domain:worksinprogress.co
Thoroughlygruntled
just now
Yes, but the ban isn't on masking, it's masking while also committing a crime. And the ban is a longstanding one only temporarily lifted in response to particular extreme conditions that have long since passed.
Ioper
2m ago
In the context of Sweden, which has very generous parental leave benefits, an extra child per woman would amount to ~0.75 lost work years per person over their lifetime.
Personally, going from 1->2->3 kids werent big changes and I feel like I share the parenting equally with my wife. The big change was going from 0->1.
wlxd
3m ago
I can second that, and I've heard exactly the same sentiment from my wife (who is very successful in her well-paid career). This was instilled in her by her mother, who worked a fake government job helping applicants fill paperwork for farm subsidies. She was paid peanuts compared to her husband, but she prided herself at being independent (even though everything was actually paid for by her husband).
Women just don't want to be dependent on their husbands, because they heard a lot of horror stories of abusive husbands, and so they want to maintain a put option ready to exercise. Usually, however, they suck at pricing this option, especially the theta.
07mk
5m ago
"every movement bends the truth, it doesn't make social justice bad just because we lie, too" or "so what if the woke encourages nosy busybodies and wokescolds? The conservatives do it, too". I've never known how to argue back other than just insisting that they should be better than stooping to low techniques then making excuses.
This looks similar to arguments I've had with myself as someone who used to be "woke" before the term was popularized ("social justice warrior" was the common term back then), and hashing out the argument was one of the many factors that got me to abandon the ideology.
On lies, it took very little thinking to recognize that lying is a habit that one can get into that's very difficult to turn on and off at will, especially since it's often difficult even to recognize when one is lying. This goes even more for lies that one tells oneself, which is by far the most common kind of lie and the most difficult lie to avoid telling even under the best circumstances and with the purest of intentions. It's also difficult to recognize which ideology is better than others if your beliefs are based on lies; as such, if I want what's best for the world rather than merely my team winning, then that means choosing the best ideology on the basis of an honest assessment of the facts and truth. But if I make it a habit to lie to others for the sake of convenience, then it'd be easy for me to unintentionally lie to myself for the sake of convenience, e.g. I could lie to myself that this ideology that happens to be popular among my peers and happens to give me social status for overtly supporting also happens to be the best or most correct ideology - what a convenient universe for me this is, that these characteristics happen to coincide in this one ideology! It also raises questions about how I was won over to the ideology, and whether those were based on lies that other follower of the ideology decided was convenient to tell to me for the sake of recruiting another follower - questions that can only be answered by taking a brutally honest look at the actual underlying reality, and that brutal honesty only comes about by making honesty a habit, which obviously includes doing so towards one's ideological opponents.
Unfortunately, I don't see this as being possible when a third party is involved, because the ideology is so hardened against external (and internal as well) scrutiny that only scrutiny that comes from an internal desire to get things right can survive long enough to actually have any effect. I think there are right wing parallels, such as some Christians dismissing some arguments as literally satanic, or Islam allowing for dishonesty towards non-Muslims as a way to win them over, but these are explicitly faith-based religions where the followers openly acknowledge that the reason they chose their team is faith. This is contrast to modern progressive idpol, whose followers claim to genuinely believe that they figured out the correct (or, at least more correct than the others) ideology through non-faith-based means. Genuinely believing this while also intentionally corrupting one's ability to discern lies from truth - and more generally abiding by the intentional corrupting of this ability in the followers of this ideology - seems like cognitive dissonance. Which, again, just doesn't seem possible to penetrate as a third party. Without the genuine will to actually figure out what the best ideology is for the world, most people will be happy enough to lie to themselves that the ideology they like also happens to be the one that is the best one for the world. Again, not lying to oneself that way is hard enough even under the best circumstances and with the purest of intentions.
