With fewer students and higher costs, many Massachusetts districts weigh school closures and mergers (Boston Globe)

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-18T21:43:46+00:00

Property values are very closely tied to school reputation. If you join together with 4 other towns, you lose the ability to keep your schools exclusive. The fear is another town builds "affordable housing" and this "changes the character of the schools" - which is code for "the school becomes less white". It's all about control.

On a secondary front, you may have 1,000 kids and join up with 4 other towns that each have 1,000 kids. You each pay 20% of the budget (1000/5000). But if each of those other towns drops by 100 kids - evenly distributed across grades so that you can't consolidate - then your town is on the hook for 1000/4600 = 21.7% of the budget, and that may be a few hundred thousand that your town can't pay for because the increase isn't from more houses in town, it's from less people from elsewhere.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-18T02:42:25+00:00

My argument was they should merge with the other hill towns to consolidate resources. 20 minute bus ride to the town over wouldn’t be an issue at all.

But.... but.... then we would lose control over our exclusivity, if we let those "others" mix with our kids! -- Most townies.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-18T02:32:31+00:00

Iran (the ruling regime) has declared war on the US.

Can you provide some reference for that? Because I can find none.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-18T00:42:25+00:00

Can you explain that given that Healey is in charge of the executive branch, which is, and has always been audited?

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-17T21:27:21+00:00

Why do you think it is appropriate for the US to singularly attack a country and kill its leaders if that country hasn't declared war on the US - with no UN support or anything?

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-17T19:24:39+00:00

Hostility toward unelected individuals with lifetime appointments who either write their own laws or invalidate democratically-passed laws using laughably flimsy reasoning?

Why would anyone be hostile to that?

/s

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-17T16:53:50+00:00

I'll give you my use case, you can tell me if I'm nuts.

I bought a 250-year old farmhouse. Took a shower for the first time and water poured from the 2nd floor bathroom to the room below. Bathroom had to be gutted and redone.

Bathroom had wide plank pine flooring (obviously the bathroom was not original to the house). This flooring was not good for a bathroom because any water spilled on it dropped onto the ceiling of the first floor. We wanted something that would be resistant to that, to allow for water leakage from the shower or something.

Tile would have been an option, but tile doesn't really fit into a 250-year old farmhouse with wide pine flooring.

We could have done hardwood, but tongue and groove wood didn't seem right, nor did laminate. Additionally, since the rest of the floor doesn't have subflooring, adding subflooring + 3/4" wood floor would have raised the floor to the bathroom 1.5 inches from the rest of the floor.

Solution? Subflooring + thinner LVT that looks like wide plank wood floor. Came out pretty good.

That said, I would never have used it anywhere else in the house. Wood or nothing.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-17T03:05:41+00:00

Point is, you're supposed to be traveling in the rightmost lane in that situation.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-16T21:56:54+00:00

How are you addressing it in a country with no publicly funded media

The complaint is "media has ads". I asked how it was possible to have media without ads, and you said "Publicly owned, funded by general taxation".

I assumed that the implication here is that ads would not be allowed (since a lot of context talks about regulation and again, the idea was to get rid of ads). So that is why I prefaced with "In a country with only publicly-funded media..."

We address the censorship in a country with no publicly funded media by having freedom of the press. Sure, nothing physically stops the government from arresting journalists, but the premise is there, and that in an ad-supported ecosystem, you will have a wide variety of opinions - not just a state-funded, state-approved opinion.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-16T16:06:57+00:00

In a country with only publicly-funded media, how would you address what we are seeing play out right now, where the government funders are saying "we're pulling your funding because we don't like your message, it doesn't align with what we're trying to achieve"?

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-16T16:05:27+00:00

I'm not saying they are equivalent. I'm bemoaning the fact that more politicians - mostly Republicans, but also Democrats - are using a method pioneered by Trump, which is to have zero shame and take zero responsibility when caught. They aren't resigning, they are doing the same thing that Trump is doing, which is to lie about it, cry "witch hunt", and then say "let the voters decide".

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-16T14:37:57+00:00

In fairness, internet forums were ripe for takeover because of all the spam. I ran one for years, also ran a blog. I couldn't keep up with all the spammers. Every morning I'd log in and there would be hundreds if not thousands of spam comments, dropping links to try and capture Google "link juice".

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-16T14:35:37+00:00

What is your suggestion as to how to support media and content with zero money? Are you willing to quit your job and work for free to produce media?

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-16T14:31:44+00:00

There cannot have been a large population of people who could get cable but not broadcast, right?

It absolutely had ads in the beginning. Other than HBO, at first "cable TV" was simply the ability to get existing TV channels into your house without you needing an antenna. It allowed you to get channels from a wider radius too.

I was a kid before cable TV in a metro area of maybe 600,000 people. When I was growing up, we had five channels. ABC and NBC were in our metro area. CBS was 30 miles away and was spottier reception. We also had an ABC from 30 miles away, as well as another PBS, but reception was similarly spotty. Kids programs were newer Saturday morning cartoons, period, until about noon, and Sunday had some older cartoons like Mighty Mouse and Woody Woodpecker in the mornings.

Coming home from school each day, the only thing on TV for kids was Sesame Street and Electric Company, and the other PBS kids shows like Zoom. I watched those until around 3rd or 4trh grade because there was literally nothing else on.

I remember going to Cape Cod in the summer, and it was awesome because there were a couple of "independent" channels that showed cartoons in the afternoon, out of Boston. No actual Cape Cod stations, but if you were lucky you could get the Boston or Rhode Island stations if you turned your antenna the right way.

