Gaashk
29m ago
In my town, it is commonplace for people to openly make overtly sexual jokes around children, people prying into my political views at random right as I introduce myself, people at functions reaching for food in a communal bowl with their hands instead of using the spoon or tongs in it, people nudging me with their shopping carts or standing like deer in headlights instead of asking me to give way, people breathing in my mouth as they reach for some frozen pizza, etc.
Huh. I'm having some difficulty interpreting this. I've lived in small American towns, and didn't notice these sorts of behaviors, or not in a way that got on my nerves. Perhaps it's best to treat it anthropologically, rather than looking for a soul mate. I enjoyed living as a single young person in a very small town. They thought me to cut fish, let me participate in town festivals, it was interesting.
Try applying your own curiosity and open-mindedness to your situation, and it will lead to amusing anecdotes you can tell your future girlfriend once you get to college.
Gaashk
1hr ago
The women in my family were also teachers with university degrees and 3-4 children, at least three generations back. Which is what stability looks like in an era of low infant mortality; it's not like society even wants a bunch of 15 child underclass families anyway.
I don't have a theory for this. None of them moved to IQ shredder places like San Francisco or New York, and when two of my cousins did, they have in fact not had any children.
Gaashk
5d ago
I like the way even the free version of Claude starts by listing what sources it's looked at, while I wait for an answer. It conveys that it's researching something, unlike Free GPT, which answers instantly, and maybe there's a website embedded somewhere.
Gaashk
7d ago
what is rightfully theirs in terms of status, money, and employment.
This is specific rather than general, and would depend on intuitions concerning specific events. It depends, ultimately, on what the work is. For instance, I don't necessarily want a pastor or professor who's been grindmaxxing his whole life, I'd like someone who's been cultivating wisdom through conversations, study groups, perhaps even traveling to get different perspectives, praying or reflecting, and other low stress activities.
But that's not because the status is somehow "rightfully theirs" in a caste sense, but because the grindmaxxing doesn't necessarily produce more wisdom, which is what people are paying them to cultivate. If they start thinking their status is "rightfully theirs," they should become subject to the rule of "whosoever humbles himself will be exalted, and whosoever exalts himself will be brought down," because that position is showing a lack of wisdom and maturity.
The oil riggers are welcome to produce more oil, as long as they aren't so exhausted they're making stupid mistakes.
Gaashk
7d ago
I've mostly heard drama around the kind of homeschool families and communities who don't want to have to prove they did in fact educate their children in basic ways, but the accusation was educational neglect more than religious practices.
There was a Muslim cult in New Mexico that got in trouble for physically neglecting its children, after one of them died of preventable causes.
While I think states sometimes go too far in scaring parents about what constitutes "neglect," both cases seem basically reasonable, not of the "kids playing alone in the park" variety.
Yes, it's chemistry based, I don't think they're antagonistic, but just developed and tested their glasses separately. Their website says they have different expansion and contraction rates when heated and cooled. Not being a materials science person, I don't really understand the reasoning behind it, something about different flux ratios and other chemical differences.
Ceramic glazes are also developed to heat at different temperatures, and in the 20th Century were classified into "cones" that droop at a certain point of heat absorption, so that a mid fire potter might look for "cone 6" clay and glazes, whereas a low fire potter, firing about 400 (f) cooler, might look for cone 06, which is weird but at least predictable and the different temperatures can be easily sold in the same store.
Edit: I'm not aware of any potters here, but Coyote Clay Glazes are great fun! They create different colors and effects based on kiln, location, thickness, and other idiosyncratic things, and each piece is unique and beautiful. Next time I'm firing, I want to try their "Texas two step" series, which creates spots by one glaze breaking over another.
Gaashk
7d ago
It's called different things in different states. Here it's CYFD (Children Youth and Families Department).
It depends on who the trad families are interacting with. I had thought there were scandals about Muslim communes at a similar rate by population to the extremist Christian ones, but haven't looked at the numbers.
Gaashk
7d ago
I think this must be a trend. I went to my first Korean BBQ restaurant last week. There were a surprising number of babies and toddlers there, considering the place was full of hot stoves and raw meat. We couldn't talk because of the loud ventilation fans, and the toddler struggling to get loose part way through, but they didn't allow food to be taken out, it all had to be consumer on premises. It seems fun as a date night idea, except for the noise. I liked the food and didn't mind the cooking, but didn't get to eat as much as I wanted or stay as long as I wanted, which is bad in an anti-carryout environment.
Interesting case study, thank you for explaining it for people who know little about guitars.
