Gaashk
23hr ago
Strangely, those are the sorts of details that suggested trans to me.
(I have given birth to three children, could probably have another, and have no tampon stash)
Gaashk
1d ago
Maybe boomer advice will become relevant again, and we'll start having to approach potential employers in person.
Gaashk
1d ago
Interesting. My impression of advertising is that it was already substantially clogged, to the extent that it hardly matters if an email is personal or not, in fact a personalized message from a stranger is actually more suspicious than a normal advertisement, it's probably going to be some kind of scam.
I think my mobile phone company has some sort of spam filter, because the only unwanted calls I get are from the politicians in a jurisdiction I once registered to vote, so plausibly I opted into that.
Lately, I've found myself ignoring or marking as spam pretty much all business emails, and following them on social media instead. This is despite being the sort of person who reads blogs that are basically advertisements. I'll be annoyed when Google reviews, Amazon reviews, and Reddit posts get filled up even more with AI entries, but that was probably going to accelerate even without AI.
Gaashk
1d ago
That's interesting, I had thought they were farther from automating meat processing. That does sound like a terrible job, anyway.
Gaashk
1d ago
What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?
Everyone’s been talking a lot about both the downsizing of the federal government, and the rapid improvement of LLM technology, such that the fake jobs are being cut at the same instant that more jobs are becoming to some degree fake. I don’t necessarily think that the US government should be a bastion of fake jobs, especially Culture War ones, but at the same time I wonder if there’s any end game people like Musk are working toward.
As far as I can tell:
Blue collar jobs are still largely intact. There’s about the same need as there ever was for tradesmen, handymen, construction workers, waste disposal, and so on. Most of the automation in those fields came from vehicles a century ago, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to leverage things like prefab construction all that much more. I personally like the new “3-D printed” extrusion style of architecture, but it doesn’t look like it actually saves all that much labor.
Pink collar: Childcare takes about the same amount of labor per child, but there are fewer children. Nursing is in demand, but surely healthcare can only take up so much of the economy. Surely? Retail continues to move online, and we continue to descend into slouchy sweatpants, parachute pants, and the oversized, androgynous look. I would personally like it if some of the excess labor went into actually fitted clothing, but haven’t seen any signs of this. Cleaning services seem to have more demand than supply, with an equilibrium of fewer things getting cleaned regularly than in the past, while continuing to be low in pay and prestige, so I’m anticipating more dirt, but little investment into fixing it.
Demand for performance based work seems to be going down. It’s just as good to listen to or watch a recording of the best person in a field than a live performance by someone less skilled. But were performers ever a large part of the economy?
Middle class office work, knowledge work, words, paperwork, emails: seems about to implode? How much of the economy is this? Google suggests about 12%. That seems like a lot, but nothing close to the 90% of farm work that was automated throughout the 21st Century. This article was interesting, about the role of jobs like secretary, typist, and admin assistant in the 20th Century. I tried working as an assistant to an admin assistant a decade or so ago, and was physically filing paperwork, which even then was pretty outdated.
The larger problem seems to be status. What kinds of work should the middle class do, if not clerk and word adjacent things? There seems to be near infinite demand for service sorts of work – can we have an economy where the machines and a few others do all the civilizationally load bearing work, while everyone else walks each other’s dogs and picks up each other’s food? My father thinks that there’s less slack in many of these jobs than when he was younger. I’m not sure if that’s true in general, or how to test it.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with a future where most people are doing and buying service work. The current trend of women all raising each other’s children and caring for each other’s elderly parents seems to not be working out very well, though.
Gaashk
1d ago
It wasn't based on much, so I'm willing to believe I'm just wrong about that.
Gaashk
1d ago
My impression is that she's a trans woman. Things like putting "and no I am not a man" in her bio, and talking explicitly online about her UTI, and the proportion of posts about gender vs everything else.
On the other hand, no, being offered "dick" three times a day isn't exactly a positive experience, even if accompanied by some other performances.
Gaashk
5d ago
The Navajo nation is some 27,000 square miles for a population of 400,000 people; there's enough land, anyway.
Gaashk
5d ago
My observation in New Mexico is that the federal government, while not very good, is still a lot better than the state at managing public lands.
Gaashk
7d ago
It's not what I hoped they were doing, anyway. I'm a bit surprised that experimental contraceptive methods is even something that countries are still accepting from the US. South African TFR: 2.3 -- apparently they are already utilizing birth control adequately. Perhaps they should stop engaging in activities that spread HIV.
I'm not really sure how the executive office works, but my impression is that, somehow, they can't do that, the study in question just finds endless ways to file extensions, are forgotten about, and continue operating as usual until the next administration comes into power. My first guess would be that it's relatively hard to figure out what any specific program is actually doing, until they go complaining to the New York Times about it, since there are so many of them, and they have an incentive to look important but also non controversial.
Gaashk
8d ago
That sounds like another entry into more bad things happening because USAID was doing things they shouldn't have been, in this case conducting medical trials.
Gaashk
18d ago
I once lived in a duplex with my husband and baby for $500/month including utilities, but it was in a small town, and did feel like a closet. I could walk to work there, which was fairly nice. But I'm more confused about spending $1,000 a month on food for one person. We spend about $800 on food for two adults, two children, a baby, and two cats, and aren't trying all that hard. Like, we just ate salmon sushi with miso soup for dinner.
Gaashk
22d ago
The preliminary speculations I’ve heard so far blame the helicopter pilot, but I have no idea how true they are.
Gaashk
23d ago
Since you mention potentially wanting to marry and raise kids together, some of those things do sound a bit counter to that.
pretty strict about sleep
This will be a struggle if you ever do have kids, but it just is what it is, they can start trying to sleep through the night at about 6 months.
don't own a car for environmental (but also economic) reasons
My husband didn't have a car when we started living together (Chicago), but you will almost certainly need one if you get a proper household going, with children.
