domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
faceh
3m ago
Ding ding.
There seems to be a situation where a corporate job is, dare I say, a substitute good for a committed husband. A woman getting a corporate job is given healthcare, a retirement account, oftentimes food and transport are subsidized, she gets a social life and maybe some travel attached to work, and is REWARDED for giving up her prime childbearing years to produce extra value for the shareholders.
But a corporate job can't provide her with a kid. So while all the above 'benefits' are legible, the opportunity cost of NOT having a kid is not concrete until, say, 15 years down the line where she's got a career but she's still single and childless and her bio clock is punishing her for not reproducing.
Looking at it that way, males are in direct competition with megacorps to attract mates who will want to raise kids. They have to offer a 'better deal', which is to say they have to make enough money to provide shelter, healthcare, retirement, food, transport, etc. And if the female isn't explicitly incorporating 'bear and raise children' into her calculation then the corporate job looks like a solid choice.
So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4m ago
In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.
...Am I crazy, or is this the exact opposite of how the term is used in physics? Like, heat-death is a high-entropy state, right? it's also highly ordered and predictable, right? Did information theory actually flip the sign on the term?
Thoroughlygruntled
8m ago
I just want to throw in a quick statement of support for the current rule. The rarity of finding free discussion of controversial topics that doesn't immediately devolve into 4chan-level shitposting is the entire reason I'm here. No moderation is ever going to be perfect, but the Motte is one of the best moderated discussion forums I've ever seen. You guys really don't get enough credit for that.
faceh
13m ago
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?
ALMOST making my point here.
Who would notice if nurses and physicians disappeared? People with doctor's appointments, or the elderly and infirm who depend on nursing care.
Most people wouldn't notice right away because most aren't going to see a nurse or doctor very often.
Compare that to say, if your local power plant shut down because all the staff left. Who would notice? Literally every person whose electricity just switched off.
In the case of physicians, the economic impact wouldn't be immediate because economic activity could still continue even as the healthcare system suffered from a huge backlog. We kinda 'proved' this during Covid. Work continues even if the hospitals are overwhelmed.
In the case of energy production, or internet infrastructure, tons of economic activity would INSTANTLY cease because those inputs are NECESSARY to said activity. So we'd "notice" immediately.
10% of construction workers would indeed be a hit, but with some reshuffling construction would continue.
Also, it is of course likely that just because they make up some significant portion of the workforce, it does NOT imply they're actually responsible for the same share of actual productivity.
If 36% of the female farmers are only producing 10% of the food, the actual felt impact is less severe than the number would imply.
And that's a good distillation of my point. Its likely that 80% of economic productivity is the result of the efforts of 20% of the people. And I'd bet my left testicle that the most productive members of the economy are mostly male.
So if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce, I would guess we'd lose closer to 10% of economic productivity. Which is to say... we'd survive.
And if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce but suddenly all childcare costs were internalized, the actual hit would probably be negligible.
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.
I think to make this proposal make sense, it would be simpler to say that the male whose sperm produced the child she's caring for is on the hook to pay her for her work caring for the child. Rather than the government taking the male's money via taxes and distributing it to women as some kind of subsidy just give her a direct claim to the guy's money as compensation.
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.
The huge glaring irony, though, is that almost any female-centric industry can be to some extent 'replaced' by technology (I will grant that this is NOT the case for Nursing)... except bearing and raising kids.
Like, any job that a female can do, a male with the right tools, automations, and basic support can presumably also do. EXCEPT THE PRECISE JOB THAT FEMALES EVOLVED OVER MILLENIA TO PERFORM, which men still struggle with despite better tech. In the case of bearing children, men are literally incapable of doing it.
So it seems like steps toward a solution require us to 'un-taboo' the idea that females bearing children is in fact a good social priority and women should be encouraged to become mothers.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
15m ago
Fair, I was working from the OP's statement about whether economic activity would be "seriously disrupted." I'm not sure how serious it would have to but I think all the examples I give would qualify.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
17m ago
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?
You're equivocating between "wouldn't notice" and "wouldn't grind to a halt".
I know LLMs are banned here so mods please don’t ban me for this. Here is what I get from chatGPT when I ask “what does it mean for something to be low entropy in the context of the information it contains?”
