Gaashk
30d ago
for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
This is a choice everyone's making, yes. Because we value qualifications more than we value children. As far as the things that humans need other humans to do, many, perhaps most, don't really need college. I like college, I enjoyed going, and am the sort of person who might have just kept going forever if I could have, but it's not actually the case that the only jobs that need to get done are chopping onions 10 hrs a day, or academic tasks. And AI is set to gut the college level tasks before the manual ones anyway. If our civilization is wealthy enough to provide it, I'm basically still fine with every young adult getting to go make friends and read books for several years, it's lovely, but it's not inevitable.
I agree with other commenters that both parents working outside the home is also, to a large extent, a choice most people are making, because otherwise we'd have to make a lot of sacrifices for unclear benefits. Being a stay at home parent of young children is exhausting and frustrating. Being a stay at home wife without children, or with older children, is not respectable. I know people who are homeschooling their children while their husbands work perfectly ordinary lower middle class jobs, it's possible for people who really want to do it. It's just kind of frustrating, lonely, and tedious for those who aren't naturally inclined that way (which seems to be most people).
Gaashk
30d ago
We only wash/clean once a week, but we don't invite people over without advanced planning. There was a time when I had a baby in a 500 sq ft apartment, and would only go to the laundromat once a month (and I don't have a huge amount of clothes), but I suppose I was to some degree slumming it at the time.
Gaashk
30d ago
If you've saved up ahead of time, or don't mind living in a bad part of town with a bad school.
Gaashk
30d ago
It wasn't. Watching someone pace around, silently fuming about someone else, or loudly fuming about someone else, is an example of my day getting worse, but not an example of domestic abuse. You don't want to give specific examples, but it's a scenario where specifics and iterated patterns matter.
If this were an in person conversation, I would somehow end up trying to defend women I don't know nor know anything about, just because the "all women" claim is so unlikely, then feeling irritated about it afterwards, because it's not like I want to defend your sucky girlfriend that I don't even know, maybe she really is a terrible person who asks "how was your day?" in a hostile way.
Gaashk
30d ago
Inb4 a chorus of armchair psychoanalysts piping up how this explains everything, Freud this, social script that, no, fuck it, I haven't observed anyone female behaving differently even at a distance ever.
That actually supports the psychoanalytic interpretation over the "maybe all the women in your life are just sucky" one, though. There certainly are terrible women, but the ending suggests that isn't primarily what you're describing. If I were in your physical space right now, my day might just be about to get a lot worse.
Gaashk
30d ago
It's not just effectively prohibited, it's actually prohibited, even for child care workers. The children cannot be with their parents, they must be enrolled, taxed, and watched by someone else.
Gaashk
30d ago
I appreciate this. I was feeling a bit bent out of shape about the "sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went," but not sure what to say about it. Sure. We all want to be surrounded by virtuous people intent on serving us.
Gaashk
30d ago
It's the sort of thing where she starts asking how your day was as a proxy for wondering if you're about to make her day bad as well, if you coming home tends to make her day worse. If you manage to express that your day was up to this point bad, but that it's better now that you're home, and you're not planning to make her day significantly worse by exuding fury for the next hour, then it's fine.
Gaashk
1mo ago
There are all sorts of social coordination problems that religious gatherings solve. Volunteer organizations too, but they tend to be a bit more sex segregated. I've never heard of anyone IRL meeting anyone (friend, romantic, other) at a bar (I'm an older millennial). A bar is where you go with someone who has already agreed to a date. Most people I know met people at college, a club, or church, then at some point invited them to a bar. Which makes a lot more sense, it's risky to go out with someone who doesn't have any mutual friends, and is unknown in one's social circle.
Gaashk
1mo ago
There are a decent number of muslims and extremely conservative Christians in America.
Do secular Americans care about an age gap unless it's someone literally in their family? If it's within their family, they would have a lot more to go off of than just that, so their opinions would probably be specific to the people involved.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Yes, my main experience with age gaps is in Islamic villages. It's so uncommon in my home culture as to not have an opinion other than "huh, guess you have unusual tastes," without that much more thought put into it.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Large age differentials are so uncommon in my social sphere, that my actual encounter is from time spent in rural Muslim Albanian villages. I don't think I've met a mainstream American woman who was sexually attracted to a settled boomer man, so it's not really a point of concern. I suppose if it happened, I might think something like "huh, that was unexpected," and not much else.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I haven't heard this talked about very much among the women I know, or seen it come up in real life. It seems like opinions vary depending on the specifics, not only of their ages and life circumstances, but also their personal characteristics.
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There probably is an annoyed old maid effect, though I haven't encountered it in real life. Nobody I actually know was hoping to date Brad Pitt, and was disappointed when he chose a younger woman instead.
