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Women Skip Math/Science Careers To Have Families
hessian notes a Cornell survey, published in the Psychological Bulletin, of 35 years of sociological studies that concludes that women tend to choose non-math-intensive fields for their careers not because they lack mathematical ability, but because they want flexibility to raise children or prefer less math-intensive fields of science. "'A major reason explaining why women are underrepresented not only in math-intensive fields but also in senior leadership positions in most fields is that many women choose to have children, and the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted,' said lead author Stephen J. Ceci... The authors concluded that hormonal, brain, and other biological sex differences were not primary factors in explaining why women were underrepresented in science careers, and that studies on social and cultural effects were inconsistent and inconclusive. They also reported that although 'institutional barriers and discrimination exist, these influences still cannot explain why women are not entering or staying in STEM careers,' said Ceci."
... for on average a lot less pay, I think that's the biggest problem. Why pay a north american a decent middle class wage when you can farm science, technology and engineering careers to lower wage countries?
My theory is that they do it because it's less stressfull to stay at home than it is to provide.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
News film at 11.
Well, at least it's becoming okay again to point out what is incredibly obvious to everyone, except feminists with an axe to grind.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Well, gee, that's good news . . . I thought women avoided such careers because of all the geeky males that tend to gravitate towards math/science careers.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
yes, and business knows it. One twist of fate includes a manager who was popping out her 3rd one.
Management was so afraid that she'd quit and become a stay at home mom that they promoted her while
she was 2months into a 6month leave of absence.
Women want to have cake and eat it too.
Wow... they could just Ask Slashdot.
Y'all never read the darn articles.
What they've found is that the difference in representation isn't justified by biological differences OR barriers and that the child rearing social role plays a big factor.
Yeah, that's the problem, too many over-religious Christians in the scientific fields! You just can't keep Christians away from science!
The real reason is that women are quicker to realize that math and science skills are HIGHLY undervalued in the US, so they don't bother to waste their time on them.
Sure, because there are certainly lots of other industrial cultures where women have achieved equal results in the workplace! Right??
From the "I thought feminism meant female equality with males" file and the interesting part was the bottom 'recommendation':
"The authors recommended that universities and companies create options for women with math talents who want to pursue math-intensive careers. These could include deferred start-up of tenure-track positions and part-time work that segues to full-time tenure-track work for women who are raising children, and courtesy appointments for women unable to work full time but who would benefit from use of university resources (e-mail, library resources, grant support) to continue their research from home."
Ah, so when feminists talk about 'equality' what they really mean is, "we want special treatment so that we get equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity based on the same starting point". Silly me, and to think that I thought feminism was all about equality with males in regards to the same starting point and a meritocratic system where skills and knowledge are the basis of advancement forward rather than the old boys network.
People wonder why I given feminists as much credibility has hearing Saudi Arabia preach about human rights, tolerance and respect.
Yeah, that's the problem, too many over-religious Christians in the scientific fields! You just can't keep Christians away from science!
Read it and weep.
This guy's the limit!
Can you really blame them? Women have a fairly short window of only a few decades to have a family. Men have no such limit and can theoretically have children from puberty until death, so there's not as much pressure for us. Besides, people tend to think too much about their careers, IMO. A good job isn't everything. I would rather spend more time with my family than work hard to rise to the top. (in the end, what do you really have with that option? Is your life really going to be better?)
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
This is possibility. In my limited observation, I have seen that Women seem more pragmatic than Men. If a woman loves math more than anything, she's still going to do the math and choose a career that pays better or allows other options.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
How are women more flexible in biology - where women are clearly overrepresented- to raise children opposed to mathematics?
Where this trend really starts getting scary is in the field of medicine. While medical schools are trying desperately to accept increasing numbers of women (often more than 50% to compensate for those that don't continue on to practice) many of the women that do finish choose to raise a family during their time of residency (or soon after). This leaves women with less actual medical experience, and generally lowers the overall quality of care.
Being obsessive about a single concept for years is a male phenomenon, and is pretty essential to leanring/practicing science. Men see this type of focus/obsession as a desirable attribute, women see it as perverted.
As my mother said "Women are not just men with grapefruit up their jumpers". However, this, like reality in general, is not politically correct, so reality is ignored.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Re:Men and Woman are different..... News film at 11. Well, at least it's becoming okay again to point out what is incredibly obvious to everyone, except feminists with an axe to grind.
I don't really see how that follows. The article and summary say:
The authors concluded that hormonal, brain, and other biological sex differences were not primary factors in explaining why women were underrepresented in science careers,
But women have to stay home with kids, right? Well, this gets us to a more balanced conclusion: increase paternity leave and/or make it compulsory, and the effects of one sex happening to be the one manufacturing kids will be greatly mitigated. In other words, the mostly arbitary decision that women have to stay home with the kids is the greatest problem (women don't have to be at home 24/7 to provide breast milk, either.) If both parents take the hit, the system will have to choose between adapting and just throwing away talent.
For an example of how much a society can do for both parents, check Sweden's stats here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternity_leave#Europe . Spoiler: 480 days paid paternity leave. (disclaimer: I'm not Swedish)
That's not true. People just don't want to admit that humans are still animals with the logical urge to keep on creating humans and in order to create humans properly at least one human has to stay home and take care of it.
Due to nature giving the woman all the birth and child caring bits naturally for centuries the woman stayed home. It's something built into humans and to think you can change centuries of instinct with a few bra burnings is silly.
Women who rather be career driven just have a chip on their shoulder because most women still rather do things the old way. It's time they realise this and quit thinking that women will dominate these areas and make the labs pink.
For all this talk of having changed things those things really haven't changed that much. We've just slapped a new interface on the same old backend.
It should not be a surprise, really. That 'female power' sort of feminism that has been in ascendancy for ~25 years now is about getting others to do things for you instead of doing them yourself.
It really shouldn't require a lengthly study to get that this mentality is not going to foster success in any field where image and popularity are less important than skill.
..yes I posted anonymously. I'm a gay woman. I cannot win in this mess so I hide like a spineless thing. Bleh.
...glass ceiling!!!
But creationists say the purpose of their visits to what some describe as "temples to evolution" is to train themselves to think critically, not to pick rhetorical fights with curators or other visitors.
Oh God! Mental note: Don't hire anyone from Liberty University, VA.
If you want a decent family life for your kid then yes there is a time limit. If you don't care about being old and worthless to your child and him being made fun of because his daddy wears diapers then no, there is no limit.
Where's the "Duh" tag on this one? Really, are we just figuring this out?
Yet another case of blaming others (like educators and CEOs for this one) for discrimination when the responsibility falls on the choices we make.
Who's forcing them to have a family? it is a lifestyle choice - like buying a washing machine or allocating 14 weeks off each year to immerse oneself into Super 14 Rugby.
Have they also thought that maybe females are actually making the choice to have families over having a career? why is it every time there is a feminist jackass who comes out of the wood works that there is this claim that some how if females aren't career oriented and pumping out kids (they choose one or the other instead of doing both) - apparently it is the man's fault?
Good lord, let people do their own thing and stop trying to think that you need to socially engineer a given field in one direction or another? what next - insufficient gay's and lesbian's in quantum physics?*
* Disclaimer, I am gay myself, I need to put this disclaimer because some jackass will go, "ooh, he's homophobic, I'll mark down his post" *Teeheehee*
"because they want flexibility to raise children or prefer less math-intensive fields of science"
Many tech jobs are great for people who want to work from home and/or have flexible hours, and many women who want to raise kids at home (like my wife) would kill to have those options. So the former sounds like a load of BS, while the latter sounds very accurate. I try just as hard to get my daughter interested in mechanics/electronics/computers as I try with my son, but she won't take an interest in it. She does well at math, but she doesn't seem to have any curiosity about math-related subjects or how to design/create things, so I don't imagine she'll go for a math-heavy career.
If you don't have a good job, you won't be spending any time with your family, because you'll be spending all your waking hours working two bad jobs to feed them. On the other hand, once you've risen to top you have guaranteed income and likely enough savings that you can quit and retire whenever you want, or do whatever you please, so yes, you'll life will be much better.
In a society where competition is considered a virtue you don't really have the option of only making a reasonable effort. Either you give your all to an attempt to claw your way to the top, or you resign to spend the rest of your life at the bottom of the barrel; and the latter means that you can't afford to have a family. It's sick, but that's the way it is.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Women have different interests for their own reasons. Oddly, "researchers" haven't chosen to simple ASK women about their choices. The very notion that there is discrimination holding women back is nonsense and has been nonsense for a very long time. We've spend decades walking on eggshells trying to man women in the workplace more comfortable as a form of "affirmative action" to what end? A whole lot of hassle and needless tax benefits for "woman/minority owned businesses" and stuff like that? While we are compensating for the choices that people make, let's offer benefits to those who choose a particular religion to follow and whichever is the minority in a region, let's give them special privileges and tax exemptions. Also, let's put all "angry black men" who dress exclusively in "thug wear" into a special social category as well.
I am sure I am offending lots of people and a flamebait is the destiny for this comment, but when it comes to choices that people make, it's time we stop compensating for these people. Religion is a choice. Family or career paths are a choice. How people adapt themselves into society is a choice. Let's stop protecting people from and compensating people for the consequences of their choices. No more tax breaks for churches and religious institutions. No more affirmative actions for women and black people. Let's give TRUE equality a chance and take these societal crutches away. There may have been a need for them in the past, but that need has very likely expired.
The "wage gap" is largely non-existent in Western countries these days. The trouble is, many feminists will point out the statistics, such as the fact that women earn 30% less than men in the UK, and claim that this is evidence of discrimination. In fact, it is almost entirely accounted for by the different choices women make regarding their careers. On average they choose less dangerous jobs, jobs that require less traveling, they take more extended breaks from their career, and so on. When you control for these factors, women's pay is almost identical to men's.
Or, to put it another way - if women really did cost 30% less to employ than men for doing the same work, why would any business ever employ a man?
It took a study to figure out that some people are more interested in having a family than they are in making sure the TPS reports are filed correctly?
Good work. (Add sarcastic comment about another obvious fact here)
D
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While I understand that there's good political hay to be made out of showing why women are treated unfairly, the whole glass-ceiling (at least insofar as salaries are concerned) thing was debunked years ago when studies on wage gaps corrected for overtime and willingness to travel.
The simple fact is that in most nuclear families, the man is the primary wage earner, the woman the primary caregiver to the children. This is probably based on relatively obvious biological differences (the woman lactates, the man doesn't; females generally excel in a number of cognitive abilities that are extremely useful in child-raising; females are generally more resistant to garden-variety infections and sicknesses; etc etc etc) This isn't prescriptive, merely descriptive, and valid for (AFAIK) the bulk of human history.
While I understand the desire for some men to stay home and raise children, and the desire for some women to have a life not based around family, both of them must understand that they are simply outside of the norm and no amount of whinging is going to make them 'the norm'.
-Styopa
Huh? Why are people who have no interest in scientific methods (like peer review or testable theories) drawn to science?
Quite seriously. Christian science is an oxymoron, the moment "God did it" comes into play, science has left the room. I cannot test God. What cannot be tested has no room in scientific theories.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A major reason explaining why women are underrepresented not only in math-intensive fields but also in senior leadership positions in most fields is that many women choose to have children, and the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted,' said lead author Stephen J. Ceci... The authors concluded that hormonal, brain, and other biological sex differences were not primary factors[...]
(emphasis mine)
Q: Now, dear Watson, what do you think makes women want have children?
A: Hormonal, brain, and other biological sex differences......
In my own research, I was able to find many examples of women having babies when it was definitely not good for the man, for the society, or even for the woman.
When exactly is this true ? America has on average 2.1 children/woman, this is just barely enough (ie. more would be preferable).
In europe birthrates are so low that they are on track to eradicate European presence in Europe before 2150 (and make Europeans a minority in Europe by 2050).
Are you contending such a thing would be good for either Europe or Europeans ? We need more babies, not less. Much, much more. Most places in Europe would be well served by a doubling or tripling of the number of native babies.
It's not just women... whichever parent 'takes the hit' to raise the kids runs into this. It's the "kid track" (formerly 'mommy track'). Kids into schoolbus means I'm off to work, rush back before they get home, so less face time and less 'being seen'. It's never about the work.
I've been advised (wisely) to never mention the kids... the other scientists with kids, it's like a secret club where you only talk to other parents least word get out you're soft. In fact, I've been asked by a boss when will my kids be old enough that I can 'get serious about my career' (meaning put them into aftercare so I can work 60+ hours). I have no regrets-- we make a choice, you can't have it all, etc. But it is real-- if you're kid-track, you're not career-track.
Given the salaries in academia/science (medium-low) and that more women (statistically) achieving in the business workplace, more science guys (I predict) will be 'going domestic', so more guys will run into this too.
And while I'm at it, what's with the lame acronomy for Stay At Home Dads, it makes us all sound sahd. Besides, if you work 3/4 time or a rushed 8 hours, you're not staying, you're just at home when K12 is not in session.
Signed,
an At-Home Dad (AHD, similarily to ADHD probably intentional)
A.
What has science to do with economics? Countries like Russia, China, and India have had remarkable scientific achievements, but have been mired down by their inefficient socialist economies. What they truly need to become successful is training in clerical business jobs, they need to learn how to keep accounting books and inventories. Rocket science they already know.
I'm not sure, but I'd be willing to bet that having ovaries and wombs has a lot to do with this.
Biology supersedes Maths?
"Why do women have babies?"
A good question... my own opinion on the matter is because that's what women are designed to do - procreate, we can backwards rationalize it all we want, but the primary purpose of life is survive and procreate. I think the process is mostly unconscious and instinctive, I've been doing a lot of reading in the cognitive sciences and how they see that most thought is unconscious, most thought is below your awareness... about 98%. So it would not be a surprise that people then backwards rationalize their actions (i.e. I wanted kids for x,y, z). Truth be told people have kids for companionship/economic reasons and (the hope) of old age security I think, that has always been the 'traditional' view imho.
I've thought about this more as I've had to take care of my own grandmother who's very old, she wouldn't have anyone to take care of her if she didn't have her kids and grandkids. I can only imagine what it must be like to be a woman with no kids who is not financially secure and is getting old... we have to remember that for most of history poverty was a significant fact of life.
People have kids just because 'thats what everyone else is doing'. When I asked my own mother why she had kids, she said 'thats just what people did back then'. Personally I think most people don't really think about it, they do it out of habit or instinct.
Either you give your all to an attempt to claw your way to the top,...
With Globalization, you have to give it your all just to stay where you are. There's no room anymore for average. What I hear from business leaders time and time again, "Why should I pay so much for an average American when I can get a much more productive and smarter Indian for half the price."
No, unless you're very good at what you do and can compete with others all over the World, there just isn't much chance of getting to the top anymore. The Baby Boom generation were the last to be able to that.
What is this inherent "NEED" to have a "family"? Honestly it's not what it's cracked up to be. You get to have a larve or two that need your attention for 24/7/365/18yr (Yes MANY need adult supervision up to and past 18) your expenses go way up while they are there and then even higher for the first 5 years after unless you have the ability to tell them "sucks to be you, you better get student loans"
They have their few fun and endearing moments but the second they turn 13 they suck all the joy the brought into the world out of it.
Finally, the planet has ENOUGH people in it. we do not need more of them. Having a "family" is a luxury that puts a burden on society and the planet's resources. Honestly it's far better to get sterilized as soon as possible and not worry about it anymore.
You lose all ability to travel a lot, you lose the ability to be an adult for those years, you lose a LOT.
People who "GOTTA HAVE" kids are nutjobs that really need to have their brain examined and see if they can get on some drugs to help them.
And then we have the really stupid people out there reproducing like they need to repopulate the planet.. making even more stupid people that taints the Gene pool even more.
Yes, that's why women go into nursing, teaching, social work. They're pragmatic, and not doing what they feel passionate about.
First why on Earth do you think we need to increase the world's population? It won't be long now before we hit 7 billion people on this rock.
Second, you are a racist. To begin with I'd want to see citation to your statistics about Europe. Further, assuming your numbers are correct, I fail to see the problem unless you believe there is something wrong with non Europeans.
So when I choose to work in a dangerous mine, and lose an arm in accident I don't deserve unemployment insurance or to be judged on the same basis as everyone else when I try to get another job because I should face the choices I made. Society doesn't exist so that we can be assholes to one another.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Countries like Russia, China, and India have had remarkable scientific achievements, but have been mired down by their inefficient socialist economies.
You misspelled "rampant institutionalized corruption at all levels of government".
You can't take the sky from me...
I think all these discussions skip over the fundamental fact that women are the only ones biologically capable of bringing a child into the world and the 9 month investment that requires rather than the 9 minute (assuming 8 minutes of foreplay) investment from a man.
Yes there will be women quite entitled to skip the whole process entirely. There will be others who will happily give birth and immediately go back to work leaving someone else at home to look after the child be it a stay at home dad or paid nanny. Many many more will enjoy motherhood and accept the hard work raising a child can be.
Evolution has made it so that women are naturally more bonded to their children and want to look after them and for good reason so the species can propagate.
As we business leaders find time and time again, they may be cheaper and might even be smarter in some cases, but they lack creativity and view each job as a project instead of being part of the team. All too often, I hear "It worked fine on my machine, I can't help you" and "We're done with that project, if you want us to come in and fix it, that's a new project and more money". When you hire disposable people, they treat your project as disposable.
How many times does this need to be said??
Women are the gender that have children. There are fewer women in X and Y fields/occupations than men. Let's start with the assumption that this is because women have children and find some reasons that fit our already-determined conclusion.
If the expectations are said to be so freakin' unrealistic then why not address the root cause - make the expectations realistic? If someone can only succeed in a certain field/occupation if they put in 80 hour weeks for 6 years then something is certainly broken.
