domain:alakasa.substack.com
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19hr ago
Feminism is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is more fundamental: human want. People want nicer houses, nicer cars, nicer food. They want financial security and control over their own lives. Human wants are unlimited and they are the fundamental force pushing towards the efficient utilization of human labor.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
22hr ago
protestors who had glued themselves to the road
When protestors started using the roads, I came up with the idea of making roads (outside of crosswalks) open range cars. Meaning you can do what you want but if a car hits you not only is the car not liable for any damage done to you are liable for the damage any damage you do to the car. That remains true even if the car speeds up or aims for you. The car has a priority right to use the road, and other users must yield to that right or bear the consequences.
Mewis
6hr ago
I feel like this is a little bit unfair on zoomers here. It's true that online applications are kind of a waste of time, the response rate is so poor. At the same time the boomer nostrum of "just go in and give them a firm handshake" might have worked for (white) men back in 1955, an age when people were happy to hand out junior executive positions to (white) dudes they just met, but it's just silly in this day and age. The old world is dead, but the new struggles to be born - in the meantime we have crappy online job boards.
Personally, looking for temporary work in New Zealand, I've gotten work through all of online applications, pavement pounding, agencies and word of mouth. There's value, too, in being aggressive - just asking people you meet if they know of any work going has some response rate. I think maybe some people worry they're being pushy but most managers do not like looking for new staff and are happy to see people who just want to work.
(More that all of this is for low wage/status work. The game is totally different if you want like, a real career)
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
18hr ago
I mean, I think the prima facie case is pretty simple: entities that have an incentive to be profit maximizing have decided that paying these women to do the work they do is, on margin, worth it. The market is not perfectly efficient, of course, but I am not sure why I should believe you are more likely to be correct than the people actually making the decision to hire them.
I think that generally speaking creating tons of economic productivity is what frees up women from household tasks so they can in fact find full-time employment, it is NOT necessarily more women working which frees up tons of economic productivity.
I think it is, more specifically, technological development. It reduces the amount of labor needed to perform household tasks, freeing that labor up for other uses, and increases economic productivity at various tasks outside the home. Technological development simultaneously increases the benefits and reduces the opportunity cost of working outside the home.
I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')
Almost all of them? Even in the heavily male dominated industries you mention women are somewhere between 10 and 30% of all workers. Do you think if 36% of all farmers disappeared no one would notice? What about 10% of all construction workers? Or hell, how about healthcare. Would no one notice if 88% of all nurses disappeared overnight? What about 38% of all physicians?
The real question is how much excess value a given female produces for the economy over and above the value she would produce if she were instead raising kids and maintaining the household. Childcare costs are 'internalized' if she takes over this role, but it still counts.
Yes, hence my proposal. One disparity here is that the value produced outside the home is partially returned to the women in question in the form of money she can use to acquire shelter, food, and all the necessities of life. If she quits working outside the home to raise a child very little of that value comes back to her in a form that can be spent to sustain herself. If the state wants more women to choose raising children then more of the value that action produces needs to come to them in a form they can use to sustain themselves.
benmmurphy
9hr ago
Women don't want to spontaneously play pickup basketball because they will be criticised for doing it for 'attention' :/
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12hr ago
What was the law that made this a temporary exception? Your link only shows the removal.
Anyway, you missed a couple options.
- Support for protestors concealing their identity while behaving correctly. I.e. honest-to-god peaceful speech as protected under the 1st amendment.
- Support for the actual, as-written exemption. No loophole, simply the belief that “physical health and safety” protections are still worth privileging.
- Distrust that right-leaning leaders will assume intent to conceal identity even when there are other plausible reasons.
- Objection to the pure chilling effect, regardless of any actual abuse.
Now, I agree with your prediction. At least the strict form, where you mean people committing crimes other than mask-wearing. I do not expect the law to be used against sympathetic chemo patients. I think it would quite likely be applied to the mythical peaceful (but still masked) protest. As in—near 100% that, if a protest were shut down with arrests, some of the perps would only be charged under this statute. It’s just too easy to insist that they were aiming for intimidation and thus must have been concealing identity. Ask @gattsuru if it’s a good idea, generally speaking, to rely on police discretion.
Of course, I don’t really expect such arrests, because I expect the law to have its intended chilling effect.
