If he spent $2 on junk, why would he give you a receipt for it? Either way, he has to be accountable by providing you change for the money you gave him and a receipt for the money he spent. How fucking hard is this to figure out for christ's sake?!
Where's the idiocy? Oh, here it is - IF THEY BOUGHT $4 WORTH OF STUFF AND HALF OF IT WAS CRAP, THEY'D HAVE A RECIEPT FOR $4 WORTH OF STUFF, INCLUDING CRAP.
Additionally, having this be on the internet via a swipe-card of some sort wouldn't change the potential for someone to just buy crap and throw the good stuff away.
Stop trying to make things difficult when they're painfully simple.
Fortunately, websites with personal data are never compromised or cracked. Especially ones touting Microsoft certification. Yep. That'd never go wrong.
And what I'm suggesting is that you be a responsible parent by teaching your child to eat well to begin with. If you are so concerned, then just tell them you want them to bring their fucking reciepts home. That's a cheaper and more personal solution than your kids knowing they essentially have some sort of fucking flight-data-recorder strapped to their gut that you can monitor in real time over the internet.
Oh man, no kidding. The only people I've ever met that liked Eyes Wide Shut were goth chicks. The kind of people who are into the whole poly-amorous, free-love, everything-is-art things found it the most amazing movie ever. For the sane among us, it was just a long, boring retarded romp through some underground sex cult. And Nicole Kidman isn't even a hot enough chick to have made that worth while.
I seriously hated that movie and I'm glad I only paid $10 for the DVD.
The thing that pisses me off the most is how many of these people taking one or more medications (wellbutrin, etc) are diagnosed with little more than "anxiety disorder".
They're people who are nervous or panic if they go outside or have to be around a group of people. Especially new people. Or whatever. I mean, who ISN'T at least a little on-edge in certain situations? And how can so much of the population have such a hard time with it, that they need to be prescribed drugs just to step outside their door or go have dinner in a public place or get their ass to work?!
It sounds much like a cop-out to me. Some people are just more social than others. If you're likely to freak out and stab some people or so depressed and self-loathing that you're likely to slit your wrists, I can understand medicating you (though there is a whole Darwin/clean-the-gene-pool discussion to be had there). But do we really need to be medicating you, because "lots of people make me nervous"?!
Hey, I'm a big fat guy (that didn't used to be) and I'm more self concious about going out in public now. I'm a friendly, engaging person and you wouldn't know I was self-concious or nervous ever, even if I really was. But I just suck it up and be a man about it. I certainly don't need a fucking stockpile of mood altering, mind-numbing pills for it.
Now, granted, maybe this "panic attack" thing really IS so incredibly strong that the medications (for the rest of your life apparently) are justified. But that still doesn't explain why SO MANY PEOPLE seem to have this "panic attack" and "anxiety disorder" thing.
If you watch some of the commercials that advertise drugs for such things, they would have you believe that if you "sometimes feel under the weather" or "would rather stay in sometimes than go out" or "feel uncomfortable in new situations" - you need to contact your doctor and ask about some prescription drug or another. I mean, holy crap - apparently unless you're always smiling, agreeble and going out to party - you have a mental disorder?!?!
Um... When I went to Chuck E. Cheese (probably both times in the late 80s), there were nothing but little kids and families. And no alcohol that I recall. Strictly a place for the under twelve crowd.
As for Arcades, I wouldn't know. By the time I started going to arcades, there were just a handful of tiny ones at the malls filled with dorky guys (I don't think I'd ever seen an adult women in one unless she was with her children). Then there were the arcades where you paid $4 to get in and you could stay all day and the games were free (or the nickel arcades, also). I don't really recall seeing girls at either of those, either. And certainly no booze.
Maybe arcades were different elsewhere, but in the pacific northwest, through the 90s onward, that's the last place to go to meet chicks. You might as well be going to the family barbecue.
I can just see that stupid chick who directed that whiney "life is so hard for a girl" movie "Thirteen" (worst piece of indulgent crap EVER). This seems like EXACTLY her type of material.
Of course, she won't call the brats to the floor for anything. Her movie would sympathize with the plight of spoiled little rich girls indulged by their mommies and daddies and older guys. Oh, so tragic being a rich pretty young female! You have to, like, look pretty and keep your mouth shut and stuff! Ohmigod!