As far as niche hobbyist supplies, artist's paint companies have mostly maintained their brand identities, which I appreciate. Professional paints sometimes contain toxic substances, and so have to disclose the chemical makeup of their pigments, for instance this high end red paint uses, in place of a cadmium compound, "PY216-Rutile Tin Zinc, PR254-Pyrrole Red, and PV19-Quinacridone Violet", and lists information about each pigment. I like this system, it is very useful! I am happy that these paints are treated as potentially hazardous chemicals and clearly labeled by the serious brands.
The paint brands are differentiated primarily by their consistency and pigment load, with some creamier or stickier, with higher or lower tinting strength, with different preferences held by different artists, depending on what they're trying to do. It looks like the medium mixtures are proprietary, but the pigments are not.
Also, if you want a very specific oil pastel experience, you should still get the Sennelier's version.
I don't know if it matters very much, in that space, whether all the paint companies are ultimately owned by the same overarching corporation or not, as long as they make consistent products. But maybe there's some entertaining IP drama on behind the scenes.
Edit: I found it interesting to learn that glass casting brands are incompatible, they crack if you mix them, so glass artists have to go all in on one company and don't buy anything from the other. As I recall the main US art glass companies are located in New Mexico and Oregon, but the teacher I was learning from had moved from Oregon to New Mexico and brought her supplies, so she couldn't go to the excellent local glass store for supplies, she has to order them from another state.
Gaashk
7d ago
My father and grandfather were cooks.
I'm confused about my father's trajectory, because he's never been in trouble with the law, got a college degree in the 70s, upstanding member of his church community, remained married to the same woman for 40 years, refused to learn Spanish, and yet was a line cook surrounded by Spanish speakers for years. Then he went and taught high school for a decade. My understanding of the situation is that he is just incredibly uncharismatic, and couldn't figure out the boomer job search methods, but it's kind of weird in retrospect. Also, we were homeschooling, and living partially off of... stocks gifted by relatives, I think?
Gaashk
7d ago
Societies with teen marriage do not generally have unchaperoned dating. They are still very hard on unmarried, especially girls who sought out sex with (anyone), and some are also hard on the men, or else offer them an opportunity to marry the girl. Does France allow a 17 year old and a 25 year old to date? Maybe they do. Google says that 33 states allow 17 year olds to marry, but some limit the age gap.
Gaashk
7d ago
Yeah, I don't necessarily like grinding at learning as a widespread practice, though that mostly seems to be about worrying that the only alternative to passing tests and office drudgery is too horrible to contemplate. The main way around that is making second or third tier jobs bearable. It should be alright (and largely is in America) for a moderately smart person to work as a cook or something. People make fun of liberal arts baristas, but that is a sign that America is producing barista jobs that are better than someone grinding super hard or running back to their families, which is good, actually.
Gaashk
7d ago
It's not cheating if they're doing work that is actually useful to people, which the 12 hour shift people probably are. Then other people get to enjoy whatever they produced, which is the point of paying people for their labor.
Gaashk
7d ago
Yes.
I had no intention of joining the US foreign service, and don't know anything about that part.
The experience itself was mixed. I enjoyed Teach and Learn with Georgia, a locally run Peace Corps shaped knock off, a lot more, but I think things vary a lot by location and gender. My main issue was that we weren't given enough work, in the hopes that we would exhibit agency to do other things that make America look good. But, also, many cultures the Peace Corps operates in expect, and indeed enforce, low female agency. So I was paired up with someone I didn't really work well with, with no other visible options for useful ways to contribute, and then had to leave early. In retrospect, I was acting pretty depressed, and my skills were mostly going unused. I was especially surprised that my English and teaching skills were largely unused in an English teaching position, despite being an actual career teacher, and the I couldn't figure out how to remedy that.
My male colleges seemed to have, in general, a better experience.
I'll have to follow dumb rules about where I can and can't travel.
Yes, more than other volunteer abroad situations.
Gaashk
9d ago
Happy Fourth of July! We got to walk to a village parade where people from the community threw candy at the kids. Go America!
Gaashk
10d ago
Yeah, there's potentially a place for a 20 year old who wants to marry a 17 year old (I think most states allow that, sometimes asking for family approval), but that rarely seems to be the intention, despite the cries of "but it's for Fertility!"
Gaashk
10d ago
I've only heard people complaining about the moral panic, not the panic itself. But I haven't seen any grown men seriously try to date 16 year olds, I suppose people would be upset about that. The WASP types that comprise my ancestors would have been upset about that in the past too, though.
