domain:felipec.substack.com
Terracotta
11m ago
Why the non-related requirement? The point of honoring your mother is honoring the sacrifice she and her body made giving you life and then sustaining and raising you
The original discussion was specifically about young women giving up a career in order to focus on having kids right out of college. The compensation for 5 years of paid professional work in the mid-20s is not just $X salary, but greatly expanded skillset and prospects for future earning, a solid professional network, plus a certain amount of prestige/ social capital that can be traded in for increased power in community interactions, etc. If you're saying the only compensation needed for an equivalent amount of time spent in stay-at-home childrearing should be the freely-rendered love of your own hypothetical someday babies (assuming you don't do anything to piss them off), well, it's a sweet sentiment, but it sounds like a terrible deal for the woman.
Tenaz
12m ago
The main problem with creative writing and screenwriting is how extremely difficult it is to get jobs in those fields. The average creative writing major should expect to get a mostly-unrelated job or need more education. The average screenwriting major should expect to essentially not get into the film industry at all.
And I'm talking about getting married and having kids, not finding sexual partners.
(Though, if you want to get laid as a man, getting married is statistically by far your best bet).
hydroacetylene
15m ago
In the era of contraception, getting laid is at best correlated with reproductive success; I suspect engineers have a higher TFR than roadies and bartenders, although probably not by as much as one would think.
hydroacetylene
17m ago
If you're going to college to get married, you need to look like you have your own ambitions. Pursuing a highly-educated mate just isn't a respectable goal for women anymore.
You can, in fact, combine the two- study education and 'need help' with your math homework in the engineering commons, you'll get that MRS degree in no time. It was what my grandfather recommended my sister to do, although she met a law student with a trust fund before she could execute that plan.
Lewis2
32m ago
I was formerly the board chair of a local non-profit daycare. Even with free facilities, only a couple of full-time staff, a bunch of part-time high school and college students making barely above minimum wage (this was pre-Covid), and zero excess funds most years, we still were barely cheaper than many of the other local daycares. At least where I live, childcare is a highly competitive field. Any conspiracy to artificially inflate costs would need to include every daycare run by a non-profit, university, church, stay-at-home mom, large employer, etc., including every new entrant into the business, of which there are many. A sinister cabal is just not possible.
Terracotta
34m ago
Jeff and Mackenzie started out in their early 20s in roughly the same position, collaborating on a business, both presumably thinking they had talent and some good ideas. So they make a great test case for the options facing young women who choose between (A) early marriage/kids and (B) pursuing their career.
Mackenzie chose A, stayed home with the children and after two decades got to be the unilaterally discarded middle-aged wife with no future, no vocation, no social or professional power, no marketable skills to build on, and zero credit or respect for the 25 years of work she put into the supposedly-so-valuable work of motherhood and family-building (just "literally marrying a dude," in your words). She gets to keep some of the accumulated assets of their joint family project-- much less than half-- and the male public is in broad agreement that she should be damn grateful to emerge with even that.
Jeff chose B, cultivated his career, and gets not just riches but power, public respect, a robust personal and professional network, and a vocation/identity that will stick with him well into his '70s, where his value will increase, not decrease, over time.
Explain to me again why you think young women should follow Mackenzie's path, not Jeff's?
hydroacetylene
just now
Ah, yes, 40's and 50's girlbosses are widely admired among the masses, the stereotypes of cats and alcoholism are signs of respect.
I think people Just Don't Like Middle Aged Women regardless of whether they're moms or not. Honestly I'm not sure middle aged men get the greatest shake either, although there's positive stereotypes slightly more often I suppose.
2rafa
1m ago
Of course, but even if your failed-out creative writing major becomes an English teacher making a modest salary, he's still surrounded by women, many of them young and attractive. Even if they'd rather a doctor, an average-to-good looking male teacher won't have trouble dating or getting married. Male nurses are a himbo profession and always seem to do well with women.
Tenaz
4m ago
I don't think status compensation is the right way to look at it. Kids are their own reward. The main thing women get out of the arrangement is more kids who are more well-adjusted.
Their husbands arguably get the same thing with less personal risk, which is why divorce should bear extreme social and financial consequences in most cases.
2rafa
4m ago
With the exception of the very poor and very rich (which even most highly intelligent and conscientious people will never be), income and tfr aren't really correlated much among secular Westerners.
Tenaz
9m ago
Of course, that's what I'm saying. You pretend to be getting an education while dating intelligent, conscientious classmates.
It's not that the education side of the strategy is fake necessarily, but even if you don't care about it at all, pursuing it as your explicit goal is probably the most effective way to find a husband.
To_Mandalay
13m ago
Healthy women have deep-seated, base, mammalian urges to reproduce and nourish healthy offspring. It is hardwired in them to feel pleasure through these behaviors. The bond a mother has with her children and how they give great meaning to her life is a story in every culture in existence.
A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.
Women are forsaking these genetic behaviors for what reason? For whose benefit?
Cuz they don't feel like it, I guess? Really nobody is forcing women not to have kids. It's not a matter of it being too expensive or anything. You can be flat broke in a western country and your kids will have an infinitely more comfortable existence than those of the peasant woman in 1312 who popped out twelve children. If women really want to have kids, they can, it's not hard.
hydroacetylene
14m ago
I've always thought most psychology degrees(and communications etc) are backup plans for when more rigorous degrees don't work out, not a first choice.
quiet_NaN
15m ago
Personally, I did have parents who would would probably have talked me out of philosophy or medieval German. But with STEM, the assumption is that you find a job other than taxi driver. Physics is kind of good because it keeps your options open between software development, labwork and a zillion other occupations. If anything, I might have spent more time thinking about the if, why, what field and what school regarding a PhD. I am still okay with how it is likely to work out, though.