Yeah, I don't see how she could have enough content for a coherent movie. And gee, there hasn't been a movie about spoiled rich brats out of touch with reality who fuck around, drink a lot, do a lot of drugs, are on a lot of prescriptions, have lots of mental problems and have a lot of eating disorders and mental breakdowns and spend their time whining to the $200/hr therapist about how mommy and daddy don't love them.
Come on - it's a cliche. We've all been there, been around it, known people like that or at least seen enough movies/books/television about it.
Man, no kidding. I'm surprised by how many people I know who are on one, two or more medications. And we're usually talking xanax, prozac, zoloft and the like rather than blood pressure meds. And not just spoiled little rich kids, though they tend to be the most likely, because they're more likely to get a therapist if they have "problems" and, in turn, are more likely then to be prescribed drugs to deal with whatever lame problem they supposedly have.
I can't even count how many people I know who claim they have "anxiety disorder" and "panic attacks". So they dope up on half a dozen things, instead. I mean, yeah, life sucks - but holy shit.
And then after awhile, they start trading their prescriptions with other people. A few zoloft in turn for a few valium. Or if they have some leftovers (especially stuff like valium and percoset), they hand them off to their friends so they can get off on them, too.
It's just pathetic. And I bet that half the people I know other than at work are like that. Often people I would have never guessed. They'd like you to think that they need it because their life is so terrible, but the truth is lots of peopel have a hard life. These people just have a hard time dealing with life.
And yeah, I know the girls with 400 pairs of expensive shoes who have traveled more by the age of 18 than I could ever hope to travel in four lifetimes. Their biggest concerns seem to be "panties or not?" on any given date for any given night. Oh, such dilemmas.
If I were a professor and I had to deal with people like that for a living on a daily basis, I'd probably vent, too. In fact, I'd probably climb the nearest clock tower.
You're talking about something completely different. PlanetSide is not exactly an "RPG". it's certainly massive, multiplayer and online. And it is persistant. But I don't see that it has much RPG in it. There isn't much difference between voice in that and voice in Halo 2 over Xbox Live. It's the same thing - except your stats continue to remain after you logout.
In a game like World of Warcraft, however, it would completely disrupt the suspension of disbelief and the whole RPG aspect.
Yeah, I'd looked at their site earlier. Note that they "only work with MSIE" and "only on Windows or Mac". And they're "MS Certified".
Their service is really more about providing a simple payment solution for meals in school, college, corporations and everything in between. That seems fine. My problem is that the school is using the fact that this would generate an online record to serve another purpose than this company seems to have intended.
And here is where I see the biggest problem coming in from a technical standpoint.
We're dealing with money. This means there will probably have to be a bank account number involved somewhere. And then a way to attach it to the student. Probably their social security number.
Bank of America, Citi-Bank, major universities and the US Government can't manage to keep the bad guys from getting this data. What chance does some rinky-dink company contracted by some rinky-dink school district have of remaining secure?
You guys are all a buncha dicks. Now you're got me off digging through my huge DVD collection trying to find my copy of AI so I can watch it again and see if I feel different about it the second time.
You don't meet bangable girls at an arcade. Maybe your definition of bangable is different than mine. The only place worth your time if you're going out to hook up and get laid is a place that is dark, noisey and has an endless supply of alcohol to ply the other person with.
But if you think you're going to woo some four-eyed comic-convention-loving chick over a game of whack-a-mole, go for it.
Dave and Buster's rocks. But it's more adult oriented. You know, with the booze and all. Then again, who wants kids hanging around a place like that when you're trying to have fun.
I got bored when I went to Dave and Busters, though. The only games they had tended to be really boring shooters with huge screens where you put your foot on a pedal to reload and you basically just fired aimlessly and kept reloading. There wasn't much to it. If you press the triggets enough times and stand there long enough, you'll beat the game. *yaaawn*
Yeah, but why do I want to meet some chubby chick who has to hang out at the dork-center to find guys or make friends with some geek and the girlfriend he dragged along with him? You can meet fellow dorks anywhere. Unless this place is somehow magically going to attract people I'm going to want to bump uglies with, why waste my time? Christ, I can meet other dorks at the office. Or at the local computer store. Or Fry's. Or a LUG. Or any sort of convention of any type.
