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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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One working parent in a family is for those who are wealthy enough to have the wife at home (or single-parent families where it's the mother working, or unemployed and on benefits). Expectations are built around couples where both are working and earning, if you want a mortgage or any kind of expense in living in today's society, there needs to be two wage-earners.

This is totally false in lots of places that aren't San Francisco. Prior to the COVID run-up in house prices, the average house price in Phoenix was about $275k. Residents of working age earn in the ballpark of $70k.

https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/AZ/Maricopa-County-Demographics.html

https://www.redfin.com/city/14240/AZ/Phoenix/housing-market

Same is true in most of the fast growing cities.

I vaguely recall there was a much more detailed AAQC about this back on the subreddit.

Tech layoffs right now because companies need to trim the fat and get back to profitability? Unless you have a guaranteed job to walk into as a replacement, you better hope your significant other is working and covering the bills while you try and get another job.

Let me introduce you to the concept of saving money - something that was far more popular in the 1960's than today.

And if there is a constant rota of untrained staff who then leave after two years, how do you expect your hospitals to work? I feel you have not thought this through (or you imagine that nursing just means bedpans and changing sheets).

One plausible way that might work is a tiered system where the 2 year staff changes sheets/bedpans while the pros restrict their efforts to things that require skills that can't be quickly acquired.

I do not know what the breakdown of work is, but it seems quite plausible - thanks to the American guild system - that a lot of work currently requiring a registered nurse could be done by a far less skilled person. We have strong evidence that many such guild-based regulations are not medically necessary, as evidenced by the lack of deaths caused by state-to-state variation between them.