coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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3hr ago
In the real world the consumer has no idea what price he could be getting without the corrupt tactics employed by Amazon. He has no idea that Amazon was secretly increasing prices. He has no reason to think that this was in the realm of possibility, and would assume that there were laws against price-fixing. He would have no reason to know any of this was happening, because the lawsuit showing this was only publicized last month.
For years, Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites, threatening dire consequences if vendors do not comply. Vendors, bullied by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, agree to raise prices on competitors’ websites, or to remove products from competing websites altogether. This price fixing scheme typically begins with Amazon demanding that vendors “fix,” “correct,” “increase,” “raise,” or “look into” the prices of products on other retailers’ websites. These directives to vendors are backed by the threat of significant penalties for failure to comply — ranging from advertising and promotion restrictions, to demands for financial compensation, to the removal of vendors’ products from Amazon.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
A sort of tangential comment, but when reading that in one month we have Amazon and retailer price-fixing, 90% of poultry suppliers price-fixing, most of the world’s shipping container manufacturers price-fixing, and a new investigation into beef price-fixing, I’m thinking the model of consumer capitalism is simply wrong today. It’s easy and desirable for wealthy owners to coordinate together to maximize profits by agreeing on prices in unison and only changing this formula to prevent a competitor from gaining a foothold in the industry with the deployment of predatory pricing. You can’t do anything about this, and if they’re clever, they realize that it is in their collective interest to never lower prices and instead make more money through coordination without actually putting anything in writing. The system actually just sucks!
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
basically zero difference in hassles
Nope, never married in general population are 10% further hassled totally (where 100% is maximally hassled) than married Amish with children
Married genpop have fewer hassles than [never] married
Does this support your original argument? Even so the difference is larger compared to Amish. But all the differences have a fine p value.
Better yet
By the way you respond I am very skeptical of how honest you are about stress
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I will side with the 200+ wives
having kids makes little difference to psychosocial hassles for married women
reduces within cohorts + significant differences between cohorts
All the benefits are due to being Amish
A SAHM culture. Younger unmarried Amish statistically likely to be around kids all day btw
Even unmarried women have fewer hassles if they are Amish
Married & kids Amish have fewer hassles than unmarried. When number go up it mean hassle go up
why is there no benefit to psychosocial hassles from having kids if kids relax women
Hassle one metric. Not best metric. Other metrics for between pops. Metric still evidence. Shows having kids reduce hassle in both pops and between pops. Lower for married w kids. 48 = max stress. 12 = absolutely no stress.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
But nothing you’ve posted indicates that you really know anything about this. You don’t mention any studies. You don’t reference anything. You misunderstood the study I quoted.
None of these are broken out by married/not married/children/no children
If we’re comparing one set with a huge amount of married women with children, to another set with a far smaller amount, then we done have to break it down further. The set that maximizes SAHM is extremely happier. If you have better evidence you should post it. Reasonable people work with the evidence they have. You’re criticizing the best study for its imperfection without presenting better evidence.
You're way overextending the evidence to look at depression rates among Amish vs genpop
Happy to see a counter-study
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I wonder if I can find a traditional Saudi guy to chime in. If he has three wives, then you would be forced to believe whatever he says on this subject, as that’s 3x the wives and 10x the female relatives. It’s funny to imagine a type of guy who weighs anecdotal evidence by number of wives and is essentially compelled to believe whatever a Salafist says about the relaxation of married women, having no way to argue from an empirical standpoint. (Indeed the empirical evidence suggests that Saudi women are not relaxed, but you would never know this if you only surveyed random men from Saudi Arabia).
The study doesn't measure 'relaxation.'
It does by way of the % anxiety or depression and the % feeling overloaded are proxies of relaxation. The opposite of relaxation is stress (overloaded) and anxiety. Arguably the depressive symptoms also factors in here.
never married women score higher on psychosocial hassles than the other groups
In both groups, the within-group “married with children” are less hassled than never married. And we can compare between these two sets of groups, one set where 32% has 6+ children and the other where only only 4% has 6+ children, and we find that the one with more children is slightly less hassled while scoring better on anxiety and depression. And given the relationship between life stressors and depression, it’s significant that the group of women of which 32% have 6+ kids has 1/10th the depressive symptoms. We can also extrapolate from the % on psychiatric meds a little (Girlboss Americans are more medicated).
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I don’t know, I’m just not convinced that your anecdota is valuable here as a generalized principle. There’s no reason for me to think that you have insight into female happiness, nor your wife or female friends. Neither do I think that women have strong insight into their own happiness, because humans are bad at predicting what makes them happy, both male and female. Hence why someone like Csikzentmihalyi can come in and totally revise how we understand peak emotional experiences. And why papers like the Paradox of Declining Female Happiness are important. Imagine how crazy it would be to think that humans can decide nutrition for themselves by taste? So I will err on the side of the Amish. The study indicates their lifestyle make women pretty relaxing even though they babymax.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I’m extrapolating because she’s your n=1, or within your n=5. How else can I respond to your sample? I have to infer from what I know about American life because I have no details.
Has a mother ever told you that raising (especially small) children is relaxing?
