HereAndGone
19hr ago
For social housing in Ireland, two siblings of opposite sex can share room until age ten. Two siblings of same sex, no specific age limit. Where overcrowding (and thus can apply for social housing under needs) happens is if you have to have two siblings of opposite sex room-sharing past age ten or occupancy past the square footage limits.
63.—A house shall for the purposes of this Act be deemed to be overcrowded at any time when the number of persons ordinarily sleeping in the house and the number of rooms therein either—
(a) are such that any two of those persons, being persons of ten years of age or more of opposite sexes and not being persons living together as husband and wife, must sleep in the same room, or
(b) are such that the free air space in any room used as a sleeping apartment, for any person is less than four hundred cubic feet (the height of the room, if it exceeds eight feet, being taken to be eight feet, for the purpose of calculating free air space),
and “overcrowding” shall be construed accordingly.
It's been ten years since I worked in the social housing department of our local council, but yeah: we used to smile when single mothers would make applications for "I need a three bedroom house because I have two kids and they need a room each". Not gonna happen, lady, if your kids are under the age of ten.
HereAndGone
19hr ago
families were cramming 4+ kids into a tiny home, with kids sharing rooms in bunk beds
Oh no, I'm going to pin you down on this, no wiggling out with "I never said that!" You said exactly that: "cramming 4+ kids with kids sharing rooms in bunk beds".
If we're going to stroll down Memory Lane, yeah I spent the first fifteen years of my life as one of four kids, two parents, and a bedridden grandmother in a house with (for the first seven years of my life) no running water. Yes, we shared bedrooms, the horror! No, we didn't have bunk beds, because bunk beds would have been a luxury item.
By modern standards where "you put your newborn baby into a room on its own and leave it abandoned there in the dark overnight, no that's normal childrearing, what do you mean that's abusive?", that is probably "oh, the humanity!" By 1959 standards, that would have been pretty okay.
I don't know how you grew up, but there are always worse things and better things whatever era you pick. Right now, there are people trying to cram kids into rooms where they are in emergency accommodation without a home of their own. So yeah, going on about "oh my god, kids in bunk beds, two or even more to a room" as the utmost in horrible awful living conditions? Not anywhere fucking close.
HereAndGone
23hr ago
I am very damn sceptical of "AI will mean AGI will mean ASI and that means post-scarcity utopia". Jeff Bezos could afford to rent out Venice for his second wedding. That's not putting any money in my pocket. Some people will get very, very rich, the rest of us will carry on as usual only now in the Brave New World of "yeah, that job is now done by a robot/AI".
HereAndGone
23hr ago
HereAndGone
23hr ago
If she really wanted a poke bowl in 1959, Sumner's daughter could have gone on vacation to Hawaii, but she probably wouldn't have enjoyed the native version on offer since the traditional dish underwent a lot of development and changes between "what the native Hawaiians ate", "what they ate after European contact expanded available ingredients", "what poke was like when it started getting popularised as a commercially available dish" and "what poke is like now, in the mainland versions and 99 other fancy varieties everyone has had a hand in mixing up".
HereAndGone
23hr ago
The original comment is "compare what we have now to what they didn't have back then", which is fair along one axis. But not along another, which is "now you too, Mr and Mrs Average Citizen, can have a TV set of your very own!" In 1959 people only had tiny screens for black and white TV? No, in 1959 ordinary people now had access to the cutting-edge modern technology of TV!
Imagine what VR fantasy tech will be invented in sixty years time. Is it fair to laugh at people in 2025 for not having the latest evolution of that tech, compared to whatever VR tech is around now?
If you are dumped back in 1959 from 2025, yes you are going to miss all the advantages we have now. But "oh goodness me, I can't doordash a poke bowl" is a stupid example to pick, since right now in 2025 I can't doordash a poke bowl since I don't live in the Big City where you can get this (and even if I could, I probably wouldn't).
If you have to live in 1959, having the 1959 equivalent of $100 grand is the way to do it.
HereAndGone
1d ago
families were cramming 4+ kids into a tiny home, with kids sharing rooms in bunk beds
For those of us who grew up in such conditions, going "My five year old and three year old have to share a room instead of having a room each? I'm living in slum conditions!" evokes a wry smile.
