There is a certain amount of overhead in servicing an account whether it has $5 in it or $500,000 in it. A $5 account doesn't give the bank much to loan while a $500,000 gives the bank lots of money to loan out. So the bank would rather have 100 $500k accounts than 100 $5 accounts. The fees help make the bank willing to maintain the $5 accounts.
When it comes to banks, there is also a tier where fees are waived for high value customers. For example, checking, atm, wires, are free if you have $50k or more in your checking account.
ADHD and autism are diagnosed based on behaviors. This might work for cases at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but when it comes to trying to identify more mild cases, you are going to start seeing a lot of overlap in behaviors of the larger population. Couple that with extra funding for kids who can be said to have ADHD and autism, and you get a recipe for overdiagnosis.
Maybe it is worth it to try to make sure fewer kids with the issue slip through the cracks at the expense of diagnosing kids who don't actually have it. Maybe it's not, but it makes sense why it can happen.
That may be less true than it was 20 years ago. Even free resources like Khan Academy can go a long ways in helping parents educate their kids beyond what they know themselves. And for parents willing to spend even a fraction of what the public school would spent on education, they can pick and choose curriculum, tutors, or even online live classes with teachers well beyond what they would have in their local high school.
That said, parents without much of an education themselves may tend to set the bar too low for their children, but that often appears to be an issue in the public school as well.
I think the idea is that it is a numbers game. If you have a way to inexpensively generate a much higher click-through rate than doing it manually, your success rate will go up with a lower investment.
Well, they were giving them jobs where they could earn money as well as providing for most all the things that a homeless person is going to need. But the return on investment from people just giving handouts is hard to compete with.
> When people aren't using the services there's always a reason.
That is what I was saying. There is the perceived return on investment of using the services designed to help get one out of homelessness, and it is being weighed against the perceived return of going back to the street. If you can bring in several hundred dollars a day on the streets that you can spend on alcohol, the effort of being in a place that is trying to help you change your situation might be hard to justify.
But a big piece of the equation is how easy it is to just get cash from well-meaning people on the street.
I'm not disagreeing with you about needing help with addictions, but there are two sides to the equation.
> until we can figure out a way to convince other americans that everyone deserves a home
I helped get a homeless person into a place that provided him with an apartment, food, and work that he could do, with a path to helping him become independent. He quickly left because on the street he had a better system for getting money that he could spend on drugs. It sounded like there was a large percentage of people the charity tried to help that ended up taking that path. There were some who were able to get back on their feet. The charity basically felt it was worth giving everyone a chance in order to reach the ones that were actually trying to get out of homelessness. However, as far as providing free housing is concerned, that is what this place did.
Unfortunately (at least for this person), the well-meaning people who were always willing to give him money on the street meant what the charity was offering wasn't of interest to him.
I've tried to help some homeless people get into a place where they are provided with housing, jobs, etc. to try to get them back on their feet. They often didn't last very long because they knew that on the street, people would give them money that they could spend on drugs and alcohol. So the difficulty with giving them money for alcohol is that it might make it harder for them to stick with a place that is actually able to help them in the long run.
(And I don't mean to be critical of your position, just pointing out that it might not be neutral in the long term.)
I would argue that a shared corpus that everyone has read is a key foundation to a society with rich and nuanced social intercourse. That doesn't mean everyone has read the same books, but there would be significant benefits in kids coming out of high school or college having all read 50 or 100 of the same great books (plus anything else they wanted to read).
I've had the pleasure of listening in on some discussions from high-school students that study classics meeting each other for the first time. Their discussions tend to be very different from what you'd hear from a typical high-school student. While other students might share the language, the ones who have read the same 50 or so great books tend to have a shared vocabulary of ideas at their disposal that doesn't seem to be there without the shared books.
The Do Nothing Scripting [1] is an approach that I feel recognizes the difficulty of automation by starting out with a script that just tells you what to do like a checklist. Once you've used it to fully document all the exceptions, etc. you can then start building the automation.
An approach like this seems to give more weight to the fact that just figuring out a way to document exactly what needs to be done is often the hardest part and if you get that right before you start writing automation code, it might make make the automation much more efficient.
I agree with the overall idea of the article, but it is important to recognize that our modern assumptions make us think there is a particular version of a fairy tale that is the "correct" or "original" version. Stories handed down orally are likely changed in each telling to better fit their audience, so in that sense, the way fairy tales were told almost always included some type of sanitization or embellishment depending on who was listening.