Again, I’m not asking you to agree with objectors. You probably have a very different level of trust in the police, and you certainly have a different evaluation of health risks. I’m simply imagining the alternate universe where this has the complete opposite valence. Where it’s seen as legal chicanery comparable to NY handgun law, or a state power grab along the lines of wiretapping. Where the same users who cry foul about liberal bias ask why this time, the ambiguity is okay.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
15hr ago
The problem with this formulation is that Y isn't banned unless done as part of X. In this case, what's illegal is not the wearing of a mask, it's wearing a mask to conceal one's identity.
I'm not sure I agree. I don't read any intent requirement in the text of 14-12.7. It seems like what's banned is "being in public wearing anything that could conceal your identity." Your intent about concealing your identity doesn't enter into it.
As to your examples I think it would be fair to say "they're banning standing around in front of the mall in a funny hat" or "they're banning beer in the park" but the firearm one is trickier.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
16hr ago
Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.
This is because the economic incentives they offer are pitiful compared to the costs they are asking people to bear. Defraying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and lost income with tiny payments.
It also introduces a huge deadweight loss of higher taxes. Since most of these ideal heavily bread females would be supported by heavily taxed men who are their husbands it’s wooing just further depress economic activity. The past would have expected the man to man up and work 80 hrs a week if he needed and transfer directly to his wife instead of using the government as a middleman.
I am skeptical that doubling the hours of work men do would totally compensate for the loss of all the extra workers in the form of women. Structuring the transfer this way also requires a women become almost totally dependent on a man, which has its own issues.
Probably far easier to propandize all the Instagram executives. Instead of filling young females with attractive girls traveling to Bali bombard them with pretty pregnant chicks with 5 children and a dutiful loving husband. You can change economic incentives sure but changing what people value changes how the evaluate incentives. If real life hot pussy is begging men to man up I am guessing there is no shortage of men willing to work 80 hours a week for that deal.
I am skeptical about the number of men who would sign up for this, or the extent to which women could be propagandized into it. We had this kind of arrangement once. We ceased having it for a reason.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
17hr ago
Should I fix myself? No, it is the women who are wrong.
Could be true, but probably not very useful advice.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
20hr ago
Just like now they drivers would have to look before opening their door. Pedestrians would still be allowed to use roads, in all the ways they currently do (even protesting) they just bear all the liability if they get hit outside of a cross walk.
ResoluteRaven
10hr ago
Two somewhat related examples are liberals who believe that "the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice" being confronted with what in their mental framework are inexplicable political reversals such as the election of Trump or the repeal of Roe v. Wade and (I imagine this one might be a bit more controversial here) economists who don't connect the economic malaise in the US after 1971 with the peak in domestic oil production and subsequent higher energy costs because their thinking has become almost entirely divorced from the actual material inputs that drive the production of goods and services.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
11hr ago
I'm not sure there exists a statistic real enough if it's not in the direction you expect.
2rafa
14hr ago
What they need to do is guarantee mothers the same career income they would otherwise have. So, eg. if a female doctor aged 28 has three children, she receives $2m in cash over a certain number of years. If a shop assistant of the same age has three children, she receives only $200k. No country subsidises kids to the extent that an even moderately successful woman would notice the difference.
RegularlyExpressed
14hr ago
I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')
Pretty soon, I imagine. First thing you'd probably hear about is a lot of people dying in hospitals as the majority of nurses disappear. Or you'd see most activity in the retail sector comes to an abrupt halt because few stores have enough staff on hand to handle purchases. A huge recession as public demand drops due to half the adult population suddenly finding themselves without a source of disposable income. And so on.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
15hr ago
I agree that the opportunity costs are much lower if women work while also raising kids but I've been operating on the assumption people want women to become full time homemakers, which I think is much more disruptive. I do not have any kids of my own but your experience makes sense to me. I'm under the impression there are a lot of up-front cost for kid 1 that can probably be re-used for subsequent kids (toys, clothes, etc).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
15hr ago
Maybe $2 million for some people, true. Most would be much less. According to FRED the median US personal income in 2022 was $40,480. According to the US census there are about 74M women between the ages of 15 and 50 (the age categories used for calculating TFR). Let's say we get half of them to have a child (that would boost US TFR to ~2.3). If we gave each of them the median income that comes out to about $1.5T per year. That would be about 15% of the US federal budget, 10% more than we spend on Social Security. This is much less than I expected it to be!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
18hr ago
I did not intend to denigrate them by calling them wants instead of needs, sorry if it came off that way. I agree those things cannot be satisfied without some kind of fundamental change in human nature. I'm interested in what this coordination end looks like.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18hr ago
Per Wikipedia:
Notable U.S. cities surrounded by UGBs include Portland, Oregon; Boulder, Colorado; Honolulu, Hawaii; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Lexington, Kentucky; Seattle, Washington; Knoxville, Tennessee;[17] and San Jose, California.