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Some religious sects like to emphasize women as those who stay at home under their husband's umbrella of protection, while the men go out into the world, work, and lead. Since this is already playing up the power and agency differential, I would be concerned about a young woman in that culture marrying a much older man with much stronger preferences/opinions/set life circumstances than her. They'll tend to fall into "I do this/like/believe things because my husband does," which I don't like, and seems to be setting them up for abuse.
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I would be much less concerned about a couple with an age gap, but similar life development levels, where she's responsible, conscientious, serious, and wants to settle down young and start a family, and he has a steady job and house to make that happen, and they're working together on their household as project. In those cases I'm not sure that I really notice the age gap all that strongly.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I like about the free school food for any kid, even if their parents didn't apply programs that their parents don't have to apply, the kids can just go up to the counter and get breakfast or lunch. Also, the food I've observed is surprisingly good, actually.
Gaashk
1mo ago
As I understand it, the Conservative position is something like that there are still jobs that kind of suck. Electricians have been going out in 50mph winds, working on the power poles lately. There are people repairing roofs in Phoenix in the summer. There are people collecting garbage on single lane dirt driveways, where they have to back all the way down the driveway to get to the garbage bins. There are people working in the South Dakota oil fields, and on Alaskan fishing boats. They have to both get paid quite a lot, and also get negative blowback from not working. There's a whole essential layer of work like that. I knew a man who was a sewage diver, and was married with kids.
A big part of the illegal immigration "jobs Americans won't do" narrative is about how high the floor for labor is, due to forbidding low labor and poor person lifestyles, while also providing more benefits.
Of course, I say this, but don't necessarily want to do those jobs as currently constituted (and couldn't physically do most of them), and am strongly in favor of further automation to make them less difficult.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Yeah, it's certainly not fantastic. I was experiencing some schadenfreude last fall when SNAP benefits were possibly going to be delayed due to the government shutdown, and people were panicking about extremely first world food problems.
I do think we have to work on culture a bit. Countries used to have fasts. Lent and Ramadan are both starting. We should probably move back towards some amount of abstention being the proper thing to do, rather than just eating thoughtlessly all the time.
Gaashk
1mo ago
My kids have been eating government posole lately. I guess I'm happy to see the government pay for regional food traditions. A big step up from my mom's memories of Navajo garages full of cheese sitting there going bad, because cheese wasn't culturally considered a viable food.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Some states offer, in addition to free school lunches, to let people bring their children to eat remade lunches during breaks as well. That's fine, they can keep doing that. I'm generally impressed with the free lunches around here, the kids' school lunches are better than what I bring to work.
Gaashk
1mo ago
The divil is always in the details for these kinds of social credit schemes.
Have kids? If they all attend school 97% of school days
If the AIs cure viral infections first, I suppose.
Kid scores in the top 20% of his grade on a standardized test?
The main reason people currently (often) get paid more for being smarter is because we need that intelligence for important things like good decision making. But in a world where their parents are putting all their intellectual effort towards gaming the social credit system, this will end badly, as currently seen in places like South Korea. Anyway, in a world with ubiquitous AI programs, why wouldn't the student just talk directly to the AI, and get rewarded for asking about socially beneficial things, and generally sounding like an upstanding young person in the AI's professional judgement, rather than doing standardized tests at all?
Gaashk
1mo ago
I'm in America, and don't think anyone has ever asked me point blank who I voted for. That seems very intrusive, and I would think less of them even if we agreed on who to vote for.
Gaashk
1mo ago
That's what I had heard, and why I would consider asking a LLM if I didn't have anyone IRL to talk to.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I'm not sure. Possibly. LLMs seem really sensitive to word choice, so it's hard for me to tell what they say to people with a different set of perceptions than myself. I did get them to be really paranoid when describing a situation, and I'm sure they could do that about relationships as well. One of the advantages of a real person is that they might know you, and what you're like, and maybe even meet the other person and have a sense of what they're like. Which neither the LLM nor Reddit has. But I also get the impression that a lot of people don't really have trustworthy friends either.
Sure. I just agree the WASP lite take is directionally correct. My mom homeschooled my brother and I, then worked as a public school teacher when I was old enough to leave the house and go to college. It would have been a bit better if she'd gotten a job when I was a teen, but it wasn't disastrous. But, also, she's smart and conscientious. My father is reasonably smart, not as conscientious, but perfectly willing to read books and go to church book club for entertainment instead of more expensive activities. People who are smart, conscientious, not given to envy, and generally somewhat virtuous are still living that lifestyle today. My family is to some extent, but it's not great, we need to get out of it sooner rather than later.
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