Yes. But not every moment of it. But that are major moments of relaxation. And traditional cultures find ways to make it relaxing. You don’t think rocking a child to sleep with a lullaby is relaxing to women? Or seeing them jump in puddled in a cute raincoat? Or telling a fun story to make them either behave out of fear or out of reward? I’ll grant it’s also stressful for traditional women, at times, but they have the training that makes it more enjoyable.
have you ever done something hard, taxing, exhausting, yet absolutely worth doing?
Yes but these things often bring relaxation, too. There’s relaxation after a hard bike ride, and you are more relaxed on the whole than never biking. So on the whole, an experience with stress can be relaxing. But not if you’re multitasking two huge stressors, or one huge stressor without previous training. If you told me to unicycle while juggling it would be horribly stressful, but if I mastered it in childhood then I would be a very relaxed clown indeed, happy to show off my neat skills. This is Csikzentmihalyi’s flow state: optimal human mood occurs when doing a challenging thing around the limits of our skill. (The lowest mood is on Sunday mornings when someone lacks a challenge to do). This is the most anxiolytic human state. Alex Honnold is relaxed despite free-soloing mountains all day because he mastered that skill, and I suppose he tells himself that is has “purpose”, but it’s not exactly raising up new life.
in the sense that you derive this knowledge entirely from reading words on a screen
There’s only one other way to gain wisdom about this without reading: going around conducting polls. I have not gone around conducting polls in these communities. There’s not another way, as far as I know. Not one that’s reliable.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
When you say that she isn’t stressed, you mean that she isn’t stressed generally speaking. But that generality is in the fulfillment of the tasks of life that she spent 35,000 hours mastering since preschool (school time + homework + ECs). School made her extremely adept and comfortable in the skills of dealing with occupational burdens in corporate America. She may be extremely good at spreadsheeting. This leads to comfortability because humans are comfortable doing what they are trained and reinforced to do. (The Chinese boy manning the cash register at the restaurant will be completely fluent in the stresses of restaurant-running by the age of 12, whereas it would take a 25yo years to develop the same fluency).
But school did not teach her anything that would lead to comfort in the domain of motherhood. That is a totally distinct set of skills that have more to do social habits and stress resilience. School did not have her carry around a doll 24/7 for a few years, or teach her how to sleep with the child so that it doesn’t cry at night. It didn’t teach proper breastfeeding or weening. It didn’t teach her how to speak to a child or how to tell fairytales that makes children behave. She wasn’t taught stress resilience as a caregiver. She wasn’t given any sort of role model relevant to the domain of motherhood, the chief domain of her existence.
I’m assuming that you understand that people are comfortable doing tasks which have been reinforced and tasks which they have been trained to do. I’m assuming that you know that traditional cultures imbue women with this training implicitly or explicitly in adolescence. I’m assuming that you can understand how the study would debunk the claim that motherhood is stressful (the population with tons of children is much less stressed than the one with very few). These are reasonable assumptions. If you want ancecdota you can go to an Amish locale and ask around, I guess.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
In the Amish sample, 19% have no children and the rest have children. 33% have between 6 and 21 children. In the general pop, 28% have no children. (That’s going by “number of pregnancies” as a proxy for children). It’s important to learn how to read a simple data table if, in the same reply, you tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Now if you go down to the Psychosocial Hassles Scale, married with children Amish are happier than never married general population women.
We have to look at data because we do not exist in a SAHM culture. So in regards to the n=1, she might be stressed around her children because she never learned the skills of motherhood during her formative years of adolescent cognition. Almost no American adolescents learn this. Or maybe she was taught and internalized antinatal values, that a woman’s worth is in her job or something. This is grilled into minds at a young age. Or maybe she is more easily stressed because her own mother-child was severed early. It really can be anything. Because the important question is whether women would be happier being a at home with kids in a culture which prepares them for this role, versus our current culture which promotes almost the exact opposite values and skills (sedentary studying, avaricious competition, &tc).
28% of the Amish women work
Likely those who are finished with motherhood plus the ones who haven’t started.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
I don’t think your n=1 wife who likely works has any relevance here. But maybe you married a Mennonite chick, I don’t know. Sorry about your stressed out wife. Here is n=288 showing that sahm culture produces 1/4th the amount of “feeling overloaded” as girlboss culture and 1/10th the depressive on a symptoms scale.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Can a woman pause her work when she gets tired of it? Do you think SAHMs play “excel simulator” to relax? Preferences are revealed.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
How many of those moms are actual SAHMs, that didn’t work in the crucial months of pregnancy? Statistically, you are more likely seeing stressed women who gave birth to stressed kids, who stopped breastfeeding after six months, who had their attachment severed way too early with daycare, and who never learned a single important thing about childrearing in their adolescence. If you want to see what a SAHM family is like, travel to Lancaster or walk through Williamsburg and you will see calm unstressed women with happy children that don’t cry as much.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Women are relaxed around children. Female school teachers for young grades are like the most relaxed women in the world, and those aren’t even her kids and she isn’t at home. There is a biological reason for why a woman would be stressed after being severed from her child but no reason why she would be stressed being in a homemaking environment. When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs). There’s also a study showing Amish women are significantly less stressed than normal Americans, and they have eight kids. There are a lot of different compelling reasons to believe that a mother with her child is the least stressed version of woman, provided she isn’t also laboring for eight hours a day away from her kid.
