The Great Distractor
mediatechdemocracy.com
mediatechdemocracy.com
This reminded me of the saying to "keep your friends close and your enemies closer".
It might be me being a cynic, but whenever I read about some critic being promoted into a visible role that makes them the official evangelist of their ideal I ask how much actual power they were instated with. More often than not it is not there.
Fun anecdote, related to the Google snack-bar example mentioned in OP. When I went to Facebook bootcamp (yes I worked for the evil empire), there was a segment on the cafes. Not cafeterias. Cafes. It's classier, and TBH the quality of the food at those cafes does justify the distinction. Anyway ... they made a big point of how they consciously arrange healthy vs. non-healthy choices at the serving stations to guide employees toward healthier choices. At the time I thought it was cool. Now, all I can think is that they're showing far more consideration for their employees than they ever do for their users. On the site/app we all worked to support, every design decision was made to encourage unhealthy choices for the sake of profit.
I would think that the ability to start up your personal computer, download an entire UI engine like Flutter and build whatever you feel like with it is not going to be the same ethically if you were directed to replace a text widget in the Flutter control responsible for showing YouTube's video dislike count.
The mindset and opinions of both parties would be drastically different. But in both cases, focusing on the smaller picture makes the entire process appear to the programmer to be nothing more than an afternoon reading through some documentation and StackOverflow posts, followed by the morally neutral stimulation of typing out keystrokes and figuring out interesting puzzles.
Developer documentation and the like will never give suggestions about one's life goals, but it's worth asking just what the pursuit of that knowledge is ultimately intending to accomplish.
And I am confused as to what it exactly brings to the average family.
Your problem wasn't that you were socialized "late", but that you were socialized in a way that didn't allow you to compete in the world outside of the circumstances of your upbringing. If everyone else was socialized like you were, you probably wouldn't have that problem.
The reason I don't like recommending school or daycare for young children is that although they learn superior marketable social skills (lying, deference, aggression, status gaming, etc.) early on in life, for the most part they think and behave like inmates do. I cannot deny that those who don't go to school find themselves at a social disadvantage, but I do not think that those who go to school are "socialized" in a healthy way.
But that aside...
So what would you recommend? Seems like those skills, though you don't like them, are currently useful in college and the adult world as well. But often quite lessened! Adult friend relationships tend to be healthier than high school social games!
And with the particular case of teenagers, it's often all they have. Tiny aspects of social standing are important because there is often nothing actually meaningful that they can contribute to or do with a near-term payoff. So it's either grind in the hopes of a payoff when you're 20-something and have graduated college, or play vicious games for short term social prizes, or both.
I would definitely be in favor of trying to figure out how to make the late-teenage years more "meaningful" but I think tearing the rest of the system down is not realistic.
I agree with everything else you say.
The fact that teenagers only have a hyper-competitive useless social atmosphere is a quirk of the past 50 years, and hasn't been true at any other time in history. Compare the required responsibilites and daily life of a Pueblo 16-year-old in the pre-Spanish 1500s, or even a poor English 16-year-old in the early 1900s to those of a 16-year-old in school in the modern U.S. Each of the pre-modern lives are far less comfortable and more dangerous, but far more meaningful to those who own them.
I don't mean to say that we should tear the system down, or that a modern 16-year-old should wish they were a Cornish coal miner during WWI. However, when the system is entirely made up of people who believe that the system is inevitable and the only way to live, meaning becomes very difficult to come by for the children it institutionalizes.
For an individual child/teenager:
- Friendships or at least informal apprenticeships with productive adults - Martial arts (those that are actually effective in the UFC, not flashy arts) - Creation of products and/or art - Strong musical tradition - Knowledge of one's lineage, ancestry, and family history
I'm not sure that's the case. They demand lots of attention, sure, and it's often hard for adults to say "no" as they leverage their ever-gushing cuteness.
They do need a certain level of focused attention with adults, but overdoing it spoils them. Have friend and relative kids come over; most kids are social and occupy each other, learning social skills in the process. An adult does need to check on them every now and then to make sure they are not lighting the cat on fire again. If they seem too hyper, put them in sports, and rotate the driving with other parents. Boys especially need hard physical activity to milk their wiggles out, or they will light the cat on fire.
The major cause for imprisoning toddlers and even young kids these days is the risk posed by vehicles.
My parents' generation grew up in a developing country where the villages did not have paved roads, and 90% of traffic was very slow moving ox pulled carts or motorcycles, and maybe a small portion of small cars. The grandparents' generation all had 4+ children, and women were not staying home to watch the toddlers. The toddlers were supervised by older toddlers, who were in turn supervised by older kids and they all just ran around the village all day until it was time to eat.
Outside of caring for infants, the mothers had many duties such as working in the farms, factories, cooking, and cleaning, similar to men. What they did not have is legal ownership of capital and sufficiently high income streams to go their own way if they wanted.