Well, I only went there once or twice, but they didn't have much in the way of videogames as I recall. They had animatronic things. THey had ball cages. Slides. Climby-tubey-hidey sorts of things. Cargo nets. The "whack a mole" game thing. Skeet ball, basketball and other things.
How many times have we been at a friend's house as a kid and heard their parents comment about the food they're eating or their diet or their weight, while the parent is simultaneously pounding down a beer, drinking a soda or pigging out on potato chips or some other crap?
You can't be sure your kid doesn't smoke when you're not around. Or drink. Or anything else. But you can set a good example. And you can't tell me that shit doesn't work, because I don't smoke or drink and that's largely due to good examples set by my family around me.
If everyone in my family was hitting the bong, smoking and getting drunk - but went out of their way to say "don't do drugs, smoke or drink" I probably would be drinking, smoking and hitting the bong (or worse) today. And having my parents snooping around in such a way as this school is offering would not have helped, either.
Anyway, if you are an attentive parent and provide a good breakfast and dinner for your child and then three decent meals on each of their day's off - those five lunches that they fend for themselves on are not going to pork them up or kill them. Add that stuff to a crappy diet at home and it's terrible... but you have your kids for 16 meals a week, compared to the 5 they're on their own. You have the overwhelming control over their diet. And even if they just ate spoonfulls of sugar for that other 25% of the time, that's still a 75% good diet.
But no, parents don't want to be active with their kids when they can just make them go to PE at school. They don't want to provide their kids healthy diets when they can just make the school do it for them and login to a website to check up on them in between sneaking around behind your spouses back with someone in the chat rooms and sucking down your pork rinds.
I'm tired of parents making excuses. "But the media!..." and all that crap. Come on, "But it's too hard!" is something I'd expect to hear from a two year old - not someone with a two year old...
So I can go to a place to pay to play videogames at a table in a restaurant where everyone else is sitting in their own group or by themselves *also* staring at the table? Dude, I'll stay home and login somewhere and play a game, thanks.
People are highly overrated. Especially random strangers in a place that serves food.
Besides, most of what Chuck E. Cheese offered was something other than videogames. Actual physical things you could interact with.
I was a "free-lunch" kid, too. But even at the age of thirteen or so, I knew what a handout was and that someone somewhere was paying for it when it isn't their obligation. So you know what I did? I brought my own lunch or I starved. Usually, I starved. Granted, I was also a wrestler, so I probably wouldn't have eaten the school food anyway (gotta make weight), but I wasn't about to go to the office and ask for my ticket from the office lady who gives them out to kids in the free lunch program, then go stand in line and wait my turn for a freebie.
And just because my one parent might have thought it was a necessary option (and I suppose no matter what your circumstance, you feel obligated to feed your kid even if it means a handout) - that doesn't mean that I felt it was the right thing for me to do.
And you know what? To this day, I bitch about my taxes. It's my money. My time. My hard work. I'm sorry for other people's hardships, but that's their problem. I have obligations in my own family to attend to, without making sure some grubby kid somewhere gets a free pork sammich at school because his parents couldn't provide it for him.
Now, as a tax payer, if they wanted to feed the kid properly - I might not mind so much. But why should I feel compelled to give a kid a couple bucks every day so he can have what amounts to 50 cents worth of the crappiest battered and fried fishsticks dipped in rank heart-attack tartar sauce?
Then tell your kid you expect to see the reciept or the money back.
Plus, what is to stop the kids from spending $2 bucks on a healthy sandwhich that he throws away, then another $2 on a soda and chips that he eats?
Well, if you gave your kid $4 and he only has a reciept for $2 worth of stuff and he doesn't still have the other $2, then that seems pretty obvious to me.
I mean, this is simple stuff. You know, my parents used to send me to the store and ask me to get a reciept, too. It was really easy. You buy something. You bring back the reciept and the leftover change. The math part is really easy, too.
I'm not seeing what the difficulty is here for these parents.
all the time, and have it recorded). But this is not government, this is a parent watching what their kid is eating.
No. Giving students a RECIEPT for their purchases and then, if the parent gives a damn, telling the kid "show me a reciept for your school lunch today" is a parent watching their kid.
