domain:felipec.substack.com
This seems low-charity. @AlexanderTurok doesn't want the government to encourage people to take up low-class jobs or to make policy that increases rather than decreases the number of such jobs.
Specifically he seems to think that the Right is full of people who haven't done such work and fail to see just how awful it is - his knowledge seems to be more hands-on than most of us here and most twitter commentators, so I take him seriously on this note even though I don't necessarily agree.
Now, frankly I have no idea how he does want these necessary but awful (by his lights) jobs to be done, and would very much appreciate hearing that directly from him. I would also, honestly, really like him to make a top level post where he lays out his own, explicit, positive ideas about how he wants the economy and culture to work.
honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed
If you have that particular ability. Not everybody does, and it's not just "oh well that's because it was taught badly in school". Some people can't math, that's the sad fact (I am one).
Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.
And then we find they can't understand books that are not the "relevant to the youth" ones they read.
Who the hell needs to understand Dickens today? Sure, that's a point. But what do you do when it's a text for the workplace that isn't Dickens but is also not "The Hunger Games"?
This study is even worse than I first thought, because while I had sympathy that American kids of today wouldn't be familiar with 19th century British law terms, then I find they were allowed to look up unfamiliar terms and couldn't even put it together then for the joke about the dinosaur (bolding mine):
This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities. From January to April of 2015, subjects participated in a recorded, twenty-minute reading session in which they were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English. Before subjects started the reading tests, they were given access to online resources and dictionaries and advised that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource. The facilitators also assured the subjects that were free to go at their own pace and did not have to finish reading all seven paragraphs by the end of the exam.
It's even more depressing, because these kids got into college to do an English degree with a poor starting level of English:
The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4, which means, according to Educational Testing Service, that they read on a “low-intermediate level,” able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives,” “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages” (American College 12). In other words, the majority of this group did not enter college with the proficient-prose reading level necessary to read Bleak House or similar texts in the literary canon. As faculty, we often assume that the students learn to read at this level on their own, after they take classes that teach literary analysis of assigned literary texts. Our study was designed to test this assumption.
They wanted to study English literature without the ability to even read Dickens. This would be like me trying to do a degree in Mathematics. You'd have more luck teaching a dog to walk on its hind legs, pace Dr. Johnson:
“Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” ― Samuel Johnson
Syphax
1hr ago
I don't know about the spanish part, I went to a Wendy's in Chantilly right before covid and noticed the staff were entirely Indian women. I only remember this because they royally fucked up my order (It's plain! Just meats, cheese, and bread! And where the fuck is the bacon?), and served a bun that was somehow 1/3 rock hard stale and the rest was fine.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character.
Especially funny since Kamala mentioned working at McDonalds.
Ms. Harris’s campaign said that she was an employee of the McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 during the summer after her freshman year at Howard University, working the cash register, french-fry station and ice cream machine. It has provided little information beyond that, including how long she worked there. She also mentioned her job at McDonald’s when she ran for president in 2019.
Well, clearly her low-class parent who fetishised manual labour should have emulated the Asians!
Er, wait...
zeke5123a
1hr ago
Biden advertised as a moderate but governed like a radical. Style aside, Trump is still a Clinton Democrat.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I think this is probably more accurate, and really of society as a whole. The dominant position seems to be “if you didn’t get college credit, it doesn’t count.” I get it for job skills, as college credits and degrees mean someone verified that you actually did the work. It never made sense to me in art, literature, history, or other liberal arts. Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts, or practicing drawing or writing. If I had a kid who wanted to be a writer, im not sure I’d make him go through university— in fact it’s a waste of time. Instead, I’d have him write on substack or some other blogging platform and learn to communicate with an audience. Same with art. There’s enough instruction out there that you could learn the techniques of your chosen medium, and the rest is down to practice and getting feedback. But it seems like so many people want to get those kinds of degrees even when they don’t make sense.
But our society somehow bought the university marketing that told them that only learning something in a university classroom taught by a TA who has 500 students a day counts. If I pass a course on WW2 history, that counts as learning history. If I read every book I can get my hands on for that topic, read first hand accounts, looked at raw footage, etc. it doesn’t. Problem being that I’ve actually done a lot more work than the kid sleeping through their lectures in Turner Hall. And unlike him, I’ve actually done all the reading.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Depends on the Asians, I know the stereotype of Indians/Pakistanis in the British Isles is "own the corner shop" (to the point where a 90s band named themselves that, their big hit) and for Chinese people it's "run the local takeaway".
In the US I suppose it's "Indians and Chinese work in IT, Koreans own the corner shops"?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
Tokens aren't everything. While you can fit an entire novel inside the theoretical token window of an LLM, that doesn't leave it much room to do detailed and coherent output, especially as your requests become more detailed.