HereAndGone
1d ago
the self-defence clause is largely true and men really are astronomically less likely to be killed as long as they aren't violent.
That is the question that remains to be answered. Along with what sounds like "things we don't want to contemplate" about 'greater chance of women killing men in domestic violence if they're poor, black and cohabiting not married" which is the kind of explanation that will ruffle one hell of a lot of feathers. It would be very racist to point out "white women don't kill white men in the same proportion as black women kill black men", for instance.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Money printing machine, sure, but not an example of "start off lean 'n' mean, remain lean 'n' mean while growing like a weed". Though, given that Jane Street got name-dropped as 'former employer of Sam Bankman-Fried', I imagine they would vastly prefer critical publicity of the "they got big and fat and slow" type to being remembered as "hey, weren't you that place that taught SBF that making hella money hella fast was the only thing that counted?"
HereAndGone
1d ago
Oh sure, we can shift, but you will have an uphill battle over "why do you expect me to pay five days' wages for four days' work? I'm a business, not a charity".
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yeah, if you stop taking it and go on eating binges, that defeats the entire purpose. That is the psychological element of weight loss, which gets ignored in the simple "calories in, calories out" model: if someone wants the gratification and pleasure of eating a ton of stuff and won't take the medication for fear that "but I won't be able to eat all the different things I want to eat", that's not a problem of 'is the drug working to stop you eating so much?' because plainly it is (even if it stops you by making you throw up).
That is the "it replaces willpower so you don't have to consciously think about reducing food intake" glowing review that people like to share, and it's the exact thing that is not happening in your mother's case.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yeah, but do you really need cranberry-strawberry-lemon-acai flavor (natural and artificial) 44g of sugar per can glow-in-the-dark fluorescent colour drinks? At some point there's just too much going on to distinguish anything.
HereAndGone
1d ago
He seems to have picked a bad year for his "but you couldn't doordash a poke bowl" example, as some cursory Googling gives me the inbuilt AI answer:
In 1959, American restaurants were dominated by diners and drive-ins, which were popular for their casual, affordable atmosphere and classic American food. These establishments often featured chrome and vinyl decor, with a menu that included burgers, fries, milkshakes, and other comfort food staples.
So if we're talking the rise of fast food/takeaways, 1959 was the year, baby!
Fast-food restaurants became a big part of the 1950s culture due to many other new innovations. Fast food restaurants became very popular during the 1950s because families were busy and they needed a place where they could quickly pick up food; people also wanted to be able to get quick food that they could eat in front of their new TVs.
What was buzzing, cousin, during the bleak and barren year 1959? Well, a lot, it seems. That pot-shot about tiny black and white screens? It was the Internet of its day, Scott m'man, just as in 2091 the Scott Sumner of that day will be laughing it up about the people back in 2025 who never even got snail tentacles quantum replicated for their micro-nutritional tasting menus and they didn't even have neural-net brain implant entertainment centres!
During the 1950s, the television became a huge part of the lifestyle. By 1954, over two-thirds of Americans owned a television and this helped form a national culture. Television changed politics by allowing speeches and political advertisements to be televised; things such as civil rights movements, documentaries about Communism, and other big news were aired on television. Many "Wild West" shows also became popular including: Davy Crockett(mid 1950s), Rin Tin Tin(1954-1959), and Gunsmoke(1955-1975). Variety Shows became very common because most programs were televised live; variety shows included musical performances, comedy skits, and animal tricks that were all hosted by engaging host. Television during the 1950s changed the society by allowing families to gather around to watch a performance, for speeches to be heard around the country, for the first commercials to be televised, and forming a national culture.
Plastic seats in your car? Plastics were the wonder material of the future!
During the 1950s decade, cars and other vehicles became more popular due to the affordability and needs for them. After the war, people in the United States believed that roads needed to be better, so the government's money started to be spent rebuilding roads; after roads were made better, everyone wanted a car, and to go on road trips or even camping. In 1950-1951, hardtop convertibles became popular from manufacturers like Chevy and the Buick Motor Division. In 1953, cars were being made with plastic fiberglass or a magnesium body; wrap around windows and wire racing wheels were often seen on cars; in 1953, three cars had air-conditioning and 50% of cars had an automatic shift, and by the end of the 1950s, Americans loved sports cars. Towards the end of the 1950s, station wagons also became very popular for growing families. Automatic transmissions, power brakes, power steering, power adjusted front seats, power window lifts and air conditioning were starting to be used in cars, and by 1958, 80% of cars had automatic transmissions. Cars became longer, lower, wider, and faster; chrome became heavily popular on cars; many cars were designed to look like something from the future to satisfy the people's ideas of fantasy. More cars were being produced and purchased during the 1950s because the economy was booming and families were growing , and the popularity of these vehicles lead to a new way of life.