Gaashk
13d ago
I have been known to stand with my kids in the parking lot while my husband pulls out, to avoid touching other people's cars with my car door, but if you're the only adult in the situation, it can't necessarily be helped. She was probably just making that up about never touching another car door herself, and did but forgot.
Gaashk
26d ago
PSS: After I wrote this, the US Government banned Fable. This is what I hate I about AI; the field moves so fast that if you write an article for next Tuesday, it's outdated by Friday. I guess Trump disagreed with me? But, fuck me, I spent a week writing this post and I am not not posting it.
LOL, very amusing that you put this at the end.
Gaashk
26d ago
If you're wondering where the cranky conservatives from the Slate Star Codex comment section went, it's https://www.datasecretslox.com
Gaashk
26d ago
This is the first I've heard of Vibecamp, but this lines up with my impressions of San Francisco rationalist culture. Assuming they don't get eaten by their peers' attempts to create silicon gods, it'll be interesting to read their children's blogs about this in 15 years. It does seem like a bad idea.
A while back I was following a blog where a childhood acquaintance was processing her bad experience of living with her extremely conservative cultish adoptive parents, and it was painfully clear that they shouldn't have tried both homeschooling, and even home churching them, her mother, especially, sounded like she was terribly impatient and should absolutely not have been stuck at home with four children all day every day. She wrote about how her mother would take her out on a mother daughter date for an entire day, buy her gifts and nice foods, and then hope she would be satiated, that she had done her work as a mother, and become angry when she wanter more interaction the very next day. And it sounded so clear that they shouldn't have been bottled up together like that. But, ideology.
I'm not familiar with the ideology of Vibecamp, but I assume there is one that pushes people to do inadvisable things.
Gaashk
27d ago
In an especially striking and interesting part of the report, it actually hints at some relatively fresh and semi-radical new solutions. Becoming a parent, muses the report, is most difficult for younger people around 25-35 who are less securely established both in career and life-situation, but who have the highest fertility and the best chance of a good outcome if they do have a child. Yet current policy sprinkles benefits over time rather than concentrating it in the hands of the young who need it most: so concentrate the benefits! Give new young parents a bigger concentrated dose of total spending instead of spreading them out over time.
That makes sense.
Society already provides a lot of benefits to school children, in the form of daycare, education, socialization, food, and other extraneous school related things. It provides surprisingly little to new parents, maybe healthcare and a small tax benefit, but sometimes not even that.
The problem of people not seriously pairing up remains unaddressed, though, and it seems to be the bigger issue. Especially, dating apps are for gay men and women who are fine with behaving like gay men because sex with sexy men is fun. Reports are poor in terms of actually establishing relationships likely to result in children, even heavily subsidized from birth children.
I'm personally in favor of increasing gender segregation in most spaces, including work, with the implication that mixed gender spaces are fair game for establishing romantic relationships. The current arrangement where almost all spaces are co-ed, but asking anyone out is fraught is retarded.
Gaashk
28d ago
I've heard "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog," but not "tits or GTFO," presumably because I never claimed to be an attractive woman. Nobody cares if someone is a dorky homeschool girl on the internet.
Gaashk
28d ago
I'm curious to see what, if anything, comes of the LLM driven automation of the next decade. It seems primed, especially, to take over low level management work. I wonder if it would be better or worse for the average worker to have high level decisions made by an AI program vs a human manager. Thinking of some of the human decisions, it might be mixed. Reports out of Amazon warehouses aren't great.
We've been learning about the mining labor struggles of 19th Century Colorado. This isn't from Colorado, but is a good song: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MjFcllICjUc
I've gotten sucked into the mommy wars section of Substack lately, and my impression is that it does go a layer deeper than that. College educated women want status for their ability to do things like write, reference interesting authors, articulate cultural and educational opinions, and so on. In the past, women educated in that fashion had nursemaids. Now, they drive their baby to daycare at four weeks old, and work. Their work does not produce much status, and neither do their children. But with everything going online, it's increasingly difficult to gain status from the things they go to college for either, so the popular ones are happy because they're popular, and bully the less popular ones, for saying unpopular things. This is not a good state of affairs, middle class women should be able to do a bit of cultural generation while their children are in daycare or school, and generate positive feelings about their lives. Feminists did not help with that, merely chaining them to fake desk jobs and bloated school systems instead of their kitchens. And the ones at home don't sound happy either, because they never get a break at all.
I, again, don't have a solution, but giving up on women doing classic feminine things like writing essays to each other, and making everyone nursemaids again seems like the wrong direction to be pushing in.
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