mitcheme

I think the two-sentence explanation was enough for me to get the idea. I knew a guy like that when I was a teenager, very smart, decent guy but problems getting along with people. (I think he made his money doing freelance programming actually, so we've come full circle.) Thanks for the link, though; your kids' blog is great. Gaming plus plothole-picking plus social consciousness is one of my favorite combos.

I think you're mistaken about the model of family that "most of the rest of humans" have. There is way more variation than arguments like this tend to give credit to. Traditional Hawaii, everyone your age is a sibling and everyone your parents' age is a parent. Other parts of traditional China, the family group you belong to depends on your father entirely. Your biological mother is not related to you, since her father was part of a different family. Parts of Native America, your mother's sisters are also your mothers, and your father's brothers are your fathers, but your father's sisters and mother's brothers are aunts and uncles. These are just basic systems of reckoning, it gets quite a bit more complicated once you look at the actual living arrangements that go with them (where do couples go to live, where do the children live, how do marriages or whatever other sexual arrangements work). By population, nowadays there are fewer that vary from the western norm, but if you count up what was going on pre-globalization, we are not in the majority. These different family systems are fading away because of modern-day western influence only, and I think that might have a lot more to do with the military (and more recently, economic power) than the custody arrangements. You can't simply point to everything western and say, "this is why we won".

I don't believe it is consistent. Based on the Masuo you can see that women will have less sex if they start being treated like western women. You can't look at how women behave in western culture and use them as proof that women have a lower sex drive, because we know that evidence has been tainted.

Maybe you're right, that it makes no difference to him. To me, it matters a great deal. None of these systems are static; they are constantly changing, and we have some control over how they change. You can compare the systems that already exist, and on some set of criteria say that these are better or worse than those. So although there's never going to be 'one system to rule them all', at some point I think we do need to figure out which aspects of our system are variables and which are constants, because if we don't decide what to change, someone else will decide for us.

Why aren't we talking about the 1950's? If you're correct, that the problem is a lack of glamour, then the 50's should not have been a problem. Motherhood was the ultimate glamorous profession for a woman in those days. Sure, you can go to college, but there's no sense doing anything with it when you could get married. The ideal was a beautiful, spotless house in the suburbs, beautiful and well-behaved children, a great and successful husband. Dress up every day, makeup, hair, a pretty dress, pearls even. Fingers in every community organization: church, PTA, charities. You get to host parties, lots of parties. The way we talk about 50's homemaking today is a lot different from the way we talked about it then.

Which cultures in which women are homemakers only, have stayed without change to gender roles for millenia? When I think of cultures that have stayed mostly unchanged, I think of the ones where women are contributing significantly to survival. Hunter-gatherer societies where men hunt and women gather. In most HG societies plant foods make up a large portion of the food; women's work is essential. And a step beyond that, societies where men hunt and women tend gardens or farms. Or where men and women farm and ranch together. Yes, women also tend to take care of the children in these societies. But modern-day me still has to do dishes and laundry; that doesn't preclude me from doing other things.

nocipher, his analysis of women's creativity is wrong because we know women have created art throughout history. We don't actually know how much art, unfortunately, because historically, the bulk of women's creative expression was not considered "real art". It wasn't signed by its creator, and its recipients didn't treat it with that extra level of care to prevent it from being destroyed. That's a big issue when you're talking largely about decorative textiles and pottery. Then there are the women who posed as men to have their art be treated more seriously. Again, we don't actually know how many women have done this, we only know from some discovered examples that it's been done for quite a long time. So to say with confidence that women don't create art is wrong. We know there have been some, and many art historians suspect there have been much more than we give credit for because of the above factors. Like many 'innate' folks, he's made no effort to account for cultural factors before declaring things innate. My personal thought on this is that if women, like men, didn't have that creative drive, they would not have bothered to create in an environment where they were untrained in art, sometimes discouraged from doing it, and given no credit at all for their work. The only motivation I can see there is the pure joy of creating. Sure, you might need a pot, but there's no need to paint it with a scene from your local mythology. And I don't think anyone can come up with a materialistic reason that you might need a novel or a bit of poetry.

His discussion on relative sex drives (sorry, typo) is spurious because, again, he doesn't separate this from cultural factors like what actions we define as being "normal" sex, and how the sexes relate to each other. The Mosuo, for example, does things differently. Instead of monogamy or polygyny, they have two-way polyamory. Young women are given a private place to bring lovers back to. She can bring home as many lovers as she likes, and the men can go to as many women's homes as they are invited to. If she wants, she invites him back, and if he wants, he goes. I remember reading that at one time, it wasn't unusual for a woman to have fifty partners in her lifetime. Women are under no economic or social pressure to invite lots of men over, so to me, it's really odd that this would be common if women didn't enjoy sex. Mosuo women these days have fewer partners, because they have access to a lot of western media and culture. Some girls are now afraid that if they invite over too many boys, they will be considered "slutty", and this is an image problem that the Mosuo as a whole are having. To me, that looks like proof that women are being discouraged from having as much sex as they'd like to have, thanks to social pressures that are inherent in our own culture. Or at least better proof than saying, "it happens, so it's genetic".

