Gaashk
1yr ago
Ideally all women do both--getting sufficient education and selecting good husbands.
...? To the extent that there's any selection going on, it can't be done by all women? Do you just mean the women you personally know and like or something?
Gaashk
9hr ago
Homemaking no longer takes a full day, when done in a sane fashion and without small children at home.
Gaashk
20hr ago
in the corporate world
Is that synonymous with "doing paid labor?" It's not usually used that way.
I tried looking up some information about this from BLS:
Mothers of younger children remained less likely to participate in the labor force than mothers with older children. In 2024, 68.3 percent of mothers with children under age 6 participated in the labor force compared with 78.0 percent of mothers whose youngest child was ages 6 to 17.
Caring for children under six is daycare more than schooling, so I'll leave that out. So apparently 22% of mothers are full time homemakers or unemployed. 3.4% of children are homeschooled, according to the internet.
What's the base rate of unemployment for women without children? I couldn't find that quickly -- the overall prime age labor force participation rate is 78% for women, the same as for mothers of school aged children, and 88% for men. So maybe there's some room for 10% of women who could be in the labor force, but aren't? Of whom 3%-4% are homeschooling?
That's not literally nobody, but someone who's going to do a good job homeschooling their kids won't be at the absolute bottom or capability, either. What are they otherwise doing while their kids are in school?
Gaashk
1d ago
Or, alternately, they are much more expensive, unless you consider the mother's labor to be completely worthless. If her labor is actually worthless, and the alternative is that she just sits at home watching TV all day, then she probably won't be very good as a homeschool teacher, either.
Apparently Arizona offers about $4,000/child.
Gaashk
10mo ago
Indeed: men, and more specifically men's visual perceptions of women, are precisely why women's bodies are more sexual than men's. But...you do know you share a world with men?
No, that implies that men's visual systems are more inherently sexual than women's. I suppose it's reasonable to say that women's bodies are more commonly sexualized than men's.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's wise for women to go around topless or anything, of course.
Gaashk
1yr ago
This is not a small scale question...
The small answer is to apply state force to the defectors regardless of any sympathy inducing specifics. Crush them into dust under the massive boot of Leviathan instead of shaming others for complaining about them. Let some people starve to death. Reinstate an earnest belief in hell. The question of why that's not possible is large.
Caleb Hammer interviews people (in a fairly obnoxious and click-baity style) in significant loan and credit card debt, breaks down their finances, and tries to get them on a budget with a varying amount of success. The most common factor of the guests he has on his show is eating out- for most of his guests, almost 33% of most of their monthly income is eating out at various establishments and other spending that does not significantly increase their quality of life.
Well at least this involves individual choice, not massive government bureaucracy. There are probably people who do in fact spend a lot of money eating out. There seem to be a surprising number of rather pricy restaurants, even in not terribly well off towns, so I suppose people are going there. It's doubtless more entertaining to find and talk to those people than the ones who are in debt because of health problems, or because they want to live in a big city, and are paying 60% of their income in rent. It would be quite the downer to have to tell someone to move to a much cheaper, duller city far away, choose a small apartment near public transportation, sell their car, and get rid of their pet.
Gaashk
1yr ago
The standards aren't super high for posting yourself. Just write a bit about why you find it interesting and a question, more or less. I'd prefer a short but new post to another wall of text.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Possibly so, there’s nothing to say even a more functional democracy than ours currently is needs to optimize entirely for economics.
Gaashk
1yr ago
One of my friends was asked to help develop parts of a national curriculum and tells me that teachers are pretty stupid, allergic to nuance and don't even follow the curriculum that much. Not all teachers and so on... But it was like there was some vast Power that was inserting errors of fact, errors of punctuation, errors of logic into the curriculum, that my friend was swimming against the tide. Endless anecdotes of frustration at incompetence.
My impression is that your friend, while plausibly smarter than the teachers in question, is actually a net negative for the system.
Given the facts on the ground (teachers as a class are intellectually average), one would most want to leverage that averageness by having them learn to teach one thing, and then they keep teaching that one thing over and over again, and don't change it without a really good reason.
This is actually pretty satisfying for average intelligence people when it works. For a while, I worked at Starbucks. There are a lot of really short, satisfying interactions. A person wants a desert latte. The barista makes the desert latte exactly as instructed. The person gets exactly what they expect. Everyone is happy (most of the time), or perhaps eventually realizes that the drinks are silly, but doesn't blame the barista, they probably made it in keeping with the recipe. There were also some other positions that were scripted, but basically fine. Things got bad when we had a lot of down time, everyone was bored and someone would suggest deep cleaning something without proper training. This is a reasonable job for average and slightly below average intelligence people.