What about the people who do take the 'necessary time' to succeed? The rest of their lives must suffer horribly because of it. Working that much, that intensely means there's nothing left for a life outside of work and there's little opportunity to build a foundation to subsequently build one after the milestone has been reached. The habits are in place. If you've been working that much, for that long, you're not going to suddenly flip a switch and do the 40 hour weeks.
I know this is off-track for the generic "Math is hard, girls can't do math" conclusion but what about the families of those people who do decide to go into these fields/occupations? What kind of spouse and/or parent can that person be if their entire focus is on their work? And what kind of damage does that do to the social fabric?
Sorry. I'll get off my soapbox now but this sort of nonsense is a waste of everyone's time and money. Not only has it been done to death but every single stinkin' time it seems like the researchers have a conclusion they build a case to support and the easiest way to do that is to decide that womens' biological makeup is the determining factor.
> Oddly, "researchers" haven't chosen to simple ASK women about their choices
If they had, there would be a post just like yours except that it would be complaining that the women might have given socially acceptable answers instead of what they really thought. People tend to lie about their thoughts and motivations to be accepted by others.
My girlfriend is in Social Work because she couldn't afford Nursing School. I believe that she thought Nursing was high-paying, she's worked in Hospitals enough not to see there's no openings for a Saint. What she's passionate about is Crystal Energy or some New-Age Hoodoo, I try not to talk about it.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I would love to see a scientific discussion between him and a good "evolution theory" scientist.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why do women have babies?
I know this is Slashdot and all, so we shouldn't assume you are familiar with the process, but maybe it's time you sat down and had a talk with mom and dad about where babies come from.
What?
Sounds like you have no idea how to moderate. This doesn't have to be one extreme or the other. For example, I have done tech startups for years. It's 80+ hours a week. It's total stress. It's a constant stream of dealing with problems just to get through the day. All for a pretty good living with a "lottery ticket" (meaning the startup takes off and you get to sell). Now I have 2 kids. As of the first one, I simply took some contract work. Recently I've even take a full time job with a company I used to do work for. I travel very rarely, I don't work much more than 50 hours a week (and I'm probably overestimating), and I make plenty of money to have my house, a few cars (not brand new anymore, but just fine) and even get to go out to dinner on occasion.
You see, besides being moderate in your job and how much income you have, you can also change your spending habits. I did it, and I'm essentially a child when it comes to self control. So it can't be all that out of reach.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
2 huuuuuuge problems with your post. Let's look at them :
Huh? Why are people who have no interest in scientific methods (like peer review or testable theories) drawn to science?
For the same reason the UN has it's clutches in just about every university worldwide and is "sponsoring" specific things. The same goes for many other pressure groups. It is getting really bad : simply stating that there is no way to study climate that would fall under the "positive" sciences can get you into trouble, no matter how evident it is : if you can't experiment on the system at will, you can't use positive methods.
Science, in case you hadn't noticed, is politicized. Several fields have already been reduced to basically spouting the nonsense or propaganda of the highest bidder. Openly communist organisations sponsor "chairs" in economics. Creationist groups "chair" a number of biology departments, and are so extreme even the vatican goes against them. The list goes on.
History, philosophy and psychology seem to be especially vulnerable fields. The problem is that if you assume the UN is right, and all cultures are "equal" in all respects, you can't have a coherent vision of history. Psychology has the same problem. If you are not at liberty to research and publish about differences, especially cultural differences, you might as well close up shop. Especially the effects of different ways of raising kids (e.g. to explain why muslims have such a big terrorist problem while (nearly) every other religion was basically unfamiliar with the concept of suicide terror until very recently is utterly forbidden).
Christian science is an oxymoron,
Really ? Then how come that all the principles of just about existing field of study were invented an written down by priest (and/or monks).
Physics : Newton almost became a priest, and many claim he ended his research career because his religious feelings were stronger, and he didn't like what his research was used for (e.g. ship cannons). He's the father of both modern physics and modern maths (integration/derivation operators are from his hand, as is the concept "function"). And even the important non-catholics were believers : Einstein punched a German minister in the face because he claimed Einstein was atheist
Optics : field created by a monk and a priest in Northern Italy (this guy first invented glasses, then made the first ever (wrong, but that's how science works) explanation of how they operate
Maths : you might as well call it catholic studies (with contributions from a few hindus who were running from islamic massacres : e.g. "arabic" numerals), certainly until WWII. Even know most contributions come from catholic institutions
Medicine : 50 years ago the score was : about 18000 catholic books on the subject, about 6 "atheist" (e.g. ancient greece), 2 islamic books
Just read the list of important people in each field and you will find the same in every field of study : they were created, built and taught by the catholic church. Some still are. There are even fields of study that are basically exclusive to members of the catholic hierarchy (e.g. ancient middle eastern languages, latin, bioethics, many lesser known or dying languages worldwide (which are critical to missionary work for obvious reasons), ...).
There are at least 4 languages whose only trace left is a bible written in that language, probably a whole lot more than 4.
There are literally hundreds of years in history about which the vatican is the only organization that has any record from those times. E.g. just about everything we know about northern africa more than 300 years ago comes from the vatican, and not from northern african sources, because muslims destroyed all historical records (e.g. it was the muslim "pope" (caliph) that ordered the burning of the (catholic) library of alexandria, the biggest disaster ever to happen to scientific knowledge in known history
If the less successful, and therefore cheaper, societies were able to do science work well, they wouldn't be less successful, would they?
There is a difference between "having the brainpower and the education" and "having the money". You should know that.
Sure, raising a family is a quite plausible explanation for the top positions, but does not explain why so few women begin the careers at all.
A girl is hardly planning to have a family when she enters undergraduate course. And, even so, less than 20% of the freshmen are women.
The reason is obvious: women don't like math. They don't have ability with math. I'm not saying "stupid bitches", they often do well in other fields, is just that their brain it's not suited to do math. Even amongst the few who enter, very few get it to the end. And don't tell me that people leave undergrad school to have children.
It is possible to have female brains that can do math? Of course! I have had two female teachers that were truly genius. But it isn't statistically likely.
It's that hard to acknowledge that there are biological differences between men and women? Next time feminists will be hunting down whoever who says that women have XX chromosomes instead of XY.
I was going to post as AC but fuck it. I'm too tired of this political correctness fashion.
entropy happens
It is unfortunate that more unions don't exist to assist these sorts of workers and conditions. Negotiating for these kinds of benefits and for better workplace safety are two reasons why unions are important. And jobs that high amounts if risk should be compensated properly but unfortunately, union power has been eroded and people are left to fend for themselves which generally results in lesser compensation, benefits and safety with increased risk.
When a large operations are allowed into towns and cities in such a way [read: critical mass] that a significant change in employment level can have devastating affect on the general welfare, then regulation of some sort is warranted. Whether this regulation comes in the form of union negotiation or government regulation is another question, but the masses need to maintain a balance of influence against the larger, more historically abusive, business interests. The tragedies that happen then business power goes unchecked are obvious and demonstrable.
Truth be told people have kids for companionship/economic reasons and (the hope) of old age security I think, that has always been the 'traditional' view imho.
I'm guessing you don't have kids? Truth is, despite all the complaining about diapers and sleepless nights and moody teenagers, its overall on average fun, both the initial procreation for a couple minutes (obviously) and the next couple decades of playing and reminiscing about your own youth, etc. Most adults are really just big kids inside and find the kids are an excellent excuse for their own goals of running around in the park and building legos and building tree houses and digging in sandboxes and riding bikes and playing aports and computer and video games. Yeah the wii is for the kids. Sure I'm only pretending to enjoy an afternoon at the waterpark or chuck e cheese, it's all about the kids. Whatever.
Add to it a society where its widely believed that only a creepy pedo molester kidnapper gang member homeless terrorist adult could possibly want to go to a playground UNLESS THEY HAVE KIDS WITH THEM, that turns the kids into a fashion accessory for the parents to have fun.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Before my second wife went loco, I thought it would be generous of me to share my superior genetic development with the world. Things didn't go quite as planned, and my career was altered. The single-dad thing kinda overwhelmed me, actually. IMHO women do that better, as they are more pragmatic. YMMV.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Ok, from the summary, filtered a bit to focus on the part I'm taking issue with:
[...] women tend to choose non-math-intensive fields [...] because they [...] prefer less math-intensive fields [...].
Mind you, I am not changing the meaning here by quoting out of context. I'm merely decluttering by removing the parts that make sense already so that the stupid part stands out. What kind of "conclusion" is this?
The above opinion was deemed sexist enough for the person holding it to resign as Harvard's President in 2005.
But this one:
is just fine?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
As a Merkin, I dread the day when the immigrants realise they don't need to speak English any more. Even more, I fear my Redneck fellows who'll probably start some whitepanther subversion and bring down the People's wrath on my ethnic minority.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
"I'm guessing you don't have kids? Truth is, despite all the complaining about diapers and sleepless nights and moody teenagers, its overall on average fun, both the initial procreation for a couple minutes (obviously) and the next couple decades of playing and reminiscing about your own youth, etc."
I'm not going to disagree with what you say, but what you said is not mutually exclusive to what I said. You can have fun without having kids. You're argument is that kids (and raising them) are fun, but you're really talking about companionship. You're also not understanding the historical precedent that has been set to live a middle class life in north america. To think we had slavery only a mere 150 or so years ago (and still do in some parts of the world to some extent, and we could also argue that poverty is a form of slavery), and then the serious racism less then 100 years ago (and still do in other parts of the world) this all in the blink of a historical eye.
I believe you may be a racist for wanting less white people in Europe. See how it goes both ways?
Mod this up. It points out a conclusion that may have been based on a biased hypothesis or perceptions of the researchers.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
Women Skip Math/Science Careers (...) because (...) prefer less math-intensive fields of science.
Now that is a brilliant conclusion....who would have thought about that?
US women are going into medicine, and law, and those fields also impact family life.
But, in STEM career fields, US workers are likely to not find a job when the graduate, or if they do find a job, US workers may be training their H-1B replacement two years later.
As STEM are aggressively offshored, and guest workers continue to flood into the STEM fields, the future for US STEM workers does not look bright.
His question wasn't 'how', but 'why'.
Here, at least, nursing pays a lot better than social work, and there are quite a lot of loan forgiveness programs out there. Nursing school is an ASN or BSN -- should cost as much as social work, except of course the bit of money you have to pay for uniforms and stethoscopes and the like...
The problem might be that we have developed a work-life that is inherently incompatible with a decent home life. Maybe women just make a rational choice on different priorities. Not far from the article's suggestion but I'd go further and recommend changing the workplace for everyone.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I've thought about this more as I've had to take care of my own grandmother who's very old, she wouldn't have anyone to take care of her if she didn't have her kids and grandkids. I can only imagine what it must be like to be a woman with no kids who is not financially secure and is getting old...
Eh... gee, much like it must be to be a man with no kids who is not financially secure and is getting old????
Just sayin'.
You answered his first question OK, but your reply to his second argument totally misses his point. You rebut with lots of examples of how devoutly religious people can be great scientists. He made no statement which would contradict that, he was instead proposing something along the lines of Steven J. Gould's Non-Overlapping Magisteria, that science deals with statements which need to be testable and refutable, and religion doesn't, and therefore they are "perpendicular" to each other and in this sense the term "Christian science" is nonsense. Like, e.g., "chartreuse idea".
NOMA being true does not prevent a devoutly religious person from being a good scientist. He just has to be careful to make the same separation of "playing rules" as Gould proposes.
How, then, did U.S. society get the money? At one time it was only a poor farming colony.
This is a big issue: Why are some societies very well-developed, and others not? It's not the natural resources of the U.S., because the Japanese culture is well-developed, and Japan has very few natural resources such as metals or oil.
Some universities do offer assistance to primary care givers. For example, Columbia University has "parental workload relief" programs (http://worklife.columbia.edu/parental-leave-policies-resources) that provide faculty with a semester of no-teaching and a delayed tenure clock. Still does not make it easy to combine kids and faculty careers. The policy is gender-neutral and there's a small fraction of new fathers who have used the program.
and my question isn't what is a sense of humor but where is yours
Which is a consequence of an economic system where the profit motive has been officially eliminated. Steal $1000 and you got that much for yourself, the whole country lost $1000 and your own share of that loss is $1000 divided by the country population.
The same works for capitalist systems too, of course. In a big corporation where no one has a majority share, decisions are often made by directors who have a bigger interest in getting a fat bonus than in improving the company's situation.
The solution, IMHO, would be a system where the controllers are directly affected by the results, a system where the directors are the owners. In current capitalist countries, companies are often owned by other companies or pension funds. The ultimate decisions are made too far removed from the people who actually own the capital involved.
No, you don't. If you chose to work in a dangerous mine without an insurance - this is a stupid choice and no compensation should be given for the stupidity.
Normally, the owner of the dangerous mine MUST provide an insurance to his employees.
Maybe I'm the only one who detected a bit of negativity in the summary, but seriously, how is this bad? It's very noble of women to give up the privilege of a chance at education to start families.
One could say the greatest and most fulfilling job in the world is parenthood.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Uhm. What does that even mean? I hate to nitpick. I've been doing a lot of reading in the cognitive sciences, too. A lot of those numbers ("people only use 10% of their brains", "Einstein only used 10% of his brain") are totally bogus. Where does that number come from?
I really don't understand our fascination with "statistical equality". This weird striving toward normal distributions and matching societal demographics to racial/gender/religious/sexual population ratios is nuts. It's fine to use these measures as a tool to detect progress or impact of our policies but equality of numbers shouldn't be the goal.
What we need to strive for is equality of choice. It isn't a problem if people simply choose to not follow a path. What is a problem is when people aren't able to follow a path due to an artificial barrier to entry. Equality isn't about balancing an equation and until we learn that we won't be able to address the real inequalities in our society.
I have a number of complaints with your argument.
1. There are too many people on Earth as it is.
2. Who cares which race is in the majority/minority?
3. You act under the assumption that population growth/shrinkage rates are constant. This is far from the truth. We will likely see birth rates climb after a population drop due to increased availability of land.
4. Races, also, aren't constant. As different races settle in the same area, slowly but surely they begin to blend together. Who knows, maybe 5 or so generations into the future it will be very difficult to tell races apart in certain areas. Then people will find new reasons to descriminate people (Windows v. Linux brand cybernetics, perhaps?)
Back in July '08 the New York Times ran an article on the possibilities of science being "Titled Nined" because congress and women's groups seemed to like the idea (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/science/15tier.html).
What studies have found though is that even among mathematically inclined girls at younger ages, they still tend to prefer the "softer" sciences or other fields. I think that this study shows the natural extension of that.
In the end, the NYTimes article states that, in the end, the mathematically inclined girls they followed and surveyed as career-adults were just as content with their careers and did not have a pay difference from men.
Douglas Whitaker
People are responsible for their actions. All the time. I don't care if they are drunk, or they walked in on their wife cheating, or whatever.
It doesn't matter that most thought processes are unconscious, because I'm holding the unconscious thought processes responsible also.
The law in most countries might disagree with me, but then again, I disagree with the law on a few points anyway.
I couldn't tell from the article whether they looked at differences between countries, for example those with universal daycare and those without? It might also be possible to examine admissions bias, particularly in medicine. You could maybe look at the GPA of candidates over the past 25 years vs. admission after the entrance interviews. I think it's important to be careful with the "she's just going to leave and have babies" argument, as it's been used as a rationale for sexist hiring practices in the past. The study should be examined carefully to determine the validity of its findings.
I don't see the problem.
The roman catholic church was actually one of the biggest researchers and inventors during medieval times. Unfortunately, it didn't develop out of its scholastic world view. I don't question its role in the development during medieval times, but you have to understand the differences in science during medieval times and today.
In Scholasticism, which was the "science model" of medieval times, you relied heavily on books written by authorities on a subject and tried to solve the contradictions. The goal was to show that there is no contradiction, and that contradictions are only subjective observations by the reader. Essentially, the goal was to prove that you are wrong, not to come up with a new theory. Contradicting the authority that came before you was basically impossible, at best you could show that he has been wrongly interpreted. But when Ptolemy writes, without any room for interpretation, that the Sun revolves around the Earth, you can't turn this system upside down. This is probably the single reason why it took three different scientists and over a decade to prove it ain't so, despite (what we would now consider scientific) proof.
To illustrate this, and how scholastic people thought, an example. When Gallileo pointed out the moons around Jupiter, the four he could see through his telescope, the "official" resolution was that it is the telescope that creates the illusion, because the moons are not there when you look at Jupiter with the naked eye.
You have to understand that medieval science, up to and past Gallileo, does not "work" the same way it does today. That does not mean that we should throw out everything that was discovered during those times. The "religious" researchers are not wrong, simply because they took a different approach to science. But you have to understand that not only science evolved, also the methods used to conduct science did. And personally, I consider them better. I prefer a model based on theories that can be tested and falsified to a system where someone or something IS RIGHT and you may not question it, you may only make adjustments wherever it could have been wrongly interpreted.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Race is coincidental. The fact of the matter is that the more educated you are the less likely you are to have children. This matters, because the more educated the parents, the less the child costs to raise to the society as a whole. For the general welfare of our society, we'd be better off if different people were having children.
Weren't they already less successful, when white colonists arrived on their ships with guns?
Coding etudes
Emphasis mine.