A school and a company providing a digital card to purchase their meals, track their items, placing them on the internet with some sort of identifier and then sharing it with parents (and whoever else) is NOT just the PARENT watching their kid.
This is easy. If MY tax money is feeding the kids they get NO CHOICE. I want to pick what they eat. Nothing but carrots and soy milk. Why should a taxpayer give his money for a kid to eat greasy fries that will make him 50 pounds overweight, so when the kid becomes a 40 year old, taxpayers will once again have to pay for his high blood pressure medicine??
Guess what? Your taxes do pay for school lunches. And guess what? Most schools provide static lunches for kids. Every kid in the school gets the same meal that day and the kid couldn't pick a healthy meal if he _wanted_ to. Trust me, I was a wrestler through most of my school life and I never ate school lunches, because they were always greasy, fattening and disgusting.
You get a kid filled with junk food, no vitamins, and too much sugar, and they act like little monkeys jumping out of their pants.
Yeah, because fat kids are always the troublemakers and the skinny kids are always quiet, obedient angels.
This is BS. When I was 10 I knew what was "healthy food", and I would pick McDonalds over it every day of the week and twice on sundays. I was young, but the commercials were really cool, McDonalds was a popular place, and I liked their food. Plus, you could get toys there.
So that means you should feed your kid shit at home because you're a lazy or stupid parent, and then put the onus on them to go to school and have their "healthy meal of the day" there?
No matter what a parent teaches their kid, it is hard to make the lesson stick when McDonalds has a commercial on TV every half hour telling your kids the exact opposite.
Guess what - it's evenharder to make the lesson stick when you're telling the kid "eat your veggies" but you're feeding them instant everything filled with sugar and salt and fat. If a kid has a good example (of anything) at home, he's more likely to pick up on that himself (in anything).
Text. Typing. It's a very RPG-ish thing. Voicechat is not. I don't want to know that the beefy warrior I'm partying with through the mountains is actually some dinky thirteen year old kid with a retainer. I don't want to know that the really hot night elf with the long legs and the quiver full of hard, stiff arrows is really a 45 year old guy with a speech impedement.
What's next? In-game video-chat? That's about the only thing I can imagine that would ruin the experience much more. MMORPGs devolve into too much of a "chat room" thing as it is, without adding in video/audio chatting.
I'd much rather have NPCs that speak, instead. Especially in games like War Craft. Save my poor eyes the extra reading and include some damned voice dialogue!
Hm. School tracking exactly what they're eating. With a digital card. And puttin that on the internet. Yeah, what could be the problem here?
What about the parent's rights? If they don't have the righ to know if the school is giving the child some free condoms or that (in some places) the child is going to have an abortion.... why should they have the right of knowing every little piece of food the kids consumes?
The only thing I can see this resolving is the poor kid who gets NO lunch because he's bullied for his parents' money on the way to school.
This is a great idea. We all know how well things usually turn out when personal information about underage students is put online by their school district.
Not to mention, I wouldn't be surprised if more than 50% of the students' parents don't pay for their lunches and they are on a reduced/free lunch program funded by tax-payers.
You have to teach students to eat well before you can expect them to eat well. I'm tired of seeing parents who only make a home cooked meal once a week, live off of hamburger helper and delivery pizza, send the kid to grade school and middle school where the provided lunches are fried everything (hamburgers, hamburger pizza, spaghetti with melted cheese, cheese sandwiches, hotdogs, weiner wraps, macaroni and cheese, fish sticks, chicken nuggets and so on) - and some how expect them to make the same wise meal choices that YOU don't make for YOURSELF or FOR THEM or that their SCHOOLS have made for them thus far.
The fact is that children will have a better appetite for better things if they're used to them. A kid who grows up on steak, potatos and veggies will prefer that whereas a kid that grew up on over-salted, over-sugared, mostly-synthetic boxed/pre-packaged/ready-mix/vending machine/deep fried/fast food/delivery/microwavable/tv dinner foods will prefer those types of foods.
But hey, if parents don't want to take responsibility for it - that's all good.
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Boy, are you retarded.
If he spent $2 on junk, why would he give you a receipt for it? Either way, he has to be accountable by providing you change for the money you gave him and a receipt for the money he spent. How fucking hard is this to figure out for christ's sake?!
