Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

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> Maybe I am making assumptions here on the general political leanings of those here, but if you are talking about supporting anything like Medicare for all, UBI, BLM, PPP or even just support the Democratic party in general, pulling a little extra weight for those in a time of need is IMHO a relatively small ask that you as an individual can implement compared to those agendas.

I suspect a fair number of the complainers are people with Democratic leanings, and I think I can describe their thought process to you.

I think their problem is that a private company is doing this, not the Government. Suppose someone has to be a caregiver for an elderly relative during COVID. Facebook probably won't offer them 10 weeks for paid leave for doing this, because Facebook's internal cost-benefit metrics tell them that it's not useful. That's why people are resentful – a private company should not be in charge of deciding who gets time to deal with changes as fundamental as this in society. Policies like Medicare for all, compulsory maternity and paternity leave, or caregiver leave implemented by the Government (ideally) take into account the wishes of society as a whole, not a large private company like Facebook. For example, I think caregiver leave would be very popular due to the aging population of the US being a large section of voters, there are already tax credits starting for the same thing.

I am personally fine with giving as much time as is needed for people with families as well as people in a bunch of other situations. Life is complex and we need to help out each other as much as possible. But I fear that the ruthless utilitarianism of most American corporations doesn't play well with this worldview, leading to resentments like the article describes.

FMLA covers caregiver leave. The law is fine with it being unpaid though.

It's weird that companies are looking inside people's homes to decide how to treat them. People should get the same flexibility, for whatever reason. If people want reduced hours to deal with other things, give it to them, and so on.

I’m curious if people with other legitimate obligations asked and received push back. I’ve seen employers make accommodations for religious, dietary, various family drama (sick parents/partners, death etc), working moms etc - you just have to ask.

The point is that now it's up to the employer to decide what's a work-acceptable thing to ask for; at which point they are kind of affecting your life choices.

At that point, people without kids start thinking “Wait, why is my employer peeking inside my home to decide what I can take time off for? This is a capitalist society, right?”.

I think you are on to something. Many people are happy to be generous with others time and money but less so with their own.

That's not it exactly. It's more about everyone pulling equal weight, not about getting freebies at others' expense. It's also about the correct realization that some problems can only be solved by the actions of society as a whole, that individual choices alone cannot sufficiently solve the problem. E.g. I alone can't solve the problem of catastrophic climate change no matter how green I live in my own life.

To be clear, what I am referring to are people who would want someone other than themselves to be more generous to someone other than themselves. This a very common pathology in well-off, educated people. You get the virtue points without the actual sacrifice.

Can you give some examples of what you're referring to? Generally what is wanted is for problems to be solved by the government providing services that we all pay for through tax revenue, not for problems to be solved through private donation. I legitimately can't think of examples of what you're referring to.

An example would be attitudes towards immigration. The people arguing for taking in more poor immigrants or refugees typically do not live in the communities most impacted by their influx.

I dunno ... I'm pretty pro-immigration, and I live in NYC, which has one of (if not the) highest immigrant populations in the entire country. The same is generally true of large cosmopolitan cities. And the "impact of their influx" is actually net positive. It turns out that having more people, yes, even immigrants, has a net positive impact on the local economy, because more people means more consumers (not just more labor market competition), and you realize greater efficiencies of scale. So I don't actually think this is a good example.

I think the hypocrisy you're alluding to here is that coastal liberals are often NIMBYist, which has the direct effect of making housing expensive, which affects most people negatively, immigrants included. I'll agree with you on that one as being a problem, but I don't think it exactly fits into the class of issues you're talking about.

A better example would be Americans arguing Turkey, Greece and Italy should do more for emigrants coming from Middle East/North Africa.

Yeah but now we're getting into the land of international relations. This is becoming awfully abstract from the original topic.

Also I think you're missing some nuance here, which is that the people arguing in favor of this would indeed do a lot more to admit emigrants/refugees here, it's just that they aren't in power and don't run the government. So they can't be hypocrites for advocating for something they genuinely would do if only they were able to.

Would they really? How many of these people do you think would be happy to open their homes, or at least their neighborhoods, to a substantial number of poor, unskilled, uneducated and culturally alien people? The world would work a lot better if we all learned to ignore opinions when they come from people with no skin in the game.

Yeah, I really do think many of them actually would. For example, I'm Jewish, so I know what happens when the US turns its back on refugees fleeing genocide.

But they're not in power and they aren't making the immigration decisions, hence it's not happening.

Fair enough, we disagree on that but I have no data to back my intuition up. Thanks for the civil discussion.

I disagree, I do think its a good example. Immigration has its pros and cons and smart policies can boost the pros and lessen the cons. Its very clear that immigrants can bring enormous value but its also clear that they can lower the wages of unskilled work, as they have done in the US, and also increase serious crime, as has happened in Sweden and other European countries. The well to do elites that argue taking in immigrants is either always good or a moral imperative, would very quickly change their minds if they were either victimized or out-competed by an immigrant. But since does not happen - problematic immigrants live far away in poor communities and are not able to pursue high paying jobs - they can keep spouting sanctimonious bullshit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/nyregion/school-integrati... might be an example? One particularly striking paragraph: "When I was watching the George Floyd protests, I was noticing that many of the white neighborhoods where a lot of white liberals were out participating in Black Lives Matter demonstrations were some of the same neighborhoods that resisted school integration. And that filled me with a lot of despair."

> I suspect a fair number of the complainers are people with Democratic leanings, and I think I can describe their thought process to you.

> I think their problem is that a private company is doing this, not the Government.

Is that a Democratic take? I think it's a liberaltarian take on it. Here's the conservative libertarian response: raising children is one of the primary functions of society, and social norms that govern private actors make a certain amount of deference to that. Replacing those norms and kicking everything up to the government is a very statist solution, inviting the government into large swaths of human activity where it wasn't present before.

What's the conservative libertarian take on what to do when those norms are gone and haven't been replaced?

Reinstate the norm because we haven’t come up with a better idea and are unlikely to do so.

I assume you'd want to reinstate the norm with the same spirit wrt government involvement... How does that work?

Sure, the abstract answer is obvious. I meant the concrete answer, how do you reinstate a norm that people have stopped caring about, or that has been eroded by some policy (in the worst case, a policy championed by those that claim the norm)?

Probably involves market solutions...

"Sister for sale! One sister for sale! One crying and spying young sister for sale!"

are they gone? isn't this thread about single facebook employees resenting the special accommodations their employer has granted to parents?

It’s not a full answer to your question, but given a long enough timeframe the problem is self-correcting.

Sub-cultures with anti-natalist norms will find themselves subsumed by those that produce a lot of children. Simple math tells us that the typical American circa 2100 is a lot more likely to be descended from Utah Mormons than Bay Area rationalists.

> Simple math tells us that the typical American circa 2100 is a lot more likely to be descended from Utah Mormons than Bay Area rationalists.

Descended from today's Utah Mormons than today's Bay Area rationalists. That doesn't mean they won't move to the Bay Area and become rationalists themselves.

> Here's the conservative libertarian response

Seems to me more like plain conservative response. Libertarian position would be to protect individual liberty against both state and societal oppression. E.g. In 'On Liberty' J.S.Mill discussed mainly societal oppression (by social norms) as it is more prevasive and insidious than state oppression.

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