I reality the male has even more restriction as he depends on the female and thus needs to adjust to here window.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
women grow children in their bodies, then are biologically attached to children via breasts and natural and social proclivities for an extended time period afterwards
in other words, they ARE special, and they DO need some consideration for that contribution
but you wish to tell us that any consideration women ask for is unfair. so: they contribute more to child rearing biologically... but hey don't deserve any consideration for that?
biology is unfair. society is trying to correct that imbalance. doesn't that seem noble to you?
of course, you could respond to me by saying women should just choose children over careers, that society has no obligation to make special considerations for women, and that's that, end of story
ok, fine. but then it is you who are like the saudis: that any mental gifts a women possesses, any contributions she can make to the advancement of math or science should be forfeit, given up. this is what your position is telling us. just because she's the one with the womb
so i say it to you: why not give women, who bear children, special consideration for that? why not? really: what is the big deal with giving women special consideration for contributing more biologically to the growth of children? why are you so antagonistic to this idea? to allow them to have children AND pursue their mental gifts, and thereby potentially enrich the society you live in? what exactly is wrong with that goal?
why do you have this axe to grind that says women deserve no special treatment, when in fact, due to their much larger biological and social contribution to child rearing, they DO deserve special consideration for that?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Then go back to work and claim that they should receive the same pay no matter how many years they have taken off.
Can't blame em for trying. There's enough people falling for the scam.
No! You're doing it all wrong. You're supposed to feel guilty about the fact that some groups of people have achieved more than some other groups of people!
Race doesn't matter.
Cultural values do, though. As someone living in Switzerland i can tell you that many Immigrants have cultural values that strongly conflict with the cultural values of my country.
This is the real problem.
To be more precise: People that take Islam as a serious guide on how to live their life (instead of a book of bed time stories) are a problem. There are other immigrants that also have significant value differences from the country they're in.
Luckily, the hippies haven't gotten as far here as in Germany, so we might still have a chance to turn out okay.
I can only imagine what it must be like to be a woman with no kids who is not financially secure and is getting old...
I strongly suspect that most of the old people who die alone in poverty actually have kids - but the kids are either unwilling or unable to help.
While saving for your old age doesn't guarantee care in old age, neither does having kids. Both plans can fall apart.
Also, taking care of kids is expensive - both in terms of the actual cost and in terms of the time commitment (that prevents career advancement). Someone who saves the money they would have spent on kids and who advances in their career may very well be better off in old age than someone who did the kids thing.
If someone were to come to me and say "The one thing I want in life is to be taken care of in old age.", would I advise having kids? Not really. Not because I know whether saving or kids is more likely to result in being taken care of - but because having kids solely to be taken care of seems rather unethical. It's like forcing someone to sign a contract at gunpoint - maybe the contract is fair, and maybe it's not, but a person should have a choice.
So, why have kids if not for retirement - same reason as sex: millions of years of evolution have resulted in it feeling good.
The number is a rough estimate by some who work in the field. But I could put it another way, do you know exactly what is going on in your mind right now in exact detail? Not likely. The same way you don't know with certainty the position of every cell in your body or what kind of bacteria live in your stomach, etc, etc. There are limits on your ability to know about yourself and your environment. Most processes in your own body for most of human history people had no awareness of, it's not a stretch to say that most cognitive functions (i.e. what is actually going on in the brain) is inaccessable to your conscious thought, since most of what is going on in your body currently you are completely unaware of.
Dear EsbenMoseHansen:
Noticing a trend between what you have said and your signature I couldn't help but question, "how is Atheism not a religion?"
I'm assuming you feel "humans were not designed" because there is zero irrefutable proof and, as such, requires "faith" to think that. However, the counter-argument is that, you have zero irrefutable proof to the contrary, that humans have evolved. In such a case then you must have "faith" that what you have read, studied, pondered, etc. is in fact truth.
Consider the original question: How is Atheism not a religion? Most people define "religion" as a faith in the unseen. Apply that to your zero-proof theorem that humans are participating in the "great game of evolution" and you have faith in the unseen.
As a side note, I completely agree that agnosticism is the absence of decisiveness.
To the real topic at hand: it doesn't take much to realize that women have a built-in need to have children (not to mention the hardware required). Whether you want to attribute that to culture, religion, science, economics or whatever, the truth is, the need is there. Much the same way men have a need for sexual release. You can try to study things and act all "scientific" about it, but that is the way we, as humans, operate.
Animals have rights!
Studies have shown that couples who DON'T have children are, on average, significantly happier. People all remember their fond memories of their children, and forget the endless behavioral problems, financial strain, sleepless nights, etc., etc.
Most adults need no particular excuse to do most of those things. Biking, video games, amusement parks, etc. Plenty of adults happily enjoy all of those by themselve, while making no excuses. Of course, YMMV.
And if you do need an excuse, most people have nieces, nephews, etc. who are only too happy to go fun places with their uncle. Mommy certainly enjoys getting a break for a while, as well.
And most people who've had a normal childhood really do grow out of their desire to do many of those activities. I certainly can't say I enjoy running around Chuck-E-Cheese, with the hordes of children screaming and yelling at the top of their lungs.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
A couple cases in point:
* India: their caste system makes it impossible to develop an educated middle class. Their sheer numbers allow them to have enough educated people to support outsourcing, but they are nowhere near the critical density of educated people to form a post-industrial society.
* China: their isolationistic mindset delayed their ability to integrate foreign ideas. As they have become less isolationist their economy has exploded.
* Japan: their isolationist mindset was dropped in the 1850s. Without a caste system they were able to rapidly form an educated middle class that integrated foreign ideas. Now they have one of the largest and most productive economies in the world.
The 'West' wasn't responsible for India's caste system or China's centre-of-the-world views. The lack of growth of many 'Eastern' and third world countries is primarily due to their own social faults. If either India dropped its caste system or China dropped its isolationist mindset a century ago, they would be the hyperpowers today and make the United States and the European Union look like trivial powers.
It's not a population drop. It's a population displacement by immigrants from Asia and Africa.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
So does math make women infertile or something? Why are math-intensive jobs less appropriate for women who want families?
You mean like that Toyota plant in Indiana (one of hundreds of outsourcing from eastern to western examples)? Or is "outsourcing" only bad when it is the USA that sends a job overseas?
I am a women in the 'Hard sciences' and I totally agree with this statement. Now, back to getting a PhD and organizing symposium for students in my field.
Attempting to buck the trend.
-Shanadeen
Why do women have babies?
Because hormones triumph over brains. Some of the smartest women I have known have become completely irrational when it comes to dropping sprog. From my own molecular biology background, I have a highly technical term for this: "stupidity hormones".
Note: I'm not being totally sexist here; after all, I am prepared to admit that an erect penis has little conscience...
Hello,
This is always such a fucking stupid conversation.
The women who want and like to go into an area generally do so. As do the guys.
Women are perfectly capable of being math/science whizzes, but by and large they don't want to.
Why?
Who fucking cares?
It's their lives. Get over it.
Maybe it's too nerdy for them. Face it. Most math science people are freakishly geeky and I am one.
I just went to a college night for an engineering school. Guys outnumbered girls at least 3 to 1. It's just not always an interest.
Some would rather have families. Some would just not like to continue on in school and marry someone who makes the money. Guys do it too, just not as many.
Whatever. Give it a rest.
The above opinion was deemed sexist enough for the person holding it to resign as Harvard's President in 2005.
Who, coincidentally, is now on Obama's economic team. But if the president was Lauren Sommers and made a similar observation on men also having the lowest IQ's and largest number of mental disabilities, if she would have been driven from office as well.
Well... there is not one factor to explain everything. Just read up on history of politics and economics. It's a long, complicated, series of interrelated factors all over the place.
What has science to do with economics?
That may depend on what you mean by "science". Without the benefits of scientific discovery everyone would be huddled in caves banging rocks together - the only "economy" would be trade in dead animals that had just been killed with the aforementioned rocks.
What you may mean is that the incremental advances of ongoing scientific research don't have a significant immediate impact on an economy - that while the long term economic benefits of scientific research are immense, the short term economic benefits of scientific research are fairly minor.
Countries like Russia, China, and India have had remarkable scientific achievements, ... Rocket science they already know.
So, how many people have each of these countries landed on the moon? How does that compare to the USA? What about Nobel prizes? How many people from Russia, China and India won Nobel prizes without coming to the USA for either education or research?
Science and technology are the fundamental vehicle of improved economic efficiency (if you don't believe me, look up what the "capital" of capitalism refers to). I would agree with you, however, that science and technology are not, by themselves, enough for a properly functioning economy. There also need to be mechanism to prevent leaders from acting solely in their own interests and mechanisms to help poor people get the science and technology training they need to do more than bang rocks together in caves.
The fact of the matter is that the more educated you are the less likely you are to have children.
It's called the Idiocracy effect.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
As a Merkin...
;-)
Not having actually, personally encountered a merkin ("counterfeit hair for women's privy parts" [Dr. Johnson]) before, I was unaware that these accoutrements utilised any vernacular at all...
Most of the time I think it's due to some biological "urge" they feel. When it comes down to it, they are just selfish and putting their desires above what is practical and responsible for themselves, those around them, and even the child itself.
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I would like to preface this comment by disclosing that I am a 'n00b'.
I love /., mainly because I enjoy the open and insightful discussion of topics and ideas that I have only recently begun privately educating myself about, being a longtime casual Windows user who is about fed up with the associated bullshit. I came here initially while trying to demystify Linux (which I am still working on). I was surprised and intrigued by finding this interesting aggregation of so-called 'geek news' articles, about a third of which are totally incomprehensible to me, but most of which I would never find out about from any major news outlet, including many about topics of great importance and influence on this world and the future. It was a real eye-opener, and remains an invaluable resource as I educate myself about things I'd never learned or thought about before, such as net neutrality, intellectual property law, &c.
But most of all I enjoy reading the comments. The 'mod' system was a little challenging to get used to, but I love the open discussion, the outrageous as well as well-reasoned arguments laid out intelligently and democratically. Much of the information and ideas I've come across here I never would have otherwise found, and it has dramatically influenced by own critical thinking. The information brought me in the door, and the insight, open-mindedness, and general spirit of free thought and intelligent public discourse hooked me.
But whenever I read an article on the front page having to do with women, I read the comments on it and my blood runs cold.
The males on /., in general, seem to me to be a very forward-thinking bunch most of the time. It's hard to wrap my brain around the response I keep seeing here when it comes to women's issues.
Outsourcing is used because it saves money on labor, managers don't care that it is less successful. Pennywise and poundfoolish. Since almost everyone does it, companies that don't outsource take heavy hits on expenses and soon fire their native employees and outsource.
Women have babies because it is a maternal instinct. It is a part of their nature, but not for all women. Some women use birth control and abortion to avoid having babies so they can have a career. Most women want children, so they can look after her after she grows old and have a legacy (or legashe based on the Simpsons) to pass on her genetics to the next generation. If most women did not want to have babies, we wouldn't have had the baby boom and population growths, we'd have population shrinkage instead. Even if a woman and a man don't know how to care for a baby, they learn from their mistakes. Each baby they have they learn more, and become a better parent, or so that theory goes.
Since most liberal women are for birth control and abortion, that makes more moderates and conservatives being raised than liberals. Which is why high schools and colleges have to have the liberal or left-wing conditioning for students and quash any other political views to make sure that there are more liberals (by making the children rebel from their parents' political views) by the time they are able to vote and get on the Internet and spread the liberal politics. Which is why you have a liberal or left-wing slant on most web sites and forums and blogs, etc.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
You misspelled "rampant institutionalized corruption at all levels of government".
And how is that different than the US?
Look around you. The cost to an individual professional woman who has a baby is currently colossal.
I work at MIT, and have had the pleasure to meet Mrs. Liskov a number of times.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7937010.stm
At last check, she not only did both, she excelled at both. It's a pity so few women realize that not only can they do this, but they can do just as well as men (not to mention make some very tasty salaries). There are not nearly enough females in the industry, and damn it we need more "Geek chicks" calendars.
Mrs. Liskov is, of course, exempt from having to pose.
Mothers can take the same amount of parental leave as fathers when the baby is born. After that, they can both go back to work if they want to get that promotion, earn that raise, etc.
That's the glass ceiling right there. Put your career on hold for 6 years+ and watch it evaporate.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Good, hopefully captcha makers will stop trying to make their captchas harder and harder to OCR (and at the same time, harder for humans to decipher) and find a different solution.
On the other hand, my dad's got a nice term for his approach: "SKIiNg" ( ski'n' ): Spending the Kids' Inheritance Now.
Which is fine by me; I have no problem with that whatsoever.
Well I, the undesigned, refuse to take part in this procreation nonsense... ;-)
This may be off topic, but I'd like to point out that you have no idea what you're talking about. Putting all beliefs about Christianity aside, when Jesus was actually around, his teachings were positively revolutionary. The idea that slaves and nobles, men and women, children and adults were equal in God's sight literally turned the societal structure completely upside-down. Women were treated almost like property, most did not have a say in whether they married the man who sought to do so. If a woman was raped, she was made to marry the man who had done it to her--horrifying! Jesus actually had a radical message for the time period, and it's probably part of why the Roman government hated him so much.
Christian male power structure? Obviously an idea put forth by too many power-hungry, self-righteous men hiding their insecurities and prejudices behind a veil of "religion".
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Noticing a trend between what you have said and your signature I couldn't help but question, "how is Atheism not a religion?"
Well, the signature is a joke. But that's ok, we can discuss Atheism not a religion, too, if you please. A bit off-topic, but hey, it's weekend.
I'm assuming you feel "humans were not designed" because there is zero irrefutable proof and, as such, requires "faith" to think that. However, the counter-argument is that, you have zero irrefutable proof to the contrary, that humans have evolved. In such a case then you must have "faith" that what you have read, studied, pondered, etc. is in fact truth.
No evidence points towards design. A overwhelming amount of evidence points towards evolution. Thus, it takes no more faith from me to assume design is an illusion than it does for me to assume that a dropped beer can will fall towards the ground.
Consider the original question: How is Atheism not a religion? Most people define "religion" as a faith in the unseen. Apply that to your zero-proof theorem that humans are participating in the "great game of evolution" and you have faith in the unseen.
It is hardly "zero-proof". Humans are participating in evolution; we know how this works (genes and friends), we know it has worked for a long time (fossils and such) and we have a good idea why it works (models and such). Anyway, I do not define religion as "faith in the unseen". I mean, having faith in your wife or gravity or plexiglass hardly makes you are religious man! A religion needs some kind of canon, some unreasonable and unfounded assumption (eternal life, e.g.) at the very least. And something akin to priests, who decides in matters of theology or whatever you call it. And a name, or names. That is me, wikipedia's is slightly different, though far closer to mine.
As a side note, I completely agree that agnosticism is the absence of decisiveness.
I consider myself agnostic in the original sense of the word, but those who tries to fence-sit the religious debate I find rather funny.
To the real topic at hand: it doesn't take much to realize that women have a built-in need to have children (not to mention the hardware required). Whether you want to attribute that to culture, religion, science, economics or whatever, the truth is, the need is there. Much the same way men have a need for sexual release. You can try to study things and act all "scientific" about it, but that is the way we, as humans, operate.
Ah, my English might fail me now, but unless "need" means something else than I think it does, women do not *need* children, they *desire* children... like a lot of men do. Same with sex. You need air, you need food, you can even argue you need love, but not children nor sex. Proof: Lots of people go without. E.g., 20% of all women around here never have any children, for various reasons, and they look fine to me.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
if people don't have children, society dies
you do understand don't you?
if someone chooses not to have children, then they're genes and their values die. therefore, you want to make a place in society for people to have children, and you want to reward them for having kids, you want to give special consideration for that, and you want to recognize their contribution as intrinsically valuable and important. which it is, because through children is the only way your values and genes survive
seems like a simple nobrainer, but i've run into a lot these strange "crotchfruit" thinkers like yourself, and i want to understand why the blindingly obvious escapes you
simple logical consequences: if you don't have children, your value system will simply die off
you do understand that right?
please, go right ahead and considering child rearing an unimportant aspect of life. its odd to choose your own extinction, but there you are, posting away
because your entire point of view boils down to nothing but choosing the extinction of your own values, whether you realize this or not, you do understand however why i will consider your opinion just odd and strange and impossible to take seriously?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You misspelled "rampant institutionalized corruption at all levels of government".
And how is that different than the US?
There is corruption in the US (and canada, and europe, and japan, etc.), it's just not as pervasive.
You can't take the sky from me...
* Japan: their isolationist mindset was dropped in the 1850s. Without a caste system they were able to rapidly form an educated middle class that integrated foreign ideas. Now they have one of the largest and most productive economies in the world.
Japan wasn't in an internal crisis, neither sociologically, economically or environmentally speaking. It was the USA who forced the japanese to open their economy to 'open' trade (only with the US though). Before that point Japan had, for example, issues an environmental reforesting campaign, that was highly successful (85 percent of Japan is covered with forest). After the US 'opening up' Japan developed - partly out of feelings of frustration and humiliation brought on by the US - into an aggressive bully in the region culminating into invading mainland China and declaring war on the US. Nobody knows how the Japanese would have developed, would they've been left alone in the 1850s, but at least it's fair to state that the US did wrong big time back then.
The problem with your criticism here is that feminists want to make these options available for men too. The description you cite is very misleading, I'll grant: it's described as "options for women" because the proposals would have a bigger effect on women than on men. Feminists in fact would be quite delighted if men took the option described in larger numbers, instead of treating child rearing as their women's responsibility...
Are you adequate?
Dear idiot,
First, it's not that there is "zero irrefutable proof" that we were "designed", it's that there's not a single piece of evidence that might indicate we were, except our own imagination.
Second, I don't have "faith" in evolution or in any scientific theory.
BTW, in answer two your signature, you do have rights!... To be shot like for the sake of humanity!!!
Oh, and it's too bad I don't have mod point, I'd mod you as troll.
How != why.
Interesting to listen to all these males theorizing why women have babies. It is not out of 'habit' or 'instinct.' Women have babies because evolution has designed them to be the givers of life. They are the loving nurturers. They are the fierce lioness defending her cubs.
It is impossible to explain to a non-parent the satisfaction to your soul seeing your progeny grow, thrive and finally set out on their own. It is the hardest and most wonderful job you will ever have.
Perhaps many men feel that getting that big promotion or gaining more power than the other guy is the path to satisfaction in life. Others may find that acquiring piles of money will lead to happiness. While they are struggling to out-compete each other, women are focused on what most consider their most important job: their families. Thank God they still do.