Where's the idiocy? Oh, here it is - IF THEY BOUGHT $4 WORTH OF STUFF AND HALF OF IT WAS CRAP, THEY'D HAVE A RECIEPT FOR $4 WORTH OF STUFF, INCLUDING CRAP.
Additionally, having this be on the internet via a swipe-card of some sort wouldn't change the potential for someone to just buy crap and throw the good stuff away.
Stop trying to make things difficult when they're painfully simple.
Oh, and you never rolled around in the ball-cage, licking the aged-urine the plastic balls were soaked in?
Fortunately, websites with personal data are never compromised or cracked. Especially ones touting Microsoft certification. Yep. That'd never go wrong.
And what I'm suggesting is that you be a responsible parent by teaching your child to eat well to begin with. If you are so concerned, then just tell them you want them to bring their fucking reciepts home. That's a cheaper and more personal solution than your kids knowing they essentially have some sort of fucking flight-data-recorder strapped to their gut that you can monitor in real time over the internet.
Oh man, no kidding. The only people I've ever met that liked Eyes Wide Shut were goth chicks. The kind of people who are into the whole poly-amorous, free-love, everything-is-art things found it the most amazing movie ever. For the sane among us, it was just a long, boring retarded romp through some underground sex cult. And Nicole Kidman isn't even a hot enough chick to have made that worth while.
I seriously hated that movie and I'm glad I only paid $10 for the DVD.
The thing that pisses me off the most is how many of these people taking one or more medications (wellbutrin, etc) are diagnosed with little more than "anxiety disorder".
They're people who are nervous or panic if they go outside or have to be around a group of people. Especially new people. Or whatever. I mean, who ISN'T at least a little on-edge in certain situations? And how can so much of the population have such a hard time with it, that they need to be prescribed drugs just to step outside their door or go have dinner in a public place or get their ass to work?!
It sounds much like a cop-out to me. Some people are just more social than others. If you're likely to freak out and stab some people or so depressed and self-loathing that you're likely to slit your wrists, I can understand medicating you (though there is a whole Darwin/clean-the-gene-pool discussion to be had there). But do we really need to be medicating you, because "lots of people make me nervous"?!
Hey, I'm a big fat guy (that didn't used to be) and I'm more self concious about going out in public now. I'm a friendly, engaging person and you wouldn't know I was self-concious or nervous ever, even if I really was. But I just suck it up and be a man about it. I certainly don't need a fucking stockpile of mood altering, mind-numbing pills for it.
Now, granted, maybe this "panic attack" thing really IS so incredibly strong that the medications (for the rest of your life apparently) are justified. But that still doesn't explain why SO MANY PEOPLE seem to have this "panic attack" and "anxiety disorder" thing.
If you watch some of the commercials that advertise drugs for such things, they would have you believe that if you "sometimes feel under the weather" or "would rather stay in sometimes than go out" or "feel uncomfortable in new situations" - you need to contact your doctor and ask about some prescription drug or another. I mean, holy crap - apparently unless you're always smiling, agreeble and going out to party - you have a mental disorder?!?!
Um... When I went to Chuck E. Cheese (probably both times in the late 80s), there were nothing but little kids and families. And no alcohol that I recall. Strictly a place for the under twelve crowd.
As for Arcades, I wouldn't know. By the time I started going to arcades, there were just a handful of tiny ones at the malls filled with dorky guys (I don't think I'd ever seen an adult women in one unless she was with her children). Then there were the arcades where you paid $4 to get in and you could stay all day and the games were free (or the nickel arcades, also). I don't really recall seeing girls at either of those, either. And certainly no booze.
Maybe arcades were different elsewhere, but in the pacific northwest, through the 90s onward, that's the last place to go to meet chicks. You might as well be going to the family barbecue.
I can just see that stupid chick who directed that whiney "life is so hard for a girl" movie "Thirteen" (worst piece of indulgent crap EVER). This seems like EXACTLY her type of material.
Of course, she won't call the brats to the floor for anything. Her movie would sympathize with the plight of spoiled little rich girls indulged by their mommies and daddies and older guys. Oh, so tragic being a rich pretty young female! You have to, like, look pretty and keep your mouth shut and stuff! Ohmigod!
