Gaashk
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
4d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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.
I took a quick look, and despite enjoying Youtube vlogs about textile content, nd enjoying beating wool with sticks, felting, and several other textile things, it looked pretty boring. I can see why someone wouldn't ever click through to knitting or weaving or anything else.
Gaashk
8d ago
Almost all of my colleagues are women. I mostly know men from Orthodox church, so they are preselected for that kind of interest.
Gaashk
8d ago
Third and final point is: stop trying to make fetch happen.
What does that mean?
Gaashk
8d ago
When colleagues have brought up politics out of the blue, generally comments about Trump, I've generally made a disgusted face and left the room. Or sometimes just ignored what they said and change the subject hamfistedly.
I've occasionally had a man try to discuss Byzantine or post USSR politics with me, and mostly I let them mansplain about it, but sometimes try to change the topic to mosaics or the history of ultramarine or Solzhenitsyn instead, and that is fine.
Gaashk
8d ago
However, I know multiple people who use LLMs to get relationship advice or other services best left to a therapist, and this example of how they can’t correctly answer a question about whether to drive or walk to a car wash is a good example which I can use to show people they can’t ask a LLM whether to go out with someone/stay together with someone or give them a lot of space, because while LLMs speak languages well, they can’t do other tasks.
The LLM doesn't have to outrun the bear, it just has to give better advice than the person's own mind or whatever friend/Reddit thread was willing to listen somewhat carefully to them. I could easily see the order of preference being: Wise Human>Normal Human who's paying attention > LLM > Normal human who's not paying attention > Own opinion > People who give advice on Reddit. But wise humans are in short supply, and often unavailable.
Gaashk
11d ago
I think this is because American waitresses make most of their money through tips, where being attractive tends to generate more tips, so hot women are literally paid better in those industries.
Gaashk
11d ago
I continued to enjoy Chicago public transportation well into the 2000s, and will probably visit and take my kids on it. There are just certain park and ride places not to park at, because your car will get stolen, but that's true in the Southwest too (which was never segregated).
Gaashk
12d ago
It wasn't that bad, just irritating to have to do. The social worker was an older veteran, who had gone into the field to give back to his community, but seemed to agree that some of the cases are stupid, especially while reading the transcript of a "mandatory reporter" just literally insulting how my baby looked, things like how fast his hair was growing.
Gaashk
12d ago
I got investigated for leaving my kids unsupervised in the same room as my husband and I, in a school, with cameras on. And for having a child with eczema.
Gaashk
16d ago
Artists were already in a fairly bad place, due to centuries of encroachment and ease of replication making it a tournament profession.
A normie compatible take is something like Brandon Sanderson's recent speech, We are the Art (https://youtube.com/watch?v=mb3uK-_QkOo). We've had enough content to consume or decorate with or read or whatever for quite some time. Most people who aren't Brandon Sanderson can't make a living off of it anyway. But people still want to be makers, not just consumers anyway, but it's annoying because... probably because our communities are broken, so it's not trivially easy to just give a friend a handmade thing and have them put it up and appreciate it, or read it, or write a letter back about it.
But so far that's not the case and, to be honest, the last big improvement to text generation models I've seen happened in early 2024.
People have been appreciating the new Opus quite a lot at least, and the others to various extents.
I think some women do have surprisingly debilitating periods that are difficult to medicate properly, so it might be worth it in that case.
Edit: I watched the linked video, and what's the trans man talking about, with forming friendships with women in the bar restroom?? No wonder some trans women apparently think women's restrooms are worth fighting for... Different worlds, I guess.
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.
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