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I love how when I'm having a crappy week I can just ask people for icon community recommendations and lo and behold! I shall have many. (I love icons. Icons are awesome.)

I have just turned anonymous comments off on LJ because I was getting too much spam. For my two regular anony-commenters on LJ, I still have it on on DW. There's a link to my DW posts at the bottom of all of my LJ posts.

Don is doing much better than he was, although we've basically given up entirely on the NS medical system at this point. *sigh*

I've learned how to borrow ebooks from my local library (my tax dollars at work!) and I now have to remind myself that I don't have time to read ebooks right now, but later! The ebook revolution is pleasing to me.

History and Repeating It: Funding Through Taxation and why David Cameron is a lousy Victorian

There's a thing going around right now where certain government have decided to move to a charity-based model on public services such as libraries, schools, hospitals, and services for vulnerable populations such as disabled people.

Funny this should come up right now when I've been examining the impact of funding-related decisions such as this on educational facilities for students with disabilities in the late 19th Century. You know, when a lot of Victorians got together and went "This whole funding of public services such as libraries, schools, hospitals, and services for vulnerable populations such as disabled people needs to stop being charity based and come out of taxes."

Funding based on charity appeals is not just bad for Institutions, and it is not just bad for the people served by these Institutions. It also has long-term problems for society.

So, let's talk about my area of expertise: residential-based schooling for children with disabilities.

When the Asylum for the Blind needed to struggle constantly for money, a large part of their activities were based on, in essence, begging for money to support the school. They were constantly having to turn down applicants because they didn't have the funding to take on any more students. They couldn't effectively budget because charitable fundraising is always a crap-shoot that could end up with far too little money to feed the children in their care. They were very limited in what new programs they could introduce, had limited success in retaining teaching staff, and were unable to send their staff to other Institutions to learn how to teach blind students.
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