Yeah, I don't see how she could have enough content for a coherent movie. And gee, there hasn't been a movie about spoiled rich brats out of touch with reality who fuck around, drink a lot, do a lot of drugs, are on a lot of prescriptions, have lots of mental problems and have a lot of eating disorders and mental breakdowns and spend their time whining to the $200/hr therapist about how mommy and daddy don't love them.
Come on - it's a cliche. We've all been there, been around it, known people like that or at least seen enough movies/books/television about it.
Man, no kidding. I'm surprised by how many people I know who are on one, two or more medications. And we're usually talking xanax, prozac, zoloft and the like rather than blood pressure meds. And not just spoiled little rich kids, though they tend to be the most likely, because they're more likely to get a therapist if they have "problems" and, in turn, are more likely then to be prescribed drugs to deal with whatever lame problem they supposedly have.
I can't even count how many people I know who claim they have "anxiety disorder" and "panic attacks". So they dope up on half a dozen things, instead. I mean, yeah, life sucks - but holy shit.
And then after awhile, they start trading their prescriptions with other people. A few zoloft in turn for a few valium. Or if they have some leftovers (especially stuff like valium and percoset), they hand them off to their friends so they can get off on them, too.
It's just pathetic. And I bet that half the people I know other than at work are like that. Often people I would have never guessed. They'd like you to think that they need it because their life is so terrible, but the truth is lots of peopel have a hard life. These people just have a hard time dealing with life.
And yeah, I know the girls with 400 pairs of expensive shoes who have traveled more by the age of 18 than I could ever hope to travel in four lifetimes. Their biggest concerns seem to be "panties or not?" on any given date for any given night. Oh, such dilemmas.
If I were a professor and I had to deal with people like that for a living on a daily basis, I'd probably vent, too. In fact, I'd probably climb the nearest clock tower.
You're talking about something completely different. PlanetSide is not exactly an "RPG". it's certainly massive, multiplayer and online. And it is persistant. But I don't see that it has much RPG in it. There isn't much difference between voice in that and voice in Halo 2 over Xbox Live. It's the same thing - except your stats continue to remain after you logout.
In a game like World of Warcraft, however, it would completely disrupt the suspension of disbelief and the whole RPG aspect.
Yeah, I'd looked at their site earlier. Note that they "only work with MSIE" and "only on Windows or Mac". And they're "MS Certified".
Their service is really more about providing a simple payment solution for meals in school, college, corporations and everything in between. That seems fine. My problem is that the school is using the fact that this would generate an online record to serve another purpose than this company seems to have intended.
And here is where I see the biggest problem coming in from a technical standpoint.
We're dealing with money. This means there will probably have to be a bank account number involved somewhere. And then a way to attach it to the student. Probably their social security number.
Bank of America, Citi-Bank, major universities and the US Government can't manage to keep the bad guys from getting this data. What chance does some rinky-dink company contracted by some rinky-dink school district have of remaining secure?
You guys are all a buncha dicks. Now you're got me off digging through my huge DVD collection trying to find my copy of AI so I can watch it again and see if I feel different about it the second time.
I hate you assholes. I'm goin' home.
You don't meet bangable girls at an arcade. Maybe your definition of bangable is different than mine. The only place worth your time if you're going out to hook up and get laid is a place that is dark, noisey and has an endless supply of alcohol to ply the other person with.
But if you think you're going to woo some four-eyed comic-convention-loving chick over a game of whack-a-mole, go for it.
Dave and Buster's rocks. But it's more adult oriented. You know, with the booze and all. Then again, who wants kids hanging around a place like that when you're trying to have fun.
I got bored when I went to Dave and Busters, though. The only games they had tended to be really boring shooters with huge screens where you put your foot on a pedal to reload and you basically just fired aimlessly and kept reloading. There wasn't much to it. If you press the triggets enough times and stand there long enough, you'll beat the game. *yaaawn*
I don't want to know your name - I just want to BANG BANG BANG!
Yeah, but why do I want to meet some chubby chick who has to hang out at the dork-center to find guys or make friends with some geek and the girlfriend he dragged along with him? You can meet fellow dorks anywhere. Unless this place is somehow magically going to attract people I'm going to want to bump uglies with, why waste my time? Christ, I can meet other dorks at the office. Or at the local computer store. Or Fry's. Or a LUG. Or any sort of convention of any type.
