpaid reproductive labor of women in the domestic sphere, work that is socially undervalued and made invisible, which supports capitalist systems rather than liberates women. Instituting a paid stipend for home parenting, while superficially supportive, risks reinforcing this systemic isolation by formalizing the separation of caregivers (mainly women) from the workforce and political arenas where power is exercised and negotiated.
Women confined to domesticity become disconnected from their own potential and larger societal participation.
Hate to break it to you, but many kids actually do better away from their parents than with them.
It's extremely sad, but a consistent finding in early childhood education is that the children who thrive most in daycares tend to come from the least advantaged backgrounds.
So a policy of paying parents to stay home would mostly benefit kids who are already well off.
Kids are social and like playing and learning from other kids. Daycare lets them do just that. It’s a great thing and every toddler I’ve met who wasn’t in daycare was behind in something. Especially verbal skills.
Plus daycare allows women to continue their career progression. It’s soo important. Not every woman wants to end their career as a mother to a young kid. Daycare enables successful women to thrive and still have families.
Your anecdote is just that. All of it is highly dependent on the child, their environment, and the 'educator'. Please don't make assumptions based on your limited exposure; it's not helpful.
Your "it depends" argument is that some kids aren't social, don't like playing with other kids, are better off not having exposure to social interaction with peers and practice talking.
If this is the criticism then it's a glowing endorsement of daycare and school.
No; it depends on the 'educator'. A daycare that doesn't have kids interacting in a positive way could be just as detrimental as a parent that doesn't socialize their children externally to the home.
I'm just gonna throw this out here: Well-off kids who barely know their workaholic parents have different but equally bad issues for society, than the poor kids do.
Those poor kids have learning deficits. The "well-off" kids often have morality deficits.
A mom or dad raising them properly might help them more than being Student #642 in a government childcare facility.
This isn't an argument against childcare. My children attended preschool for 3 years before Kindergarten. But I'd rather that people got equal support to have a stay-at-home parent so that people can choose.
From what I’ve seen, the research leans the other way. For example:
Children from more advantaged families were actually more likely to view unfair distribution as unfair, while poorer children were more likely to accept it. [0]
Mother’s work hours show no link to childhood behavioral problems, it’s schedule flexibility that matters. [1]
For working-class families, more father work hours correlated with fewer behavioral problems.[2]
The idea that “well-off kids” end up with morality deficits because their parents work a lot doesn’t seem to hold up.
You aren't wrong but calling it being "Student #642 in a government childcare facility" the wrong way of looking at it. Children grow up best when they are allowed to play with other children. Modern society robs kids of that and helicopter parents are bad for society.
I agree with you vigorously on both those points. I am skeptical however that NM will be able to create a lot of healthy, play-based environments for so many kids.
The market already has incentives to create them -- a ton of good places have waiting lists nationwide, showing unmet demand even at the current price. This suggests the price will need to go higher to attract enough people to do this job. It seems their "$12,000 value" estimate is based on an optimistic belief that they will be buying childcare for their citizens at current prices. When they realize there aren't that many slots available at current rates of pay, will they be okay significantly increasing the costs of the program?
So, my expectations for these facilities are very low and that's a big part of my concern.
> Hate to break it to you, but many kids actually do better away from their parents than with them.
Is this based on something?
There's research left and right shows that children under 36 months at group nurseries are linked to increased aggression, anxiety, lower emotional skills, elevated cortisol (stress hormone), which is associated with long-term health and developmental risks.
Infants and children do better with one-to-one care at home by their parents and familiar faces, rather than strangers in a group setting.
Perhaps there is something about the environment of an economically disadvantaged household that could be improved by a stipend which allows at least one parent the breathing room to dedicate full time attention to the child instead of a job (or multiple jobs). I don't think the findings you mentioned cut against that idea at all.
I hear you saying the benefit of dedicated caregiving for children mostly helps families with less economic advantage. I'd agree with that, and suggest that OP's proposal capitalizes on exactly that. I'm not convinced of what may be implied in your argument that low-earners make for bad parents and that children should be separated more from their parents for their own good. Let the internal dynamics of a family be solved first, before saying we need to separate parents from children more.
Moreover, those with more economic advantage are unlikely to take a stipend in exchange for staying home. That's not a good deal when keeping the job pays so much that they can afford to pay for childcare.
It is precisely those with less advantage who will take the deal.
So I don't agree with your prediction that such a stipend mostly benefits those who are already well off.
My daycare was called preschool. It allowed my mother to focus on my infant brother during the day while I was literally two blocks away running around, coloring and learning shapes. Show and tell was my favorite.
The most obvious example is the children of addicts. It’s hard to imagine a kid is better off stuck at home with druggie parents than spending the day in daycare.
A good example of bottom quintile policy. Because the bottom quintile has a better outcome with a certain approach, it becomes standard care for everyone else.
A realistic stay-at-home subsidy would max out around $30k. Your proposal only meaningfully shifts incentives for the bottom income quintile. For everyone else:
- Upper-income families can already afford to choose whatever setup they want.
- Middle-income families couldn’t take it because it’d mean too steep a drop in income.
So the alternative you proposed economically benefits the bottom quintile while leaving their kids worse off. For everyone else, it probably either doesn't matter or gives them cash they don't need as much.
Worse. Not just a "stranger" but a subset of strangers running "real businesses".
I would rather my kid be raised by a) spouse b) grandparents c) no-habla cash only daycare (who are catering to customers who's average values are much closer to mine than an above the table business). Only after all those options are exhausted do I look toward a "real business".
So basically this is a subsidy of the 4th place option.
Those are still options? The state isn’t going to force parents to use public daycare. However you might keep in mind that not everyone has an available spouse, and grandparents might not always be available either.
The incentive alignment of a stay at home mom who's taking care of 10-15 kids (which is typically what these operations are) to add some extra income is way better than a "real" operation that's got one manager and some min-wage employees running around herding 15 kids each while simultaneously trying to keep the state off their back.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect the former to have ADA compliant doors or hot water that meets state regulations but the "give a fuck factor" is just so, so, so much higher when someone is working out of their own home, one of their own kids is in the mix, the rest of them are kids of a friend or friend of a friend, etc, than it is when your kid is being looked after by some 20yo college kid who's doing this part time.
just flag it, and child comment below, and move on with your life. if it really bothers you, email hn@ycombinator.com. any ignorant mothertrucker can create an account and just spew hate. it's, ah, a design choice.
Am I still required to add a phone number to use signal? What's the point of that. Every single person in the USA (and probably world) is quickly and trivially de-anonymized with a phone number.
That article is out of date. It says things like "Signal still knows nothing about you", but Signal collects every user's name, phone number, photo, and a list of their contacts and permanently stores that data in the cloud.
That data is only protected by a pin (which can be brute forced) and SGX which has a history of being leaky. Researchers even demonstrated that data could be collected from Signal at one point. There are very likely side channel attacks that would allow Signal, or the government to collect the data stored in the cloud.
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