As for epubs, yeah, one of the steps in my app is being able to read from docx and epub files and extract context from chapter headings, for example.
Most automatic epub generation tools suck. For that matter, I have seen professional published epubs that are just terrible slapped-together artifacts. I taught myself to make properly formatted ebooks using Sigil and I'd make a business of it except it wouldn't pay shit (too many people offering to do it on Fiverr for ten bucks).
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
The celebrities aren’t the big deal to me. If a foreign country was involved in using Epstein to gather intelligence and to blackmail, then the public should know that. If the foreign country is so influential that they can do that without ever facing repercussions, then the public should definitely know that so they can change their priorities accordingly.
As the child of two undocile people, it’s because in a two-person system with no rank or higher outside authority, such people rip each other apart the moment they have a real, serious conflict. Temperamentally neither is equipped to back down gracefully or elicit sympathy from the other, so the relationship ends up either in prolonged turf war or divorce.
That’s not to say you should be marrying a cocker-spaniel instead of a woman, just that if you find yourself a male born with an undocile temperament (many such cases!) your relationship is going to do a lot better with a laid-back girl than with a spitfire or a girlboss.
The opposite scenario is also true, but proportionally less likely for biological reasons.
On a broader case, I think this extends to a principle that we can encourage women to be assertive OR have a tradition of equal, gender-neutral gender roles, but not both.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I mean, yes you improve past age 12, but if I started violin at 6-7 and you start at 13-14, I have somewhere between 6-8 years of practice ahead of anything you could do in the time between 14-18 and I will be much better than you. It’s that way with sports. If you want to have a chance of playing high school sports, you have to be playing select sports by 8 because otherwise you’ll not get enough quality practice to compete with those who did.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
I don't care if all men can do it, I care if any man can do it.
Y'know, I scrolled down fast and didn't see the author's name on this post, but when I hit this bit:
the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools
I went "Oh! Alexander!" and scrolled back up and whaddya know, I was right!
there's no reason to make him work manual labor because some conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway."
It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
Friend, mate, old buddy, old pal - learn a new song? "Righties are dumb and smelly and low-class and have too many bastard kids and are way too sympathetic to the low-grade low-IQ blacks and browns who have too many bastard kids" is getting boring now. The pure despite and contempt you have for those who make it possible for you to live a comfortable life is astounding. Oh, you don't like the grubby proles who work the cash registers? Don't worry, supermarkets are working fast on self-checkout so now you can do the job of being the grubby prole who works the cash register for free!
Even for those Elite Human Capital who are going to waltz into whatever high-status white-collar job you think most desirable will do better if they have some experience of summer work. Granted, it'll probably be an internship with a company of one of Dad's golf buddies, but some experience of "this is what work looks like" is much better than none. Otherwise you end up hiring people who have all the right qualifications on paper but need to be hand-held every minute of the day since they have no idea what to do on their own (I see plenty of smart people who haven't a clue about "okay this is my first job, how do I sort out my tax?")
You really do want all the low-class (by your metric) people, regardless of colour, to just disappear so you don't have to interact with them, don't you? No more manual labourers. No more people on the tills in shops. No more unsuitables that can be confused with you, the striving wannabe, by the elites you so desperately want to belong to.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
"it's not about ideology, the bad (incorrect) term is polluting our data" seems pretty good
The problem is not the change per se. The wokes, the medical establishment and MAGA would agree that a column which tracks sex-assigned-at-birth should rather be labeled "sex" (with the wokes probably prefering "SAAB") than "gender". This is why this is such a non-story.
But I will not pretend that the thought process of whoever was doing the change was "oh no, if the Trump administration sees this, they will get really mad, because they really care about scientific accuracy. Remember what happened when someone confused atoms and ions in a grant application?" The thought process was more like "Trump clearly sees the word gender as the language of the political enemy, better remove it asap."
we are talking about a medical database here, peoples' sex is actually a thing that matters; gender not so much
Arguably, it depends. If I want to study breast cancer, then I likely want to select "people with boobs", which might be more closely related to gender than sex-assigned-at-birth. Ideally, I would use both columns and select for cis-women (or cis-men). (If the database contains detailed info on gender related medical interventions, I guess studying trans people might be a possibility as well.)
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Thé average marriage age for urban women inside the Hajnal line in Northern Europe was much younger than today; it was also not in the teens. Early-mid twenties as opposed to late twenties.
Now marriage in the teens also does not seem to have been seen as sharply negatively as it is today, either- the average age at marriage drops in American colonists, for example, and those were fine, upstanding citizens who happened to have much better economic opportunities much sooner. And while not Saudi Arabia women faced substantial legal disabilities; they worked but there was restrictions on profession, pay might be legally required to be less than male employees, they didn’t have full control of their finances, etc.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
2hr ago
Theta gang.