We can all speculate on this forever, but lets all hope that women continue to have babies, to be good moms to our kids and maybe teach something to men about parenting in the process. Perhaps the problem is not with women having babies, but with the family-unfriendly demands of the job and the lack of help many women get from their career-minded spouses.
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
For an example of how much a society can do for both parents, check Sweden's stats here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternity_leave#Europe [wikipedia.org] . Spoiler: 480 days paid paternity leave. (disclaimer: I'm not Swedish)
Sweden's throwing every benefit on the table that it can to boost its birth rate. Making babies is a good way to keep your old age benefits solvent. By 2050 I think nearly half of Sweden's population will be retired and a huge amount will be over 80.
Unfortunately for the Western World, Darwin favors dumb male dominated societies over smart equal societies.
This is my sig.
One of my best friends from college fits the profile. She was a top ranked student in microbiology, went on for masters and phd in something related to DNA profilig. Got married, had kids, and decided to stay at home
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
So when I choose to work in a dangerous mine, and lose an arm in accident I don't deserve unemployment insurance or to be judged on the same basis as everyone else when I try to get another job because I should face the choices I made
Uh, then don't work in the mine?
This is my sig.
You mean like that Toyota plant in Indiana (one of hundreds of outsourcing from eastern to western examples)? Or is "outsourcing" only bad when it is the USA that sends a job overseas?
Well, considering that the US isn't known as a bastion of cheap labor I would say that the outsourcing to the US is to minimize the costs of shipping/importing. That's a whole lot different than a lot of US outsourcing which increases shipping costs but allows for extremely cheap labor.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
"Why should I pay so much for an average American when I can get a much more productive and smarter Indian for half the price."
Funny how that only applies to those on the bottom but not those at the top. When was the last time you heard of a CEO being fired and replaced with an Indian with an MBA from Harvard?
You might have a great argument if your observation "wanting less white people in Europe" wasn't a total straw man.
i have an argument to answer that, and it has nothing to do with morality or religion: a society which hobbles half of its people just because they are women is a society that cannot compete with one that does not hobble its women
is that a good answer in your mind?
ok then, in answer to your position:
"If the woman is not capable of advancing math or science because she cannot make time for it, I don't see what you want people to do about it."
well, lets make believe we have a society that DID do something about it. if society A DID do something about it (you know, daycare, what a radical, horrible imposition pffft) then it would simply outcompete society B, that did not do something about it
so i wish to be part of society A, that is more fit, and frees its peoples up to contribute more advancement and progress
you, meanwhile, wish to hobble a person who might advance your society with her mind, simply because she has to stay home and breastfeed
which is like the saudis: without making any bullshit religious or moral or ideological arguments, your vision of society is weaker than my vision, simply because my vision is able to produce more intellectual advancement by freeing up those people with a womb to contribute to society in ways that are not hampered, just because she has a womb
simply put: my society outcompetes your society, is stronger than your society, and renders your ideology obsolete and extinct, simply because i outproduce you
(which is exactly what would happen to the saudis, if they weren't sitting on billions of barrels of oil)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Okay, so women are designed to procreate. And men aren't? Its not news that people have kids. What is news is that (apparently) women do not enter STEM because they have kids, but that isn't stopping men. Does it thereby follow that men in science careers have fewer kids? Or is it that having a family is usually ends up more time-consuming for a woman because women are expected to be the primary care-givers?
I don't necessarily agree with either explanation, but simply wish to point out that it could be either one, or both, or something else entirely.
Studies have shown that couples who DON'T have children are, on average, significantly happier.
Yeah, you're REALLY gonna need to cite that. I know of not a single person who, in the twilight years of their lives, have looked back and said, "Ya know, having kids was a complete waste of my time."
You may be happier for a few years, but if your last decades are spent wishing you had a family, are you really happier overall?
Actually "why" can mean "how" in some instances. You simply have assumed that the OP meant "for what purpose" when he said "why." For example, "Why did you hit me?"
He could have just as easily meant "what is the cause?" For example, "Why is the sky blue?"
Each is a valid use of the word "why."
What?
Everybody that has their first child is one of those people that don't have kids. Since you credit having had one with providing the knowledge of the fun that ensues it is clear that the first child is not had for the fun, but the decision is made for some other reason...
Aka, pay attention at the back.
You're right not everyone does fit into cookie-cutter shapes and they don't always fit into what we think they should fit into so trying to force something to happen (like generate more female programmers) is likely a waste of time.
Pretty much everything that should be done for equality has been done. If it happens most women don't want to do certain things then that is the way things have gone and there is no point in trying to change that.
There are many reasons for not having children, but the strongest is that your parents didn't have any.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't meet the average. I'm hitting 40, with my engineering and computer science backgrounds, while still having no children, but two divorce certificates to boot!
I'm thankful I have no dependents with this economy.
If you're initial procreation is a couple of minutes, you truly have to hang on the child rearing as something to enjoy. Holy crap! A few minutes means you were doing it all wrong.
Sounds to me you are describing something called 'regret'. That is less to do with having kids and more to do with wishing you did.
You also *can* have a family without having kids. Just ask someone who is gay and has not or cannot adopt.
You're so naive. Look up "Down syndrome". The probability the kid will have it raises dramatically with mother's age.
Feminists can talk about "career for women" and "late pregnancy" as much as they want, but it's the nature who decides when it's best to give birth to a child.
Hmmm, C has Vikram Pandit.
How, then, did U.S. society get the money? At one time it was only a poor farming colony.
Money is an abstraction. What's important is natural resources, with the most important being food and water (Japan had that). If the land of a country is not fertile enough, if it requires a lot of work to get anything, then your potential scientists and engineers will become farmers instead.
In the case of the US, the poor farming colony was mostly left alone (instead of being abused like all good colony) because the empire was weakened and that empire preferred to allocate its own military resources for potentially more profitable colonies. It allowed the US to keep his natural resources for itself. Then slavery was a big boost for the economy. After that, the reason was mostly WW1 and WW2. Some countries, because of a lack of resources and historical hatred, decided to use war against their neighbors, they destroy each other, and then the US comes in and profit from the weakened position of everyone with only a minimal investment.
Are you REALLY that lazy, or do you just feel the need to feign ignorance?
I heard about it on TV, months ago, so I don't have a URL handy, but you know, the first handful of search results are perfectly good:
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art43105.asp
http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2003/05/06/breeding/index.html
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/parenting/children-do-not-make-couples-any-happier-1245184.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1941195/Marriage-without-children-the-key-to-bliss.html
http://www.newsweek.com/id/143792
You're assuming you'll be wishing for a family if you don't have one. You're REALLY going to need to cite that!
How many people are on bad terms with their families? How many people raise children, only to have them turn out as selfish, sociopaths, criminals, etc.?
Raising children also happens to be an unimaginable amount of endless, thankless, work.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That would be the woman who things her own free time and material wealth is more important than that of children and the world's future.
Note that the economy will REALLY collapse without intelligent sane humans.
Right now, the women with the ability to produce intelligent sane children rarely do so. That's selfish. A few generations from now, the children produced by idiots will fully overwealm the children produced by bright people. We're doomed.
Science and religion are often mutually exclusive. Science requires empirical evidence and peer review -- and repeatability. If you don't think a scientific theory is correct, you find evidence to show it. Or you run an experiment, if it's applicable. No scientific theory is an absolute: everything can change in the blink of an eye given the right evidence (although given the body of evidence shown for evolution, this isn't very likely). Science is not religion because it depends on empirical evidence, and because it does not purport to be unchanging or absolute. Those happen as a result of good science, not before good science.
Read everything at http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution and then come back, because you have shown a profound lack of understanding about what evolution (and science in general) are all about.
Evolution does not require irrefutable proof. It is not an irrefutable proof in itself, either. It is a very, very strong theory (such that no - or nearly no - reputable scientists don't believe in evolution), supported by over a century of research and evidence (no, evidence is not irrefutable proof. It's just the raw material from which theories can be constructed and tested). The core ideas of evolution (natural selection, competition, mutation, etc.) haven't changed since Darwin. The mechanisms by which it happens have been discovered, or are still being discovered.
I'm not sure where you got your definition of 'religion' as 'faith in the unseen'. That may describe faith. But there's a kink in your definition. Chemists -- who regularly produce materials that a century ago would be unimaginable -- depend on the theory of the atom to describe this process. Physicists go further and describe subatomic particles. Until very, very recently, nobody had seen an atom (IBM managed to create a tunnelling electron microscope capable of seeing xenon atoms a couple of years ago). It took no faith to accept the atom. Would you call chemistry a religion, then, because it has belief in the unseen? If you say yes, then I'm afraid you're in an extremely small minority of fanatic theologians. If you say no, then you would have to concede that something else is going on here. The difference is that chemists came to the conclusion that there were atoms after much evidence to show it. It took chemists most of a century to accept that atoms actually were the basic elements of matter. What convinced them was experiments, not faith.
Finally, atheism is by definition a lack of religion. You may believe that it is impossible to be an atheist, on the grounds that nobody can live entirely without religion (but I must disagree with you there, on empirical grounds again, because many atheists exist). But to say that atheism is a religion is a conflict of terms. It is saying "the lack of religion is a religion", which leads irreparably to circular logic.
I completely disagree. The recent bail-out scandals shows how utterly corrupt the US government is. The main difference between the corruption in the US, and in third-world countries like India and Mexico, is that in the US, the corruption is far more pervasive as you go higher in the government, whereas in those other places, corruption is pervasive at all levels, especially at the lower levels. I.e., your average beat cop in the US isn't that likely to be completely corrupt, like an average cop in Mexico is. Sure, US cops are incompetent, trigger-happy, etc., or worse, completely ineffectual because of the dumb laws and useless DAs, but they're very unlikely to on the payroll of the local organized crime syndicates. In Mexico, it's very unlikely a typical cop ISN'T on the payroll of organized crime. In India, it's very unlikely a typical cop won't demand a bribe from you for no reason. In the US, cops taking bribes isn't very common.
However, at the highest levels, the politicians and other officials in the US government are completely corrupt. This is pretty easy to see from things like how they subsidize highly profitable oil companies, and give free bail-out money to financial companies so they can pay their executives huge bonuses. They claim incompetence, but they keep doing the same things.
Women have babies because it is a maternal instinct. It is a part of their nature, but not for all women. Some women use birth control and abortion to avoid having babies so they can have a career. Most women want children, so they can look after her after she grows old and have a legacy (or legashe based on the Simpsons) to pass on her genetics to the next generation.
Having babies will be part of their nature for all women, because the others fail to pass their genetics to the next generation.
Birth control and abortion are MASSIVE sources of evolution-causing selection pressure. The change to our environment has been tremendous. If you don't want kids, your DNA is going out of style really fast.
In prior centuries, sexual desire was a good proxy for a desire to reproduce. We've broken that link, so now we evolve mental differences that will get us back on track regarding the population explosion.
Since liberals are generally being selected against, you can make a reasonable bet that abortion will be illegal within a few generations. Maybe even birth control will eventually be illegal, perhaps after a dozen generations. Of course, a tendency to understand evolution is NOT being selected for, so God will get the credit.
Wrong. The cost to a professional couple to raise children is huge, because of its affect on their careers. It simply isn't possible to raise children yourself in a proper way and have jobs at the same time. And most middle-class people don't make enough money to hire nannies, due to the high labor costs in this society (plus, would you want certain low-class people raising your kids, and teaching them stupid things like fandom of monster trucks or whatever?).
Personally, I already have so little free time between a professional engineering job, a marriage, extracurricular activities, and side businesses (to hopefully get away from being a wage slave, which is not a stable long-term position), that I can't imagine putting any time into having children. There just isn't any available time for it.
The big problem is biology: we humans don't live long enough, and women in particular are screwed because they can't have children past their 30s. (Well, they can, but the risk of having a Downs Syndrome or otherwise defective child go up exponentially. It's hard enough raising a normal child; a special-needs child requires people with no real jobs.) If people could spend their first 50 or 75 years being single, getting married, building careers and saving money, and then have children after their retirement, then we wouldn't have these problems.
Why is it that European countries allow so many immigrants from those areas anyway?
if your last decades are spent wishing you had a family
Yeah, true, if you want to have one. Some people don't.
With savings (just not invested in companies like AIG), you're much more likely to be able to take care of yourself in your old age. With children, it's a total crapshoot, and the odds are against you in this society that your kids will have any interest (or time or ability) to take care of you in your old age. Besides, when you're old, your kids are going to be trying to raise their own children, and juggle that with jobs. How are they supposed to fit in waiting on you hand and foot?
Or is it that having a family is usually ends up more time-consuming for a woman because women are expected to be the primary care-givers?
Ding ding! We have a winner!
Even though our society supposedly treats men and women the same, it really doesn't. Raising children still generally falls on the woman's shoulders, whether or not she has a man around to help out. If there is one, he usually sits on the couch watching sports while the woman cooks meals, changes diapers, etc. If she's really lucky, he'll actually hold a regular job and bring home a paycheck.
the drivers for men in the field are the same as the drivers for women
No way.
Men, especially from about age 15 to 25, are genetically programmed to do things that may impress women. It is this drive that produces Nobel prizes, dictators, fire eaters, and football players.
Look, we can even measure brain structure differences. Think that affects nothing?
To imply that the STEM inequality is a bad thing is to judge women by male standards. Life isn't all about getting published, famous, or powerful. Other things are valuable in life, especially if you are not male. There is nothing wrong with having different priorities in life. To judge women by male standards is to devalue female standards, and thus women.
Here is an article on the study by the BBC. Google finds a lot of similar articles.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Perhaps what we need overall is a more flexible balance between work and other aspects of life for everyone. For an example, absentee parenting should not be a precondition to having enough money to raise children at all. People who choose not to have kids should have just as much opportunity to pursue non-work activities as parents.
My mom was a nurse before she retired. She generally hated it (which is why she didn't bother doing any part-time nursing work after she retired). While she liked working with patients, dealing with hospital management killed it for her. She got injured lifting a grossly obese patient and that was the beginning of the end of her career. Why did she lift a patient she had no business lifting? Because the nurse supervisor ordered it, because the hospital had no orderlies to lift and turn patients like that. (Orderlies are big men who just go around the hospital doing brute-force jobs like lifting people.) Why were there no orderlies? Because the hospital laid them off to save money.
Interesting to listen to all these males theorizing why women have babies. It is not out of 'habit' or 'instinct.' Women have babies because evolution has designed them to be the givers of life. They are the loving nurturers. They are the fierce lioness defending her cubs.
Hi, female here.
What is this, stereotype Sunday?
Hint: Women are around 50% of the population of the planet Earth, and vary quite as much as the other half. Your 'lioness' schtick, poetic and I suppose admirable in an abstract sense as it may be, nonetheless bears very little relation to reality. You may like to romanticise yourself but don't do it to half the human race, because it's both rude and inaccurate.
Newsflash: Many women don't particularly like babies and aren't drawn to 'nurturing'. Many men, surprisingly, are more interested in the whole parenthood thing than their wives. Why don't you go read Lionel Schriver's "We Need to Talk About Kevin", or at least this short article and reflect a little on the idea that a lot of women feel very much the same way; that babies can be career-destroying, time-consuming and result in the destruction of loving relationships, changing the relationship between parents sometimes for the worse, and that it is only very recently that anybody has begun to express these sentiments openly. It's healthy to be realistic about this stuff. There's a lot of pressure (which you have demonstrated quite well here) for women to care for kids, but many don't, can't and won't.
In short: women choose to have babies for a whole number of reasons. Being a lioness isn't one of them, although being able to kid their own egos into believing that they're like a lioness may have something to do with it. I don't presume to suggest that there's anything wrong with procreating, of course there isn't. It's a job that someone better get on with doing or the human race won't have time to worry about the various environmental catastrophes that allegedly will kill us all eventually. But romanticising and generalising is very, very unhelpful, because real people have real lives and real careers and don't have time to sit around congratulating themselves for doing the 'most important job'.
Guilt, i suppose - that Western Europe made it, and some nations didn't.
Many illegals too. Borders are open, which makes it easy to get in. Guilt strikes again, and the people aren't made to leave.
Just a few years ago (20-30, so before i was born) it was pretty difficult to get a Swiss passport. Nowadays the rules have changed, and even if you don't speak one of the four languages spoken here you can get a passport quite easily.
But the people here aren't all that happy with the situation - Switzerland has a half-direct democracy, and there are several initiatives and motions that intend to turn things around.
In 2007 votes, the SVP (a right wing political party) gained a lot of support from voters. Unfortunately, a lot of things went wrong when several leftist parties banded together to not reelect Christoph Blocher (a popular SVP figure).
The best english material on the topic i found was here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_People's_Party
Regarding guilt - look at this example:
http://www.20min.ch/news/zuerich/story/23037069
Unfortunately, it's in German, a translation program might help you if you're really interested. 20min is a very popular magazine amongst young people and mostly oriented towards the left of the political spectrum. It's about a family that does not qualify for an extended stay here and doesn't want to leave.
(My bias should be obvious: I vote SVP)
Holy crap! A few minutes means you were doing it all wrong.
Unless the few minutes was the big O. Then, well, something's still technically wrong, but only technically.
:) And thanks to science, you are free to do so even if you do partake in the mating dancing. But be careful, because many men grows a desire for children later in life. Including this man.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
While at work, the breasts get full. This discourages milk production. For many women, the end result is that they have to switch to fake milk.
Depending on the breast of course, a pump doesn't even work very well. It hurts too.