It would be nice if someone would actually address this instead of just downvoting. I knew my comment wouldn't be popular when I made it, but I was hoping to get some actual answers out of the deal.

There's very little actual substance there to invalidate, and I did discuss some of issues. His analysis of women's creativity is wrong, and is his talk about relative sex drives is spurious. I also think it's a huge mistake to label cultures who have persisted by making over half their population miserable (women and low-status men) as "successful". If you wanted me to take it apart line-by-line you will have to be disappointed.

Again, so if women lack those motivations, where did feminism come from?

What I dislike about these kinds of "evolutionary" arguments is that they tend to assume that the differences between the genders are genetic, even when there's no evidence for that. Even as late as the Victorian ages, several of the traits we now think of as immutable part of being male or female were swapped around. For the Victorians, blue was for girls and pink was for boys, and all women had the potential to become insatiable, incurable beasts for sex, one reason it was so important to keep chaste. This model of sexuality fit what the people experienced in their daily lives, just as ours does to us, and they had their studies that revealed women who enjoyed sex far more than was proper. Compare the here-and-now with every other culture in the history of the planet, and most of our "innate" traits turn out not to be. It makes it very difficult to take the "innate" people seriously.

I don't think it's that surprising that so many women are opposed to the idea that we're essentially designed to live out our whole lives hidden in the private sphere. Especially when you consider the 1950s, when (white, middle-to-upper class) women were "free" to do just that. They were miserable. I know I would have been miserable too. There's a reason the Feminine Mystique exists, and the 50s housewife who drowns herself in a bottle of booze is a cliche. For most people, that's just not enough to make a fulfilling life by itself. Even women today who are SAHMs have other things going on than taking care of their household, husband, and kids. He implies that it's somehow detrimental to our survival if women like me are free to create lives that don't make us deeply unhappy. If this arrangement had been as cooperative and nice as the author claims, how does feminism fit in? If we were happy inside the home, why did women look up and think, "I want to be a CEO" in the first place? Why did they not all look up and say, "I'm glad I don't have to do that, it looks stressful"? Given that it was their job to take care of the CEOs and other assorted businessmen after they came home stressed from work, it's not as though they didn't realize the drawbacks. Vacuuming is just not meaningful work.

Guys, if you lived in a time where your choices were to latch onto a woman for financial support or pick a low-paying unskilled job, because everyone believed you were genetically incapable of doing anything better, would that be OK with you? Or would you find it personally offensive? What if they said you were incapable of making art, and labelled any creative work made by men as not art in order to reinforce that? (In the case of women, that's tapestries, embroideries, and pottery, for a start.) What if our default model of "real" sex was stuff women liked more than men (random, probably inaccurate example: doll up for us, dance for us, an hour of groping, grinding, and oral, PIV at the end optional), and "all men were frigid" because for some reason they found it less interesting than women? Come on. Women are people, like you; empathy applies. The old ways were awful.

Re #5, when I was looking online for laptops it was really annoying how some retailers just would not have pictures of the keyboards. Given how terrible some laptop keyboards are, this is kind of important. I hate when the important keys are squished up to fit in keys that just start up their bloatware. I want a decent-sized tab key, not a key that launches Outlook or Spammy Games Center every time I accidentally whack it trying to indent a line.

Cool. :) If it's not too rude, why unemployable? Does homeschooling just create people who are too independent to be a good fit with a lot of employers, or do employers/college admissions see a homeschool education as less valuable than public/private?

I have to say it would be pretty awesome if there was a sudden influx in bored SAHMs learning to program / contributing to open source / starting their own company.

If open source is so important to our hypothetical you that you'd turn down an otherwise-great job over it, why did you marry someone who is so unsupportive of it? Even if your SO is 'bad with computer', presumably they know how much you value "open-source" (whatever the heck that is). Sounds like hypothetical you made some poor life choices.

At one point my college campus was a "Pepsi campus" and you could not buy anything but Pepsi. I think I bought it once, and I drink far more Coke than is probably healthy. That stuff tastes bad. I would bring my own Coke from home or buy water. If I'm at a grocery store and they're out of Coke, I will take the red label no-name cola over Pepsi or blue label cola. While we're at it, if people didn't care that much about the difference, I doubt my grocery store brand would make both kinds of cola.