In the context of information theory, low entropy indicates that the information content is highly predictable and ordered. Entropy, a concept introduced by Claude Shannon, measures the uncertainty or randomness in a set of data. When entropy is low, the data has less randomness and is more structured, meaning that there is less information content or fewer surprises in the data.
For example, a string of repeated characters like "AAAAA" has low entropy because the next character is easily predictable. Conversely, a string of random characters like "G7d2#k9" has high entropy because the next character is unpredictable. In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.
This is what I mean. Very low information, skimmable (because it’s predictable and repetitive).
I agree that “low information density” would be a better way of phrasing this, it seems like I am using this term wrong. Thank you!
fartVader
20m ago
Fair enough. But towns like Edison NJ, Redmond WA, Sunnyvale CA & Fremont CA sit on a whole another tier. (afaik)
nice place with good schools
The schools are good because the people are rich and the residents are hard working. If the schools are to stay good, it makes sense that newest generation of rich and hard working people are moving in.
good schools is 10x in prices
Nimbyism strikes again. Enough place for everyone, but SFHs screw everyone over. Especially true in places like OC and SD, where the populations could 5x without space being an issue.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
20m ago
I think I touch on this in my last paragraph. From the perspective of the person choosing to have children (or not) a lot of the social benefit of having and raising a child comes in the form of a positive externality they don't receive. Maybe it's an opportunity cost for society to, in some sense, have someone work rather than raise children but that externality isn't an opportunity cost for the people doing the choosing, they were never going to receive that benefit anyway.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
24m 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.
fartVader
24m ago
I understand your concern, but look at it in context.
infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers
I said that
Indian or Chinese, bay-area tech workers
and I am one of them (though I wanna leave the bay area asap)
It is a phrasing we use among ourselves all the time. It is easy to be self-deprecating when you're making bank.
this seems to be a place where it's ok to call an immigrant group an infestation
Yes, I can call my own group of people whatever I want. I was being edgy, sure. But, you're making quite the leap, going from 1 mis-used word to accusations of chattel-slavery era racism.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
28m ago
What counts as "low?" According to the World bank Japan has a female LFPR of 55%, Italy's is 41%, and Israel's is 61%. This is compared to, say, the United States at 53% or Afghanistan at 5%. Israel is an outlier in terms of TFR but I'm given to understand that's heavily driven by population subgroups that mostly don't work.
fartVader
32m ago
Strongly believe Lee Quan Yew had general purpose intelligence that matched an average nobel/turing/fields medalist. His son (Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore PM from 2004-2024) was the undisputed top student at Cambridge Math. In another life, he would have been the favorite to win one of those prizes. Assuming an apple doesn't fall that far from the tree, Lee Quan Yew was likely to be in the same ballpark.
Those are some near impossible standards on IQ alone. Take Lee Kuan's GOATed public speaking and it's actually impossible.
The new guy has a standard college education, with a standard beaurocratic career. Reminds me of when cofounders retire and hand their company over to a caretaker MBA. I'm sure he is competent enough to execute. But, I doubt if he is competent+charismatic enough to innovate in the face of inevitable crises.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
36m ago
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.
Not OP, but the obvious rejoinder is that the company but outsources all of the opportunity cost to the employees. The real question is why the prospective employee is so heavily discounting the opportunity cost.
hydroacetylene
36m ago
I mean, the US is also not going to collect 37% of income either.
This is about Canada, not the US.
Disclaimer: I've used family reunification sponsorship to help my wife move to live with me here. But she's not elderly, she's from a western country and she will contribute to society.
But anyway. I don't think it needs to be steelmanned: it's pretty obviously a nice thing to allow people to move in to live with their family. I think it's up to the other side to demonstrate that we cannot afford it.
I'm not saying that they cannot make that case. Chain migration exists. But I would be more in favor of slowing chain migration at the source, taking it as a granted that an economic migrant is likely a beachhead for a larger group, and thus being (A LOT) more selective in allowing them in. This, rather than disallowing family reunification, which has a clearer case of being a pro-social, pro-human justification for immigration.