Regarding housing, I know of few tenants who spent more food/eating out than on rent. Typically, the rent is more than half of your paycheck. Again, in Germany, most of jobs (in, say, IT) and most of the infrastructure are in the big cities, where housing is crazy expensive. For people living in the big metropolitan areas the decision 'let us have three kids' would necessitate finding another job somewhere else where rents are cheaper, dropping out of their social circle and all that.
MartianNight
18m ago
"nobody is trying" is kinda consensus-building, but probably fine.
I never wrote “nobody is trying” to ban real meat. I'm sure there are some PETA-style militant vegans who'd love to ban real meat, but they are a tiny minority that does not have enough power to enact such a ban, and I don't see a likely scenario where that changes in the near future.
What I did say was:
Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options.
I've not heard a convincing argument against this, and can't imagine one that doesn't rely on a lot of assumptions and slippery slope type fallacies.
Meanwhile, there is real-world evidence in favor of my claim, in that restaurants already serve vegan and vegetarian options in addition to meat-based options, and this hasn't lead to meat becoming unavailable in general.
If lab-grown meat ever becomes commercially viable (which is a big if) I can see large chains like McDonald's introducing it as a separate option, just like they now offer a plant-based burger. The plant-based option isn't there to force you to eat it. It's there so that if your friend group consists of 9 meat eaters and 1 vegan, you can all go to McDonald's together.
jkf
20m ago
Cows don't eat trees (much) though -- they eat grass, and after a year that grass is turning back into CO2 one way or another.
2rafa
22m ago
People in Jeff's circles who aren't begging for handouts acknowledge pretty openly that he was a scumbag for what he did. He and his duck-faced new woman are viciously mocked by everyone from the well-educated inhabitants of elite tech and political circles to the literal tabloid press that made fun of him for his 'alive girl' texts and delights in publishing pictures of the couple where they look awful.
Being one of the richest people in the world is always going to attract a baseline level of respect from the majority of the people who surround you, since a pittance from you is enough to set them and their descendants up for generations. Still, I'd hesitate to say that Jeff came out of it better than Mackenzie. You also don't acknowledge that she didn't demand her fair share, she didn't care enough to and settled for much less. She could have demanded (and would have been granted) both more equity and voting shares in Amazon if she wanted them.
Lewis2
23m ago
In modern mass culture, the middle-age dads of tweens and teens are also portrayed as out of touch laughingstocks. At least the moms are portrayed as competent. As for older women, yes, there’s the stereotype of the overbearing mother (or mother-in-law), but there’s also the great respect shown to grandmothers. Just think about the messaging during Covid. Everyone was told to mask and get vaccinated in order to save grandma, but no one even thought to be concerned about grandpa.
Either way, I’m pretty sure dasfoo was talking about the traditional views under the bad old patriarchy, not modern views.
hydroacetylene
23m ago
I'm pretty sure American Jews vote left wing because the American right has a history of racial discrimination, which Jews pattern match to Nazism.
Secular urbanites, which is what most self identified Jews are in practice, vote left wing. Religious Jews either block vote as part of machine politics or vote republican.
jkf
26m ago
Like I say I'm not the hugest fan of intensive dairying, so fine if true -- but I do think they will run into trouble with energy inputs. One cow can generate a truly shocking amount of milk, and they don't really eat that much. The problem (to me) is that the demand for milk products is also truly shocking -- so anyway you slice it there's going to be some shocking resource usage going on.
2rafa
29m ago
A little-discussed phenomenon is that since 2011 or so, low-wage pay has skyrocketed in major urban areas. People who were making $8 an hour in 2008 make $30 an hour today. Meanwhile, white collar workers who made $50 an hour (converted to hourly pay) in 2008 may make $75 an hour today, a much smaller increase.
The cost of childcare, fast food, hotel rooms etc for white collar professionals (ie. the upper middle class) has therefore increased much faster than their own incomes.
gattsuru
29m ago
Maybe a computer mouse or something like an NES controller for playing retro games?
Doable, though I'd need to step up on 3d printing for anything usable for the longer term. Retro gaming's a lot more hit or miss than I would have expected for a lot of the teenagers I get, though.
Alternatively some kind of optical scanner that can read barcodes/QR codes for data retrieval.
Barcodes is possible. QR codes are rough: either you're using a prebuilt module for the heavy lifting and just spits out a boring (usually UART) stream, putting a RaspPi in a box, or you're throwing camera focus and bulk memory management and illumination all in at once on a microcontroller project.
Displaying changing QR codes on ePaper or oled displays aren't too hard. Dunno if that's anything students would useful.
To_Mandalay
33m ago
Inferior in the great chain of being, in absolute worth, closer, in the mind of a pre-modern, to the Imago Dei
To_Mandalay
34m ago
If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.
Not necessarily. Women are valuable because they can give you sons.
"Female infanticide" is it's own phenomenon deserving of a name but not "male infanticide." The wiki article only gives the examples of India, China, and Pakistan, but gender-skewed infanticide was also not uncommon in pre-modern Europe. Not a lot of men in history were going "awwww man, another son?" when their wife popped out the latest kid.
My guess is that straight men who do creative writing and screenwriting get laid much more than straight men who do software engineering or physics. Even political science, as @Bartender_Venator says below.
They're around (vastly) more women, will have largely female social circles in many cases, meet more women in the course of their professions and have jobs that women would (in many cases) like to speak to them about. That easily cancels out the engineer's larger paycheck.
If you want to get laid as a man, studying English literature and spending your 20s and early 30s being a bum in a band and working part-time bartending gigs in Brooklyn is far superior as a sexual strategy than literally any white collar profession will be. That isn't a recommendation.
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