Still, it sounds a lot better than some of the 'healthy eating' vending machine gimmicks. Most (in)famously, in my area, are the ones that introduced the "heart smart" stickers by raising the price of unhealthy foods by 50% and raising the price of healthy foods by 25%. I guess in some sick, twisted way that's a "discount on healthy foods" but it wasn't very useful. Since everyone knew the machines would rip you off regardless of what you chose, they just bought their candy bars elsewhere.

OK, thank you. My high school math teacher was dyslexic but as he told it, it was an issue with letter rotation, flipping, and swapping, which is what I've heard from other sources (including local SLTs). Maybe that's something that depends on native language or the type of dyslexia you have.

Could I have a link to the M/P thing? I googled it but all I could find was stuff about M[agnocellular] and P[arvocellular] processing in dyslexics.

"[Zuckerberg] recently bought his first house in Palo Alto for $7 million, a fraction of what he could afford... Skeptics may wonder whether all this conspicuous self-denial is scripted."

This skeptic wonders on which planet a 7 million dollar house is considered self-denial at all.

Paying money to work for anyone is absurd. I don't care if your company is the best thing since sliced bread. It isn't worth going homeless, nor is it worth taking on tens of thousands extra in loans to (a) support myself while providing you with free labor and (b) cover other expenses I could've paid for out of pocket if I'd been paid fairly, such as tuition. If free internships became standard, it would put students from low-income families at a serious disadvantage. Who needs meritocracy when we can make a caste system? Hopefully, your company will be successful, so you can afford to pay all your kids' expenses and put them through unpaid internships of their own.

I want to be able to buy gas and keep my car maintained so I can actually come to work, so I'm not "engaged". If I want to pay enough of my tuition up-front so that when I graduate I can afford to work for small companies doing interesting projects, instead of auctioning myself to the highest bidder to cover my loan payments, then I'm a "bad fit". So be it, I guess.

Don't feel too bad, that's what I thought too.

In my school, we call them "co-op jobs". If you sign up for co-op, you get college credit for them, but either way you get paid. And of course if you're any good, your co-op employers will want to hang onto you after you graduate. I didn't bother signing up for co-op because co-op or no, it's impossible to complete all the other graduation requirements and not have enough credits. So the credits you get from a co-op job are useless. Students pay money to the school to be part of the co-op program, and that's not unusual. Here, it's $400 for a once a week class that teaches you how to make a resume plus an additional ~$100 fee if you find a job, even if you didn't use the school's connections to find it. If your internship results in college credit, its likely that students are actually losing money by working for you. I think that's absurd.

A lot has changed Canada since the late 1970s, which is why I say you'd need more information than just that little map or even stats of the kind I got off statscan. You could probably come up with a half-dozen stories why that fit the map data, but that wouldn't mean they were right.

Men are already the majority of programmers so this wouldn't be necessary, just reactionary (and you know it, too). I have no problem with workshops for men for skills which are traditionally dominated by women, since in many cases it makes for a more comfortable environment for men to start out in. I've seen men-only parenting classes and craft groups; there are probably others. Why is it so horrible to encourage people to try nontraditional hobbies and skills?

I recommend Emily Short's fractured fairy tales (Bronze, Glass) and Galatea. They're all well-written and pretty well-programmed; Glass is funny and the other two are a bit trippy/strange. IIRC they all have multiple endings.

Oh, I see. When you said 'directions', I thought you were talking about the page text. The directions are on the Directions page, and the number is on the Place an Order page. The banner could probably be better, but the only thing I'd complain about is the lack of business hours.

And as a sidenote, if you look at e.g., Africa, you can see women's rates are going up faster in many countries, and in fact globally:

"Across the world the rate of diabetes rose by 18% for men and by 23% for women"

Or Canadian men were eating way more than their fair share of Skittles in 1980 -- their rates of diabetes are still higher than women's.

http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/health53a-eng.htm

I would guess that Canadian men have had problems with diabetes for a long time (>30yrs) and women are now starting to catch up. But I think you'd need more numbers than are in that map to get any real answers.

Unless it's changed in the last 2h, the directions and phone # are both plain text.

I have Google Web History turned off and I'm seeing a pretty good mix of things in my results. E.g., I'm heavily left-wing, somewhat pro-gun control, with no personal interest in shooting, but my results for 'gun' are pretty much all gun shops and fansites. For Barack Obama I get mostly official sites, although some of the top news is critical (I'm Canadian, if it matters). Egypt gives me a mix of travel, protests, general info and ancient history. I don't recall ever turning it off, so is it off by default? And if so, what's the problem here?

It would be hilarious but I'm not so sure it would work that well. I think one of the big reasons the scigen papers passed for real was because a lot of people will assume that if they can't understand a paper, it's just gone over their heads. There's enough real jargon in them to reinforce that assumption. Entertainment news is a lot more accessible so it would be pretty obvious.