Gaashk
1yr ago
But their other role models are their parents. So to the extent a role model matters (which I find dubious) that could explain the difference.
Yes, this probably makes a huge difference, even with extended family and social networks. I have great uncles who were globetrotting humanities scholars, and despite being rather distantly related, I always got the impression that kind of thing might be possible, in a way I didn't for things like CEO or politician.
It's believable that someone growing up in a black neighborhood might know someone by proxy who made it big in entertainment, but not anyone who's doing well in the corporate world.
Gaashk
1yr ago
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I haven't ever worked as a server, and there a bunch of people online talking about tipped positions raking in the cash, making $20 - $50/hr. I assume based on this it's not true where you live? Does your romantic partner have that issue as well? It's not like it makes financial sense to immediately return to a low wage, physically demanding position six weeks after giving birth anyway, and put a month old baby into childcare. Also, there are people willing to donate diapers, if that's actually a problem. They cost about $40/month.
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It sounds like you've had some bad experiences with employers. Working for a bad boss can be horrible. That seems like something that has to be figured out regardless of children, though, since working another 30 years for someone who takes advantage of you and you don't respect would be terrible even without kids. Also, first point
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I was surprised how easy it was to get pregnancy and infant medicaid, which covers all costs, including a choice of hospital of midwife in my state.
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I've moved states a lot. There isn't a high cost to interstate travel? I'm not sure why you would think that? Like, yes, you have to wait until a lease is up or negotiate with the landlord, get rid of all your furniture, and pack everything into your car or a rental truck that you're able to drive yourself, but that's a willingness, not exactly a cost. I moved cross country with my husband and baby in a small SUV a couple of years ago. It was a bit stressful, but basically fine.
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There's probably no way to confirm, ahead of time, that you won't pass your issues along to your children, seeing as how issues are just about universal among humans. That isn't to say the therapist isn't worthwhile, maybe they are, but the idea of getting one's whole emotional and financial life in order before having kids is probably not realistic. I'm a decade older and still not in perfect order, but am still glad my daughters exist, and they also seem glad they exist.
Gaashk
1yr ago
While I disagree with Freddie deBoer on a lot of things, especially his ongoing war with his commentariat about gender, his thoughts on education seem pretty solid. His new post https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated is no exception, though he puts in a bit of boilerplate declaring on faith that of course groups can be equalized somehow, even if individuals can't, despite giving no reason to believe that of any particular group or groups. This seems a pretty paltry fig leaf, but oh well.
I suppose if I want to get more of his view on a way forward, I should read his book, The Cult of Smart, but I don't want to just now. Based on his blogging, he seems to think that moving money from smart, productive people to stupid, unproductive people is the best solution, but this doesn't solve the fundamental question of allowing people who can't contribute much economically to live in a worthwhile fashion that allows self respect.
My state legislature has been debating plans to fiddle about with small levers at the margins to make up for Covid losses and "improve education." The levers are very small indeed. An extra half hour in the day? More private bathroom stalls? The only topic that made some sort of sense was career and technical education. I've been thinking about one side of this, trying to help my husband fix a leak this morning, and reading some thoughts from Internaught at DSL lately about crumbling infrastructure. Every time I interact with a Trades produced physical object, I realize that they are made for the large, strong hands of a young man who has been working on manipulating physical objects with weight and mass for years and decades. This probably makes sense from a materials engineering perspective -- assume that a mechanic or tradesman will be interacting with the object, and it can be heavier, with a tighter seal, probably more durable. But it seems like something of a hard sell, getting people to work with these heavy, sturdy objects for decades at a time when they don't have to, and don't get much status out of it, and most people can't afford . Giving out money doesn't seem all that helpful when we're all living in a crumbling, unfixable physical environment, and the computers can do 80% of the writing, calculating, and art, but can't keep the utilities repaired.
I would like to see more emphasis on humans as embodied, physical, tool using beings, but am not sure what steps might lead in that direction. I was listening to a podcast the other day by a Waldorf kindergarten teacher who had started taking his classes on walks to the park all morning, every morning, and that it worked out very well for them, but this was a nice, safe forest park in a place with decent weather much of the year. I don't really know where to go with these thoughts, though. It seems like kids need more physical, sensory experiences, but it seems like a hard pitch, perhaps something to do with laptopping being high status and easy on the body, as is mentioned in the thread on class.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I don't necessarily want my daughters to become symbol manipulators. Sure, I'm glad they're not growing up in a society where they have to be oyster shuckers at six, seamstresses at 12, bear, cook for, and clean for 8 children, and blind at 50.
