Most economist get their money by teaching and writing books, or put up a lot of speaking engagements.
??
Most Economics students that I know from actually studying Economics got their money by going into business. We didn't study the economy to write crappy editorials in the NY Times, you know.
Anecdote: The leading Australian economist's answer to a low wool price was to kill a lot of sheep to make wool scarce. That actually happened. A lot of farmers dutifully killed off most of their flocks, wool was a bit rarer but the price didn't go up because cotton exists. That's some "real world economics" as an example to show how stupidly simplistic their models are and how riduculously overcondent they are about them.
It is very easy to get an undergraduate degree in econ without knowing anything more than algebra and some statistics.
I don't think this is true.
Even your plain old intermediate macroeconomics course is going to require you to compute derivatives. But I don't remember needing anything beyond first semester calc for my undergrad in econ.
My wife and I are achievers, and we definitely have high expectations for our kids. But the one thing that we make clear to them over and over is that we made mistakes along the road, and we expect them to make mistakes as well. And that they can always come to us for help. And that our intent is always to act in their best interest, even though we will make mistakes from time to time, and even though some of our decisions will be unpopular with them.
Anyhow, you walk a fine line as a parent. Teenagers are mostly lazy people and need nudging just to get 'em out of bed in the morning. Some parents (like yours) go way overboard. In fact, yours went even farther than overboard by taking your life as a shame upon theirs, and pressuring you for it. Hopefully, in time, you'll be able to heal your relationship with them.
My post was not in relation to how the child acts, but how people act towards the child. Claiming to raise a child in a gender-free environment simply doesn't fly... one may not even recognize the differences in gendered play, but studies have proven that we do interact with people (babies included) differently based on their perceived gender.
This is a valid point, and I won't dispute it. I'm sure if you had a video of our interactions with the kids from when they were little, you'd probably be able to pick out some subtle, subconscious differences in how we treated them and attribute those differences to their genders.
But what I found so shocking was not that they had some tendencies toward their specific genders, but to what degree they took to their gender roles and at what an early age. We maintained just a general pool of baby toys because we were too cheap to actually buy anything, so we got to see how they played with the exact same toys. My daughter certainly never attacked a doll with a hammer. My son certainly never fed a fire truck a bottle nor comforted it when it "cried".
With gender-neutral toys like legos, my daughter used to bake me a cake and throw me a birthday party, while my son would build trucks and drive them around and smash them. Please be assured that I would have never thought of, on my own, baking a "lego cake" and throwing a party with legos. No one taught her to do that. And certainly no one ever encouraged my son to bludgeon dolls with hammers or knock over lamps before the age of 1.
While the parents may be accepting of their little boy figureskating, or their girl fixing cars... the schoolyard is not that forgiving. There is no such thing as a gender-free childhood.
I agree with this, and it further supports my point. A friend of mine has a daughter who was a tomboy until about age 13. She was teased mercilessly, and girls can be so cruel. But did she change? No, she did not change. How could she change? It was simply who she was--she was born that way. It was her nature.
It is the same basis for why "fag", "gay" and "dyke" are still insults, it implies that variation from gender norms is a bad thing.
This gets even more to the heart of gender norms being "nature". In many civilizations of the past (and even some in the present), being gay meant a very real risk of serious persecution, or even a death sentence (ever look up where the term "faggot" comes from?). Yet even in those civilizations, the homosexuality rate is estimated to be on par with the homosexuality rate in the most tolerant, liberal, modern countries like Holland.
And anyway, if homosexuality was a learned behavior and not innate, and the homosexuality rate is 10% or so, why would there even be any homosexuality? Wouldn't it be long gone by now?
Kind of like if you take a kid, tell them to play sports all the time with their brother and never hand them a book or encourage them to read on their own, they simply won't be much interested in reading. In school they'll be the kid who's favorite class is recess and gym, who can't sit still, and who has to be forced to read.
This is exactly the type of thing that you can't count on to work. Energy levels, learning style, and ability to focus for long periods of time are things that are very specific to each child and there is very little a parent can do to influence it. It's very easy for a parent who read to his child when he was young to pat himself on the back when said child likes reading and sits still in elementary school, but I doubt the parent had much to do with it.
Case in point: my mother stayed at home to raise me. She read to me constantly. But when I got to elementary school, my favorite class was "recess", I hated reading, and couldn't sit still unless I had plenty of time to run around like maniac (this was before the days of drugging up your kid for the crime of simply being a kid). I got involved in several sports from an early age, and that helped a lot in terms of sitting still, but I never did learn to enjoy books.