*EDIT: Though I guess I'm open to some changes to family reunification. I'd be open to increase the delay between immigration and being able to sponsor. I think now it's 5 years from the moment you become a permanent resident. Maybe 10 years after becoming citizen? Long enough that anyone planning on chain migration will probably look somewhere else, unless they have extreme patience. I don't know how the pathways for immigration are for an extended family group, maybe these need to be developped/improved so a prospective immigrant and all the family he wants to bring to Canada can all attempt to immigrate together, so they can't then complain that it's inhumane and evil that we won't allow all the cousins to move in with them after we accepted one of them.
hydroacetylene
39m ago
Japan and Italy have very low female labor force participation rates. Israel has a high one.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
42m 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.
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
44m ago
South Bay is really rough in terms of nightlife (mostly because the majority are 30s married Asian/Indian programmers). San Francisco is pretty fun if you know where to look.
johnfabian
46m ago
I think there's a simpler option here. If you get popped with an illegal weapon on you (and you haven't somehow victimized a Canadian in the process), just instant deportation. Why put them in prison? Just kick them out of the country, done.
hydroacetylene
50m ago
Yes. Texas’s schools underspend the national average by a lot and the better districts tend to be on the low side of the average, except for highland-park level eyepoppingly wealthy areas. And even in those cases, the extra money usually goes to athletics.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
52m ago
Presumably to avoid a repeat of the 60's-80's
TitaniumButterfly
55m ago
Those aren't wants, they're needs, from a genetic and generational standpoint. High-quality mates are positional goods and everyone is in competition with everyone else for those. It's not the bigger house or the nicer car that they want -- not enough to sacrifice all the amazing things only made possible by non-working women -- it's the status which will enable them and their offspring to outcompete others for high-quality mates and thus progeny which will outcompete others in turn. It is survival itself.
Competition for scarce resources is what defines almost every aspect of human reality. It's not somehow decadent for a person to pursue status symbols if that means ensuring a better future for their children, and as I said above, status symbols are positional. These needs cannot be satisfied without fundamentally altering human nature, turning us into something... else.
Within this hellscape, we can coordinate to make things better, c.f. Meditations on Moloch. People want other things, too, such as stable families, well-raised children, healthy food made with love, thriving communities, and so on. Women are the social fabric that enables all of these things, which they can't do if they're working full-time. Just like we coordinate to prevent children from being put to work too early or too rigorously, we could coordinate to protect women and safeguard all the many wonderful things which flow from recognizing that hammering women into masculine-style productivity is putting them to poor use.
faceh
56m ago
There is a complex formula which determines how much of that is allocated to the HSA "pot" (Medisave) but the effect is that most people end up with $1 less in their retirement pot for each $1 they spend on healthcare. This is backstopped by a government-subsidized catastrophic insurance fund (Medishield) and an indigent fund which is made deliberately unpleasant to claim from (Medifund).
There is also a very deliberate class system - if a Singapore citizen stays in a class C ward (nightingale wards with no facilities and deliberately inferior food) the government picks up 65-80% of the bill and if they use a class B2 ward (similar but with 6-bed bays) the government picks up 50-65%. Class A patients get a private room and pay full freight.
These seem like facially reasonable approaches that nonetheless would be politically untenable in the U.S.
Assuming quality of care was comparable, it shouldn't be controversial for the government to maintain lower standards for amenities at the facilities they're paying more for, and people willing to pay for the nicer stay are in contrast agreeing to foot more of the bill.
Now, in practice this is basically how Medicaid works for long term care, and I think we're going to see some massive birfurcation in end-of-life treatment between people who are reliant on Medicaid and people who actually saved up enough to cover cushier facilities. But it seems likely that U.S. citizens would flip their lid if the government declared that was exactly how the system was supposed to work, right on the tin.
My understanding with meth, and I've been "out of the game" as it were for a little while, is that Mexican OC and their partners (the mentioned bikers) have had US meth distribution on lockdown for a while. Its manufactured semi-openly in Mexico in large amounts and smuggled in for distro with local groups.
One thing that a chemist might find lucrative nowadays are the broad range of "technically legal" drugs that have flooded the market in permissive states. I don't know a whole ton about those though, other than the local guys who set up a lab extracting the psychoactive substances from legal hemp, the various D8/D9/THC-A etc edibles and vape carts that have flooded head shops in the last decade or so.
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