I'm open to comprise as long as it doesn't involve me eating meat or animal products, but this isn't always clear on the first date.
Hm. Yeah. It's really irritating to cook dinner, and then have your man say, no, he's got his own food that's different, enjoy though. It's also pretty irritating to be always cooking vegan food with a side of meat or cheese, though that can depend on what cuisine you both like. Also, only going out to restaurants that serve vegan food makes proposing a place to eat out much harder. I used to keep Orthodox fasts, which are like that, and mostly just didn't eat out. Which was alright, since it was meant to be penitential, but isn't great for dating. Not sure what to do about this.
I will not swear forever allegiance to any institution or group that doesn't allow me to update my beliefs based on my experience in the world.
A big anxiety around this for women is whether they're in danger of losing their belief based community, and if so, what you can replace it with together. One of the big problems of modernity is that there often isn't a replacement, people just become more isolated.
Gaashk
25d ago
I think "trads" propose things like making it easier to raise children on a single salary, and harder to get divorced.
Why not?
Partly because they couldn't use drugs or alcohol for the majority of their adult life. And most women would be having maybe 6 kids -- not that nobody has ever had more, but many women shouldn't for health reasons.
But, also, a good job is, in part, something that structures people's days and weeks, gets them out of the house even if they're feeling a bit depressed and it's cold and dark outside, gets them to interact with other people, and ideally offers some amount of "autonomy, mastery, and purpose." So the gamification idea makes sense. Parenthood can offer some of that, since the parent needs to find a way to care for their children, and will go do things with them, and can generally find some sort of rhythm to the day, week, and year that works for the family, especially as the babies get a bit bigger. Eventually, they can talk and expect different days and holidays and so on, and it's actually pretty fun to decorate with them, or garden together, bake together, and so on. So, as jobs go, stay at home mom is a bit unstructured, but it makes up for it somewhat in progressing in an interesting way, especially with several children. Surrogacy does not offer that. And if some government were to try to institute something like the military, but while pregnant, then it's probably better to join the normal military, and do support stuff while not pregnant.
Gaashk
26d ago
the temptation for whoever builds it is always going to be optimising it for society's benefit rather than for the benefit of the chump in question
I think this is very hard to avoid, unless the person asking for help has extremely clear goals that they are articulating well, and the person trying to help him actually knows how to get them. There's an autism program I sometimes interact with, and it's very clear that the goal is mostly teaching them to interface with a large institution. It isn't even clear what else it could be about, since there's a pretty rigid schedule that includes interfacing with a different teacher, therapist, or situation every 45 minutes or so. It seems like a smaller setting with l fewer transitions would be better, but maybe then they wouldn't even feel like they had anything to teach.
Gaashk
26d ago
Apparently the best Eastern European place for surrogacy has moved from Ukraine to Georgia, due to the war. A quick search leads to, for instance, this, where at least one woman came from another Central Asian country by lying to the husband she doesn't like, and at least some women are having up to six babies for the agency.
I can't tell based on a short search how popular it is, but the four to six number sounds about what I would also expect from a woman who was into motherhood, and had found a husband to support her. I've heard of exactly one woman in my personal sphere who had 20 children, and then shortly died, leaving them to raise each other. You can get families like the Duggars by some combination of good health, religious belief, and media attention.
I'm not so much saying that there aren't women who are willing to have a basically normal amount of children, some of whom they sell. Just that having 20 and leaving them at an orphanage is too far.
Gaashk
26d ago
I’m saying both that your allusion to “orphanages” suggests that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and that even the underclass doesn’t want to be “just wombs” professionally for 30 years. Not that you aren’t in good company, Socrates suggested it on the Symposium, just there are reasons you’ll mostly see that system in bleak dystopian novels.
Gaashk
26d ago
Or just pay like 10% of the most motherhood-friendly women to produce 20 children and raise them in an orphanage (they can visit of course) , that also works and intrudes less in people's personal lives.
Orphanages???
This exists, it's called surrogacy, there are couples who will pay for it, and there would be more if it were subsidized, as there's a waiting list for adoption of young children, though 20 sounds excessive. There probably isn't any way to make giving birth more than a couple of times for someone else not extremely low status. There was a thread a bit ago on DSL where a poster was talking about considering surrogacy so that his hot young wife doesn't lose her figure, and there's no way for the relationship between him and the surrogate, or the well off gay couple and the surrogate not to be pure power dynamics at scale.
Gaashk
26d ago
The "not that many" is key. This one specific man you don't like or spinsterhood is a bad deal. But so is 100 messages a day from random men on an app. I'm not sure what approach rate is ideal, but maybe it's something like six realistic choices.
I would be interested to see a social experiment where group A does as you suggest, and group B commits to pay men more in relation to women, gets the men to dress well, work out more at, gives them more slack in their jobs so that even the ambitious ones have time to socialize, organizes dances and parties with light drinking for mid twenties men with actual jobs, not just college students, give extremely low social status to men who abandon their children, and other things along those lines. Ban the apps!
I would bet a small amount on the latter being more effective.
It's coming from both sides. Women who spend their childhoods longing for children have about average success at it. Most women want to have children with their husband when they have one who's supportive of that, it's just taking an unreasonably long time.
An interesting three I saw: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1hvotgr/should_i_have_children/
No, I'm saying that, oddly enough, the sorts of bios that highlight "not a man, a woman, no really," and stories that feature "tampon stashes" on the internet lately do not come from biological females.
I'm not saying I disbelieve you right now, just that this has been the case for several years now. This is literally the first time I've heard a woman mention tampons in relation to "actually a woman."
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