I think this really overstates the case that 'retention' is a significant part of the picture. The average age of students taking the 4th grade test has not risen at all. There was a brief bump in retentions when the requirements went into place, but they're now at old levels.

So now increasingly more & more people getting blocked by these economic barriers we set up to recreate the old explicitly racist barriers. Everyone is being locked out by exclusionary zoning. tuition based schools, etc.

But…the timing of this coincided with the loss of the U.S. special post-war status & the rise & recover of other industrialized nations & so the prosperity that allowed the “right” people to hop over the economic barriers (while blocking others) started to falter.

1. Bigots don’t like it so they replaced explicitly bigoted policies with economic proxies like exclusionary zoning, converting public Uni’s to be more tuition-funded instead of tax-funded. Due to correlations btwn race & income, income barriers effectively acted as race barriers

But, during the height of that post-war Boom 2 big things happened. People felt guilty about the inequality & unfairness of that prosperity & we got Civil Rights, war on poverty, great society, etc. But this had two problems…

WW2 left most big industrialized counties as rubble. The non-rubble ones (like the U.S.) got to briefly rule everything & got rich. Eventually, the rubble countries rebuilt & new countries industrialized & countries like the US lost their special place. It won’t come back.

What this is really showing is our grids are being asked to do more than it was built for. Your bill pays for two things: electrons and plumbing. The electrons (wholesale power) haven’t been persistently expensive, natural gas has even been cheaper at times but the plumbing

Also, “food stamps” are debit cards these days & I remain doubtful that people are familiar enough with the designs & close enough to other shoppers to quickly recognize that the card they’re using is an EBT card. Some folks even get covers for theirs for additional privacy!

They’re really breaking out the Reagan era hits w/ the Cadillac & Steaks story in SNAP discourse. But, c’mon, you gotta update the car & the food. Cadillacs & Steaks don’t feel as fancy in 2025. That’s some Texas Roadhouse shit.

very consistent with what randy clarke said about fare enforcment, people with warrants and illegal guns on the subway are not paying

Oakland was primed to be massive in the wake of SF’s refusal to build housing. So many people & so much energy moved there, but it succumbed to excess leniency towards antisocial & criminal behavior out of empathy for low income people being displaced by SF housing refugees.

I know folks across a broad income spectrum & I’ve know very rich jerks & very poor jerks & very rich good people & very poor good people. In my life “goodness” & wealth seem unrelated. It’s weird to Me when folks relate them. (Also true for folks who think poor = bad)

Later story swung to someone that she clearly thought was bad & she made a point to mention how rich & successful this bad person was & it dawned on me that she had a rich = bad, poor = good heuristic & those stories of her dad’s dumb business stuff was meant to show he was good!

One time I was talking to a very DSA involved friend of mine about family & she kept bringing up really dumb business ventures her dad made that ruined the family financially but she was clearly trying to portray her dad in a very positive light. It struck me as odd…

if it never happens, NYers are less likely to realize it makes NJ & CT will become appealing & their residents will also get free buses when in the city, subsidizes by NY & buses would be annoyingly jammed w/ tourists. The cabs & uber drivers would lose paying tourist passengers

As a politician, it’s almost better to have your policy *not* implemented. You don’t have to take responsibility for the downsides. You can claim it woulda been all lollipops & unicorns. It exists only in an imagined state of perfection. And you can vilify those who blocked it.

“Make greedy rich bastards pay for your free shit” is electorally popular. But, such policies have downsides. Albany knows that. They won’t go along w/ it. He’ll escape responsibility for those downside effects & get to claim it woulda been awesome while pointing blame at others.

That’s clearly an H.

@growing_daniel But also, like FBI, ATF, DEA, police, sheriffs, etc. don’t wear masks and presumably also have many enemies. It’s just objectively weird that they look like the dept was created the night before & outfitted last minute at a Cabelas.

I have an inkling of a political hypothesis that I think is driven purely by my enjoyment of the inherent metaphor that maintaining a Big Tent becomes harder the more WASPs there are in the tent.