By high school, I wasn't doing any of the assigned reading at all. But I lettered in 3 sports!:)
Man you are depressing me. My wife and I just had a little girl and I've been dreaming about all the lego sets i'll be buying her in a few years... Tell me i won't have to give up on encouraging my little girl to give engineering a chance!
Congratulations! I hope you get some sleep.:)
Brief, for your comfort:
No reason to wait years to buy legos. They make big legos for little kids.
My daughter loves legos. When she was 2, she would bake me a birthday cake out of legos and throw me an elaborate birthday party.
If your daughter was not meant to be an engineer, your badgering will only make her hate you. However,
Kids imitate their role models, and their 2 biggest role models are their parents. If you model your engineering career as something you enjoy, find fulfilling, rewarding, etc., your little girl will pick up on that. If you involve her in your work in a kid-appropriate way, I'd say you stand a chance. Be generous with your time with her.
Is your wife an engineer? Do you have any female family members or friends who are engineers? From age 2-3, she's going to be old enough to know that she is a girl and will grow up into a woman (although it may take you considerably longer to accept this!). Like it or not, society currently says women don't become engineers. Having some female engineers around as role models will let your daughter know that normal women do become engineers and like it.
while you may not see a huge difference between bouncing and cooing, it is gendered based on the sex of the child.
My son wore a lot of pink and purple when he was a baby--hand me downs from his big sister--but the biggest thing he wore was that look of elation when he was throwing, smashing, running, knocking-over, overturning, mutilating, shooting, and disemboweling.
I'm pretty sure this goes far beyond any cooing or bouncy-games.
Sure. What do kids get as a gifts for (insert holiday celebration of your choice) from their relatives (especially Grandma/Grandpa)? Do the girls all get Bob the builder toys and the boys get a play kitchen and dolls? Probably not.
First of all, I'm talking way younger than dolls or bob the builder. Boys and girls start acting like boys or girls after just a few months of age.
Secondly, it makes no difference which toys you give to which gender. Like I said earlier, you give a boy a doll, and he will play with it as though it were a ball or a tank or some other type of vehicle. You give a girl a fire truck, and she'll feed it a bottle. Same thing with gender-neutral toys. Give a boy legos, and he'll build a fort and smash it. Give the exact same legos to a girl, and she'll bake you a cake.
I don't blame you for thinking I'm crazy. Before I had kids, I wouldn't have believed it, either. But if you look at the responses here from other parents, you'll see that I'm not an anomaly.
I don't think s/he is saying that the child recognizes pink as a girly color and hence deduces that they are a girl. The child simply develops an affinity for the color pink because it's what it is surrounded by most often and so when given a choice of colors it opts for pink.
A child developing an affinity for the color pink bears no relation to what I'm talking about, and that's why I called the example "silly". When I say boys and girls are different, it goes far beyond affinities for this or that color.
Boys seem to love action, motion, running, jumping, destruction, throwing, smashing, knocking-over, overturning, exploring. Even more striking than the actions themselves are the expressions of elation at just how much they are enjoying all of this activity. Girls seem to love speaking, singing, drawing, nurturing, cuddling, etc.
I can explain this over and over until I'm blue in the face, but it'll never get a full appreciation until it happens in your own household. Once you see firsthand the difference between how you thought you wanted to raise your kids, and who your kids became, then, and only then, will it sink in how bankrupt the side of "nurture" is in the nature vs. nurture question.
Why not encourage traditional gender roles? They seem to work out decently well. I dislike the default assumption that traditional gender roles = bad; where is the evidence?
I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but my wife and I decided not to squander our parental influence trying to shape our kids into perfect little boys/girls. Instead, we chose to focus on good values, manners, and appropriate behavior, and let them develop their own personalities.
Parents only get a limited amount of influence by fiat. My wife and I chose only to wield it over things the kids wouldn't pick up on their own.
Yeah... because people grow up in a vaccuum, and because anecdotes prove your case.
Anecdotes sure as hell do prove my case. My case was: "I can't tell you how many times I am personally shocked, and my friends who are also parents are also personally shocked, at just how innately different boys and girls are. And it's not just my own kids, but it's all kids."
If you want more generalized information, please avail yourself to the metric shitload of scientific research into gender roles of small children. You'll see that current research strongly supports what you thought my case was.