Then there is the hassle, the loss of close natural mother-baby interaction, the cost, the spoilage risk, etc.
both statements accept that women have a difference from men. but the first statement simply accepts the difference as a inalterable fate, while the second statement proposes changes in society's structure to allow women to overcome the real difference with men. in other words, the first statement is contradictory to social progress, while the latter embraces the notion of social progress
by the way, the difference between men and women is nothing strange or mysterious: they have breasts and wombs, and therefore contribute more biologically to child rearing, and therefore to realize the level of unencumbrence that men experience, need really simple social changes, like child care support, in order to fully exercise their mental gifts
women raise your children. as a man, you recognize this contribution, and make accomodations for that. as a mysogynistic boy with mommy issues, you fail to recognize the value of women's biological contribution to your genetic future, and the future of your society and its values
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There was an unofficial poll once, run by Ann Landers, I think--she posted a letter by a mother who regretted her children, and received a mountain of mail in response. I can't remember the statistics, but I think it was something like 70% of people stated they regretted having children--most would only admit so under guaranteed anonymity.
Of course, this could be skewed by a variety of factors--the children being at a non-fun or rebellious age, the children disappointing a parent's high expectations (eg: being a criminal, dropping out of school, having grandchildren at 14, etc), having never wanted children to begin with but conceding due to a partner's desire, people who had them because "that's what you do" without thoughts to how it would change their lives (for better or for worse, especially financially--I've seen a lot of people advise "don't delay having kids if you can't afford it, if you wait until you think you can you'll never have them--it'll work out somehow"?), etc. etc. etc.
Plus the general nonsense of it being an unofficial survey, with those who dislike being a parent more likely to write in than those who do.
Then again, we can look at Nebraska--if people enjoyed parenting, universally, then why were so many abandoning older children there? And driving halfway across the country for the opportunity?
Most adults are really just big kids inside and find the kids are an excellent excuse for their own goals of running around in the park and building legos and building tree houses and digging in sandboxes and riding bikes and playing aports and computer and video games.
And the childfree (the name the movement has given itself, for people who have recognized they'd be poor parents and have made the choice not to reproduce) cannot do this too? It seems, overall, that those who do not have children tend to invest in better 'toys'--awesome sound systems for their movie collection, all the video game systems known to man, etc. because they don't have children that would mess with or break their stuff. *shrug*
Children are a fashion accessory to most of the celebs around, but that doesn't mean they're not also a lot of work that some people aren't cut out for or willing to handle. Those who don't want children may very well turn out to be "that cool aunt/uncle/parent's friend" that may spoil your kids and take them out to do fun things for an afternoon, or that volunteer with Big Brothers, Big Sisters or other associations, enjoying all the "good" parts of parenting but without all the down parts... Because even though they realize they might not be cut out for full-time parenting, doesn't mean they don't like children or won't find a way to be involved in helping the new generation.
You may be happier for a few years, but if your last decades are spent wishing you had a family, are you really happier overall?
If you spend your earning years preparing for retirement, and get yourself into a very nice facility where you can enjoy your hobbies and party amongst the other elderly whose families never visit and probably never will (and those elderly whose families do visit), then is it truly a loss? Having a family is not a guarantee they'll be there for you at the end of your life--they may have abandoned you early on, died, or any countless number of things.
Plus, there's always adoption if they change their minds. Certainly a lot of unwanted children out there who could very well use a home; even older children and teens who wouldn't need as much of a physically-active parent as toddlers and babies might.
My wife is barefoot, pregnant, and... well she's making chocolate cookies with a slow traditional recipie, but close enough!
She likes it. She knows how to hack code in C, but that doesn't make her feel good. She can even beat me in math much of the time, but she'd rather pop out kids. We're going for double-digit family size here. She even thinks giving birth is fun.
Good thing too; somebody has to make the next generation of engineers or there won't be any.
They both feed on each other. It is not that people in Russia or China are naturally more corrupt, but that the system gives them all the wrong incentives.
If you responsible for allocating a billion dollars and your pay is only a few thousand and you know that you are stuck in that position for life, you will cheat. In a capitalistic system you have bonuses, you have promotions based on skill and you have other greedy people watching over you to not lose money.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
A really good article, best I've ever seen on what makes women tick, is this one: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/men-as-beasts-burden_id1228
(1) Yes, if success means being able to kill people. (2) Have you read Guns, Germs, and Steel? You might like it. It goes a long way towards answering your question. To wit: there were a bunch of factors, and more than a few had to do with coincidences of geography.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
I'm not sure, but I'd be willing to bet that having ovaries and wombs has a lot to do with this.
That has more to do with how than why. Why is a much different question.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
There is a shameful disparity here. We must address this.
Also: elementary school teachers, nurses, home health care aides, rape councilers, nannies, maids, interior decorators, etc.
We could start early, with after-school and summer programs for boys only. We could offer special college scholarships for men. We could have college admissions quotas to ensure that classes won't be mostly women.
Really, why the hell not?
although 'institutional barriers and discrimination exist
Discrimination toward women exists in the workplace for this very reason. Companies don't want to become too dependent on a female employee only to have her leave to have a child. I'm not saying it's right, just true.
My rights don't end where your feelings begin.
I think you're in for a surprise.
Personality often changes a bit because of pregnancy. You may find that you actually enjoy the things that seem yucky to you now, and that your current interests become boring.
You'll still be happy, as long as you don't try to resist your changing desires.
http://xkcd.com/385/
Why does water flow downhill?
Why do women have babies? Often women have babies even though they have little ability to take care of them. So the theorizing at Cornell is very limited. The first step would be to understand why women have babies.
Why does someone even ask such a question when they wouldn't dream of asking the male version of the same question?
Why do men impregnate women? Often men make babies even though they have little ability to take care of them.....The first step would be to understand why men impregnate women.
The real question is "why do humans have babies?".
These are fundamental laws of nature. We must eat, we must sleep, we must reproduce. It's very hard to resist these basic instincts. Even if the brain knows it's a bad time to get hungry/hard/pregnant, the body doesn't always listen to the brain. Most birth control is merely attempts to trick the body into doing what the brain wants, but seriously, does anyone really enjoy using birth control or abortion? Sexual urges are very hard to fight. Anyone who is physically capable of making babies (male or female) will probably make them unless they are unusually good at self control (or can't find a partner).
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
... maybe it's time you sat down and had a talk with mom and dad about where babies come from.
How is babby formed?
How girl get pregnant?
Your society keeps the intelligent women from passing their genetic material on to the next generation.
Your society may outcompete mine today, but not N generations later. Your short-term thinking wins today's battle but loses the war.
society A: no support for women. therefore an intelligent woman chooses between children or career
society B: support for women (daycare). therefore a woman can have children and a career
in society A, half the intelligent choose career over family, and don't pass on their genes
in soceity B, all the intelligent women can have a career and a family, meaning MORE genes are passed on, AS WELL AS her intellectual contribution
"Your society keeps the intelligent women from passing their genetic material on to the next generation."
no, yours does, clearly
"Your society may outcompete mine today, but not N generations later. Your short-term thinking wins today's battle but loses the war."
no, my society outcompetes yours on the short term and the long term, outright
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
you are saying "stupid bitches", complete with your condescending 'but I'm sure they "often do well in other fields".'
It only looks like "stupid bitches" to you because you are judging math as being the superior mental activity. That's a male-oriented way to view things.
If you instead consider social capability to be the superior mental activity, then women tend to look way smarter than men.
If you insist on judging women by male standards, then of course they will look bad. The same goes for judging men by female standards.
would it KILL you to have someone go away for a few months to have a baby?
they let people off to join the military all the time, but oh, have a baby ? NO... not 'career oriented' enough. lol
american industry will suffer.
As a Merkin, I dread the day when the immigrants realise they don't need to speak English any more
(Shrug) As long as they understand key phrases such as "Shrimp Pad Thai" and "Chicken enchiladas with no sour cream", what the hell do I care what language they speak amongst themselves?
Nationalism and patriotism are only useful if your eventual plans include a holocaust.
Maybe you were a mistake? Maybe your mother thought about aborting you, but didn't. That's how I entered this world.
The primary cost is having one parent, normally the mother, give up the opportunity to earn an income. I certainly am assuming a married couple that doesn't burn money on unimportant junk and isn't on minimum wage.
Once you do that, kids are really cheap. I have a half dozen of them. :-) You don't need most of the junk people try to sell you: crib, high chair, changing table, breast pump, fake breast milk, walker, popular toys, special baby food, stroller, restauraunt meals, individual rooms, TV, sugary breakfast cereal, etc. It's mostly useless or worse.
Do buy car seats, new shoes, and wholesome food. Carry the baby in a sling, possibly homemade or even just a knotted sheet. Homeschool if you want your kids to learn more than the watered-down public school curriculum. Let the kids make their own toys from sticks and stones. If you have any friends at all, you'll get more kid clothing than you know what to do with.
http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/bul1352218.pdf
you are asserting that if a woman is given aid to have children, less will choose to have children?
and if forced to choose between career and children, more will have children?
can i have what you are smoking?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
according to your logic, a family that has 5 children has less invested in any given child than one who chooses to have 2 children
right?
less time to spend per child if you have more children, right?
you see why this is nonsensical?
furthermore, lets compare a homeschooled child to a child in public school: the home schooled child has less social abilities, because they spent TOO MUCH time with their parents
you actually believe that quality of child rearing is directly proportional to time spent with child, and its very easy to see how wrong you are
no: quality child rearing is quality time spent with a child, a couple of hours per day, the rest spent elsewhere while someone else holds the milk bottle or brings out the legos
you don't have to spend the whole damn day with the child. really. you can work, and come home to the kid, and raise children just fine
really
your perspective on what's important in child rearing is simply outright wrong
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I dread the day when the immigrants realise they don't need to speak English any more
So learn another language and get a leg-up on the competition. Life is capitalism in slow motion, if you can't compete you fail.
No, I think a good job is everything. Is the point of life to make your own life better, or is the point to make the world better? What should matter is how you are contributing to the rest of the world.
And if you are dumb enough to go into academic science these days, you'd better believe that 100%.
It's called the Idiocracy effect.
Idiocracy will be accurate only in so far as we manage to avoid disaster. Some catastrophic event that causes enough scarcity and hazard for long enough will result in the intelligent ( = resourceful ) people surviving and thriving, and the unintelligent ( = unresourceful and uncreative ) either dying or positioning themselves so low on the hierarchical totem pole their genes will become less relevant.
For the unintelligent to survive at all ( which is a biological imperative that animals as dumb as flatworms manage to pull off ) in the face of catastrophic events they need a larger number of offspring as a contingency for their genes... Like how crocodiles lay 50 eggs so that a few survive.
It makes evolutionary sense that low intelligence is correlated with large brood
This sounds like a lame excuse.
I pursued my career as a software developer and I did it from home. I looked after two kids and their dying mother. After she died things became easier. My kids were 6 & 10 when she died and I looked after things for 10 years before she died.
There are many solutions for child care including a part or full time nanny. As I recall Scarlett Johanson was available a few years ago and I figure she would be a pretty good Nanny, especially for a single guy like me! If only I'd known. :-(
Stats like this are inflammatory and a distortion of reality at the best of times. The truth is that many of us work too hard and we work too dumb. Many tasks simply don't need to be done. My grandfather was a pioneer and he farmed with horses. He cut his own lumber and built his own house and all the other buildings on the farm. I grew up in the house he built. If my grandfather could handle that sort of work load then with our modern technology I fail to see why we need to work so hard to enjoy a decent standard of living... unless I consider the amount to paper that gets pushed around which serves little purpose other than filling a recycling bin.
My point is not to roll back the clock to the time of my grandfather. My point is to ask why it is that so much work needs to be done and why people figure they need to spend 60 hours per week doing it. Job sharing, rotating child supervision, hubby at home actually making dinner and doing the dishes... part time nanny, baby sitting while mom and dad are home - so mom and dad can focus on a project if need be. There are MANY MANY solutions.
I didn't get help when I did it. But I still was able to do it and I will point out that since my office was at home I managed to skip out on a commute to down town in the morning, a commute from down town in the afternoon, and basically a wasted lunch hour. That gave me about 2 1/2 to 3 hours that most single parents didn't have.
Next I was there when the kids left for school and there when they arrived home from school. If one of the kids was sick I was there. I had no baby sitting fees, no child care fees, and I was able to write off the cost of my office in my house and all the equipment I needed to buy for that office... which I might add was considerable. For instance I bought my first computer the day the space shuttle exploded and I reckon the cost was something in the order of about 1/6th the value of my house at the time. Included in that cost was a 300 LPM line printer and a 36" plotter. My modem at the time cost over $600. Those were 1986 dollars too.
In my opinion its about drive and commitment. If someone wants to make it happen then they can.
So it's "liberals won't reproduce, so they must recruit"? Dude, I see the fnords....
There are places that work your way, and they have less than 2 births per woman. I just recently saw a figure of 1.5 for one of those places. (such places are mainly to be found in Europe, but not exclusively)
I didn't make any claim regarding a reason, so I can't be logically incoherent or logically coherent. I just pointed out the facts.
Of course I think I can guess the reasons, but I left that out of my post because it would be a distraction from the simple facts.
... because the education researchers have a different idea. Namely, that females don't go into Maths or the Sciences because there is a mentality of aggression against the problem(s) that females don't naturally have. Which makes *far* more sense than this one. Well, perhaps not in the small town. But, that is becoming more and more of a special case that need not be considered. Well, that and living in the US. You guys really have an odd culture there.
in which case, we have a grand tragedy: the society with less social justice outbreeds the society with more social justice
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Second, you are a racist. To begin with I'd want to see citation to your statistics about Europe. Further, assuming your numbers are correct, I fail to see the problem unless you believe there is something wrong with non Europeans.
There's nothing wrong with non-Europeans, but ethnicity does partially define culture, and the core of European culture is White Europeans, like it or not. Others can successfully assimilate, of course, but only for as long as that core remains - if it does not, then there's nothing to assimilate to.
And yes, I do like the European culture. I do like other cultures, too, so I hope that India stays Indian, and Japan stays Japanese, and so on; and all those unique cultures remain unique and valuable.
Countries like Russia ... have been mired down by their inefficient socialist economies.
I'm a Russian. I'll be short, because there really isn't much to say but: you, sir, are an idiot. Russia hasn't been socialist for almost 20 years now, and its economic collapse in early 90s was sped up by attempts to implement extreme economic liberal (in European sense; it's "libertarian" for you Americans) policies. The result? Totally devastated economy, widespread poverty, and rapid population decline.
The problem was precisely the opposite - people who came to power in 90s thought that "the further it is from communism, the better". And so we have what we have. If moderate social democrats have been at the helm then, things could have turned very differently.
It's the opinion of both my husband and myself that having (hopefully!) smart kids and raising them well is probably a larger contribution to civilisation than the research that all but the most remarkable scientists will produce in the same time period. Justifications aside, it's just something that I want to do, far more than I want to publish a few extra papers or make full professor ten years earlier.
You spout off the arguments Malthus used many years ago about overpopulation. His predictions have been wrong for a couple hundred years so far. We don't need to limit population growth, we just need to encourage technological innovation and better use of natural resources. We also need a lot of younger people to help support the aged population. So yes, we do need to increase the world's population.
"The first step would be to understand why women have babies. "
I know this was probably an attempt at a flamewar, but I can't resist.
As a general rule, for every woman who has a baby, there is also a man who... contributed to the process. Actually, scratch that "As a general rule" part. Its always the case. Get your mommy and daddy to explain it to you, its not my place to do it for them.
"In my own research, I was able to find many examples of women having babies when it was definitely not good for the man, for the society, or even for the woman."
You are not the arbiter of when it is good and when it is not good to have a baby. In fact, there is no such arbiter. Hence why eugenics does not work.
You seem to be one of those people who saw a news report on "Octomom" and now think every woman in the world is just like her.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Last time I checked women had this thing. What's it called? Ah... yes. Maternal instinct.
Really men don't care about the children. Only on psychological level.
just give birth?
or daily care?.......
c'mon.........dun give such shxt paper as report or even research pls.......
use ur brain.........
men doesn't play gals game
then why would gals do?
such a guy writing this crap doesn't come with a brain built-in........sorry.......
The "cost to society" of raising children only matters when society has an involvement in the process.
If society has no such role, then there is no cost. Of course there'd be no support network as we know it. The solution to that is simply to have more kids to increase the odds that some will prosper.
These two different ways to raise kids are happening now and in some cases are in conflict with each other. In such cases the child-rearing part is only one aspect of the conflict.
Example: Israel. I won't get into the religious or political parts because they're well known and not really relevant. Focus only on the child-rearing sides.
Birthrates in modern Israel are low, because modern Israeli women are choosing to work and do the other things much as women do in many other modern cultures. They want careers and conveniences, and raising kids in a modern society takes enourmous effort for schooling and so on. As a result, Israeli families are having fewer children than in the past.
Meanwhile, birthrates in the Palestinian cities are surging. There is far less value there on careers for the moms and far less burden to educate the children. Thus, many families are having multiples of children, five, six or more. Having more kids leads to more advantages in most cases.
Simple math shows -and it has been said before- that Israel is winning the war on the battlefields but the Palestinian sides are winning it in the bedrooms.
Japan is another country facing a similar problem, except they don't have an active war. Birthrates in Japan have been negative for years and the country is in serious danger of not having enough young people.
In the US, the same thing is happening. Birthrates are dropping off for whites and increasing among blacks and hispanics, which has the potential to cause strife in the next 20-50 years.
The moral of all this is that we all make choices everyday. To choose luxuries over having kids. It may not seem to matter whether one child more is born but add them up and it can and does affect the course of nations.
Studies have shown that couples who DON'T have children are, on average, significantly happier.
Yeah, you're REALLY gonna need to cite that.
I have one, but it's in Finnish.
Namely, something similar was cited in an article on happiness in Tiede 2/2009 (a Finnish popular science magazine). I don't know the original source of the research.
Paraphrasing, "The correlation between happiness and having children is smaller than usually thought, and slightly negative. Parents are at their unhappiest when their children are either at the toddler or the teen age. However, people tend to believe that having children will make them happier. This may be important for them to want to have children in the first place."
