Gaashk
5hr ago
According to Google, it was more about being unable to adequately cool the schools during the hottest part of the year, that's why is doesn't include time for planting or harvest (but rural schools where children were actually needed did).
My city still isn't able to install AC in the older schools, despite exceeding 100F on hot days, and keeps discussing less school in July, but just suffers through it due to state requirements. My mother spent some of her youth in Houston, and said that they spent much of summer at the beach, but they still had several months of miserable hot classrooms surrounding that.
I would like to trade three weeks of summer break for two weeks of fall break. June is alright, but in July we fall into just sitting around in front of the swamp cooler for days on end.
Gaashk
1d ago
Tightening up educational requirements again is probably a good idea for other reasons, but I'm not sure it would do much for fertility. It's very common for women to graduate at 22, and get married at 30. They can and do date during college, so if the culture were oriented differently, even college educated people could be getting married at 23 or so. That they're not seems to largely be a matching problem -- that each relationship lasts for several years without leading to marriage or children, and then eventually people settle.
I do think that college has been overhead as a path to the middle class for working class children, and that was a mistake. They have become bloated, politically charged institutions and should be replaced or reformed. My own family, going back four generations at least, were educated lower middle class (teachers, professors, psychologists, cooks who like to talk about books, etc), and I would be disappointed if my own children don't have an opportunity to enjoy something approximating college, even if it doesn't increase their job prospects all that much.
Gaashk
1d ago
Most of these seem outright counterproductive if you want more children. People have more children when life is difficult and uncertain no matter what they do, and someone will probably turn out sickly or disabled, so you're best off having six kids and hope half of them turn into productive adults who can provide a buffer for the rest.
When even a single child results in legal landmines, interactions with CPS, and onerous family requirements, you're asking for fewer, not more.
Sure, you can still divorce on a whim without any fault, but you're probably not going to like the terms if children are involved. To freestyle a lighter measure example off the dome, this could involve requiring filing parties to attend a humiliation ritual wherein they are browbeaten with every stat and fact known to mankind about how bad divorce is for children, and they must affirm personally and publicly: "yes, I am a complete piece of human shit, afflict all of these maladies on to my own flesh and blood for my own selfish gain".
Unless accompanied by banning contraceptives, this seems likely to actively lower people's willingness to have children (which would lower willingness to have sex as well).
Put simply, social security and other forms of elder welfare need to be either phased out or replaced with something far less permissive to the old and intrusive to the young.
Possibly? People with long time preference already have marriages and family oriented around wanting people around them when they're old.
Requiring of female duty to the well-being of children, in basically any form whatsoever. As it stands, there's very little from women our civilization actually demands for the benefit of children. She can drink, snort, and smoke however much as she likes while carrying her child and nobody can actually stop her.
Women do get shamed and end up having to raise retarded children if they screw this up. Already. I'm not sure what you're proposing here, but if it's increased penalties, maybe that could, on the margin, lower TFR a bit?
A sea change in the tone by which our society speaks to men regarding their place in it, particularly in how it relates to his role as husband and father.
Evangelicals do this already. How's it going?
Far steeper penalties for dereliction by men. The penalties are already plenty steep if you compare them to what women presently suffer, but not nearly steep enough if the aim is to make women's investment into family formation less scary and shield children from harm.
That seems like it would... slightly lower people's willingness to have kids?
Child support needs to be massively increased in the average case.
With the hope that men would be more vigilant in their condom use?
In lieu of ill-advised cash bonuses per birth, subsidies for necessities that improve the lives of both women and children, such as housing and food stipends, attached to the child and their guardian, of course. These interventions need to be both greater in volume and more selective than current programs, in order to maximize both reproductive incentive to adults and benefit to children. This is of special interest to women, who due to reasons of physicality are often most impacted by these needs.
Will it be equal to an entire adult's annual income? Otherwise, nice but unlikely to do much.
Expansion of pregnancy-related protections. Needless to say, measures where the well-being of mother and child intersect should be expedited. Regionally, however healthcare ultimately shakes out in the US, women should be exempt from whatever the hell is causing them to walk away from hospitals with not just a child but tens of thousands of debt.
We have the median household income in our state, and pregnancy and infant health costs were fully covered by medicaid. That was nice, I'm in favor. Maybe one or two more women would have another child if they knew about that?
Gaashk
2d ago
Maybe we'll have to go back to formal dances or something instead of dating apps at some point. It doesn't seem to be working out. Especially, most men don't look very good in photographs. Women like the way men flirt or smell or pursue physical activities or talk as much as how they look in photos.
It does seem like some otherwise perfectly nice and friendly women I've known have broken up with men after what seems to me like a long period of time, perhaps a year, for reasons that seem very petty. It's not socially appropriate to say to the woman: is that really what happened? That sounds very petty. It seems like an error, I suppose in the future their bloodlines will die out, and be replaced whether through culture or nature with people who descended from less petty women, but that is of course no consolation in the moment for the men they broke up with.