If only nothing ever happened...
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
God is inherently interesting and doesn't need us to make Him anything. Eventually more and more people will be broken by the dopamine treadmill and will come back to God, as I have. Happens every day.
It may not necessarily happen immediately, I'd imagine this will play out over a large time scale as it often does. But the wages of sin are death, especially on a societal scale.
2rafa
2hr ago
It’s not a great outcome but the reality is that life in eg. Southern Brazil or the nicer parts of Mexico is “fine” for the middle class. Worse, strictly, yes, but bearable.
The situation in what will become of Europe will be far worse than that.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
I am familiar, I the Jesus Prayer and occasionally prayer beads. I still think meditation in the Buddhist view is more flexible and able to look into different things, such as focusing attention on the body, or the breath, areas and objects of attention which are useful in the Christian path.
2rafa
2hr ago
Because of the character of the immigration. Latinos are largely deracinated, with little shared identity (which is why ‘Latinx’ or la raza stuff is largely the preserve of PMC white-Hispanic academics and the working class Mexican equivalent of Hoteps). Many will vote for a conservative ‘strongman’ caudillo over the left. Many consider themselves ‘white’ regardless of reality, and intermarriage rates are quite high. Many essentially share an ‘American dream’ of being an atomized consoomer with a big pick up truck, a bimbo wife and a McMansion in the suburbs. This may be suboptimal but it is not immediately catastrophic. An America after mass Hispanic migration (now occurring) is a poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional America, but it can probably survive as a polity.
In Europe the same isn’t true with large scale immigration from Islamic societies that have old, deep cultural and religious identities, often with an undercurrent of resentment towards Europeans and European society and separate both particular identities (‘I’m Turkish, not German’) and universal ones (‘I’m Muslim, I’m part of the global Ummah with my brothers and sisters’) that fully supplant the previous civic identity. Intermarriage rates between those from Islamic backgrounds and the natives are so low that in most places they’re negligible (and when they happen almost always involves an indigenous usually-woman converting). Coupled with general dysfunctional migration (including from non-Islamic regions) and the extreme pace of demographic change - faster in most of Europe than the US even if America is at a more advanced stage - and you have a recipe for the complete breakdown of social order and full Lebanonization in the coming years.
Consider that in 1950 the Maronites could easily have carved out their own state. But by the mid-1970s they no longer possessed the demographic strength even though they had most of the money and the technical skills.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
2hr ago
what part of this do you think is either not a thing your hypothetical good woman would look for, or not a thing under the control of the men?
All men can't earn above average (or whatever percentile $60k is) wage in the way that all women could have less than 5 lifetime partners. If they did, it wouldn't be above average anymore and the buying power of that money would be lower.
yofuckreddit
2hr ago
Man, having kids is magical. Getting to see the first time a human decides to take responsibility for their own skill and proficiency is an unmatched feeling.
I took a more passive-aggressive approach. We live in a neighborhood with a ton of kids. While pulling my oldest around in a trailer, I pointed out the 3-year-old girls pedaling on their own without training wheels (admittedly rare and Asian) and that he was older, so he should be able to do it.
A week later he was up without training wheels, and the week after he was pedaling a 12-mile round trip.
Now to get his younger sibling to do the same...
many centers of high economic and industrial development
So the East and West Coasts, particularly the West Coast, propped up by cheap serf immigrant labour? Spots throughout the rest of the country like the tech hubs in Texas of Austin and Dallas also doing great? Sure, a lot of the country is sliding into decline, but The Economy is going gangbusters through a mix of the giant tech sector massively outperforming everything else and skewing things that way (if AI works out the way everyone is betting their shirt on it working) and the world is still using the US dollar as currency of choice. Yeah, lower middle-class to middle middle-class you can't buy meat anymore and you're living sixteen to a four bedroom house to make rent, but GDP is booming, the market is sky-high, if you own stocks you're okay, so shut up about the economy, stupid!
I could well see that happening.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2hr ago
I happened to luck out and eventually find one of the few remaining friendly, docile, feminine women left and married her.
I understand wanting to marry a woman who is friendly and feminine. But docile? Not to imply anything about your sexual proclivities, but the only time I see that used as a positive descriptor of a relationship partner is when talking about sexual submissiveness. And wanting your partner to act docile in bed is different from wanting them to be docile in normal life. So I'd like to understand why you list that as a desirable trait in a life partner.
Any man can become president. That's still a very bad life plan to be offering to people as a whole because all of them except one will be disappointed. It matters that the majority of people have decent lives.
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