Women's clothing styles during the 1950s dramatically changed because of the new styles and trends (like rock n' roll), as well as the ability to purchase new fabrics (a lot of new clothing designs and colors were inspired by Asian clothing) because of the great economy.
Booming economy, growing families, mass communication, mass transport, new kinds of eating experiences, a gap between childhood and adult life where you have more leisure time, more money, and more options with popular culture becoming attuned to you rather than your parents (the rise of the teenager), the New Look in fashion for women, affordable modern luxury for the average person: so tell me, the equivalent of $100,000 in 1959 or the equivalent of $12,500 in 2025, which sounds better to you?
Granted, there was much less of what we nowadays consider seasoning, but I think (1) the French tradition as you say for fine dining, with the reaction against highly seasoned food that came in after mediaeval times and (2) how much of today's flavours are really "hot and spicy" as against a range of subtle, herbal, flavours? 'Nobody in 1959 was putting gochujang on their beans on toast!' Friend, I'm not doing that in 2025.
I see some American recipes online and it's just ingredient upon ingredient upon ingredient, to the point I go "but you can't taste the meat or the vegetable under all the flavouring!"
I have to refer to Tasting History and the origins of deep dish pizza. This is from the 1940s, is this fine dining by the standards of 1959? 😁
Airline food from 1954!
HereAndGone
1d ago
He could also afford to keep a personal cook or housekeeper. Or, you know, just have a servant to do all the regular housework while his fancy wife did the cooking.
Yeah, looking at the Brady Bunch sit-com from 1970s. Mike Brady is an architect living in a suburb of Los Angeles, with a new wife and a blended family of six kids. He has a full-time housekeeper. According to Google "The median annual salary for architects was $96,690 in 2023". So Mike would have been making less than that back in the 70s and was able to afford that lifestyle. The equivalent of 100 grand in 1959 would have been serious money. You could indeed afford to hire a cook/housekeeper and a maid and maybe even a gardener/maintenance guy.
HereAndGone
1d ago
If Jane Street does that, then they will end up like Google and all the "faster, leaner, smarter" companies that started off with "we can do this without the bloat, in half the time, for half the cost". They'll grow, get established, become part of the establishment, and start getting bloated and slow themselves.
Eat the dinosaur, turn into the dinosaur.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Also, the full week has to be covered somehow, so you would have one shift working Mon-Thurs, another shift working Tues-Fri, and another Weds-Sat. It would cost more to have three people working separate four day weeks than one person working the five or six day week (e.g Joe works Mon-Fri, gets paid for 5 days. Sally works Mon-Thurs and Bill works Tues-Fri, that is two people for 8 days). Plus, I don't think that employers would pay 5 days wages for 4 days work; you work 4 days, you get paid for 4 days, and if you need more money then either the government has to top up with some kind of UBI payment or you have to be able to work extra hours/take on a second job, which defeats the entire purpose of "we want to employ the people laid off by AI so the 4 day work week will soak them up".
HereAndGone
1d ago
If there's a societal shift working Fridays is going to end up looking as quaint to Westerners as working Saturdays does to the right now (plenty of parts of the world where working Saturdays is normalized).
My friend, once upon a time working on Sunday was not done. Then it was done but in exceptional circumstances and you got paid double time for working on Sunday. Now, in a lot of jobs, working weekends is part of the job, you don't get paid extra for working those days, and maybe you only have work every other weekend. But you still have to work it. (And it used to be that working half-days on Saturdays was normal before unions got strong, which is what I think you are referring to with "as working Saturdays does to the right now)".
Think of the jobs where it's "my weekend is free, now I want to go shopping/eat out/visit this attraction". People have to work in those places to provide the services for the people not working on the weekend.
Plenty of people in the West work Saturdays and Sundays.
