Gaashk
12hr ago
My kids and I have all had the same colds and flus this year, and their's are about equal severity, but we are at three separate elementary schools and daycares this year, and I hear it's very normal for that situation. We are the vectors that allow the viruses to travel between otherwise unrelated communities.
Gaashk
3d ago
That makes sense, closer to a preindustrial household economy, where cooking, cleaning, and textiles/crafting were much more important and harder to replace. I think it was CanIHaveaSong who used to write sometimes about (her?) mother hand washing everything and growing up without running water.
On the other hand, the original context was about the kind of woman who might get a degree in psychology but not take her eventual career path too seriously, since ultimately she's more interested in meeting a future husband at college, which to some degree higher status than I am. My grandmother was of the Mrs Degree class, and went to university to get a BA in stage or something before settling down to raise her four children in the 50s and 60s, and even when she lost her husband and became the head of household, I'm not entirely sure what she did, actually. Which isn't judgment on her as a person, and seems to have been appropriate to her class.
So I suppose I was thinking of a socioeconomic situation somewhere between my grandmother's and your mother's, the kind of lower middle class woman who's certified as a teacher or nurse or something. I personally get summers off and spend the time going on road trips with my family, reading Motte posts, and painting in the garden, and would absolutely be a poor candidate for an actually useful stay at home mom. This is related to why old female novels make such a huge deal of women, especially, dropping classes -- they won't necessarily know what to do or have any useful instincts for it, having been trained mostly to read books and paint (or whatever) for their entire childhood.
Gaashk
5d ago
that doesn't mean you can sell your food.
Yes I can. Nobody bothers the tamale vendors, clearly selling stuff they made in their home kitchens from out of their personal cooler chests. The teachers in the schools are selling their home cooked food (mostly tamales) to each other through the official newsletter. Just if they make enough money at it, they'll be expected to pay taxes.
Gaashk
5d ago
If you're already taking care of a kid full-time, you can throw in a couple more, and barely see the difference
This doesn't appear to be true. It's extremely complicated to get a stay at home mom to watch another mom's kids even for a couple of hours of babysitting. I have heard of it happening now and again, or in an emergency, but it is absolutely not a regular thing, and I could definitely not pay my stay at home mom friends to watch my kids reliably, all day, at any price that I would be able to pay. I grew up around stay at home moms, it was definitely not illegal to watch each other's kids, and it also very rarely happened at a greater scale than very light occasional babysitting.
Gaashk
5d ago
Ideally all women do both--getting sufficient education and selecting good husbands.
...? To the extent that there's any selection going on, it can't be done by all women? Do you just mean the women you personally know and like or something?
Gaashk
5d ago
Sure.
But then you probably can't just advise a young woman to get a frivolous degree and hope to be a housewife, because even if it works out to get married, start a family, and be a stay at home mom from 22 - 35 or something (big if), she'll still either need to develop a very substantial hobby that might as well be a job, but without burning through all their disposable income, or have a plan to get a job that's sustainable as a middle aged and older mom, both of which take some amount of forethought.
Gaashk
5d ago
I feel very confused by the way this is often talked about.
Women need jobs for the same reason men need jobs. Hardly anyone marries a well-off man at 18. It's not really an available choice for that many women, even in very conservative communities where it's theoretically ideal. Someone might say that they can go be a waitress or barista or something at 18, and sure, that's not that bad. But then unless both partners have really bought into the homeschooling lifestyle, most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day. That was the issue in the 50s -- taking nicer and nicer jello casseroles and sewing unusually pretty aprons is not any more fulfilling than even quite a dull job, and husbands are not impressed by their wives chilling with their friends all day while they're at work. And then their kids grow up enough to take care of themselves, so what are they going to do? Running a non-profit for fun is for the rich, and costs money. and it's not great to be a waitress at 50. Maybe some women can take 10 years off to raise young kids, but there's another 30 years or so there where most of them will have to work, or face resentment and very tight finances. And for what? Lots of leisure is only enjoyable if you have money or similarly situated friends and neighbors.
Gaashk
5d ago
The "yaslighting" thing is cute.
It seems like a case where something can be good enough advice at an individual level, while also not being very useful systemically, or in a way that's relevant for fertility rates. To the extent that a trend is effecting America, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, etc, it's unlikely to be primarily a matter of personal or subcultural choice.
Sometimes the people in the middle are hardest hurt--those who haven't bought into the modern secular ideology or the trad religious one. Women who don't go all-in on their careers, but also don't actively seek out husbands in college, and so end up in dead-end jobs with whatever mediocre husband they end up with.
Maybe they are themselves mediocre? Not everyone, nor every job can be above average. Thinking of that as a harm is a large part of the problem. A civilization where people won't have kids because their house and job and man are average is not in a good place.