You personally might not encourage traditional gender roles, but the culture around you, including friends, relatives and the media, probably does.
That might be true, but we noticed the differences since long before they were old enough to even have a gender identity. How could a child take clues from society about his or her gender roles before even knowing his or her own gender?
We raise girls to be nurturers and boys to be tinkerers. Small children are all given little dolls, which act as security blankets. But when little girls get their next toy, it's another doll. A little boy will get a toy truck, or car. The girl gets the Barbie dream house. The boy gets the lego set. We define gender roles for children from the time they are small, then are amazed when they don't break out of those roles.
If/when you have children, you will understand just how false this is. I can't tell you how many times I am personally shocked, and my friends who are also parents are also personally shocked, at just how innately different boys and girls are. And it's not just my own kids, but it's all kids.
Another thing I found shocking is just how unreceptive children are to parents' attempts to define roles for them. They really are there own people, and that goes from about age 0.5 onwards. Go ahead. Try to give your male child a doll. Last time I gave my son a doll, he was about 1 year old. He threw it around for a while, then smashed it repeatedly with a hammer. Try giving your little girl a toy gun. She'll put it to bed and tuck it in and give it a kiss good night.
In our house, my wife and I do not encourage traditional gender roles. But man, oh man, do they sure happen on their own.
They should have started at making him asian to resemble a native Kazakh.
Who is "they"?
The Borat character is from Sacha's comedy schtick. It's not like the producers could just substitute someone else in his place--no one would have watched the movie.
The movie wasn't about Kazakhstan, it was about Sacha's character.
If you're asking this question, then you did it wrong.
The whole idea of Spring is that it is agnostic regarding which technologies you use. You should be able to swap out Hibernate and replace it with JDBC without affecting anything beyond the data access layer.
I recommend you just stop everything and read a good book about Spring before you dig this hole any deeper. Or just don't use Spring at all if you don't want to use it properly.
Slashdot Mirror
That was not an Econ problem--that was a finance problem.
And furthermore, that's not where the term "dismal science" comes from.
Most economist get their money by teaching and writing books, or put up a lot of speaking engagements.
??
Most Economics students that I know from actually studying Economics got their money by going into business. We didn't study the economy to write crappy editorials in the NY Times, you know.
Economics and Finance are totally different disciplines.
Anecdote: The leading Australian economist's answer to a low wool price was to kill a lot of sheep to make wool scarce. That actually happened. A lot of farmers dutifully killed off most of their flocks, wool was a bit rarer but the price didn't go up because cotton exists. That's some "real world economics" as an example to show how stupidly simplistic their models are and how riduculously overcondent they are about them.
[citation needed]
It is very easy to get an undergraduate degree in econ without knowing anything more than algebra and some statistics.
I don't think this is true.
Even your plain old intermediate macroeconomics course is going to require you to compute derivatives. But I don't remember needing anything beyond first semester calc for my undergrad in econ.
I liked your post, especially in light of my sig.
My wife and I are achievers, and we definitely have high expectations for our kids. But the one thing that we make clear to them over and over is that we made mistakes along the road, and we expect them to make mistakes as well. And that they can always come to us for help. And that our intent is always to act in their best interest, even though we will make mistakes from time to time, and even though some of our decisions will be unpopular with them.
Anyhow, you walk a fine line as a parent. Teenagers are mostly lazy people and need nudging just to get 'em out of bed in the morning. Some parents (like yours) go way overboard. In fact, yours went even farther than overboard by taking your life as a shame upon theirs, and pressuring you for it. Hopefully, in time, you'll be able to heal your relationship with them.
Good luck!
Don't let your boss fuck you, that's anti-capitalist. Fuck back.
Apparently, I wound up in the wrong line of work.
My post was not in relation to how the child acts, but how people act towards the child. Claiming to raise a child in a gender-free environment simply doesn't fly... one may not even recognize the differences in gendered play, but studies have proven that we do interact with people (babies included) differently based on their perceived gender.
This is a valid point, and I won't dispute it. I'm sure if you had a video of our interactions with the kids from when they were little, you'd probably be able to pick out some subtle, subconscious differences in how we treated them and attribute those differences to their genders.
But what I found so shocking was not that they had some tendencies toward their specific genders, but to what degree they took to their gender roles and at what an early age. We maintained just a general pool of baby toys because we were too cheap to actually buy anything, so we got to see how they played with the exact same toys. My daughter certainly never attacked a doll with a hammer. My son certainly never fed a fire truck a bottle nor comforted it when it "cried".
