Gaashk
3mo ago
Why would you expect that? I wouldn't necessarily. I would expect it to stay about the same, since the core teachers, the children, and the states they live in will remain the same
Gaashk
3mo ago
I think feminine or androgynous would be acceptable. "Trans woman" would also be acceptable. "Woman" would certainly give the wrong impression.
Whether or not it's reasonable to call Alice "Miss Smith" will probably depend on how well he passes for female. Going by the description, it sounds like people who don't know him will feel confused, and try not to use gendered terms of address, and people who know him well will simply call him "Alice," and introduce him to acquaintances as "Alice Smith." Unless they're schoolchildren, I suppose? I would prefer that he not be allowed to pull schoolchildren into his preferences, and would likely refer to him in front of my own children, in private, as Alice or Mr Smith, but not as miss.
Gaashk
3mo ago
It is a little silly, and will probably be regarded with bemusement by future generations, like fake recovered memories from a generation ago. But it is also causing active havoc in the present, also like those "memories."
norms of personal presentation, for instance.
This is how we got terms like "tomboy" and "drag queen." Masculine and feminine are fine for more formal contexts.
Gaashk
3mo ago
Going by the people I've known who want to work retail between getting a college degree and a serious job, Starbucks and Trader Joes are both fine with the trade off of higher turn over, but smarter, more interesting employees, and will give an immediate interview. Other companies don't necessarily respond at all. I suppose these are simply different business strategies?
Gaashk
3mo ago
Education is more like this than not -- I've gotten about a third of the jobs that I've applied for. They do make people enter all their credentials into an online application with no chance to autofill, and ask for written letters of recommendation, often from one's current principal, before even scheduling interviews, though. It's also accepted to substitute teach in a school district someone wants to work in until they offer a permanent job.
It doesn't help to call and "check up," though. I suspect it might annoy the people involved, and make them less likely to hire, actually.
Gaashk
4mo ago
I'm on team "it depends."
There are a lot of problems in Chicago, but the city looks pretty goody, actually. I like their Trump Tower! It has human centric walking paths around it, gardens, and places to sit. It looks pretty good from across the river! It's probably comfortable inside. The Wrigley building may be more aesthetic, but not enough to be worth passing up all those windows. I love the aesthetics of the Lurie Gardens, with a little bit of prairie, surrounded by city towers. But Chicago has always wanted to be a big American city.
I'm less of a fan of California design, especially since it's been encroaching on the Southwest, with grey houses with sharp angles taking over from the tan houses and soft edges. The Southwest should have tan houses and rounded edges! It should look like it's covered in local clay! I'm not certain what's prompting the grey and white angular houses, the owners probably think it looks "fresh" or some such thing, even if I think it's tired just five years on. Like the Catholic churches in the 70s, they age quickly.
Phoenix is odd, and not very aesthetic, but each individual person gets some nice desert landscaping, an air conditioned house, and access to a bunch of goods at one of the hundreds of identical strip malls. It isn't a city built for the past or the future, but for the present, and it will be fine if it keeps getting rebuilt until they run our of water or air conditioning units are outlawed. Tucson has more history, and therefore better architecture. Here's a church from about a decade ago. It's completely fine. Most of their newer apartment and condo developments are also just fine, in a way that pictures don't capture super well. They're safe, clean, have nice little patios full of potted succulents, and a couple of swimming pools. Nothing grand or awe inspiring, but just fine. Very livable.
I'm not sure what's happening with Toronto, perhaps like Phoenix they don't have enough history as a city? Quebec City sounds reasonably aesthetic. South Korea is more aesthetic than Phoenix, but may be a worse place to live, going by everyone's unwillingness to raise children there.
Gaashk
4mo ago
I think that it's reasonable for the government to provide care for disabled children, teens, and even sometimes adults, since Americans do not live in multigenerational clans or villages, where care can be somewhat distributed. But it seems both very expensive and also rather miserable to be in a school, specifically all the time if someone isn't being educated. They aren't that comfortable, I guess they're reasonably safe and the food is acceptable, but large schools just don't seems like a natural setting for primarily providing supervision.
Gaashk
4mo ago
That seems fairly similar to how things are in the US. I work in schools, but not in subjects with mandatory tests, but I get to see all the IEPs for the school, and they're mostly things about longer times for tests, breaking down instructions into shorter chunks, repeating instructions, preferential seating, and less stimulating environments (especially for testing).