But there's a lot of space between that and a laptop career, which doesn't seem like a great idea either.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Personally, I'm probably thinking more of lower middle class, education sorts of people who can't maintain our houses, and also can't afford to hire anyone else to do it either, but this may be specific to my own experience.
In this context, I'm also thinking of Freddie's solution of "so give people money then," which seems like a recipe for more currency chasing less goods and services, since there doesn't seem to be any attempt at replacing symbol manipulation with anything communally useful. But as I've said, I haven't read The Cult of Smart, and there might be more about that there.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Yes, that seems likely. I dropped an application to teach at a school like that once, because it involved a lot of storytelling and very little income.
I was homeschooled, and for several years my study of math consisted of being given a math textbook (not even Khan academy lessons or something!) and asked to study it. I was in my mid twenties when I realized that I wasn't just unusually bad at math, and that I probably could have gone into something tech adjacent if I had taken actual classes.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Fair enough (aside from the piles of skulls). I don't know all that much about what lower productivity people do in moderately functional communist societies, but ideally it would be something other than overdosing on fentanyl. My understanding is that communist states are supposed to tell their people what to do with themselves, even if it's sometimes "you're bad at everything, accept this pension, move to the countryside, and keep a small orchard" or something.
I don't have a good sense of what Freddie would do if he were in charge of the communist city state of New York, but get the impression he's thinking of more than half the population when he refers to people who aren't academically inclined, so it can't just be "give everyone money, hope the trash doesn't pile up too high." Or is it?
Gaashk
1yr ago
Thank you for the links, the review was helpful.
I've recently become more aware of the extent to which school decisions are governed by things like bus schedules, physical infrastructure, and unwieldy scheduling -- elementary school lunch rooms that can only accommodate one grade level at a time, combined gym/auditorium/lunchroom set ups, so it's extremely difficult to have whole school assemblies, and everything is in tightly scheduled batches, five or six day specials rotations, complex pull-out schedules with mandatory blocks when they can't be pulled out, and so on. Within an existing school or district, almost everything is necessity, almost nothing possibility.
I was substitute teaching for a while at a high school with a culinary arts class that had a real, professional kitchen. The teens seemed genuinely very happy about it, and would bring me tasty fresh food sometimes, so I was also happy about it. It was the kinds of foods teens actually enjoy eating together -- beignets and omelettes and quesadillas. Even if not many of them ended up working in restaurants, I'm sure their families and friends were happy about it. At another school, we made ribbon skirts, and painted a culturally traditional mural. This was also lovely. If I were education czar, and it seemed likely I would probably include "make more beignets" as an initiative, even if the long term goal was Communism.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I've heard some journalists use the term "pink collar" for the (mostly female) jobs like nursing and childcare that are primarily about bodies, rather than symbols or objects. They can require an associates or even a bachelors, and sometimes that translates to real skills they need (nurses need to have some idea if the medication they're giving out is plausible and not a typo or something), but is more a test of conscientiousness and conformity.
I'm reading "Face to Face: Knowing God Beyond Our Shame" by Fr. Stephen Freeman. I like reading his blog, he's a very gentle and straightforward writer, and this is a nice little book he released a couple of weeks ago, and about my speed lately.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Probably something about everyone being a carer -- eldercare, childcare, service jobs, without much thought going toward whether or not the displaced people are temperamentally suited to that, followed by even more "disabilities." The schools are already adding "social and emotional learning," in a way that assumes the recipient is already well socialized and doesn't need to explicitly be taught things like "don't say your unpopular opinions in public."
Gaashk
1yr ago
At a small high school where I used to work, this is literally what they said. They did not have drills. It seemed very sensible.
It's not such a good plan at a large elementary school, though.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Emily Oster always comes up as a good resource in these discussions. I have not read her, however.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I've flown some long haul in economy, and don't remember ever wanting anything in particular? What kind of thing can the attendants do to improve a flight?
Gaashk
1yr ago
When I was car shopping last year, this was very much not the case, due to the supply chain issues. We ended up buying new and waiting several months, despite preferring something a bit older and less expensive, because used cars cost about the same as new ones. Some used cars cost more than used ones last summer, because there wasn't a waiting list.
The situation may have started to clear up by now, though.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Yes, the question of whether people will use public transport when it's offered, even if it's significantly cheaper than a car, varies a lot by city, and even by parts of the city.