Ioper
10m ago
Ireland is moving to recognize Palestinian statehood, making them the first nation in western Europe to do so, as far as I know. The historical relationship between the Irish and Palestinian nationalist movements means this was perhaps to be expected
Sweden and Iceland have already done this.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
10m ago
I mean, it's not that big of a change, like, numerically. I bet it would be a pretty big change in the lives of the women having the children. It's true the state could punish people but, being a liberal, I am pretty averse to that as a strategy.
pigeonburger
13m ago
The system being implemented is a spoils system, and the question to answer is whether it is a result of or a cause of a drop in civic virtue.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
15m ago
Even if none of that is true, you’re also dealing with the added costs associated with outsourcing child-rearing. Daycare generally costs enough that the second income doesn’t go as far as it would on paper.
So like $2 million a kid? For the people you want breeding the most. IQ >110. That’s a yearly income of probably $150k give or take which capitalizes to $2 million plus or minus.
Having someone carry your biological kid for you thru pregnancy runs 50-150k and that’s recruiter lower class. Doesn’t include the 18 years of motherhood. I don’t think we have anywhere close to enough money to boost tfr at the rates you imply by paying people. You need people to desire motherhood as it’s own reward.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
18m ago
I think you’re correct that it’s a selfishness problem more so than a trust problem (the trust problem is developing as a response to the selfishness problem. And I think the cause or at least a major cause of selfishness has little to do with government, but more to do with atomization.
Communities, civic pride, and rootedness in a place have all declined rather rapidly over the course of the last 50 or so years. People don’t stick around the same places, the don’t keep the same jobs, they don’t form deep lasting relationships with people around them. And without a sense of tribe, a lot of pro-social behaviors don’t make sense. Why return a lost wallet when it belongs to someone you don’t know, and you’re not going to get social credit for doing the right thing anyway? Why not cheat Red Lobster? Do you know the owner? Do you worry that friends and neighbors will notice you cheating the system? Even if they do, what social control is there that they could leverage to shame you? Or on the negative end, who in your area knows or cares if you never contribute to society? If you decide to do nothing but game and eat? Who’s going to shame you for being a burden on your family or the government?
The thing that jumps out at me about the so-called high trust societies is the degree of social conformity and shaming that happens in them. There’s a shame to not working hard in those societies, but it’s not the theoretical “grind-core” thing like we have, it’s people you work with (and might work with for decades) noticing that you leave early all the time. Or noticing that you’re not producing as much as they are. In social relationships, they’re close enough that you’ll be shamed if you do something that the society sees as wrong. And the informal social credit system works pretty well most of the time, producing the kinds of pro-social behaviors we actually want. If you want divorces to go down, having a lot of negativity around getting a divorce AND having a network of people willing to gossip and shame you for getting a divorce keeps most people together.
I think shame works for the most part, and the loss of it makes trust-breaking a much more rational decision than it would be in a shaming culture.
Ioper
21m ago
I mean, were talking like 0.5-1 more kids per woman, it isn't that big a change. We've lived in that world and with the same FLPR.
Also, the state doesn't necessarily have to compensate people, it could punish them instead. Currently we only have (tiny) carrots but perhaps we should introduce some sticks as well and possibly increase the carrots for those that actually contribute until we reach something sustainable.
Or try any number of other ideas a Instead of throwing up our hands and declaring that we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
TIRM
22m ago
This is all sensible, except:
will not need to ask for social assistance for 3 years
3 is wildly low. If I had to make up a number I'd go for at least as long as it would take for them to qualify for citizenship. I'd start around 15 years.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23m ago
It's not that motherhood "sucks" as an activity, but being a stay at home mother does have significant opportunity costs in the form of lost income and other expenses. A million a kid is probably far too much. I suspect you would raise fertility pretty significantly if you paid women merely they wages they would have had if they had not stopped working in a kid-independent way.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
37m ago
I don't know. I think if some activity X is generally banned, but with an exception for Y, then you remove the exception for Y, your action is fairly characterized as "banning Y." You used to be able to do Y. Now you can't. Sounds like a ban to me!
sliders1234
39m ago
You said it was a simple solution to just pay women to have kids. Now it sounds like you are arguing being a mother sucks so we need to pay them a lot of money? How much like a million a kid? More? Obviously we do not have that much government money. So government paying women money to have kids instead of worker would not be viable. At the end of the day women being homemakers and taking care of children has to be funded by basically the earning capabilities of one man (whether direct or indirect thru taxation of men). It sounds like your saying one man can’t make enough money to fund a women staying home which means we should just accept low fertility.