With gender-neutral toys like legos, my daughter used to bake me a cake and throw me a birthday party, while my son would build trucks and drive them around and smash them. Please be assured that I would have never thought of, on my own, baking a "lego cake" and throwing a party with legos. No one taught her to do that. And certainly no one ever encouraged my son to bludgeon dolls with hammers or knock over lamps before the age of 1.
While the parents may be accepting of their little boy figureskating, or their girl fixing cars... the schoolyard is not that forgiving. There is no such thing as a gender-free childhood.
I agree with this, and it further supports my point. A friend of mine has a daughter who was a tomboy until about age 13. She was teased mercilessly, and girls can be so cruel. But did she change? No, she did not change. How could she change? It was simply who she was--she was born that way. It was her nature.
It is the same basis for why "fag", "gay" and "dyke" are still insults, it implies that variation from gender norms is a bad thing.
This gets even more to the heart of gender norms being "nature". In many civilizations of the past (and even some in the present), being gay meant a very real risk of serious persecution, or even a death sentence (ever look up where the term "faggot" comes from?). Yet even in those civilizations, the homosexuality rate is estimated to be on par with the homosexuality rate in the most tolerant, liberal, modern countries like Holland.
And anyway, if homosexuality was a learned behavior and not innate, and the homosexuality rate is 10% or so, why would there even be any homosexuality? Wouldn't it be long gone by now?
Kind of like if you take a kid, tell them to play sports all the time with their brother and never hand them a book or encourage them to read on their own, they simply won't be much interested in reading. In school they'll be the kid who's favorite class is recess and gym, who can't sit still, and who has to be forced to read.
This is exactly the type of thing that you can't count on to work. Energy levels, learning style, and ability to focus for long periods of time are things that are very specific to each child and there is very little a parent can do to influence it. It's very easy for a parent who read to his child when he was young to pat himself on the back when said child likes reading and sits still in elementary school, but I doubt the parent had much to do with it.
Case in point: my mother stayed at home to raise me. She read to me constantly. But when I got to elementary school, my favorite class was "recess", I hated reading, and couldn't sit still unless I had plenty of time to run around like maniac (this was before the days of drugging up your kid for the crime of simply being a kid). I got involved in several sports from an early age, and that helped a lot in terms of sitting still, but I never did learn to enjoy books.
By high school, I wasn't doing any of the assigned reading at all. But I lettered in 3 sports! :)
Man you are depressing me. My wife and I just had a little girl and I've been dreaming about all the lego sets i'll be buying her in a few years... Tell me i won't have to give up on encouraging my little girl to give engineering a chance!
Congratulations! I hope you get some sleep. :)
Brief, for your comfort:
Good luck!
while you may not see a huge difference between bouncing and cooing, it is gendered based on the sex of the child.
My son wore a lot of pink and purple when he was a baby--hand me downs from his big sister--but the biggest thing he wore was that look of elation when he was throwing, smashing, running, knocking-over, overturning, mutilating, shooting, and disemboweling.
I'm pretty sure this goes far beyond any cooing or bouncy-games.
Sure. What do kids get as a gifts for (insert holiday celebration of your choice) from their relatives (especially Grandma/Grandpa)? Do the girls all get Bob the builder toys and the boys get a play kitchen and dolls? Probably not.
First of all, I'm talking way younger than dolls or bob the builder. Boys and girls start acting like boys or girls after just a few months of age.
Secondly, it makes no difference which toys you give to which gender. Like I said earlier, you give a boy a doll, and he will play with it as though it were a ball or a tank or some other type of vehicle. You give a girl a fire truck, and she'll feed it a bottle. Same thing with gender-neutral toys. Give a boy legos, and he'll build a fort and smash it. Give the exact same legos to a girl, and she'll bake you a cake.
I don't blame you for thinking I'm crazy. Before I had kids, I wouldn't have believed it, either. But if you look at the responses here from other parents, you'll see that I'm not an anomaly.
I don't think s/he is saying that the child recognizes pink as a girly color and hence deduces that they are a girl. The child simply develops an affinity for the color pink because it's what it is surrounded by most often and so when given a choice of colors it opts for pink.
A child developing an affinity for the color pink bears no relation to what I'm talking about, and that's why I called the example "silly". When I say boys and girls are different, it goes far beyond affinities for this or that color.