When I was taking public transport in Chicago, which is quite good by American standards, people would advise me on what lines or stops to avoid, or where my car would be stolen from the park and ride lot. There's a local train I'd like to take, but everyone says to avoid it because I have to drive to the station and cars are stolen from the lot frequently. There's a lot of inconvenience people will put up with to avoid gambling on losing an object worth half a year's pay.
Gaashk
1yr ago
This is a good comment, and again illustrates the divide between those who have experienced clean, safe, decent public transportation, and those who have experienced the reverse.
I don't like to drive, and now have a 30 minute commute so that I can have a yard with children and chickens and fresh eggs, but previously relied on public transportation in several different cities. Busses in the Southwest were mostly civil, but I had to sit out in the brutal heat for up to an hour to get them. I eventually got a car when my plan became to take a bus in the morning to the first part of my job, then a ride from my family member at lunch, another ride from a co-worker or walk through an air force base, another walk back, then another bus ride, so I was spending probably three hours on this daily, and involving multiple different people with cars as well. This only worked for a month, and wouldn't have worked at all if I weren't single with no other obligations.
Chicago was interesting. For the most part, I actively enjoyed their public transportation. Even though there are some panhandlers and some smelly homeless, they're kept in line, and middle class businessmen still ride the trains. Also, the CTA was built in the brief window of knowing how to build impressive stacked roadways, elevated trains, underground garages with parks on top of them and so on, and before everyone decided not to do that, and that it was too much work. So the multi-level train rides were both civil and actually interesting in their own right. But there were certain stops I was warned away from (maybe this was unfounded prejudice -- I didn't test them to find out). My commute there also involved driving to the metra, walking between the metra and CTA line or a 40 minute walk, and took over an hour each way, but it was an hour I enjoyed, which made all the difference. Also, I didn't have any kids or really hobbies, and still needed the car anyway. If LA could become more like Chicago that might be worth doing, but it doesn't seem possible, the city simply isn't designed that way as far as I can tell.
Gaashk
1yr ago
The idea of "many criminals strike near home because they're too poor to have a car" always seemed a little bit odd to me, and they surely can't also be too poor to jump a turnstile, right? Is the real explanation a vicious/virtuous cycle of policing, where a criminal expects to be caught if preying on a "safe neighborhood", so they stay in the "unsafe neighborhood", which makes the job of the police on the "safe neighborhood" beat easier and makes them more likely to catch criminals who don't stay out?
This seems plausible. Among the South Side neighborhoods, there was the city worker neighborhood, where cops lived and were comfortable raising children and setting off (ostensibly illegal) fireworks on holidays, and repelled an attempted BLM protest. The cops were standing on the side of the street handing out recruitment fliers to people in their cars last I visited. And there are the other neighborhoods, where they're always investigating the last shooting, and there's barbed wire and metal detectors installed in the high schools. Presumably in the city worker neighborhood, if a person (especially a person who looked a certain way) were standing in a parking lot breaking into a car, someone would notice, call the cops, and those cops would come right away. In the other neighborhood they would not.
Gaashk
1yr ago
DDT is banned, bird populations have recovered, and food production is perfectly fine.
Isn't the primary use of this for killing carriers of malaria? And malaria is controlled in America... from extensive past use of DDT? Isn't this still a huge active problem in Africa? A cursory search suggests that it is, with articles as recent as last year about the ongoing conflict.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I'm Orthodox, and wanted to take the kids to a Lazarus Saturday egg hunt yesterday and Palm Sunday fish feast today, but we all had colds, and services are long and far away, so we stayed home.
I started digging out a back yard pond and moved some paving stones around to make a path through the yard. It's finally feeling like true spring, so I got a lot of sun and took a long (for a three year old) walk with my daughter, by the local Catholic church, which was not in session at the time. Sometime I would like to visit for mass, since it's the center of an old Spanish colonial viliage and a comfortable walk from home, but never get around to it.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Probably the first, but if she is 36, interested in having children, smart, looks fairly normal, and has famous people in her friendship circle... why is she getting dates this way? Something seems to have gone wrong/weirdly here. Also, kind of wants children, but doesn't seem very serious still at 36 -- kind of poly, wants to sit in bed on her laptop a lot... thinks that's a reasonable combination of things to advertise upfront?
Edit -- which is to say that if Tyler is being helpful, this doesn't seem like a great way to go about doing that, but he might still be, since exposure is something anyway.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I could see that working for companionship, but not necessarily for raising children. Both because it dramatically increases the chances of the children ending up with mental illnesses, and also because at least one partner should be reasonably emotionally stable so the kids still get taken care of, all the time.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
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