Well, I only went there once or twice, but they didn't have much in the way of videogames as I recall. They had animatronic things. THey had ball cages. Slides. Climby-tubey-hidey sorts of things. Cargo nets. The "whack a mole" game thing. Skeet ball, basketball and other things.
That's exactly right.
How many times have we been at a friend's house as a kid and heard their parents comment about the food they're eating or their diet or their weight, while the parent is simultaneously pounding down a beer, drinking a soda or pigging out on potato chips or some other crap?
You can't be sure your kid doesn't smoke when you're not around. Or drink. Or anything else. But you can set a good example. And you can't tell me that shit doesn't work, because I don't smoke or drink and that's largely due to good examples set by my family around me.
If everyone in my family was hitting the bong, smoking and getting drunk - but went out of their way to say "don't do drugs, smoke or drink" I probably would be drinking, smoking and hitting the bong (or worse) today. And having my parents snooping around in such a way as this school is offering would not have helped, either.
Anyway, if you are an attentive parent and provide a good breakfast and dinner for your child and then three decent meals on each of their day's off - those five lunches that they fend for themselves on are not going to pork them up or kill them. Add that stuff to a crappy diet at home and it's terrible... but you have your kids for 16 meals a week, compared to the 5 they're on their own. You have the overwhelming control over their diet. And even if they just ate spoonfulls of sugar for that other 25% of the time, that's still a 75% good diet.
But no, parents don't want to be active with their kids when they can just make them go to PE at school. They don't want to provide their kids healthy diets when they can just make the school do it for them and login to a website to check up on them in between sneaking around behind your spouses back with someone in the chat rooms and sucking down your pork rinds.
I'm tired of parents making excuses. "But the media!..." and all that crap. Come on, "But it's too hard!" is something I'd expect to hear from a two year old - not someone with a two year old...
So I can go to a place to pay to play videogames at a table in a restaurant where everyone else is sitting in their own group or by themselves *also* staring at the table? Dude, I'll stay home and login somewhere and play a game, thanks.
People are highly overrated. Especially random strangers in a place that serves food.
Besides, most of what Chuck E. Cheese offered was something other than videogames. Actual physical things you could interact with.
I was a "free-lunch" kid, too. But even at the age of thirteen or so, I knew what a handout was and that someone somewhere was paying for it when it isn't their obligation. So you know what I did? I brought my own lunch or I starved. Usually, I starved. Granted, I was also a wrestler, so I probably wouldn't have eaten the school food anyway (gotta make weight), but I wasn't about to go to the office and ask for my ticket from the office lady who gives them out to kids in the free lunch program, then go stand in line and wait my turn for a freebie.
And just because my one parent might have thought it was a necessary option (and I suppose no matter what your circumstance, you feel obligated to feed your kid even if it means a handout) - that doesn't mean that I felt it was the right thing for me to do.
And you know what? To this day, I bitch about my taxes. It's my money. My time. My hard work. I'm sorry for other people's hardships, but that's their problem. I have obligations in my own family to attend to, without making sure some grubby kid somewhere gets a free pork sammich at school because his parents couldn't provide it for him.
Now, as a tax payer, if they wanted to feed the kid properly - I might not mind so much. But why should I feel compelled to give a kid a couple bucks every day so he can have what amounts to 50 cents worth of the crappiest battered and fried fishsticks dipped in rank heart-attack tartar sauce?
A kid will not keep his reciept.
Then tell your kid you expect to see the reciept or the money back.
Plus, what is to stop the kids from spending $2 bucks on a healthy sandwhich that he throws away, then another $2 on a soda and chips that he eats?
Well, if you gave your kid $4 and he only has a reciept for $2 worth of stuff and he doesn't still have the other $2, then that seems pretty obvious to me.
I mean, this is simple stuff. You know, my parents used to send me to the store and ask me to get a reciept, too. It was really easy. You buy something. You bring back the reciept and the leftover change. The math part is really easy, too.
I'm not seeing what the difficulty is here for these parents.
all the time, and have it recorded). But this is not government, this is a parent watching what their kid is eating.