But none of this is applicable in modern US society.
Does this actually work against the two income trap?
Before you needed one income, so a woman not allowed to work had to find a new man before she could cut loose a bad one.
Now you need two incomes, so a woman who has to work in order to provide one of the incomes has to find a new man before she can cut loose a bad one. And has less time to find one because she's working 40 hours on top of everything she used to do in the home.
Sometimes progress doesn't know which way the arrow is pointing.
Progress for some portion of society can be a regression for others.
There is no question that I would rather live in a world where my daughter had just as much opportunity as my son to be a doctor or start her own business or whatever she wants to do. The possible cost of this reality is that the variance of family life across society will increase, with those at the bottom experiencing a quality of life worse than they would have had if society did not offer women the freedom to pair up with similarly advantaged men and compound their benefits.
> Now you need two incomes, so a woman who has to work in order to provide one of the incomes has to find a new man before she can cut loose a bad one
This is simply not true. People break up a lot. Real world people sometimes stay with bad partners for money reasons, but employed ones significantly less so. The "I can't leave because I have no job" is a thing tho.
A plausible theory is that things that improve the economy reduce both domestic violence and [female] unemployment. Or maybe it's what you said. Or maybe it's something else. No way to tell because correlational studies are worthless.
> This is simply not true. People break up a lot.
I think lotsofpulp has it on this one. It's a real benefit to women who make good money, because they can actually leave. It makes things worse for women with low pay or no job, because it makes things cost more, which makes it harder to survive on your own and exhausts the resources of non-rich friends or shelters.
Male employment going down compared to female did lowered it. Simply, if that person materially depends on another, he (or she tbh) is less likely to be abusive or violent ton the source of money.
Statistically, poor people divorce more often. Middle class and rich people have more stable marriages, actually.
Poor and lower class women still leave relationships. Both partners then go to live with parents, friend or to even worst housing.
What about a generous, gender-blind stipend for families in which only one parent is employed? Might get tricky for the case of separated or single parents, but there are already a lot of careful laws and tax provisions there, so I imagine a system with the right incentives could be designed?
Some examples are the constant debate about schooling and segregating kids, to higher achieving children in families moving away to achieve success, but leaving other members of the family behind, to various companies achieving outsize gains and leaving behind or obviating other industries in a society.
The core of the race to the bottom is artificial scarcity.
You need a house, another family needs a house, there is only one house. If they have two incomes and you don't, they get the house, but it costs them the second income. Better solution: Build another house. Then you can have one without a second income and they can spend the second income on vacations or something. But we have zoning restrictions prohibiting that, hence the problem.
That's the biggest example, but artificial scarcity exists in other places. Education is a big one. For K-12, get school vouchers and stop tying it to housing costs -- that will also help with housing costs.
Make more of stuff instead of forcing people to outbid each other for artificially constrained supply and the extra income becomes extra income instead of the baseline you need in order to stand still.
While I agree with the gist of your comment, the reality is that humans create artificial scarcity regardless of actually supply in many scenarios. The want to compete is deeply ingrained in the mating process, and it inevitably manifests as participants of society outbidding each other for something.
Look at me, I have more expensive art than you. Your car is efficient and reliable but mine costs three times more and has the right logo.
Better yet, I donate more to charity than you.
Competition for true scarcity is fine. Competition for artificial scarcity deserves to burn.
The competition will then move somewhere else, but the somewhere else could be more efficient, i.e. it sends more money to schools or charities or artists rather than inflating a housing bubble and making housing unaffordable.
> Because if not, then that brings back the same incentive to only live near those at or above your level.
But then what happens if there is no constraint on building higher density housing? More people want to live near the good school, so housing prices are higher there, which causes higher density housing go up there and the housing supply increases until prices come back down. That doesn't happen now because the zoning doesn't allow higher density housing to be built there.
They'd probably find a way to gate access to schools other than housing costs, e.g. testing for which test prep courses improve outcomes, something like that. But it would stop making housing unaffordable.
- Vouchers don’t work. The vast majority of parents don’t have time to shuttle their kid(s) outside of their district.
- Removing housing prices from school funding was such a disaster in California that they reversed the policy
- You cannot build more housing in major cities which is where the vast majority of people want to work. There is no more space. We used it all on housing.
- Making more doesn’t help anyone as long as foreign investors are allowed to come in, buy it up, and effectively remove it from the real estate market by turning it into an AirBNB (to say nothing of Zillow inflating prices beyond affordability to begin with).
So put a drop off point in each district where a bus takes everyone from there to a school in another district. Or build more, smaller schools so they compete with each other without being far away from each other.
> Removing housing prices from school funding was such a disaster in California that they reversed the policy
Politics was involved.
> You cannot build more housing in major cities which is where the vast majority of people want to work. There is no more space. We used it all on housing.