Gaashk
2d ago
Yeah, most Western interstates are 75, but I felt a bit concerned about some of the undivided county roads in Texas that were also 75.
Gaashk
3d ago
Up to three months, unpaid after running out of sick time (but it demolishes sick time, so if I got sick after coming back, I'd just teach sick). I got one month, since I couldn't that much unpaid time off.
Gaashk
4d ago
Where I work, maternity leave is taken out of sick time, and I've had two babies in the five years I've worked there. So when I've been pregnant, I've had to balance taking a sick day while being both sick and pregnant, vs getting to recover from having a baby. I do not like that policy. Fortunately, I don't get sick much.
Gaashk
12d ago
I suppose I know what it's like to be a woman, but not what it's like to have important friendships online that didn't start in person. Considering online relationships to be ephemeral and in some sense unreal seems to be fairly common, even on dating apps where the express purpose is to find someone to eventually form a RL relationship with, as annoying as that must be for the (usually men) getting ghosted. If someone on The Motte tried inviting me to their house, I'm not sure that I wouldn't simply never use this user name again. But DSL has in-person meetups (that I've never considered attending), so not sure.
Gaashk
12d ago
Now his whole status in this server with folks he likes is in question.
Was it in front of everyone rather than as a PM or something? Odd.
If he was doing this over Discord, presumably he didn't actually know her yet, or he would have done something else? Maybe she wasn't representing herself accurately? Personally, I've only spoken with people semi-anonymously on Discord, and would be a bit spooked if they inferred my location and invited me over, even just another woman as a friend. But other people seem to use Discord with their actual relatives when playing games together, I think. So it seems to vary wildly.
I don't remember any specifics of rejections, I'm very awkward and was even more awkward when younger, so I'm sure I said/did something terribly cringy. I do remember one time a guy that I was good friends with but not romantically interested it and I walked by each other unexpectedly, glanced at each other, and both chose to pretend we hadn't, didn't even wave. We later confirmed that, yes, we had both noticed that happening.
Gaashk
12d ago
Apparently things are different with younger millennials and boomers, but introverts have been courting each other for generations. They just invite each other out for coffee or a book club or some such tepid thing. I (a millennial who remember an analogue household) and the few but not none men who have asked me out (in person) are introverts. If things continue this way I feel like I'm going to have to send my son off somewhere less neurotic when he comes of age.
Gaashk
12d ago
I recommend Lavazza espresso and a small espresso maker with steamer wand (~100 but worth it if you drink lattes). I basically only drink homemade lattes. But, also, I was a barista for a couple of years, and have a proven tolerance for making lattes (they are not hard, but you do have to stand there and steam the milk).
Gaashk
12d ago
It's also fun to read fortunes in the leftover grounds.
I went to a coffee roasting event with an Ethiopian woman, and it was fun, smelled great, and tasted fine for black coffee. She told a story about highly caffeinated goats where coffee used to grow wild in her homeland.
I like Sanderson novels, but it does seem a pretty pedantic own, since so much of his work is about angsty young adults getting superpowers
I've been enjoying the new semi-series of Hoid novellas (Tress, Yumi, and The Fires of December has a nice preview chapter), though it's a bit odd how they've been bundled with other gift items on Kickstarter instead of having normal releases. I guess they make good gifts for the teens in one's life that way? They do also sell them normally, I think, but it's a bit convoluted.
Gaashk
26d ago
Ha, yeah.
I think people are looking for something to say about it, since it's usually a fun thing to put into some designs or write a little article about, and Literally Just White gives them so little to work with. It seems like a manifestation of anxiety over "screw it, LLMs are probably going to do all the designing soon enough anyway."
Every year around this time Pantone publishes a "Color of the Year," which shows up in places like graphic design, home decor, and clothing over the course of the next year. I used to follow them, and in the mid 00s they had nice colors like frog green (greenery, 2017), coral red ("Living Coral, 2019), and Emerald Green (2013). Like many things, they've been corrupted lately, and the past three years have seen "Peach Fuzz" (the color children's art sets used to use to represent people), "Mocha Mousse" (the color of a mixed race actress in an advertisement), and now... white. Literally just white. It's called "Cloud Dancer," and has a tiny bit of grayish blue in it.
People are making fun of the "authoritarian" vibes of literally just white. But also, I was hoping that the white and grey trend was on its way out? I've been seeing white and grey boxes going up this past half decade, full of coffee shops, burgers, and more recently apartment buildings, and am not a fan. At least it's not Pot Shop Green, I guess?
Does this predict another year of literally just white and Landlord Grey?
Adding: The LA Times is trying to make the best of it, by highlighting bridal fashion. The Guardian and the New York Times both mention the difficulty of keeping actually white things clean looking, and several people talk about Whiteness.