No. Giving students a RECIEPT for their purchases and then, if the parent gives a damn, telling the kid "show me a reciept for your school lunch today" is a parent watching their kid.
A school and a company providing a digital card to purchase their meals, track their items, placing them on the internet with some sort of identifier and then sharing it with parents (and whoever else) is NOT just the PARENT watching their kid.
This is easy. If MY tax money is feeding the kids they get NO CHOICE. I want to pick what they eat. Nothing but carrots and soy milk. Why should a taxpayer give his money for a kid to eat greasy fries that will make him 50 pounds overweight, so when the kid becomes a 40 year old, taxpayers will once again have to pay for his high blood pressure medicine??
Guess what? Your taxes do pay for school lunches. And guess what? Most schools provide static lunches for kids. Every kid in the school gets the same meal that day and the kid couldn't pick a healthy meal if he _wanted_ to. Trust me, I was a wrestler through most of my school life and I never ate school lunches, because they were always greasy, fattening and disgusting.
You get a kid filled with junk food, no vitamins, and too much sugar, and they act like little monkeys jumping out of their pants.
Yeah, because fat kids are always the troublemakers and the skinny kids are always quiet, obedient angels.
This is BS. When I was 10 I knew what was "healthy food", and I would pick McDonalds over it every day of the week and twice on sundays. I was young, but the commercials were really cool, McDonalds was a popular place, and I liked their food. Plus, you could get toys there.
So that means you should feed your kid shit at home because you're a lazy or stupid parent, and then put the onus on them to go to school and have their "healthy meal of the day" there?
No matter what a parent teaches their kid, it is hard to make the lesson stick when McDonalds has a commercial on TV every half hour telling your kids the exact opposite.
Guess what - it's evenharder to make the lesson stick when you're telling the kid "eat your veggies" but you're feeding them instant everything filled with sugar and salt and fat. If a kid has a good example (of anything) at home, he's more likely to pick up on that himself (in anything).
Text. Typing. It's a very RPG-ish thing. Voicechat is not. I don't want to know that the beefy warrior I'm partying with through the mountains is actually some dinky thirteen year old kid with a retainer. I don't want to know that the really hot night elf with the long legs and the quiver full of hard, stiff arrows is really a 45 year old guy with a speech impedement.
What's next? In-game video-chat? That's about the only thing I can imagine that would ruin the experience much more. MMORPGs devolve into too much of a "chat room" thing as it is, without adding in video/audio chatting.
I'd much rather have NPCs that speak, instead. Especially in games like War Craft. Save my poor eyes the extra reading and include some damned voice dialogue!
Hm. School tracking exactly what they're eating. With a digital card. And puttin that on the internet. Yeah, what could be the problem here?
What about the parent's rights? If they don't have the righ to know if the school is giving the child some free condoms or that (in some places) the child is going to have an abortion.... why should they have the right of knowing every little piece of food the kids consumes?
The only thing I can see this resolving is the poor kid who gets NO lunch because he's bullied for his parents' money on the way to school.
This is a great idea. We all know how well things usually turn out when personal information about underage students is put online by their school district.
Not to mention, I wouldn't be surprised if more than 50% of the students' parents don't pay for their lunches and they are on a reduced/free lunch program funded by tax-payers.
You have to teach students to eat well before you can expect them to eat well. I'm tired of seeing parents who only make a home cooked meal once a week, live off of hamburger helper and delivery pizza, send the kid to grade school and middle school where the provided lunches are fried everything (hamburgers, hamburger pizza, spaghetti with melted cheese, cheese sandwiches, hotdogs, weiner wraps, macaroni and cheese, fish sticks, chicken nuggets and so on) - and some how expect them to make the same wise meal choices that YOU don't make for YOURSELF or FOR THEM or that their SCHOOLS have made for them thus far.
The fact is that children will have a better appetite for better things if they're used to them. A kid who grows up on steak, potatos and veggies will prefer that whereas a kid that grew up on over-salted, over-sugared, mostly-synthetic boxed/pre-packaged/ready-mix/vending machine/deep fried/fast food/delivery/microwavable/tv dinner foods will prefer those types of foods.
But hey, if parents don't want to take responsibility for it - that's all good.