Gaashk
5d ago
The workers at my local Costco always seemed noticeably polite and efficient, especially compared to the neighboring Sam's Club workers, so they're probably earning it.
Working in schools has good hours, good breaks, decent benefits if they decide to become full time teachers, the same hours as your kids if they end up having kids, very portable if you decide to move, and school stabbings are quite rare almost everywhere, especially ones involving staff members and their non-gang affiliated kids.
Gaashk
5d ago
Yeah, educational assistant. Mostly women and a couple of men without college degrees. It's especially popular with moms who don't have a real career and want the same working hours as their kids.
Oh, I see -- yes, we do have those positions, and I think the high schools have even more.
Gaashk
5d ago
I'm also working at a school with a lot of EAs, and have not encountered this even once. Aid positions are for those without degrees. Aimless men are substitutes, or go into alternate licensure programs. Perhaps this is a regional difference?
Gaashk
5d ago
Yeah.
Also, in my circles "self care" has mostly been co-opted by non-self actors to try to get people to do what they want them to. People do not take a personal day off of work for "self care," but rather to do a thing that they like. The people talking about self care in those words are the ones running restorative justice circles, pastors talking about "prayer and fasting as self care," an employer pushing "we all need to practice self care! Call this number for a free telephone therapy session" (presumably as an alternative to taking a half day off to see a real therapist, or asking for better working conditions). Now when I hear it I think the speaker is trying to get me to replace my actual preferences with something they consider better or more virtuous.
Bad Therapy is largely about that kind of thing. The premise is that there are always risks to any intervention, and when the target audience isn't suffering from debilitating mental illness, the risks outweigh the benefits.
My father experienced something similar with his sister, due to a "repressed memories" therapist.
The identity preference ratchet is something else, though, from what I've heard. Something more like Marxist class warfare, but for identity groups. Cain and Able, Kulaks, misdirected Leviathan, that kind of thing.
There might sometimes be a steel man for people to use HR scary words about discrimination and toxic environments when they really just have kind of a shitty manager who's bad at managing or something. As far as I can tell, unless it's absurdly obvious and well documented, if an employee complains that their manager is bad at their managing job, they will be met with disinterest, possibly irritation towards them, rather than the manager. Perhaps they will get in trouble for wanting clear directives or trying to enforce their own boundaries in the face of the shitty manager at some point. They will probably not get a better manager. If they go on about HR scare words, on the other hand, the company will go out of its way to protect them from reprisal, and they might actually get put under someone else. That's a win for the employee! So that's what they're incentivized to do.
Gaashk
6d ago
I would just get on the bus. But, also, there are almost never actually lines for busses in my region, so it wouldn't come up. Even when I was taking the CTA, everyone just spreads out, there isn't a queue.
Gaashk
7d ago
Permanently stuck in a forest with a man reminds me of this story: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/
One should take precautions against both bears and some men, but the real problems with any situation that can be described as "stuck in the woods" is much more likely to have bad outcomes from exposure, starvation. and sometimes drowning. I lived in grizzly country for a while, and people were much, much more worried about people trying to cross weak ice.
Gaashk
7d ago
In the event of a brown bear, a California ranger told campers to make lots of noise, bang stuff together, yell, and whatnot, the bear would probably think there was a group of people, or more people were coming, and leave. But also that they're really focused on food stashes, so don't be dumb and leave food lying around.
In grizzly or polar bear country, what are people doing out in the wilderness without a group and multiple guns? I think when I was in Alaska the men in town shot any brown bear bold enough to show its face. Each family had a half dozen or so guns.
Gaashk
9d ago
I don't think Americans think that about most wars we get involved with, either. There's rarely a chance to vote against them.
Gaashk
9d ago
Except the UMC-raised men don't have the same financial status now as the UMC women did when they were growing up; they're earlier in their careers and thus lower on the finance/status ladder than the women's fathers were.
It seems like a person would have to be awfully stupid not to notice this about their own life?
The latter are actually double whammy, as higher rents hurts UMC men's ability to save for a home/family, and higher home prices means that their diluted savings don't go as far when it comes time to get married and buy a place.
Hence why in America women generally contribute to housing costs. I'm not sure about the statistics, but Americans mostly seem to buy houses when already engaged/married/ready to have a baby. Do they not in Korea? If not, why not?
Gaashk
9d ago
That's only managerial class and above Americans. Plenty of Americans have kids while renting, even in smallish apartments.
Gaashk
11d ago
Does anyone know what's going on with the student loan consolidation by April 30th thing?
I tried briefly looking it up because a friend asked (they have Stafford loans, if that matters?), and it looks complicated and confusing, but like the government is trying to pressure people to consolidate their student loans this week, dangling the possibility of forgiveness "over the summer", but without any concrete promises. Are they trying to push something dubious legality through again?
I think this year's viruses may just be like that. The same thing is happening to a decent number of kids as well, of varying health and activity levels.
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