None of those cities are notably famous for their YIMBY attitude to urban infill and densification - Portland, Seattle and Boulder are possibly the three most notoriously NIMBY cities outside California.
Skibboleth
19hr ago
NYT exit polls indicate the opposite. Also, a 2022 House Exit Poll for another example of the GOP winning high earners.
I'm far too lazy to run around aggregating a bunch of exit polls, but it doesn't really matter that much because whatever the exact tilt they're all pointing the same way. Namely, that the spread on voting by income level may be electorally significant (not hard when margins are so low), but it is not demographically substantial (i.e. if you were to get a random sample of any of the strata, roughly half would be voting for each major party). Thus, my initial point remains the same:
either major party trying to position themselves as the party of the poor/working class is typical American posturing where everyone wants to be rich but no one wants to be Rich.
Saying one party is the party of the working class because slightly more than half of voters go for the other party while slightly less than half go for the same seems like it's drawing too strong a conclusion from too little evidence. Whichever poll you reference, characterizing the conflict as one of pure class comes across as slightly farcial. It is, however, consistent with my theory that the liberal-conservative conflict is sectoral (in particular, merchants and gentry versus professionals) and normative.
less charitably: the "realignment" is conservative wishcasting that more reflects how suburban conservatives would like to see themselves. It's part of the broader populist-conservative 'just a little guy' routine where Trumpists pretend that they have no power or influence. Admitting that they're actually well-off and influential would puncture the fantasy that they're rebels against the empire instead of engaged in a peer conflict.
curious_straight_ca
20hr ago
The kind of woman who would be 'impure' a few hundred years ago is one who went against the explicit desires of her family and culture. The kind of woman who is 'impure' today is one who does what the culture guides you to do. The supposedly deontological choice is just selecting for something very different today. Nothing is absolute, and not being pure is, if it's a negative signal, necessarily a weaker one today, and not one worth trading off against everything else. Just like a culture with deep traditions about planting and harvest times need to modify those traditions when they move to a new climate.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
20hr ago
Car collisions would remain case by case. Only pedestrians would be liable by default.
So you're free to kill jaywalkers like you're in the purge? I see a lot wrong with this view. Any deviation from lawful norms should not be death. How about if a kid wanders into a neighborhood road after a ball? Free to run him down on purpose?
"I'm going to run over children and make the families pay me for the privilege!" seems like a bad platform to run for office on.
We're all in this life together. I only live every day because some asshole doesn't decide to cross the center line on my commute and kill us both at a combined speed of 120 mph. We live by the grace of others. Always.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
23hr ago
An urban growth boundary, inside of which there is only high density development, outside of which no one may build at all.
I don't claim to want this at all. An urban growth boundary would be a terrible thing. Letting people build on farmland they own is no different to letting people build on urban land they own. You wouldn't get the Kowloon Walled city, you'd get a smooth gradient of housing densities slowly decreasing from urban centres to rural locations.
A lot of the UK's current housing problems stem from the fact that people can't build on farmland they own.
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
Is it any wonder that people got afraid to date except on an app where she’s explicitly expressed interest by swiping right?
Except everyone hates that. It doesn’t get any dates, it doesn’t get anyone anything, and most women prefer some sexual harassment to no interest at all(because they won’t show interest first).
The solution is simple. If the state wants women to give up their careers, their education, their financial independence so that they will have and raise children then the state needs to adequately compensate those women for what it is asking them to give up. No state on earth is prepared, or could afford, to do this, which is why functionally all efforts to increase fertility fail.
We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.
Why could this work historically? Partially because much more of women's labor was needed inside the home (and so unavailable for work outside the home) and partially because there were actual legal restrictions on the work women (especially married women) could do outside the home.
More options
Context Copy link