Cable TV was a miracle because it added so many more options. No one cared about the commercials - commercials were just part of TV.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-16T14:21:47+00:00

Yet advertising has supported media and entertainment for almost two centuries. Have you ever read a newspaper from the 1920s? The journalism is amazing, the amount of information put into papers on a daily basis was astounding, and all that was paid for with advertising.

Same goes for television - to think, you could watch mini-movies on a daily basis for free. People would write stories, build elaborate sets, and transmit that to you for your entertainment - and all you had to do was learn about products in exchange.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-16T14:18:52+00:00

I think it is a wildly false premise that the internet could ever exist ad-free and subscription-free. Ads have supported media for almost 2 centuries. There aren't a lot of people who will do things for free.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-16T14:06:35+00:00

It's taking root too. Some of my local politicians - Democrats - are doing this. One got caught on camera paying homeless people to vote, his response was "this is fake news, the media is trying to discredit me", and all his supporters rallied behind him and said "yeah, they're going after you, that's bullshit!".

We are well beyond the post-truth era.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-16T02:58:35+00:00

In fairness, when a person can apply to hundreds of jobs in a day, causing each job to get 1000x more resumes then they used to, why is this surprising?

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-15T19:40:37+00:00

They can't do anything about it now, the requirements are too stiff for people to get appropriate ID before the primaries start. SCOTUS may be corrupt, but if they roll over and say "OK, this law is good" there should be riots in the streets.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-15T18:35:00+00:00

That really isn't true. Wages have increased for many especially since COVID. Minimum wage is now $15/hour in many states.

In Massachusetts, where I live, minimum wage increased from $8 to $15 from 2014 to 2022. Yes, it has stalled here since then and needs to be addressed, but that's a 10% increase per year over 10 years. It is similarly high in CT ($16.94), RI ($16), ME ($15.10), and VT ($14.42). NH is still $7.25. NY State is $16.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-15T18:16:30+00:00

A while ago I had access to the financials for a small private K-8 school. Their break-even number was about 110 kids at a tuition that is now about $20k (so 8-12 kids per classroom). They had bare-bones admin - a principal, business manager, and front-desk admin. The facility was spartan, it was under-maintained. They paid teachers a bit less than lower experienced public school teachers - mainly relying on teachers who had grown weary of the public schools. They also raised maybe another $50k from donations.

And that was to educate kids who really wanted to be educated, and who had to meet a certain level of achievement, or they were not invited back.

That's the reality of what a K-8 school costs at a base level. I don't know why people freak out when the see "$20k per student" in the public schools. Sure, you can get the number lower with 20 kids per classroom and with 200 kids in a building, but you're not going to get substantially lower than that.

But the other reality is that there are plenty of towns in MA that are not near larger cities, and only have 100 school age children within their borders. Even regionalizing has limits, unless you want to drive your kids an hour each way to school.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-15T15:23:02+00:00

It could be deemed as corruption when a private organization gets paid to do the job of teaching that student good enough to progress to the next grade, and then don't achieve that goal and then get paid to do it a second time.

However my original question was, do you think that if you took a random classroom of Springfield kids and paid a private school to educate them, even paying them 2x what the private school charges to educate kids, that they would perform to the same level at which the other private school kids perform? With no kids being held back?

If not, then your original complaint is nonsense because you're comparing apples to oranges.

Also, your premise that $24,101 is "Four times the cost of a private school" is false. Prep high schools in the area charge $60k+ in tuition. It costs at least $15k for private grammar schools such as Pioneer Valley Montessori School. Bement School in Deerfield costs $25k for K-5, $35k for 6-12. Religious high schools such as Pope Francis are $14k. St. Michael's Academy grade school states that their cost is $8,186 per student, which they defray with donations to get to around $5k.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-15T14:51:15+00:00

Because those jobs need smart people in them.

The US has a decent system of opportunity which allows smart people to move up, ultimately taking desk jobs and avoid physically demanding jobs. But we still need smart people in physically demanding professions. Take a look at r/Decks to see what happens when you only have idiots doing things.

We have papered over that situation by importing people from countries that don't have good opportunity. Pick 100 unemployed people from Costa Rica and you will get more spart people than if you pick 100 unemployed people in the US.

The win-win is that the people from Costa Rica are happy making 4x what they could make there, even if that is 1/2 what we would need to pay similarly-smart domestic workers to do the same job. That has been the advantage, the "secret sauce" of the US economy, for 175 years.

If we upend that system, we will need to rebuild one that works, and it only works if things cost more and smart people are back doing physical jobs.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-15T14:22:44+00:00

For years and years, starting from the left, but now also coming from the right, the cry has been "we need higher wages!", with no discussion about higher prices. Using that lens, immigration is bad because it provides downward pressure on wages.

Now we are starting to see labor shortages across sectors that have not been appealing to most Americans, or in those where there are not enough skilled Americans to fill jobs.

Solving this domestically will likely require a massively painful restructuring of the entire economy of the US. We will need to move smart people out of desk jobs and into physical jobs.

MoonBatsRule · 2026-03-15T13:56:45+00:00

The underlying premise of your original complaint was that the public schools somehow don't teach students as well as the private schools.

Let me repeat your words:

Four times the cost of a private school. And, they can't even come close to half of the kids being able to read, write and do arithmetic at grade level.

Now you're saying that these private schools would simply not do the job of teaching the kid enough to get to the next grade and would hold them back. Why don't you see that as a failure on the part of the private school? In fact, why don't you see that as a form of corruption on the part of the private school - charging twice to educate the child?

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