-AC
You either:
a) have dad issues
b) have made the unfortunate mistake of selecting a couch potato to father your children
I'm sorry either way.
a random scattering of half-truths and wannabe issues
none of which have much to do with each other, or anything i said, or anything internally coherent
try again. make a point please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There is something terribly wrong when Europe, by dint of immigration and lack of fecundity, will see the noblest traditions swept away by the likes of "Sharia," et al. Sharia courts are already springing up in Britain.
This is really the fault of Western democracies, for not encouraging assimilation among immigrants. And yes, change always comes. It's not necessarily for better, though.
Dark Reflection
you can find exceptions to probably every single point in this thread, the story summary, and the article its attached to
but yes, overall, if your society has less children than another society, the other society inherits the earth
so it behooves any society to have children
its not exactly a complicated point for you to understand
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Raising children still generally falls on the woman's shoulders
A lot depends on how you want to define raising children. This model seems to overlook the substanial responsibility of the man to pay for the food, shelter and security of said mother and children. Also take into account the need to do this for at least 20 years. The opportunity cost for the man to have to be responsible finacnially all this time is also hefty. I would prefer cooking meals and changing diapers over 20 years of financial responsibility for 3 plus people for at least 20 years...
Actually, from what I've heard from people with experience outsourcing that it is indeed social factors that make offshoring not worth it. Your average Indian tech is just as smart as your average American tech, and a hell of a lot more motivated. The problem is, he tells his boss "It's nearly done, we just have a few bugs to iron out" and the boss passes on a message of "Yes, sir, it is all very exceedingly good and ready for production straight away!". He has to - if he doesn't he gets fired and one of the hundreds waiting in line takes his place.
In the same way, when outsourcing to China, problems aren't reported because doing so means you lose face, and/or are seen as less loyal to your company.
That said, I don't think that you can say China has a "lack of growth", up until last year they were lightyears ahead of anywhere else in terms of economic growth and they're still chugging forward while everyone else starts sliding backwards. They're rapidly making the transition from ripping off existing tech to being the innovators in their own right.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
people have babies because that's what we're on this earth to do. your DNA is the only part of you that will live on after you're gone. some other things may live on (example: albert einstein's legacy), but those things aren't your physical self.. the only PHYSICAL part of you that can live on is your DNA People who "choose" to not have kids are basically saying "my dna is worthless". the problem is that most people don't see it that way.. all they see is that it's "fashionable" these days to not have kids.
A negative growth rate would be perfectly fine for the world. Just because there is a negative growth rate right now does not mean it will continue on in that fashion. As the population shrinks there will be a higher demand for labor, wages will rise, and workers will have more power to request things like money and time off to raise a family.
If moderate social democrats have been at the helm then, things could have turned very differently.
Are there any moderate social democrats left in modern Russia? Hysterical non-Russian media sometimes (often (always)) portrays current Russian political environment as nationalistic (fasist(nazist)) authoritarian system, where xenofobia drives the directions of economic development. Moderate Russians have no voice in this media, other than as victims of political (cultural) assassinations. These kind of news are pounding the eyes and eardrums in other countries so much that I personally refuse to read or watch any locally produced news about Russia. By the way, Zimbabwe was targeted in the same way by the BBC (I am not British) even if the Mugabe's goverment simply acted naturally for anyone who have been fighting such a long time against the racists. I think the best way to fight this kind of media war is to stop fearing(in/for/with Kremlin) and start communicating and interacting positively(in/for/with Kremlin). (sorry for the OT rant)
you seem to forget western population rates declining is only a recent occurence
project to the future
well, actually, the population will still be around in the west. in europea, your average european might have 1 kid or less, but his muslim immigrant neighbor is having seven kids
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is pretty astute. The only thing I would add is that this whole "equality" thing in today's society really just means that women are expected to do *twice* the work, because they ARE generally expected to contribute to the household income nowadays. Work-life balance is a pretty atrocious phrase that you almost never hear said to (or by) MALE applicants for a demanding job. Balance schmalance. That's just a fancy way of saying she gets to juggle a full time job in an office with a full time job as a homemaker and mother and whatever else (because Dear Hubby is so tired after a hard day's work that he couldn't possibly help with chores).
What saved us for the last half century was the green revolution. As soil became depleted and salinized, we converted fossil fuel to massive fertilizer and pesticide inputs, essentially manufacturing our food. Now that peak oil is here, we won't even be able to continue producing what are now, much less accommodate a growing population. As Kunstler likes to point out, technology isn't energy.
Is it our fault or responsibility that all of the 3rd world is booming in population, taking their 6+ kids to Europe, and living there?
There's nothing racist about saying Europe is facing a cultural death. If anything it's more racist to say you don't give a damn about there being no white people in Europe. Isn't the death of any culture sad? Didn't you die a little on the inside, too, when you found out about the Japanese situation? Or when your kids (or you when you were a teen) found out about how Russia's population is dwindling down to nothing?
Sorry, neither. What you're seeing in my post is actually disgust at how the younger generation is turning out. For some reason, there's a lot of young women out there who take in complete loser men, even letting them father their children, even though they have no job, no responsibility, prison records, etc. Why they do this I'm not sure, but I imagine it mostly boils down to poor parenting, something the Boomers and later generations are very guilty of.
First, you disagree with GP's statement that it's less pervasive in the US. Then you say it's more pervasive outside the US. What's going on here?
Of course, these days, it seems like many men don't have to have a job, or if they do, they get to keep their paychecks to "invest" in their jacked-up pickup truck with giant wheels, while the woman has to also work full-time to raise her 3 children by 3 different fathers.
You're describing a situation I don't see much any more, where the man is responsible and earns a paycheck for the whole family while the woman stays at home and raises the children.
All of the major articles I have read purporting to disprove the hypothesis that biological differences in men and women are to blame for the preponderance
of men in elite positions in math and science fields provide data supporting the opposite conclusion.
Studies consistently find a noticeable difference in standard deviation in their measures of ``mathematical ability'' --- in particular, they find that the distribution of mathematical ability among men can be more-or-less accurately modelled as a Gaussian distribution with a certain mean and standard deviance and that the distribution of mathematical ability among women can be accurately modelled as a Gaussian distribution with a similar (sometimes slightly lower) mean with a (consistently) smaller standard deviation.
Elementary statistics then predicts that the ratio of men with mathematical ability above a high threshold to the number of women with mathematical ability above the same threshold will be large.
The typical approach to obfuscate this simple fact is to harp on the fast that the means of the distributions are very similar --- which is quite besides the point.
A ratio of standard deviations of 1.1 to 1.0 yields large differences at the tails of the distributions. I invite you to do the experiments yourself --- there quite easy and very instructive.
But.. it has really come to irritate me over the last few years that females can wear a vneck open down to the below their breasts yet MEN get in trouble for looking at their cleavage.
If I wore my shirt open to below my chest, I better expect people to look at all that bare flesh.
Yet another place where it is distinctly uneven.
It's supposed to be playing the sex appeal angle but these days all it does is piss me off at them.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The problem is we are selectively breeding for high breeding populations.
And those are usually wacko religious populations too.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I've read slashdot for a quite a while, and witnessed all the blatant idiocy and biases present in this group of self-important, pompous fools.
But really, it just beats all when one of you says a male can raise a child just as effectively as a female.
This is why no one listens to idiots like yourselves. You're so distanced from reality, stuck in your own tiny world of what's right and wrong, you couldn't see the truth if it was stuck right in front of your face.
Are there any moderate social democrats left in modern Russia?
Do you mean politicians, or popular support?
Actually, never mind. For both, the answer would be "no". In today's Russia, it's a marginalized political ideology bordering on extremism (because it comes from the "filthy West").
Hysterical non-Russian media sometimes (often (always)) portrays current Russian political environment as nationalistic (fasist(nazist)) authoritarian system, where xenofobia drives the directions of economic development.
This isn't entirely correct. Authoritarian - yes. Fascist - maybe, getting there at least. Nationalistic - not really, but that card is played often for the entertainment of the public (as it's always a popular one); but I wouldn't say that the overall policy of the country is nationalistic, much less xenophobic.
Moderate Russians have no voice in this media, other than as victims of political (cultural) assassinations.
That is quite correct, given that virtually no government-independent media outlets remain.
By the way, Zimbabwe was targeted in the same way by the BBC (I am not British) even if the Mugabe's goverment simply acted naturally for anyone who have been fighting such a long time against the racists.
Well, I'm obviously not British either, and I've no idea what they say about Zimbabwe on the BBC, but it's fairly well-known that Mugabe's government has been doing what effectively amounts to discrimination, and later on genocide of non-Black (note that this doesn't mean just "White") population of the country.
I think the best way to fight this kind of media war is to stop fearing(in/for/with Kremlin) and start communicating and interacting positively(in/for/with Kremlin).
The Kremlin doesn't care about your positive/negative communications, anyway, only so long as you pay for that gas they sell you. Other than that, the only use Kremlin has got for the West is 1) as a place to send their kids to study, and 2) as the "eternal enemy" for the masses (NATO in particular).
That metaphor is broken simply because females choose to have children where as those humans have to breath oxygen and cannot exist without it. Will a female die if she doesn't have a off spring? no. End of story.
Both male and female make lifestyle choices; you can choose to have a family, take up an interest in monster truck rallies, going to the local swingers club each Tuesday and partake in partner swapping. All of these are lifestyle choices in which your life as a single entity does not rely on for its continued existence.
"I am not a feminist; at least, I don't believe I am. But I think you're taking a slightly male-centric tack when you say 'in regards to the same starting point'."
Excuse me, but I'm finding that society is far too heterosexual, I want special treatment - I want all the straight men to take special pills to make them bisexual to it improves my chances of getting a boyfriend.
Society exists as it is; it is you who demands that society accommodate you choice of wanting to have children. If you want to have children then all power to you but don't expect society to give you special treatment in the same way of me demanding all straight males start taking pills so that it improves my chances of getting a boyfriend.
"Ok. Do you disagree with the idea that women are as capable as men? Or do you disagree that women face a natural handicap in merit-based careers because they are forced to lose a year of their working life for every child they have?"
Tell me, when was the last time a baby just spontaneously popped out of a female?
Having a baby is a lifestyle choice and is not comparable to a person in a wheel chair; NOW if the person in the wheel chair chose to buy a flasher wheel chair to the point that it didn't fit through a standard door way then it would be a matter of a lifestyle choice.
"The problem with your criticism here is that feminists want to make these options available for men too. The description you cite is very misleading, I'll grant: it's described as "options for women" because the proposals would have a bigger effect on women than on men. Feminists in fact would be quite delighted if men took the option described in larger numbers, instead of treating child rearing as their women's responsibility..."
Why should we accommodate peoples lifestyle choices? Christ! lets take the slippery slope to the point that we grant males 14 weeks per year to pursue masculine past times as part of their right to express their manliness?!
"People should be allowed to get help when trying to achieve their personal and professional goals. That's all this is about, and in the end, we'll all benefit."
Ah yes the old bullshit of 'it takes a village to raise a child'. Please, leave your emotionally dripping Marxism at the door and stick to facts instead of dredging up emotional sob stories.
So women would kick our ass at math, except those jobs are for losers a.k.a. men.
There is a saying that most gender studies are done by feminists and I'm starting to believe so too, I mean, is there anything we are better at? And can they answer in anything besides veiled and not so veiled insults?
But... the future refused to change.
I'm one semester away from a BS in computer science, and I've worked in groups with a lot of people from India and China, mostly graduate students, over the last year or so. I'm not concerned for my future.
I don't mean any disrespect to any of them, in fact in most cases I like working with them and hanging out with them. Their work ethic is fantastic, but in some ways that's part of the problem. Both cultures put a very high emphasis on working hard, but it seems their educational systems place little value on creative problem solving. The Chinese (PRC) education system in particular seems designed to squash any bit of creativity that its students may have had.
I've become convinced that the reason America has been on top is our peculiar form of laziness. We're always looking for a better, smarter, and most of all easier way to do things, and that is precisely where innovation comes from. From what I've seen of Chinese and Indians, they're so concerned with working hard and doing things the "proper" way, that if they ever even notice the places where their processes could be improved, they would immediately discount the thought because that's not how they were told to do things.
A note about Japan: They've always excelled at integrating foreign ideas. Most of what we think of as Japanese traditional things were in fact imported from China and/or Korea many centuries ago.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
And how is this behavior different than any previous generations? There have always been deadbeat dads (and deadbeat moms as well.) Why do they women let losers father their children? Oxytocin.
Wow! My original comment: First step: Understand why women have babies, has 131 comments at present, and is marked "(Score: -1, Troll)". That's got to be some sort of record.
I didn't intend to cause a controversy. My understanding is that outsourcing is not working well. There is a huge sociological question: Why are some societies more successful financially than others?
Also, to do truly successful research about why women have babies, it is necessary to do research about fundamental issues, such as why do they so often have babies when the outcome is self-destructive for them?
Apparently one reason why sociology research is usually done so poorly is that many people can't consider the questions without becoming upset.
In fact, women often have babies with no consideration of the man. One of the first stories in Jewish literature, which is now also the Christian bible, is of two women, isolated from other people, who got their father drunk so they could have sex with him and get pregnant.
Most people don't handle issues involving conflict well.
MOD PARENT UP. It's interesting what you said about the Indian culture. That is my understanding, also.
Parts of China are doing very, very well. That's partly because of a successful partnership with the U.S., in which products are built to U.S. specifications by Chinese who can hire other Chinese who are willing to turn themselves into manufacturing machines for very little money. It's improvement, but a long ways from a sensible, sustainable way of living.
"I've become convinced that the reason America has been on top is our peculiar form of laziness. We're always looking for a better, smarter, and most of all easier way to do things, and that is precisely where innovation comes from."
Very interesting.
I've become convinced that the reason America has been on top is our peculiar form of laziness. We're always looking for a better, smarter, and most of all easier way to do things, and that is precisely where innovation comes from.
In fact, here you're echoing a chap called Larry Wall, I think you may have heard of him. From the second edition of Programming Perl (sourced from his wiki page:
The Three Virtues of a Programmer:
1. Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris.
2. Impatience - The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and hubris.
3. Hubris - Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience.
These qualities, while beneficial to the tech industry, are somewhat at odds with the traditional mindset in some more diligent cultures. :)
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Further, assuming your numbers are correct, I fail to see the problem unless you believe there is something wrong with non Europeans.
Below, you call out a sibling poster for raising a straw man, and yet here you do exactly the same thing. Europe is home to an incredible diversity in culture, with many ancient and unique small towns/villages which will disappear without increased birth rates. Immigrant populations can't completely maintain the culture of the destination even if they want to, which by observation they very seldom do.
So when the GP post said
Most places in Europe would be well served by a doubling or tripling of the number of native babies.
and you countered with
Second, you are a racist.
I have no choice but to paraphrase your own response:
I fail to see the problem unless you believe there is something wrong with Europeans.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Countries like Russia, China, and India have had remarkable scientific achievements, but have been mired down by their inefficient socialist economies.
You misspelled "rampant institutionalized corruption at all levels of government".
Good Lord, this sort of tripe gets modded "Insightful" - don't people read or think about what they see here at all? Apparently not.
GP: Are Russia and India "socialist economies" at all? I wouldn't have thought so - I guess that you use the word in the American sense: "something evil". China, though, is still a socialist country - but then on the other hand, an expected growth in the region of 8% in 2009, while all the Arch-Capitalist countries in the world are in deep recession, doesn't really sound all that inefficient to me. But maybe I'm just stupid.
As for the parent - "rampant institutionalized corruption at all levels of government" - wow, you really know it all, don't you? Corruption in China is something that the central government works hard to eradicate (so that's one level of government where it isn't rampant) - it is something that goes on on the local level, as far as I know below the level of provincial government. There are three major contributing factors in this, IMO: one is that it is in many ways a traditional part of Chinese culture to give gifts when you are introduced to influential people.
Another one is the way local leaders have stepped into the traditional role of the local feudal lord - democracy as a form of government is not something that people in general just take on when they have lived under a fairly autocratic form of government for ~5000 years. Democracy has to be learned; that's how it happened in the West, certainly in Europe, where it took a couple of generations, actually. So people in rural areas still expect to have a "feudal lord" of sorts that they can give gifts so he will treat them more favourably.
And thirdly, this has become "rampant" only because of the introduction of some degree of Capitalism - after all, successful businesses have a lot more money and can therefore give better gifts. This is how corruption works in China and, I expect in most other countries. This is also why we have had scandals like the recent milk scandal or the one with the poisonous toys - local government officials have been all to willing to overlook irregularities in rich companies, and greed has led to this kind of ruthless fraud. The fact that the leaders of these companies tend to get executed indicates to me that the Chinese central government and the justice system takes the fight against crime and corruption very serious indeed.
Even though our society supposedly treats men and women the same, it really doesn't. Raising children still generally falls on the woman's shoulders, whether or not she has a man around to help out. If there is one, he usually sits on the couch watching sports while the woman cooks meals, changes diapers, etc. If she's really lucky, he'll actually hold a regular job and bring home a paycheck.
Can I just say as a father that's out of the house 5 days a week 13 hours a day, then comes home to do chores including laundry, bins, picking up after, clearing the table, the dishes, feeding the pets and yes nappies and bottles, handywork, handles the finances, and after all that still gets grief that I'm not spending enough time with my 7 month old son, I find your remarks insulting.
The whole men vs women thing is just old and just plain destructive. The reality is when a woman was expected to stay home, she had a full time job tending house and looking after the children. Now neither the male or the female earns enough to support the family long term. BOTH have to work to do it, and then somehow in their spare time find time to raise the children and do the chores. Instead of blaming employers for not providing a living wage, women and men turn on each other. Pathetic. Equality would have been the man spending less time at work, and the woman spending more time at work with the man looking after the children while the woman was at work. What we have instead is indentured servitude and a frenzied lifestyle where no one can fulfill their role.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
That's just a fancy way of saying she gets to juggle a full time job in an office with a full time job as a homemaker and mother and whatever else (because Dear Hubby is so tired after a hard day's work that he couldn't possibly help with chores).