It would be very reasonable to teach a slightly below average intelligence person who's generally responsible and decent with kids how to, for instance, teach 7 year olds phonics. There are several curricula, they mostly seem just fine, she could become an expert in teaching 7 year olds phonics according to some specific just fine curriculum curriculum. It's satisfying seeing a kid go from not connecting letters to sounds, to connecting letters to sounds. The kids feels good about it, the teacher feels good about it, they get a good performance review, perhaps they get a pay raise.
I have a degree in teaching in my specific subject area. They taught us the subject area. They taught us... who to write essays about John Dewy, and some formats one could use to write lesson plans, if anyone ever asks, which they don't... Well, they taught us our subject matter, anyway. But they did not actually teach us very much about teaching our subject matter to kids, and the standards change every couple of years anyway, so I just kind of make stuff up that seems kind of like a watered down version of what I learned about the subject, and keep tinkering with it when it doesn't work.
This is absurd.
Personally, I kind of like designing curriculum, so I don't mind that I'm just making everything up myself. But also, that's absurd. Maybe I'm making up complete nonsense -- someone who doesn't know my content area comes in to check once a year, to see if it looks like I'm teaching something that seems kind of reasonable (actually, to make sure there isn't too much chaos). Why is each teacher making their own Philosophy of Education? I like philosophy, and it was still a waste of my time, because the constraints are pretty tight, so we're really going for optimization more than creativity.
If the problem is that teachers aren't that bright, then they should learn A Curriculum, for something pretty constrained, and learn to teach it well. It will be fine if all seven year olds just learn to behave appropriately, and to connect sounds to letters really strongly, and then the rest of the time is enrichment or something. All the smart sneering people tinkering with the curriculum every year, so that all the average intelligence teachers are trying to learn it as they teach every year is a significant part of the problem.
This is, ultimately, my problem with the review as well. Two hour essays on shiny new conceptualizations instead of "here are ten great stories to read to an eight year old, including the best adaptation." Everyone already wants to tell the kids stories. That is not where the weakness lies at all, even a little bit.
Gaashk
2yr ago
That's an interesting and somewhat surprising observation. As I recall, in mid-America, married women are about as likely to vote conservative as their husbands, but I'm not sure how that translates to willingness to attend formal public political events.
Gaashk
19hr ago
The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture
What should the system formerly devoted to education, but definitely committed to keeping kids off the street do with them? A brief look at https://nces.ed.gov suggests it's something like 30% of people are below literacy level 2 (of 5).
Gaashk
19hr ago
Indeed. I'm not quite anonymous enough here to talk about this in detail, but it's very much an issue. Trainings can become incredibly hollow if the administrators aren't fully on board, so that teachers don't even understand or have access to the full ideas behind what they're supposed to be implementing, even if they want to do it.
Gaashk
2d ago
On the more wacky front, I've wondered if we should be dosing married couples with Oxytocin since pretty much all the literature available shows that it makes couples more interested in each other (although I'd not be surprised if this would fail to replicate.)
Couple shows up at the doctor's office saying they've not had sex in months, he hands them a spray bottle: "Take two snorts each and call me in the morning."
Inconveniently, babies are one of the big things that leads women to not want sex over long periods of time.
Oxytocin comes up medically in the context of childbirth and lactation, and is heavily involved in breast feeding. So, if you stimulate a breast feeding mother's nipples, her body will produce oxytocin... and milk. She will likely then think of the baby. Doctors give oxytocin during delivery to make contractions stronger (or, if they only need them a bit stronger, can use a breast pump).
Gaashk
6d ago
Interesting, I wonder if there's any way to tell whether that practice is contributing to crashes very much.
My intuition would be no, in comparison to drinking tequila or vodka at a bar, but maybe I'm wrong.
Gaashk
15d ago
Parts of Chicago do it as well, despite the acceptable public transport infrastructure and decent city planning.
Gaashk
28d ago
How is it? He’s one of the writers who I like in short form, but get a bit lost in his longer works.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Since it's Holy Week this week, it might be worth visiting a service if it's feasible -- Friday evening (Lamentations), Saturday Morning (Descent into Hell), and Saturday night (Pascha) are all highlights, but next Sunday is also very Paschal and lovely.
Gaashk
3mo ago
Indeed. And since all the students surround the owl in a circle, you should also draw a slightly different angle than anyone else. Only you will know what your angle is, exactly. The teacher might make a mark or two and comment that since their head is near yours but not superimposed, those marks they made might not be exactly right.
It makes sense to say that (many?) women't bodies are sexy, sure.
If someone says they're asexual, or heterosexual, or whatever other kind of sexual, that usually implies something about their preferences, not the viewer's. Oranges don't have preferences, so I'm not sure there's anything analogous that applies to them.
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