The very high needs children who have a one on one aid are also on IEPs, but it's quite different situationally, even though their IEPs generally look more or less the same.
Perhaps it ultimately won't make much of a difference whether there's a national Department of Education or not, since the expectations are already there for all of the accommodations.
Gaashk
4mo ago
Career and Technical Education high schools have pretty useful shop classes.
Gaashk
4mo ago
It might be worth a try, even so. Hand knitting clothing out of alpaca wool or something is probably still less expensive than most of the interventions in public education.
Gaashk
4mo ago
I think that number includes 504s and BIPs (behavior intervention plans), and IEPs is closer to 10%
Gaashk
4mo ago
Other than the beatings, some of the “social communication” classrooms for severely autistic kids are already rather like those prisons.
Gaashk
4mo ago
There's a fair bit of talk both in person and in the news about downsizing the Department of Education, possibly moving student loan servicing to another department, and federal requirements around students with special accommodations.
I'm interested if anything will happen with the (massive! extremely expensive!) special education edifice.
Some articles from the past couple days:
- "Trump's Education Secretary Doesn't Know What IDEA Is and Special Needs Parents Are Outraged"
- "As Education Department Slashes Nearly Half Its Staff, Special Ed Worries Mount"
- The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
I've been personally hearing a lot more (hushed, furtive) negative talk among teachers about IEPs and small groups (children who aren't able to be in a regular classroom due to their conditions) lately, though that could just be my own work environment. Like many controversial things, there are usually a few children who are essentially black holes in the context of large systems, such that while most children will need and be given, say, 1/10 of an adult's attention (and learn the material), two or three will end up with five full adult's attention (and it's entirely unclear whether or if they're learning anything). There are some children in the middle, who may need the attention of one adult, but will then clearly learn things and become productive members of society, and they are generally not talked about negatively, even though it's rather expensive. It might still be less expensive in the long run, anyway.
I have mixed feelings about it. Kids with various conditions should have as good a life as reasonably possible. Their parents and siblings shouldn't necessarily be expected to stop everything to support them full time for the rest of their lives. But at what cost? It's not reasonable to deprive their classmates, who might have a condition but be able to learn curricular things of an education. It's not reasonable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on interventions to obtain a tiny improvement in the utility of one person.
Apropos Zvi's recent post on education, it's probably not even reasonable to keep dragging a child who's clearly miserable with an enormous school and is trying to run away most days through a daily cycle of "transitions" the they hate every 40 minutes or so (sometimes every five or ten, in the classrooms that use "rotations" with bells and special behaviorist noises).
Perhaps nothing will come of it. Should the edifice change? in what way?
Gaashk
4mo ago
They have been converted to the civic religion of celebrating each other's sexual preferences.
Gaashk
4mo ago
Moral foundations seems like a better fit for most of these issues.
The main area for both conflict and mistake is economics. Most people want to have a bigger slice of the pie for themselves and their fellow class members. The interests of the person who wants a cheap employee or servant and the person trying to get an entry level job are not the same. The interests of the person who wants government housing in a nice part of town, and the person who already owns a house in the nice part of town are not the same. Many people also have bad ideas about how to get where they're trying to go.
I used to be very into MBTI types, because as an ITP woman, I often felt like I needed an explanation for my personality.
So if this were actually an important project for your career progression, how would you self-report to get the best potential team?
I would probably be honest. MBTI is fairly values balanced, such that there aren't universally better or worse answers. That's its main value proposition, in addition to having a more constrained number of possible results.
The problem with OCEAN, from an employee's perspective, is that it's more threatening. Employers always want their workers to be conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable. Especially conscientious. So if it were an OCEAN test, I might try to look more conscientious than I actually am.
Adding: you'd want an extroverted feeling teammate if you're planning a social event.
Gaashk
4mo ago
It reminds me of Neil Howe's books about "the Fourth Turning." It's interesting and suggestive, but I'm not sure if it's accurate or not. That kind of pronouncement seems very suggestive, but also like it's impossible to figure out whether it's real or not until a decade or two later.
Gaashk
4mo ago
For a while, I was part of a friends group that included music hobbyists (though I am not one). People would write their own songs, and perform them with guitars and such. It was lovely! I would certainly welcome the return of more intimate, live performance spaces.
