Gaashk
9hr 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
12hr 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
12hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
3d 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
3d 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
7d 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
20d 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
20d ago
If you're wondering where the cranky conservatives from the Slate Star Codex comment section went, it's https://www.datasecretslox.com
Gaashk
20d 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
20d 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
22d 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
22d 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
Gaashk
22d ago
I got an unsolicited neighborhood magazine recently, which is painfully on the nose for well off Gen Xers. There was an article about a couple who looked to be in their 50s, and it was all about their yoga studio, how they do hot yoga, warm yoga, dog yoga, and have a French handstand consultant, and here's a picture of the husband doing a handstand. There's a picture of their little dog. Somewhere in the middle it mentions that he was an engineer for 30 years and their two sons, one of whom is helping them run their yoga studio. They sound like normal wholesome people who are trying to pretend like they are alternative in some way.
None of it is wrong or bad, but I don't like it; it seems like it should be a parody somehow, but I can't quite put my finger on why I feel that way.
Gaashk
22d ago
it might be unseemly to ask people to rate their social interactions with me on a scale of 1-10?
Haha.
I remember enjoying how CS Lewis talked about philia in The Four Loves.
My parents keep joining book clubs; currently they're looking forwards to a TS Eliot meetup. But we were all educated lower middle class, and didn't have any idea how to get complex, satisfying jobs with quantized and measurable feedback. We've mostly had the kinds of jobs where feedback came in the form of getting yelled at, or sometimes unexpectedly fired. I can see how it would be very appealing to put time and effort into an actually good job that you're good at.
Gaashk
22d ago
I don't have a ton of romantic experience, but such as it is, it's been the same sources as friends. I do realize that this has the failure mode of ambiguously date like friendships, but I've never tried anything else, and so have no experience with relationships that are romantic from the start.
Gaashk
22d ago
How were your early 30s in terms of socialization? I don’t dislike the idea of it, but the effort vs returns can vary significantly
I moved states, got married, had a baby, and moved again during Covid, so my social life outside my husband and family was pretty thin.
In my late 20s, my social connections were through church, liberal arts college, and volunteer work, and that was lovely. We were putting on supras (formal toasting dinner parties), bonfires, game and beer nights, holiday festivities, meditation meet ups and other pleasant events.
Personally, I would have gotten burnt out working all the time and not prioritizing community get togethers, but I'm a woman, low in conscientiousness, and doing the kind of work where more work doesn't result in increased opportunities, so ymmv.
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.
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