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Whirlpool (the appliance manufacturer) donated washers and driers to schools and increased attendance.
According to Whirlpool's research, one in five school children report difficulty finding clean clothes to wear to school. It turns out that offering free in-school laundry services to kids with attendance problems increases their attendance.
When compared to factors like economic opportunity, unemployment, and institutional racism, laundry seems pretty inconsequential in the fight to keep kids in school. But while that might be the case for their parents, for a ten-year-old who already has the odds stacked against them, having nothing clean to wear to school could be the deciding factor in whether or not they want to face their classmates that day.
I can remember my grandmother telling me that she thought lunches in schools were a wonderful innovation, because they didn't have anything like that when she was a girl, and many children couldn't come because they wouldn't have lunch. I'm sure back then nobody thought of lunch as something school should provide. Now apparently laundry is the next big innovation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:51PM
What you're describing isn't a set of ideals so much as a programme for action. This isn't bad, but you're not saying how you would get there. Who gets to push thorium generation? How? Using which incentives, prohibitions and legal structures? What are the limits placed on government, if any? How do you prevent government agents from becoming the new elite? How do you prevent anybody else from becoming the new elite? Why hydroponics and tower farms? What about the limited resources upon which they rely? How are those allocated? How are conflicts adjudicated? How do you assure Pareto efficiency with your system of vouchers? How do you prevent voucher black markets from cropping up? What about commodity black currencies? How do you compensate people who deliver things paid for by vouchers? How do you ensure that they give voucher holders equal priority?
These questions, in case you're wondering, come pretty directly in most cases from world experience with proposals similar to yours, whether you're talking about war rationing systems, attempts to do various forms of alternative farming at grand scale, and alternative legal systems that left lacunae in terms of dispute resolution over access to resources.
To put it another way, you're a meta-level too high. Get down to more fundamental points.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday August 21 2016, @02:13AM
Yeah, I've thought about all this, and come to the conclusion that the blocker is lack of political will, not lack of technology.
At this point, unfortunately, I think only a tragedy (and I count massive, bloody revolution in this category) is going to allow these changes to happen. Too many people with too much power are too invested in the status quo, and as this seems to be a consequence of human nature, I don't think there's any way of putting a permanent end to that.
There is a reason "may you live in interesting times" is a swear-phrase in Mandarin.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...