This essay would likely make me as a professor think, "Oh dear, they so misunderstand what we do here that they are unlikely to be able to get anything out of this course. It seems probably they cannot engage with psychology as it is studied."
Is there a canon of things Psychology students are expected to know? Or is it just people's personal opinions and models all the way down?
My impression of Psychology is that it's more like Education than it is Psychiatry. Like in Education, the professor apparently thought it reasonable to ask students for their own personal reactions to an article, rather than a summary, or how someone might use the information in a clinical setting, or (heaven forbid!) a test where they had to reproduce some of the findings from memory. Like in Education, there seem to be a number of different frameworks, and someone can talk about Freud or Jung or Pieget or someone who once did a study with 40 boys, some of whom were less gender conforming according to surveys than others, or Rat Park or whatever, there doesn't seem to be a specific body of knowledge that's expected to be learned.
In Education, some professors want students to say that they will put aside merely teaching the standard Rs in favor of spending more time and energy on Radicalization, whereas other professors think that is a bad idea and it's a red flag if students say they will focus more on Radicalization than on 'Rithmetic. But they don't want to cause a headache for themselves, and give everyone a passing grade on personal reflection essays, no matter what they say.
Maybe I'm wrong, and there are more concrete and agreed upon areas of Psychology, but choosing a mediocre paper about an extremely contested culture war topic, asking for a student to react to it, and then punishing her for writing out her actual reaction, doesn't suggest so.
Probably girls like Samantha study Psychology at the state university so they can find a husband and become a Christian women's counselor, endorsed by the pastor's wife. This is a silly state of affairs, but I also went to Baptist Women's Group at my state college, and it is how things are. Since the TA was punished by the university and legislature, not the student, it's apparent that they were the one who misunderstood their role.
Gaashk
27d ago
Apparently she was not sent that message at all, but rather the message that her professor and TA are anti-Christian bigots, but that the zeitgeist in mid-America is more on her side than theirs.
Gaashk
27d ago
I get the impression that Scott used to talk to poor people as their psychiatrist sometimes, listen empathetically to their vibes, and end up with some insight usually unavailable to people in his situation. Lately he listens to people like Bryan Caplan, hires a second nanny, and wonders what the fuss is about. Of course, what with the having a wife and twins and employing servants, it would be unreasonable to hope he would actually go spend some time in a community where the vibes are bad, like Orwell. But then it's unsurprising that he has little of value to add to the conversation, aside from looking at the official statistics, and mostly agreeing with the official narrative.
It would be interesting to hear more interviews by someone fair and not given to ragebait. We bought a second car because the house we could afford is very far from public transport, but when we looked into it, it was post Covid, and the used cars actually cost more than ordering a new car but with worse financing, so we did buy a new car. It then had to fit three car seats across and go down rutted dirt roads, so it's a small SUV not a sedan. Apparently my grandmother, a very respectable person, put her fourth child in the hatchback, but we wouldn't be equally respectable if we couldn't fit the third car seat until our oldest is 7. Both the car and the car seats are certainly better, but also more mandatory.
Gaashk
28d ago
I was disappointed, it didn't seem up to Scott's previous MMTYWTK posts. I'm not sure that I learned anything new, which is unfortunate, it seems like an interesting question.
Gaashk
28d ago
While it's not a good essay, it does look like the student read at least some of the article, and herself wrote what she actually thought of it, which is better than a growing number of essays lately, so a 0 is pretty outrageous. It would be fine to not give her full points, since she's only engaging with the article in a very superficial way, but it seems like since it's just a personal reflection and not that serious of a paper, she should have gotten at least half points.
Gaashk
28d ago
Yeah, I would expect her to probably get a C, possibly even a D if it's especially bad, though essays are so messed up lately, I would probably give her some points for clearly writing it herself, anyway.
Gaashk
1mo ago
My husband was an Eagle Scout, and we take the kids out dispersed camping, though it's kind of stressful with kids who are too young to use a sleeping bag correctly, and keep crawling onto my head all night and pulling the blankets off of each other. I think husband just plans to keep doing this individually and teaching the kids, especially the son, things himself, because we're both the kind of introvert who reads disagreeable message boards and complains about them together, and organizing anything with another family feels like too much work. This is too bad, maybe we'll join some weird little Orthodox neighborhood or something, where none of the kids are allowed to have screens and have to crochet and harvest maple sap instead.
Yeah, the reasoning I heard was that if they update the AC, they have to update some large amount of infrastructure -- maybe ducts and roofing? Which is extremely expensive. I also heard that LA has more potholes than necessary because if they repave the roads, they have to make the sidewalks accessible, which is much more expensive than the repaving itself.
I hav seen several bring up ensuring AC for all as a high leverage improvement for schools, that basically all children, parents, and teachers would appreciate.
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