Boys seem to love action, motion, running, jumping, destruction, throwing, smashing, knocking-over, overturning, exploring. Even more striking than the actions themselves are the expressions of elation at just how much they are enjoying all of this activity. Girls seem to love speaking, singing, drawing, nurturing, cuddling, etc.
I can explain this over and over until I'm blue in the face, but it'll never get a full appreciation until it happens in your own household. Once you see firsthand the difference between how you thought you wanted to raise your kids, and who your kids became, then, and only then, will it sink in how bankrupt the side of "nurture" is in the nature vs. nurture question.
People treat little kids differently based on whether they are a boy or a girl, regardless of what you as a parent want (or even what the kid wants).
I'd love to hear an example of that. Remember, I'm talking about kids who aren't even 1 year old yet.
Your "wearing pink" example is silly. How would a 9-month-old know that pink is a "girl" color?
Why not encourage traditional gender roles? They seem to work out decently well.
I dislike the default assumption that traditional gender roles = bad; where is the evidence?
I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but my wife and I decided not to squander our parental influence trying to shape our kids into perfect little boys/girls. Instead, we chose to focus on good values, manners, and appropriate behavior, and let them develop their own personalities.
Parents only get a limited amount of influence by fiat. My wife and I chose only to wield it over things the kids wouldn't pick up on their own.
Yeah... because people grow up in a vaccuum, and because anecdotes prove your case.
Anecdotes sure as hell do prove my case. My case was: "I can't tell you how many times I am personally shocked, and my friends who are also parents are also personally shocked, at just how innately different boys and girls are. And it's not just my own kids, but it's all kids."
If you want more generalized information, please avail yourself to the metric shitload of scientific research into gender roles of small children. You'll see that current research strongly supports what you thought my case was.
Insightful? Parenting advice that includes giving a 1 year old a hammer?
What can I say? We're liberal parents?
Here is a link to the toy hammer employed by our little doll-smasher. Hopefully that clears up any confusion.
You personally might not encourage traditional gender roles, but the culture around you, including friends, relatives and the media, probably does.
That might be true, but we noticed the differences since long before they were old enough to even have a gender identity. How could a child take clues from society about his or her gender roles before even knowing his or her own gender?
We raise girls to be nurturers and boys to be tinkerers. Small children are all given little dolls, which act as security blankets. But when little girls get their next toy, it's another doll. A little boy will get a toy truck, or car. The girl gets the Barbie dream house. The boy gets the lego set. We define gender roles for children from the time they are small, then are amazed when they don't break out of those roles.
If/when you have children, you will understand just how false this is. I can't tell you how many times I am personally shocked, and my friends who are also parents are also personally shocked, at just how innately different boys and girls are. And it's not just my own kids, but it's all kids.
Another thing I found shocking is just how unreceptive children are to parents' attempts to define roles for them. They really are there own people, and that goes from about age 0.5 onwards. Go ahead. Try to give your male child a doll. Last time I gave my son a doll, he was about 1 year old. He threw it around for a while, then smashed it repeatedly with a hammer. Try giving your little girl a toy gun. She'll put it to bed and tuck it in and give it a kiss good night.
In our house, my wife and I do not encourage traditional gender roles. But man, oh man, do they sure happen on their own.
They should have started at making him asian to resemble a native Kazakh.
Who is "they"?
The Borat character is from Sacha's comedy schtick. It's not like the producers could just substitute someone else in his place--no one would have watched the movie.
The movie wasn't about Kazakhstan, it was about Sacha's character.
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. distcc and ccache has been a staple of Gentoo users since forever.
And who in their right mind would pay for their services instead of a licensed, "clean" prostitute ?
Someone who doesn't want to pay as much?
Let's not forget that once prostitution becomes a legal profession, it will be considered 'work' from the perspective of unemployment agencies.
This is a silly argument. Exotic dancing is already legal. Do you see women being forced to become strippers or lose unemployment benefits?
I didn't think so.
If you're asking this question, then you did it wrong.
The whole idea of Spring is that it is agnostic regarding which technologies you use. You should be able to swap out Hibernate and replace it with JDBC without affecting anything beyond the data access layer.
I recommend you just stop everything and read a good book about Spring before you dig this hole any deeper. Or just don't use Spring at all if you don't want to use it properly.
Well, thanks for being the statistic breaker for me! You lose 2 laptops so I don't have to. ;)