(There also used to be a custom called half-day closing during the week, generally on Wednesday or Thursday. That's gone too, now those days are full work days).
HereAndGone
2d ago
The sneering about watching "I Love Lucy" on your black and white TV. I grew up watching "I Love Lucy" on a black and white TV, and that wasn't in 1959! Today I couldn't tell you the last time I watched a TV show on TV since there's nothing I want to watch. 57 channels and nothing on, indeed.
(What I am watching are episodes from the late 90s to 2010s of an old pop archaeology show on Youtube, so don't laugh at old TV, mate!)
Talking about rotary phones like they went out with the dinosaurs. Some of us are dinosaurs, and we're still around! 😁
HereAndGone
2d ago
I goddamn will take $100,000 in 1959 where I can go out to eat in a restaurant and order steak, instead of 2025 where "hey, beef is getting so expensive, go vegan!" or what boggled my mind today when I read it "eat venison instead" (that has to be some 'let them eat cake' moment, except where cake is indeed less expensive than bread) and going out to eat in a restaurant will require a second mortgage.
Yes, we have a lot more luxuries today. We have a lot more choices. And if we can't afford those luxuries and choices, Mr. Summer?
Just today read a story in the news about a guy who poured boiling water on his sleeping wife and hit her over the head with a claw hammer. No further details as to why he did that, and he's awaiting a psychiatric report, but the general rule of thumb is: if you see a story about "partner attacked by current or ex-partner", it's female attacked by male. Women seem to attack children (see that murder of a child by the stepmother I mentioned on here before). Sometimes yes, it's the woman attacks the man, but mostly it's man attacks woman.
And it's hard to tell! Forty years married, then one night he pours boiling water on top of you! Very few people can foresee this happening if the person has otherwise been normal all their life.
Your link is interesting, thanks for providing it. Reminds me of the golden age of British murders, where women were as likely to bump off husbands as husbands to bump off wives.
On the other hand, this data set claims that for intimate partner homicide, it's majorly women:
American homicide victims are mostly men, except when the killer is an intimate partner.
Almost 20,000 Americans were murdered in 2023.
The chart shows the homicide rates among male and female victims. Men were 2.7 times more likely to die by homicide than women.
We can see that for men, most of these murders were committed by friends, neighbors, acquaintances, or strangers (shown as “Other” in the chart) rather than a partner or family member. The opposite is true for women: intimate partners are the biggest threat.
Because the risks are different, the most effective responses may differ too. For women, reducing intimate partner violence is a key priority. For men, prevention is more often tied to crime, gangs, and violence among acquaintances or strangers.
The potential explanation for the difference in American spousal homicide sounds untested:
The team examined police files of spousal homicides occurring over the past three decades in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. The sleuths found that while husbands kill in response to revelations of wifely infidelity, women rarely do - even though their spouses are usually more adulterous. Men will also kill their wives as part of a carefully planned murder-suicide or a familicidal massacre.
Women, on the other hand, murder in self-defense. "Unlike men, women kill male partners after years of suffering physical violence, after they have exhausted all available sources of assistance," say Wilson and Daly in Criminology (Vol. 30, No. 2).
So why are women so much more likely to murder their spouses in the U. S. than anywhere else? Contrary to the so-called "old equalizer" hypothesis, which suggests that the availability of guns in U.S. homes neutralizes men's size and strength advantages in lethal marital spats, American SROK rates tend to be lower for shootings than for other spousal homicides.
Nor has the abolition of traditional sex roles led to increased male-like crimes by women. The peculiar symmetry of male and female spouse-killing in America existed 40 years ago, before such social changes.
The spousal SROK is higher in de facto unions than in registered marriages, more prevalent among blacks than among whites, and more common among couples who lived together than apart. Wilson and Daly also discovered that homicide rates increased among couples with significant age differences. And while they can't explain why these factors give wives more than husbands murderous clout, they have a few ideas about what does.