If women prefer being boss babes and going to Bali instead of motherhood then just isn’t a solution. Personally I think the current viewpoint is the propaganda and most would prefer motherhood if society did not pressure them to oppose it. But if Bali is preferred to babies there really is not a solution. Motherhood is evolutionary programmed into females since well it’s necessary to survive so I think it’s the other side doing the propaganda.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
41m ago
If you have a partner, is she "pure"?
Yes, I’m her one and only. And I’ll admit I’m lucky.
charles
41m ago
What's wrong with C-sections? Let me try to answer my own question. It looks complicated: https://islamqa.info/en/answers/92831/ruling-on-caesarean-births
There appears to be some sort of stigma attached to it, and a belief it makes future pregnancy less likely? I lack the background to know if any of this is true.
SomethingMusic
42m ago
You're right this is not clear, I'll admit to this thought being a little half baked but I want to get it out before I forgot or moved on to other things.
I would assume, based on this, that the increase in selfishness then, would be found in the, non-marginalized, non-favored, demographics, but my vague understanding of the spike in shoplifting is that this is not the case.
My argument is when governance stop enforcing laws unilaterally and starts responding to perverse incentives, that all parties start switching to self interest over mutual growth. In a game theory matrix, the best but 'unstable' outcome is both the government and constituents do wats best for each other, when one party defects for one reason or another, they both slide to following self interest, creating a more stable or predictable, but significantly less beneficial, environment.
I think government action, or often inaction, is probably contributing to the rise in the overtness of these behaviors, but I am not sure the mechanism is any more complicated than, some people will act up if you remove the consequences from their actions.
Why do you think governments are selectively enforcing laws? And what are the consequences of the government making these deliberate choices?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
46m ago
I am not sure where your quote is coming from, I didn't say anything about "more" economic value compared to some other state of affairs.
In any case if your argument is correct it suggests my proposal would be a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. We can simply tax away part of the social gains of raising children and remit it to the women doing the raising and we will all come out better off. Let's get it done!
NewCharlesInCharge
46m ago
With this context, I think I'm actually wrong, and some of the media were right, but perhaps on accident.
Interesting to note that this section of the law, passed in 1953, appears to be designed to attack the KKK. The section is titled "Prohibited Secret Societies and Activities": https://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/ByChapter/Chapter_14.html
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
48m 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.
hydroacetylene
51m ago
They’re sometimes bound to do so by treaty, but they frequently don’t IIRC. Nobody actually wants criminals hanging around their country, after all. I think there’s been cases of the US paying big bucks to convince various foreignstans to accept their own citizens back.
SomethingMusic
53m ago
Selfishness doesn't always come at significant cost to someone else, but I'd argue the choice to pick former over the ladder does imply some amount of selfishness in the term of short term gain over long term benefit.
hydroacetylene
53m ago
I think it’s because they don’t trust men to do what they say they’ll do. The feminist attack on Harrison butker- aimed at their own audience- wasn’t ‘you deserve a career’. It was an evidence free assertion that he beats his wife. A lot of the ‘why do women give up X to not be dependent on a man’ has an answer, and that answer is ‘they think a man will abuse them if they’re dependent, or otherwise not fulfill his side of the bargain because he thinks he can get away with it’. This belief may be neurotic and unfounded, but it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t exist and inform the behavior of a lot of very risk averse people.
I encourage you to go talk to the socially conservative housewives in whichever sect that practices female domesticity is easiest to access; they will tell you that their particular sect has figured out how to make men behave, but women out in the world have to go into the corporate world, poor things, because they can’t depend on their men.
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
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 to2.3). If we gave each of them the median income that comes out to$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!More options
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