Tootfinder

Congressional Democrats are introducing a bill that would provide childcare relief to federal workers affected by the shutdown of the federal government,
as it drags on through a second week.
Parents would be reimbursed for fees paid to childcare facilities during the shutdown under plans initiated by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

Were they perchance inspired by the Dutch government? (The shameful false accusations of childcare benefit fraud, which all but ruined numerous families, known in the Netherlands as the #toeslagenaffaire – still not fully resolved and remedied.)

Labour admits 60% of parents wrongly targeted in HMRC child benefit fraud crackdown
Exclusive: Scale of government’s anti-fraud fiasco is four times higher than previously admitted

WA Head Start closures leave thousands of families without childcare – KIRO 7 News Seattle
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/wa-head-start-closures-leave-thousands-families-without-childcare/CZTFPLJAOBEDJI65BCZAGU32E4/

✊🏽 Socialist Politics Can Break Through to Asian Immigrants
#politics

“Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/06/europe-zohran-mamdani-policies-normal?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

"In 2020, Berlin passed a law that resulted in a five-year rent freeze [...] for 90% of the flats in the city. While the law offered relief to about 1.5 million households who had seen rents rise by an estimated third in the six years prior, it was ruled as unconstitutional in 2021 after Germany’s highest court sided with landlords and property investment lobbyists who had argued it was inappropriate and illegal for the state to meddle with the private market."

Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’
Critics of New York City’s mayor-elect have said his pledges of free bus service and universal childcare are unrealistic, but in Europe it’s a given

Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’ | Zohran Mamdani | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/06/europe-zohran-mamdani-policies-normal

Could? This has been happening for a long, long time. It's not a new phenomenon!
@… - Older Australian women could retire in poverty, new report says http…

Looming crisis for older Australian women who will retire into poverty if no urgent action taken, new report finds
Women’s super balances are disproportionately impacted by events later in life, in addition to childcare duties, which could mean serious financial problems, research from Super Members Council (SMC) has found.