EDIT: [Another](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/104398629401000303 paper has an interesting hypothesis - class and race:
Abstract Wilson and Daly (1992) examined spousal homicide samples from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain and concluded: "For every 100 U.S. men who kill their wives, about 75 women kill their husbands; this spousal 'sex ratio of killing' (SROK) is more than twice that in other Western nations" (p.189). In this paper we examine the SROK for the United States using data obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) to determine if Wilson and Daly's conclusion can be supported. While confirming Wilson and Daly's summary findings, our results show that the SROK is an elastic measure, varying over time, race, and ethnicity. In many segments of the U.S. population, the SROK is comparable to the sex ratio of killing for other Western nations. Moreover, the differences between various racial groups in the United States are greater than the differences between the U.S. and Canada, Australia and Great Britain, respectively. We suggest that socioeconomic factors and family structure are the major reasons for the disparity in the SROK for different racial groups in the United States and abroad. The implications of our findings for future research are discussed.
...The White SROKs are 48 and 36 for ex-spouse and girlfriend, respectively, and the Black SROKs, 99 and 99 for ex-spouse and boy/girlfriend, respectively. For those couples legally married, the SROKs are 48 and 111, Whites and Blacks, respectively. (Note: The sex ratio of killing for White ex-spouse and those legally married are identical).
That might also explain the number of trans people killed by ex-partner/current partner in the list I posted before; the majority of the trans people on that list were BIPOC. If there are higher intimate partner rates of homicide among black Americans, that translates over for trans as well as cis.
HereAndGone
2d ago
Well, "miracle cures" aren't, by and large (except maybe in the early years of antibiotics when it was the Silver Bullet that cured damn near everything, and then eventually we got drug-resistant strains).
For some people, it will work fantastically. Cuts down hunger, makes you feel satiated, weight comes off, general boost to willpower, even claims that it's an addiction cure for smoking, drinking, lack of moral fibre, and so forth. For most people, it'll help. For some people, we'll be there looking at all the "no excuse to be fat now that GLP-1 drugs are there" posts and wanting to drop a flowerpot on poster's head. Definitely it's helping with my blood sugar levels, and since I got prescribed it for Type 2 diabetes that's the main concern. But the main weight loss is from the initial "this will have you running to the bathroom every five minutes until your digestive system adjusts", for me at least. Nausea and diarrhoea mean no eating, and naturally no eating means water weight loss, which shows up on the scales. As for your mother skipping injections, either try and keep on a regular injection schedule even with the nausea until it passes (and that will take a few weeks), or if it doesn't pass, ask to be put on something else.
The major effects are supposed to be "this slows down digestion, that means food passes more slowly, that means you feel fuller for longer and so won't eat as much". It's had a very weird affect on my appetite. Yes, when I sit down to eat a meal, I don't eat as much as I used to before (I will leave food on the plate instead of eating every scrap). But then half an hour to an hour later, I'm hungry again. And I'm constantly grazing. Small bits here and there (a bowl of cereal, two slices of toast, some cheese, some sweets, so forth) but small bits add up.
Mainly I'm maintaining my current weight, so not packing on more pounds is good, but not seeing the magic weight loss yet. Though I'm on Ozempic and not at the maximum 2mg dose yet. Maybe when my doctor moves me up to that, there will be a visible result? Or maybe not. I'm not holding my breath hoping for a miracle.
As ever, the only thing that works is cut out all junk and snacks, cut down on carbs, eat much fewer calories in total, and exercise for muscle toning and retention.
HereAndGone
3d ago
it's been a long, long time since my family had anything to do with Scouts, but re: Cub Scouts and women - yes? Den Mothers? though I see you refer to the women as Den Leaders so presumably that went by the wayside in the name of equality or something. Cub Scouts, so far as I can remember, are meant to be a bunch of six year olds so you have the female Den Mother keeping them from poking their eyes out with scissors until they're old enough to graduate on to the Boy Scouts (and then go on to Venturer or whatever if they stick around into their teens).
HereAndGone
3d ago
These people are nuts but I think it goes something like "animals innocent and good, humans wicked and blameworthy". Sort of a Seven Kill Stele vibe.
It really is dependent on how you grew up. Where it was normal for siblings to share, that is no big deal (so the horrified grimace about "kids in bunk beds" does not land). Where it was normal for everyone to have their own room (because you only have one sibling and your parents can afford a big enough house) then it's deprivation to have "kids in bunk beds".
'Oh no in the 1950s kids had to share a bedroom with their sibling' as one of the human rights deprivation features of the dark ages is laughable, if you grew up where sharing is normal.
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