Do you have any idea how insulting that is to those men who do contribute to the household as well as work? Funny how when the woman does it she's taking on twice the work. When a man isn't out of the house 13 hrs a day, then coming home and helping with the housework AND the child and spending ALL his waking time on a combination of the 3 he's scum. When the woman puts her child down for a nap, and watches daytime tv she's just doing what she has to do to cope. When a man has no friends or social life to speak of because he's spending all his time on his family that's just expected. When a woman takes her child to playgroups, mother's groups, swim classes etc. that's just part of her hard work.
Gimme a break.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Not as true as it used to be, but on average men earn about 50% more than women ($39k median versus $26k median), so are doing considerably more of the monetary providing in aggregate.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
why was this sexist comment modded up insightful?
Some catastrophic event that causes enough scarcity and hazard for long enough will result in the intelligent ( = resourceful ) people surviving and thriving,
Unfortunately not. Most governments will not allow the poor to die of hunger. In any case - for democracy having a lot of offspring is a more successful strategy (power is equal to the number of offspring)
It makes evolutionary sense that low intelligence is correlated with large brood
What you are referring to is the r/K selection theory.
You are a racist because you want less straw men. And what about straw women? Sigh, you logically proper folk always be taking our women.
Perhaps I'm being unreasonable, but I don't want someone doing a life-threatening job who's worked more than about 14-18 hours straight at most. Truck drivers have a maximum shift of 14 hours, of which no more than 11 may be driving. Is the stuff residents do really less error-prone for fatigued people than driving a truck is?
You seem to have basically responded to "residents work ridiculous 36-hour shifts" with "no no it's all better now, nobody works more than a perfectly reasonable 30-hour shift".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Although academia was never really the ivory tower of caricature, where people sat around and smoked pipes and "just thought", it does feel from what I've read that it's less that than ever. Doing things other than The Project With A Deadline is really, I think, necessary for significant progress other than churning out incremental results. Everyone's big on "interdisciplinary" work these days, for example, but that seems to usually mean frantically cribbing something from another field that you can shallowly map to your problem at hand. I think a deeper interdisciplinarity really requires academics to have free time to pursue other interests, where they can run into possible areas of cross-pollination that would never happen in the shallow "I need something from biology to support this grant proposal" style of interdisciplinarity.
But that really ties into the "tons of publications is necessary" culture being bad for all sorts of reasons. It's bad for people raising kids, which is bad for retaining a whole class of people. It's bad for interdisciplinary work and fostering long-term research. It's bad for readers, who have to wade through papers that would never have been published if the author didn't feel compelled to churn them out (sometimes somewhat guiltily).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They both feed on each other. It is not that people in Russia or China are naturally more corrupt, but that the system gives them all the wrong incentives.
If you responsible for allocating a billion dollars and your pay is only a few thousand and you know that you are stuck in that position for life, you will cheat. In a capitalistic system you have bonuses, you have promotions based on skill and you have other greedy people watching over you to not lose money.
Greed is like sea water: it is infinitely bigger than us, can swallow us whole, and the more you drink from it, the thirstier you get.
You can't take the sky from me...
The fact that the leaders of these companies tend to get executed indicates to me that the Chinese central government and the justice system takes the fight against crime and corruption very serious indeed.
You misspelled "simply do not value human life at all".
The only reason the central government fights corruption at lower levels is because those guys are skimming from their bribery pool.
You can't take the sky from me...
Are you REALLY that lazy
Don't call him lazy for asking you to back up your assertions. Even so, there are some inherent errors in how this sort of study is done. Nothing can be inferred about how the couples with kids would feel if they hadn't had kids (the same goes for how the childless couples would feel if they did).
It seems that the dominant paradigm from about 50 years ago was that the man would contribute to the home by bringing in salary and the woman would contribute to the home by doing domestic work. My point was simply that a shift where both parties are now expected to contribute to the home by bringing in salary should also be accompanied by a shift in how the parties share the domestic work. By the same token, if the couple is NOT doing the two-income-household thing, there's theoretically no problem with a choice of the salaried party to focus on career and a choice of the non-salaried party to focus on domestic matters. As a female law student, I found it insulting for interviewing law firms to always make it a point to pair female candidates with female attorneys so they can talk about maternity leave and work/life balance and options for going part time in the future when the female candidate decides to have children. I may or may not go that route, but I don't like having that assumption in front of me right off the bat. I don't have any way of knowing how male candidates are interacted with during interviews though. So my serious question for you (as, I assume, a male in a demanding profession): Are companies discussing family emphasis with young male candidates to the same extent that they discuss it with young female candidates? If not, do you think they should?
Sorry, I don't mean to bring the discussion back on topic or anything, but a lack of females at the top of the law profession was one of the other things mentioned briefly in the linked article, and my experience as an interviewee brought that to mind again.
It seems that the dominant paradigm from about 50 years ago was that the man would contribute to the home by bringing in salary and the woman would contribute to the home by doing domestic work
That is until the work required heavy physical labour (moving furniture) or technical skill (eg. handywork, fixing electronics). Getting on a ladder and changing a high lightglobe is somehow not seen as housework.
My point was simply that a shift where both parties are now expected to contribute to the home by bringing in salary should also be accompanied by a shift in how the parties share the domestic work. ...and yet if a man wants to take 6 months off to raise his child, in most circumstances he'd be ridiculed.
By the same token, if the couple is NOT doing the two-income-household thing, there's theoretically no problem with a choice of the salaried party to focus on career and a choice of the non-salaried party to focus on domestic matters. ...and yet few housewives are happy to do all the chores.
. As a female law student, I found it insulting for interviewing law firms to always make it a point to pair female candidates with female attorneys so they can talk about maternity leave and work/life balance and options for going part time in the future when the female candidate decides to have children ...and yet when women are teamed up with men they complain that they can't relate or that the workplace is male dominated.
I may or may not go that route, but I don't like having that assumption in front of me right off the bat. I don't have any way of knowing how male candidates are interacted with during interviews though. So my serious question for you (as, I assume, a male in a demanding profession): Are companies discussing family emphasis with young male candidates to the same extent that they discuss it with young female candidates? If not, do you think they should?
I think what should have happened is that there should have been a shift in work life balance for both sexes. It should be expected that the male will also take time off to help raise children. I don't have that choice. The only way I could take paternity leave is if I took it unpaid, and even then only if my wife was working full time. As it happens I'd make a terrible stay at home dad. I'm just not good with kids. (we could debate whether that too was because I never got the chance to learn to be around children, but at the end of the day I don't think I have those innate qualities anyway). My point is women always complain that they're treated unfairly and have social expectations placed on them yet men are also treated unfairly and have social expectations placed on them. Part of it probably is biology but a lot of it is just social convention. When the day comes where male graduates at your law firm sit down with their male mentors and discuss taking time off to raise a family, THEN you'll have your equality.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Wrong. The cost to a professional couple to raise children is huge, because of its affect on their careers.
Correct. Cost to the couple. Less of the costs are covered by the community.
You're saying the same thing I am. You merely prefaced it with "Wrong."
It seems like we're pretty much in agreement on the social issues here actually. It's just a pretty contentious issue in general. The lack of support in the workplace for men who want to focus on family is an excellent illustration of the continuing inequality.
and yet when women are teamed up with men they complain that they can't relate or that the workplace is male dominated. - I worked in a big corporate office before going to law school, and my mentor was a male who had advanced far in his profession by working hard and being dedicated to a superior work product. I'd like to think that my choice wasn't because the workplace was male-dominated, but that because this particular male was one that I connected with on a professional level and who understood my goals and priorities. There were plenty of middle-to-upper management women around (and yes, they often had a lot of young women who went to them for mentorship), but a mentorship to me is a lot more than sharing reproductive capacity. So, while I can't speak for all other women, I for one would be fine with being paired with more men during interviews. I'm interested in a career, not a job to make money until baby season.
My general take away from this exchange is that men and women are both still struggling with the holdovers from an outdated paradigm, with working women being expected to earn a salary AND be a wife and mother and keep the house in order, and working men being expected to earn a salary as a replacement for actually being involved in their children's lives, with few if any options for taking time off of work to focus on family obligations. So everyone is getting shafted and will continue to be shafted until the employers shift their own views of the roles of men and women OUTSIDE of the work environment. Does that sound about like our middle ground?
I work to live, not live to work. I did choose a technical field, I'm a web developer. It appealed to me because of the problem solving aspect. (If I would have chosen a non-technical field, I would have gone into psychology or veterinary medicine. Both of those fields would fit the stereotypical "woman choices".)
When I do have children, I desire to be a stay-at-home mom until my kids are in school. I feel those first few years are very important in a child's development, I want to be the one raising my children, not some day-care worker.
I have not, but thanks for bringing it to my attention. This summarizes my think on the subject better than I probably could.
There are a lot of things I like about those cultures, and in fact my current love interest is a fairly traditional Chinese woman. My conclusion, though, is that their education system does very well at preparing them for standardized tests, while ours does better at preparing us to solve real world problems.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
The big problem is society. If people could spend the years from 20 - 45 having and raising children and then spend the next 20 years having a career then we wouldn't have these problems.
It seems foolish to blame biology when it's our own fault for building a society that ignores biology.
Society is (should be) a lot more flexible than biology.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
Just because someone with power may do things that you don't agree with or you don't quite understand the motivation for, does not mean they are corrupt.
Not saying that corruption doesn't exist, but your explanation for what constitutes "corruption" in politics is essentially the same as someone throwing out the "activist judge" charge, simply because they consistently make rulings that make them angry or that they disagree with.
Assuming any of it was factual, which is debatable.
Even if we assume that the synoptic gospels are accurate, it's made clear that that Romans didn't really give a rat's ass about Jesus. It was the Jewish clerical aristocracy that had the beef.
Christians in general, on the other hand, tended to make nuisances of themselves in a variety of ways (though, in spite of the common perception, Christians were mostly irrelevant for quite a bit). The Romans were typically very eager to stomp out nuisances in their jurisdictions.
(okay, so its Columbia, but hey)
I wish I had some mod points for this. It's already bad in the US for a balance between work & home life (Europe does better, but it's spotty). The way to fix the biggest 'differences' in career for women is to shove the divide between work & home back more toward home!
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
One Party Classroom proves that to be true.
I went to the University of Missouri in the mid 1980's and it was true then, as it is now, that only the liberal point of view is taught and indoctrinated to the students. My Sister-In-Law had the same indoctrination recently, but then later she passed away of a heart attack.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Or, perhaps something a bit earlier The Marching Morons.
Uhh, if that's what you believe, why are you denying "instinct"?
For the same reason the UN has it's clutches in just about every university worldwide and is "sponsoring" specific things.
You allude to some huge conspiracy or something, then don't state what you think it is. And in the universities I've attended, I've never heard of any UN influence.
Science, in case you hadn't noticed, is politicized.
Everything, in case you haven't noticed, is politicized.
The problem is that if you assume the UN is right, and all cultures are "equal" in all respects, you can't have a coherent vision of history.
Well, for one, to work in your rant, you are asserting that history is a science. For something that's completely un-testable in any way, I'm not sure how one could assert it to be a science. "Bob said X on Y date" isn't a science. It's secretarial work. Placing that comment into perspective in relation to other comments on the same subject or at the same time is an art, not a science. But that aside, I'm not sure how equality makes history incoherent. The facts will be the same regardless of what you think of anyone. The "art" of assembling the facts into a coherent narrative may change based on perspective, but I can't see how favoring one side over another will give a more accurate narrative than assigning equal value to all involved. In fact, doing it twice, once with each side elevated over the other, will probably give the most accurate reflection because it would be more like it was experienced at the time by the separate peoples, and then the person evaluating the history should view both impartially. But somehow, getting the full picture would make history "incoherent"? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Especially the effects of different ways of raising kids (e.g. to explain why muslims have such a big terrorist problem while (nearly) every other religion was basically unfamiliar with the concept of suicide terror until very recently is utterly forbidden).
The early Christians were "terrorists." They didn't do suicide bombs, but they were actively working to subvert the political system to spread their religion. Christianity grew out of that phase, and Islam hasn't. The Church established early and firmly that suicide was unforgivable. That's not the same in Islam. They aren't committing suicide in the Christian view of the word. Killing oneself isn't strictly forbidden, or else smoking would be a sin. Instead, it's the idea of giving up on God that's the sin, and suicide is the ultimate expression of that. A suicide bomber doesn't give up on God, but instead embraces him. But that distinction is too subtle for the debate on religion, because people polarize and shut down their brains long before someone could make a point like that. Instead, it becomes an issue of "us good, them evil" from both sides, with a bunch of people that believe what their parents told them who don't want to kill anyone caught in the middle. But I've had discussions in school on this subject. That you haven't says something about where you've chosen to go to school.
Then how come that all the principles of just about existing field of study were invented an written down by priest (and/or monks).
Because 1000 years ago, monks were bored men living in seclusion tasked with understanding God (while knowing the task was impossible). So they picked some thing. Most understood that God didn't create babies. There was some physical process that wasn't understood that was put in place by God to do that. It's like a script, so he could set the world in motion and step away. And the monks were the geeks assigned the task of reverse-engineering the script.
Modern science is more like we have reverse-engineered all the major parts of the script of life, and gotten to the point where, as long as we use His original script as a template, being able to modify it. Now, to fill in the unknowns, we must alter the script and see what happens. And some
Learn to love Alaska
My wife expects me to bring home a steady amount of money. So the deal is that she takes care of the kids during business hours, and I take care of them in the early morning and the evening.
For better or worse the man as bread-warden (OE Hlaefward -> Mod. Eng. lord) and the woman as bread-maker (OE Hlaefdige -> Mod. Eng. lady) are deeply entrenched in expectations of both genders.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Can I just say as a father that's out of the house 5 days a week 13 hours a day, then comes home to do chores including laundry, bins, picking up after, clearing the table, the dishes, feeding the pets and yes nappies and bottles, handywork, handles the finances, and after all that still gets grief that I'm not spending enough time with my 7 month old son, I find your remarks insulting.
You sound learn not to take things personally.
If you do everything you say, then you're not part of the problem; you're acting the way men are supposed to act. I'm talking about the legions of men who don't act this way at all. Unfortunately, men like you seem to be a shrinking minority in America these days. I see it all the time: these "men" find some desperate woman to leach off of, never find a real job, sit on the couch watching sports all the time, and then claim "I'm taking care of my kids." even though they don't pay any child support for any of the kids they've fathered by 6 different women.
Be thankful my wife isn't writing this; you'd see a giant diatribe, much longer and more detailed than I can go into.
The whole men vs women thing is just old and just plain destructive. The reality is when a woman was expected to stay home, she had a full time job tending house and looking after the children. Now neither the male or the female earns enough to support the family long term. BOTH have to work to do it, and then somehow in their spare time find time to raise the children and do the chores. Instead of blaming employers for not providing a living wage, women and men turn on each other. Pathetic. Equality would have been the man spending less time at work, and the woman spending more time at work with the man looking after the children while the woman was at work. What we have instead is indentured servitude and a frenzied lifestyle where no one can fulfill their role.
I mostly disagree. It's not employers to blame, it's the people themselves. Look at how middle-class people used to live back in the 50s. They had 1 car, and they had a small house by today's standards. They didn't have 4000 square foot McMansions with granite countertops, and 2 BMWs in the garage. You can see this yourself; find the neighborhood in your city where the houses were all built in the 40s or 50s. That's what people lived in back then. Now, everyone wants more, because they think they're entitled to it. It's not employers failing to provide a "living wage", it's Americans who have become greedy and don't want to live in 1000 square foot houses so the wife can stay at home. If people dialed down their expectations and reduced their consumer lifestyle, they'd find they had enough money to support the family long term on a single paycheck. Don't forget, there's several billion other people on the planet who also want a better lifestyle, and we're now competing against them, like it or not.
Of course, when I rant about loser men and women that enable them, as above, I'm really not talking about the socioeconomic group that has a McMansion or BMWs; this is really referring to people in the lower middle class or below. As a landlord, I see a lot of that class, and I see the behaviors I detailed above a lot.
That's a good point. It just seems like that behavior is growing by leaps and bounds. Maybe it's just that the media shows it all the time, I don't know.
The big problem is society. If people could spend the years from 20 - 45 having and raising children and then spend the next 20 years having a career then we wouldn't have these problems.
It seems foolish to blame biology when it's our own fault for building a society that ignores biology.
Society is (should be) a lot more flexible than biology.
It's easy to say that, and a lot more difficult to do it. Basically, you're saying that society should give out giant welfare payments to everyone while they're young, in the hope that they'll pay them back when they get older and go back to work. How would you enforce such a system? What would the incentive be? To pay for this, a person would have to work full-time after their kids are grown, and almost all their paycheck would be taken in taxes to pay for this giant welfare system. Basically, it's a big pyramid scheme. But what if people decided they didn't want to bother working hard after their kids are grown, to repay their debt to society? There's no way you can force them to (at least force them to work in a high-paying job, which is what's needed to repay the debt), and the system would collapse.
This sounds just like communism, an economic system which has been proven to not work in practice.
The best solution to this would be for medical science to figure out how to drastically lengthen human lifespans, and also overcome the problem with female fertility, so that women can have healthy children when they're 50-70, and still be youthful and energetic enough to raise them.
So you're saying there's a good reason why they subsidize oil companies? I'd like to hear this one, or else I think you're full of shit.
Absolutely agreed. This problem affects women more than men for the simple reason that it's somewhat easier to be an absentee father living in the same home than to be an absentee mother. Neither is particularly desirable sociologically.