We know how to build hundred story buildings. No city on earth is comprised entirely of hundred story buildings. We can build more housing anywhere.
> Making more doesn’t help anyone as long as foreign investors are allowed to come in, buy it up, and effectively remove it from the real estate market by turning it into an AirBNB (to say nothing of Zillow inflating prices beyond affordability to begin with).
People do this because they predict housing prices to increase in the future. They predict housing prices to increase in the future because they predict that zoning will constrain sufficient housing from being built.
Build enough housing that prices actually go down and see how many speculators it attracts.
The only place in the entire US where you possibly make this argument is Manhattan.
My googling suggests that Manhattan has fewer than half that many AirBnb's, suggesting that all 100k of those new luxury units would push down the price of all existing housing more than simply returning 40-50k AirBnbs into supply.
Might be hard to fit 100k new apartments into Manhattan, sure, but it would be much easier to fit them into LA. Lots of two story buildings out there. Dallas? Austin? Portland? Even easier!
This happened even to demographics where essentially everyone already had a house.
But your neighbor has a pool.
But your other neighbor has a Range Rover.
But your OTHER other neighbor has a sweet home theater.
There's a huge gap between 'basic food and shelter needs met' and what people will compete for.
Because you're not just competing with people in the same demographic.
Suppose you used to be able to afford a house on your single income, but only just. Now a family with two workers who each make 60% of what you make you show up and outbid you on the house you'd have bought, because together they make 20% more money than you. You just got priced out of a house unless you too get a second income.
> But your neighbor has a pool.
And that's not a problem. If you want to go from being a housewife to working for money so that you and your husband can have a house with a pool and a Range Rover and a sweet home theater, more power to you. If that's what was happening, we can make more pools and more Range Rovers and more home theaters -- and there would be more labor to do it with.
As long as anybody who just wants the house and doesn't want to be forced into a change in lifestyle, could still get the house.
But then a family with two incomes outbids you and when nobody is allowed to make enough houses for both families, that is no longer true.
Instead, things went alright until deregulation allowed the market to capitalize on the increased supply of labor, wages stagnated in the median due to supply depressing wages, and now the market has adjusted to operating under the assumption that each household has approximately two able-bodied people who can contribute to the workforce. So we have unprecedented GDP and most of the money is kept by those who can employ other people, not the employed.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
relevant graph: https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-pos...
The it took communities that were impacted by the mechanical loom quite awhile to recover - multiple decades.
I'd say the big problems are inflation - destroying the value of the dollar and savings not in equities and rising taxation that also decreases income.
Similar thing happened with raising children. Women used to be in the job of raising kids. But around the time of World War I kindergartens were popularised, so that women could be incorporated into the war economy. The wars ended but kindergartens remained.
After the war a lot of women were already employed. And others, due to technological innovations, suddenly found themselves with a lot of free time on their hands. So it was only natural for them to follow the rest.
Of course, the political system was also a factor. In some parts of eastern Europe, now considered part of "the West", women were obliged by law to work.
The proper way to counteract the increased labor supply would be to use laws to reduce labor supply, such as overtime wages, minimum paid time off, parental leave, etc.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44705/6
Recent changes due to the pandemic response shocking the system and catalyzing changes in the labor markets, are not reflected in the reports above, and I suspect we (USA) are just beginning to see a reallocation of labor resources in the market as the US finally confronts a reducing portion of working age population relative to non working (old people) population.
Yes other benefit is to families where women were employed anyway. A lot more women worked then people assume, even in 1950 if you check employment stats. They salaries were lower and they did not had access to many jobs.
But they still had to work, in jobs that were available. Fun trivia: even Rosa Parks worked and loss of employment after sitin was felt heavily in her family.
2. Shareholders benefit.
3. Men suffer from lower purchasing power and more competition in the workplace.
4. Some women - those who would prefer to be housewives - suffer from having to join the labor force.
5. Other women - those career-oriented - gain equal pay, less discrimination, more opportunities, etc.
Just as with everything in modern US culture after the failed Occupy Wall Street movement, the upper class (1 and 2) wins another battle while disguising its warfare on the lower class (3, 4, and 5) as a win for social progress (emphasizing the benefit in 5).
In short, it brings nothing good to the average family, but you'll praise it anyway lest you want the reputation of being anti-woman.
If a household has two breadwinners instead of one, then it could be twice as wealthy, no? NO! Nowadays most households need two breadwinners, just to scrape by.
When I was a kid, I welcomed automation; robots, computers, machines. I thought these things would help us, and free us all from wage slavery. That's not what happened; the automation certainly increased our productivity, but that just ended up meaning that we were expected to produce more for the same reward.
Automation should have meant that we could all be free. Didn't work out like that. Automation has disappointed me.
Most, if not all of us, are offended by direct or indirect manipulation. So it stands to reason, that our agency is the greatest thing we must protect.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Apparently I did being a student all wrong.