hard to make a rational case
There are economic benefits to keeping women out of work but they have never been robustly measured due to ethics and feasibility. Studies show that primates separated from their mother early receive lifelong mental illness and worse learning outcomes, and we are arguably in a mental illness crisis nowadays, so it’s reasonable to assume it has something to do with the eradication of the mother-child bond. Early life is important for future outcomes, and women are inherently invested in teaching their children lessons unlike Random Bureaucrat #183729, so we are impairing the learning of our whole population. There are important emotional and social lessons that only a mother can supply to her child at a young age, and a mother will supply hundreds of such lessons a day with very salient terms of reinforcement and punishment (for a child, nothing is more reinforcing than love, or punishing than alienation thereof). A child is supposed to be breastfed for 3-4 years, and this is good for their future health. Stressed women produce worse kids with worse health, and work stresses women. Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home. When women stay with their children all day it keeps them occupied and away from the computer where they might promote really bad things that destroy civilization like affirmative action. Keeping a woman at home and away from work means that everyone in the family can eat better and has clean living conditions, which affects health for the next generations.
Good luck trying to measure any of this in studies, ripping twins away from mothers and measuring the outcomes unto the third generation. Stress and poor health are exorbitantly expensive. Antisocial behavior is expensive. This comes from working moms. And if we were able to make pronatality a status symbol, then the smartest people would have the most children (as they would see it as a mark of success, and a smart choice, maybe even a problem to solve, and they could afford it). So in the 1960 cohort, the smartest men and women would have 64 grandchildren by now, instead of their meager four. Imagine 16x the number of geniuses just from the 1960 cohort, and then 65x for the generation after ours. Imagine 65x the Terence Taos or John Carmacks. This is bad for the economy!
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
If life isn’t fair, and we shouldn’t care that it’s unfair, then how can anyone criticize —
women surrendering their bodily autonomy for nine months,
as there is no longer a basis for arguing against it on moral grounds? How could you criticize the policy goal of, say, making women the property of their fathers and then husbands again, if we no longer care about unfairness? It can’t just be unfair for men because life is unfair, sorry men, as there are many cultures where it is unfair for women because life is unfair, sorry women, yet these cultures have children.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like
It looks what we were doing before the mid 20th century. Young women are handed specific literature and media at a young age which makes them want to be mothers. In school, they take classes to help them to be mothers. They are told to behave in a way which is conducive to being mothers (meek, sensitive, humble, loving, &tc), and if they stray from that they are shamed. As they get older, they are looked down upon for not settling down. They are shown anti-spinster propaganda in female media. There were many Victorian guides for women penned, filled with pronatal propaganda. Women are sensitive to shame and so you don’t actually have to do a draft, you just have to successfully moralize natality. But that’s also a big difficulty, with all of our secular cultural institutions captured.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Is there a way for Hamas to get the same desired outcome [reduce Israel support] without the potential negative effect on their own morale & recruitment? If there is, then it is not reasonable for Hamas to make this lie, because there is a better lie available. This means that they did not take time to consider the outcome of the lie [unlikely, it involves sodomy], or it means Hamas is probably not lying. Here are some easy lies that Hamas could have told which do not come with any serious drawback, but which would still succeed in their goal of reducing Israel support:
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IDF is raping boys in Gaza, and/or using dogs to do so. This would have no downside for Hamas, and indeed it would push boys to seek out their protection.
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IDF is raping girls in Gaza, and/or using dogs to do so. No downside for Hamas, only upside.
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IDF is torturing Hamas soldiers in a way which does not reduce their honor. Crucifying them? Hitting them while they pray? Preventing them from praying? Drowning them? There are unlimited options. “IDF shows prisoner a video of his child being suffocated by IDF soldier”. No downside for them, only upside.
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IDF is using dogs to kill children in Gaza. No downside for Hamas, only upside.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Good point. Not sure if the study I read controlled for that.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
I think it should be noted that the non-promiscuous women may still be in a “talking stage” with the more promiscuous men, or they may be in a situationship with the more promiscuous men, and thus not necessarily on the market. The top 1% promiscuous men have many more unique partners than the top 1% promiscuous women, and my theory is that this has been exacerbated by social media. (These men, though, may be so busy that they have no time to fill out surveys, so tremendous skepticism should be placed on optional unpaid fill-out surveys).
Replying under myself to make an additional point: should it not in theory be easy to stop this behavior while retaining the basic structure of capitalism?
jail time for infractors and the expropriation of all of their wealth and property. Like, actual punishments. Why are we not actually punishing these people.
multi-million dollar payouts to whistleblowers, plus national honors. Place their portraits in the White House, they are model citizens.
a government program that sends out mailers and emails to every vendor in the country, asking them about their experiences with services in exchange for a small payment for their time (this is to know where to investigate)
Use AI to determine which industries should be lowering their prices (but are in an unspoken agreement not to), and then force them to or tax them
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