Many other societal ills are a result as well. People are apathetic towards the political process, their neighbors, and their communities because they have no time to be anything else. Perhaps crime would go down if there was a more significant chance of someone being home. Since the early '60s we've roughly doubled the person-hours a family must devote to work each week without the reasonably expected doubling of real income to match.
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. This article explores [a] possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs."
— Philip Greenspun Women in Science
Tweet, tweet.
In europe birthrates are so low that they are on track to eradicate European presence in Europe before 2150 (and make Europeans a minority in Europe by 2050).
Only if you ignore immigration. We've got plenty of that to make up for the low birth rates.
That's the unfortunatel upside of people being unhappy where they live: other countries can use that to supplement their population.
i have an argument to answer that, and it has nothing to do with morality or religion: a society which hobbles half of its people just because they are women is a society that cannot compete with one that does not hobble its women
Compete in what sense? Have you seen a breakdown of birth rate by country recently? And that goes for subcultures within a given country too.
you, meanwhile, wish to hobble a person who might advance your society with her mind, simply because she has to stay home and breastfeed
which is like the saudis: without making any bullshit religious or moral or ideological arguments, your vision of society is weaker than my vision, simply because my vision is able to produce more intellectual advancement by freeing up those people with a womb to contribute to society in ways that are not hampered, just because she has a womb
Well you have to make bullshit religious or moral arguments eventually. Why is your ideal society of equality superior to an ideal society of Nazis that had an unbiased approach to eugenics? Or even just the exact same society as yours except that children with grave mental problems are just killed immediately so as not to be a burden?
Other than that I mostly agree with you.
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.
Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog:
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:
1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
Consider Albert Q. Mathnerd, a math undergrad at MIT ("Course 18" we call it). He works hard and beats his chest to demonstrate that he is the best math nerd at MIT. This is important to Albert because most of his friends are math majors and the rest of his friends are in wimpier departments, impressed that Albert has even taken on such demanding classes. Albert never reflects on the fact that the guy who was the best math undergrad at MIT 20 years ago is now an entry-level public school teacher in Nebraska, having failed to get tenure at a 2nd tier university. When Albert goes to graduate school to get his PhD, his choice will have the same logical foundation as John Hinckley's attempt to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan.
It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls.
What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my 'medical school recommendations' directory."
— Phil Greenspun, Women in Science
Tweet, tweet.
Why is it that European countries allow so many immigrants from those areas anyway?
Various reasons, but mostly for extra labour. We had too much work and too few workers in the '70s, and apparently it was the other way around in Turkey and northern Africa.
Nowadays the biggest imflux is knowledge workers: highly educated and with a good income, usually from India, the US or China.
Studies have shown that couples who DON'T have children are, on average, significantly happier.
I remember a study that showed women without children were slightly happier than women with children, but a follow-up study showed that women who had children at a later age were happier than women without children, who in turn were happier than women who had children at a young age.
It's always more complicated than you think.
Most adults need no particular excuse to do most of those things.
It helps, though. We're expecting our first kid in a couple of weeks, and I just got a big lego set for my birthday from my wife. After not having bought any lego for 20 years.
Nowadays the biggest imflux is knowledge workers: highly educated and with a good income, usually from India, the US or China.
Oh really? That's good to hear, as all the horror stories I'm hearing are involving the Muslim immigrants. The Indians and Chinese are great; they're generally friendly, don't cause any problems, don't commit any crimes, don't follow insane religions, and actually contribute to society and to the economy with their high-paying, high-value jobs.
So is Europe having the same problem as the US, where the native children don't have any interest in science and engineering, and all think they're going to become movie stars or sports stars?
The number is a rough estimate by some who work in the field.
A rough estimate of what exactly? How do you quantify something like that?
The real issue is that our society does not adequately support health and child care for parents that attempt to maintain a middle class lifestyle. 50 years ago a middle class lifestyle was attainable with 1 full time worker, now it takes 2 people working at least full time. If we want parents, especially mothers, to be successful in the workplace we have to put in place systems that support this. Workplace child care, universal health care, flexible hours, telecommuting, realistic expectations (50+ hour work weeks are bad for everyone and should not be considered standard in any field), and a fundamental recognition that we work to live, not live to work, are all necessary to create an environment where the person is allowed to work to their full potential without shortchanging the rest of their life.
The longer the lifespan, the longer the person will be expected to work to support themselves, this isn't remotely close to solving any of the problems that we face as a society.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
My wife jusy finished her PhD in Math. It was about 3 years but it was worth it! We have 2 kids, 11 and 13. She took night courses which meant that I took more care of the family. She teaches higher level math and is a great role model for my two girls who happen like school and math!
I hope more spouses are supportive and we see MORE math/science ladies!
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
The real issue is that our society does not adequately support health and child care for parents that attempt to maintain a middle class lifestyle. 50 years ago a middle class lifestyle was attainable with 1 full time worker, now it takes 2 people working at least full time.
I disagree. As I pointed out in another post here, the definition of "middle class" has changed in 50 years. 50 years ago, middle class people did not have a 4000 square foot McMansion with granite countertops and two BMWs in the garage; they had houses of 1000-1500 square feet, which today is considered quite small, and they had one car at most. Go find a neighborhood in your city where the houses were all built in the 40s or 50s. Do dual-income middle class people still live in houses like that? Probably not.
What's changed is peoples' expectations. Americans want more: more and bigger cars, a bigger house, and more stuff. Worse, they think they're entitled to it. To pay for all that, and to keep up with the Joneses, both parents are going to work now, instead of being happy with one paycheck and a 1000 square foot house. This has nothing to do with "society" not supporting its members, it's the members of society that have developed lofty expectations of what things they should have, and are sacrificing their families, their health, and their sanity to achieve it.
It's still completely possible to life a comfortable lifestyle with 1 full time worker, as long as you don't mind living in a small house and sharing a car.
As for working to live rather than living to work, why do you think anyone is entitled to such a nice lifestyle? Remember, the people who built your iPod in China live in company-owned barracks, work 80 hours/week, and are virtually held prisoner there. What makes you so special that you deserve telecommuting, 40 hour weeks, child care, etc.? Those Chinese factory workers actually choose to work in those conditions, because it's a better life than working themselves to death in the fields.
The longer the lifespan, the longer the person will be expected to work to support themselves, this isn't remotely close to solving any of the problems that we face as a society.
Totally wrong. Thanks to the magic of investment and compounding interest, a person who lives to 200 or more can work during their first 50 or 60 years and save up a bundle (by not having children during that time), pay off a house, and live off their savings for the next several decades or even indefinitely if they do some part-time work (such as consulting). Of course, this won't help people that are too stupid to save adequately, or are determined to spend every penny that they get in every paycheck, but that's their problem. (Of course, they also need to be smart enough to not invest all their money in a company like AIG or Lehman Bros.).
I am a female studying Computer Information Systems at a public university. When I graduated high school, I cannot recall thinking "I should not enter this field because I may one day one to have children." It never even crossed my mind; further, I highly doubt that kind of thinking crosses the minds of many females first entering college. Sure, they may know they want kids, but in my opinion, it won't sway them from what they want to do in life.
Instead, my thought is that girls are intimidated by some of these fields that are male dominated. I am the only girl in majority of my classes and it took some getting used to. Before I felt like I was sticking out "like a sore thumb" as they say.
Or maybe it just goes back to what is "right" within society. You just don't see a lot of women in these fields. So possibly young women see and emulate that. We all want to be "normal" right? Doing anything outside of that norm can open us up to be teased, prodded, or mocked.
Just some of my opinions. Don't be too harsh on me, this is my first time commenting =P. I typically only come on here to see what my boyfriend is commenting on.
Nowadays the biggest imflux is knowledge workers: highly educated and with a good income, usually from India, the US or China.
Oh really? That's good to hear, as all the horror stories I'm hearing are involving the Muslim immigrants.
Size isn't everything. Germans and Indonesians are the biggest ethnic minorities in Netherland, but you hardly notice them.
The biggest problems don't come from recent immigrants, but from the kids and grandkids of the immigrants of the '70s. They've been Dutch since birth, have rarely been to the country of their parents, yet they don't feel accepted and don't see any future for themselves. So they make trouble or explore fundamentalism, which makes them even less accepted. It's a vicious cycle.
The Indians and Chinese are great; they're generally friendly, don't cause any problems, don't commit any crimes, don't follow insane religions, and actually contribute to society and to the economy with their high-paying, high-value jobs.
Indians are great and often adapt well. Chinese hardly adapt at all. They form their own mini societies, and some don't even learn the local language, but they do take care of their kids and they have a tight social structure that deals with any problems.
Maybe the problem is that Turkish and Moroccan immigrants were poorer and lower educated than other groups of immigrants, and they didn't bring a lot of functional social structure with them. Iranian immigrants are completely different, for example. They're often refugees, well educated, and have a tendency towards atheism. They integrate well with Dutch society, but badly with Turks and Moroccans.
So is Europe having the same problem as the US, where the native children don't have any interest in science and engineering, and all think they're going to become movie stars or sports stars?
Managers, football players and singers (we have three simultaneous Idol/Popstar shows on TV at the moment). Why managers? Because they get paid more than engineers. So people with brains become managers, and we end up with a surplus of managers and a shortage of engineers.
I am saying that subsidizing industries is not a de facto indicator of corruption, which (amongst other things) is what your simplistic line reasoning was implying.
"communism, an economic system which has been proven to not work in practice"
Pardon my French, but moron, where have you seen 'communism in practice'?
It certainly can be a de facto indicator of corruption, depending on the industry.
For instance, subsidizing Halliburton when the VP has known ties to that company and its execs is certainly an indicator of corruption. Similarly, using taxpayer funds to subsidize a private industry which is awash in profits, in the middle of a recession, seems like a pretty obvious indicator of corruption to me. Are you actually telling me it could be otherwise? Again, I'd like to hear your reasoning here.
It's not the same as, for instance, subsidizing the textile industry to protect it from cheaper foreign competition. Of course, arguments can be made on both sides whether taxpayers should subsidize an industry that can't compete with extremely low offshore labor rates to protect local jobs, but that's not an indicator of corruption, just of differing political ideologies.
The oil industry doesn't have workers that need any protection (it's not like they can move the oil fields from Texas or the GOM to China and take advantage of cheap labor there). It's also not an industry that's in danger of collapsing due to foreign competition (like the now-disappeared American textile industry), and instead is experiencing record profits. So please, tell me exactly why subsidizing this industry isn't an obvious indicator of corruption.
Hey stupid, it was practiced, in a form, in the Soviet Union. You can argue all you want about how close to Karl Marx's manifesto it came, but for all practical purposes, it was "communism", which is really a short way of saying "authoritarian socialism". The means of production were controlled by the State, and the State decided how to ration goods and services to the consumers. It makes a lot more sense to call it "communism" than "socialism", because most European countries today are known as "socialist", but the nature of their socialism is a far cry from the Soviet Union's: they have private companies and free markets, and the "socialism" really just deals with government regulations and healthcare.
Those are some pretty shonky results, to tell you the truth. Most of them focus on parents of very young children, or view babies as some kind of incontinent stock portfolio.
BellaOnline - a rant from a 'childfree' woman who is trying to convince the world and herself that babies are terrible, with an oblique reference to "a recent study conducted by the American Sociological Association"
Salon.com - the woman's main concern is whether a child will pay for itself financially. Hint: We don't reproduce for (our own) profit.
Independent.ie - at last something vaguely resembling data, but it's only based on pre-preschool aged children. That's the hard bit, when people say children are rewarding they don't mean that it's peachy from day 1.
Telegraph.co.uk - Again focussing on anecdotal evidence from one guy (Professor though he be) with little to back it up. Also concludes that financial stress is a large part of why childraising is difficult.
Newsweek - claiming that people find children disappointing because life as a parent isn't one big Napisan commercial.
If you put a survey in a friggin women's mag, you're going to get responses from a lot of frustrated, tired, cranky women who are dealing with a child in its terrible twos. Talk about selection bias. You're not going to get responses from the ones who are happily playing with their kids, or sitting cuddled up with hubby with a coffee and a book while the kid sleeps.
And most importantly, what all of the above are missing is that we have a deep psychological drive to reproduce, and unless it's satisfied, all the bigscreen TVs and fancy cars in the world won't make you really feel contented.
People who say "you can't try life both ways" are wrong - I had 26 years to experience life as single, and as part of a childless couple. I know what it's like. Other than getting a slightly faster car, or a bigger house, there's nowhere really to go. Sure, the world's your playground, but while playgrounds are fun to visit, you have to grow up eventually.
What I can say from experience is that there's no feeling in the world like holding your baby for the first time. Suddenly your life isn't all about you any more. It's an experience that could greatly benefit a lot of people, IMO.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
And frankly what you are saying is bollocks.
Some of the most creative people I have had the pleasure to work with have been Chinese and Indian.
All these supposedly Western (or do you really mean USian?) traits are just propaganda (and here I use the word after really thinking what I am saying).
The power elite in the US has willed the general populace to believe that the US is special and that the gifts of creativity and invention are somehow inherent to the US.
Of course what is not explained is that the US is built by immigrants, which is to say that the US actually innovates squat but relies on innovators going to the US in order to take advantage of an environment where certainly creativity is promoted, but not exclusive to any place in particular.
Keep believing this nonsense and stereotyping such big swathes of people. They have strength in numbers, even if you were correct (you aren't) thousands of people would escape the strictures of their educational system in order to develop their ideas.
Put another way, while the US was busy innovating the Chinese were busy working hard and saving for a rainy day, as a result China has the US by the proverbial short curly ones in the economic field.
If people are as short-sighted as you are believing Chinese and Indians are not creative, then you are ignoring thousands of years of history and actual knowledge of the global job market at your peril.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I wasn't born in Europe and I am European now.
So what kind of bullshit are you trying to promote there?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So apologize please.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Ethnicity does not exist. Get over it.
Large swathes of Europeans are descendants of people that have come from elsewhere. Check an history book, honestly. Huns, Mongols (who reached as far as Austria), you name it.
Spain and the Balkans in particular had Muslim (Arab, Turkish) rulers and populations for centuries.
Even in England people have black ancestors dating back to the Roman Empire, or do you think the Roman Legionaries that came from Africa didn't have a chance to intermingle with the fair ladies of the far away Roman province of Brittania?
Talking of ethnicity is misguided, talk about culture and you may have a point.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And we would reach them if growth continued to be exponential.
It is very lucky for us that as soon as people are more educated an affluent the prefer to have fewer children, if this wasn't the case there is no amount of technology that would save us from an exponential rate of growth . It is physically impossible.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The lobbying industry in the US has perpetuated a legalized system of bribery that would be impossible in countries like Mexico, Malaysia or Singapore.
And the corruption of the financial elite in rich countries is pretty much equivalent to the one of politicians in third world countries.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm guessing those numbers are based on rough estimates of the difference in the levels of neural activity when conscious versus fuly unconcious (comatose), or a non-dream sleep state.
(It goes without saying that in any sleep state with dreams involves some level of consciousness. In some cases nearly complete consciousness, namely lucid dreams, or quasi-lucid dreams (Those in which you consciously make decisions, etc, as opposed to those where you are just along for the ride)).
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I spent a few years out in the real world before heading back to school, and I can't completely disagree with what you say. You should read what I actually said, though. I never said they don't have the same natural abilities we do, just that their educational systems actively discourage creative thinking. Obviously some are able to overcome that, Einstein being an excellent example from the western world.
I've worked with great engineers who were Chinese, Indian, and a variety of other nationalities. I now have professors from around the world who are brilliant as well. However, that doesn't change what I'm seeing in my classmates, or what many of them have to say about the educational system in their native countries.
I'm the first to agree that if either of those countries get their social issues worked out, they're absolutely going to eat our lunch. That's one of the reasons why, in addition to taking some extra math classes (I was considering a double major), I'm also learning Chinese.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Yeah sounds about right. I wasn't trying to attack you or all women, but I do find that men's issues get tossed right out the door in the equality debate with men being told to just suck it up and am a little tired of hearing how men are layabouts who don't want to do their share. You seem like quite a rational and reasonable young woman who's actually able to praise individual men as well as women. There are too many women your age who are all to ready to just dump on all men.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I appreciate the positive feedback. The reason I was focused on the female side was because that was the focus of the thread, but it wasn't intended to indicate that I didn't see problems with how society treats the other side too.
Yes, you have successfully backpedaled into a mostly rational statement instead of the irrational, simplistic one you were endorsing before. Congratulations, here's a cookie.
I think his point was that immigrants don't retain the local heritage and customs more then the population will shrink.
It's this entire history and culture thing that we encourage immigrants to retain when they move to a new nation. But you can't expect the immigrants to know and honor the local customs and traditions that have been in place for centuries. What will happen is the European cultures will be displaced by foreign cultures imported with the immigrants. Generally on a small scale this is actually a good thing because you can take whatever is better and improve your society. But on a large scale, it's all too possible to lose the good things in the flood or replacements.
"Most of what we do every minute of every day is unconscious, "says University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whelan.
http://www.auburn.edu/~mitrege/ENGL2210/USNWR-mind.html
Hope that helps.
As I said in another post, it isn't ALL men who are "layabouts who don't want to do their share"; this behavior seems to be restricted to a certain socioeconomic group (to be blunt, usually either white or black lower-income couples). You're not going to see a lot of men laying on the couch, too lazy to find a job, in subdivisions of $500k+ homes, probably because such couples would never be able to afford that style of living unless they got a huge inheritance.
If you're going to feel offended by a generalization, make sure first that you're actually part of the group that's the object of the generalization.
If I had mod points, I'd give you all 5. Very insightful post.
I've noticed the same thing over nearly 15 years in IT.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
of possible tangential interest http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090325.wmothers25/BNStory/lifeMain/home "Highly educated women face a much more severe loss of earning power when they have children compared to mothers with less education, says a report published yesterday by Statistics Canada."