Gaashk
4mo ago
No, I'm saying that, oddly enough, the sorts of bios that highlight "not a man, a woman, no really," and stories that feature "tampon stashes" on the internet lately do not come from biological females.
I'm not saying I disbelieve you right now, just that this has been the case for several years now. This is literally the first time I've heard a woman mention tampons in relation to "actually a woman."
Gaashk
4mo ago
Strangely, those are the sorts of details that suggested trans to me.
(I have given birth to three children, could probably have another, and have no tampon stash)
Gaashk
4mo ago
Maybe boomer advice will become relevant again, and we'll start having to approach potential employers in person.
Gaashk
4mo ago
Interesting. My impression of advertising is that it was already substantially clogged, to the extent that it hardly matters if an email is personal or not, in fact a personalized message from a stranger is actually more suspicious than a normal advertisement, it's probably going to be some kind of scam.
I think my mobile phone company has some sort of spam filter, because the only unwanted calls I get are from the politicians in a jurisdiction I once registered to vote, so plausibly I opted into that.
Lately, I've found myself ignoring or marking as spam pretty much all business emails, and following them on social media instead. This is despite being the sort of person who reads blogs that are basically advertisements. I'll be annoyed when Google reviews, Amazon reviews, and Reddit posts get filled up even more with AI entries, but that was probably going to accelerate even without AI.
Gaashk
4mo ago
That's interesting, I had thought they were farther from automating meat processing. That does sound like a terrible job, anyway.
Gaashk
4mo ago
What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?
Everyone’s been talking a lot about both the downsizing of the federal government, and the rapid improvement of LLM technology, such that the fake jobs are being cut at the same instant that more jobs are becoming to some degree fake. I don’t necessarily think that the US government should be a bastion of fake jobs, especially Culture War ones, but at the same time I wonder if there’s any end game people like Musk are working toward.
As far as I can tell:
Blue collar jobs are still largely intact. There’s about the same need as there ever was for tradesmen, handymen, construction workers, waste disposal, and so on. Most of the automation in those fields came from vehicles a century ago, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to leverage things like prefab construction all that much more. I personally like the new “3-D printed” extrusion style of architecture, but it doesn’t look like it actually saves all that much labor.
Pink collar: Childcare takes about the same amount of labor per child, but there are fewer children. Nursing is in demand, but surely healthcare can only take up so much of the economy. Surely? Retail continues to move online, and we continue to descend into slouchy sweatpants, parachute pants, and the oversized, androgynous look. I would personally like it if some of the excess labor went into actually fitted clothing, but haven’t seen any signs of this. Cleaning services seem to have more demand than supply, with an equilibrium of fewer things getting cleaned regularly than in the past, while continuing to be low in pay and prestige, so I’m anticipating more dirt, but little investment into fixing it.
Demand for performance based work seems to be going down. It’s just as good to listen to or watch a recording of the best person in a field than a live performance by someone less skilled. But were performers ever a large part of the economy?
Middle class office work, knowledge work, words, paperwork, emails: seems about to implode? How much of the economy is this? Google suggests about 12%. That seems like a lot, but nothing close to the 90% of farm work that was automated throughout the 21st Century. This article was interesting, about the role of jobs like secretary, typist, and admin assistant in the 20th Century. I tried working as an assistant to an admin assistant a decade or so ago, and was physically filing paperwork, which even then was pretty outdated.
The larger problem seems to be status. What kinds of work should the middle class do, if not clerk and word adjacent things? There seems to be near infinite demand for service sorts of work – can we have an economy where the machines and a few others do all the civilizationally load bearing work, while everyone else walks each other’s dogs and picks up each other’s food? My father thinks that there’s less slack in many of these jobs than when he was younger. I’m not sure if that’s true in general, or how to test it.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with a future where most people are doing and buying service work. The current trend of women all raising each other’s children and caring for each other’s elderly parents seems to not be working out very well, though.
Congress can still redistribute directly to the states if they want to, and probably will.
Student loans are already a horrible mess, and the DOE and federal government hasn't done anything to sort it out, so it's probably best we have less of them, not more. I went to community college, followed by an inexpensive state college. If those colleges don't have enough money to function in some states, the federal government can redistribute directly to them. Private scholarships are probably useful and good.
I work in a school, and have seem hat kinds of programs the money goes towards. They are mostly not what I would want. The DOE's priorities are not only the same priorities as most children and parents, but not even the same as most teachers. Not even the teachers of superfluous subjects.
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