Two other factors to consider: 1) people grow and change and 2) working a job is very different than doing "the same" activity as a hobby.
I enjoy gardening and cooking as hobbies, but I don't want to work a job as a landscaper or line chef. After 20+ years of coding, I absolutely hate it despite having started out loving it, but I recognize that my cushy job is less hours for more pay than I could get doing anything else.
> working a job is very different than doing "the same" activity as a hobby.
This is very true. I've been fortunate enough to be able to take a break from working. For a while after quitting my 9-5, I didn't want to touch code at all (hooray burnout). But after a while I started working on my own projects, and have gotten involved in open source again. I'm not doing 40 hours of OSS work per week, but it's much more than I'd be able to do with a full time job.
It's very different to get to work on whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want. "Working" like this feels completely different from working for an employer, even an employer that gives a large amount of autonomy.
What? Of course maternal instincts exist and are distinct. The differences in reproduction are the most fundamental basis of sex differentiation in animals.
In some mammals, fathers have literally no contact with their offspring while mothers care for them for years (eg, bears). In others, the mother and father both remain as part of a pack, but the mother does all of the direct care and the father is doing hunting or protection. In some, the father may have a minimal role in early life but then become more involved later as their offspring learn to hunt or fight.
The social construct of both parents having equal and identical roles in parenting at all stages of child development is very new and very culturally unique to Western, industrialized and affluent societies. Across all primates and all evidence of pre-industrial humans, maternal and paternal roles were very different.
Actually, there are many species who share the burden of child rearing equally. It is often a matter of resource availability, if food is scarce, males become aggressive and patriarchal structures emerge more prominently, and vice versa. Human history has been harsh, so it is not surprising that our ancestors tended to that type of society.
So, it is simply not true “across all” anything. I will forego badly parroting what actual experts say, so instead I recommend Robert Sapolsky’s lectures on this in his biology courses at Stanford. They’re available on YouTube.
I also notice you just vaguely referred to various animals in instead of humans, which is curious.
My position here, to be clear, is that there are gender differences in personality and phenotype, but they are mostly inconsequential for child rearing in a resource-rich society, ie, both genders are equally competent parents. Individual variation outweighs gender differences.
> I also notice you just vaguely referred to various animals in instead of humans, which is curious
Intentionally so, because humans are animals and that's an imaginary distinction. Modern western society likes to pretend like we're these abstract minds that are attached to bodies. We're not, we're primates, only a tiny bit different than our ape cousins.
If you want to stick to humans, for about 99.9999% of the 315,000 years humans have been around, no mother was pumping breastmilk and sticking it in the refrigerator so that the father could do the 4am feeding.
Your comment is essentially putting a causal arrow backwards. Biology and nature would have us behaving in far more strongly differentiated gender roles. Contemporary western social norms and modern technology allow us to go against that nature. "Maternal instincts" are as real and fundamental as any other survival instinct humans or any other animal experience.
”We’re basically monkeys” is a bad argument when monkeys share child rearing duties IF they have resource abundance, as do other animal species. Pair bonding is a term to search for here, this is a really well-studied question. I again don’t want to parrot experts badly. Sapolsky is again a great popsci level resource here. Interestingly, parental investment is also correlated with long reproductive cycles such as humans. It makes sense I guess.
But please don’t let “human is just smart monke” turn into some naturalist fallacy wherein men must be manly because we were made so. We weren’t, but given a stressful environment, we CAN turn out that way.
These sorts of vague, slightly conspiratorial and cynical comments aren't helpful. "The system" isn't designed by some secret cabal of sinister tricksters who are intending it to fail specific people in specific ways.
"The system" is a hodgepodge of thousands of different laws, programs, agencies and organizations under a multitude of federal, state, county and city jurisdictions and operating under rules and budgets that were approved over numerous different sets of elected and appointed individuals over decades, each of which had to strike compromises and try to work within the existing system.
If you don't do enough to prevent fraud, you get a lot of fraud (see recent issues with covid payroll protection and other related measures, or homeowners insurance issues in Florida after hurricanes). If you do too much to prevent fraud, you get legitimate cases not getting the support they need.
No matter what the system is, you're going to have some amount of both "false positive" and "false negative" outcomes from it.
I think it isn’t exactly as conspiratorial as you are portraying it. It is a mess and some of that is an amalgamation of cruft. However limiting social spending is a major political point of conservative politics, like it or not.
There is very little effort towards making the system better for people who rely on it. And a lot of that is specifically due to politics.
The barrier between a recipient of benefits and the SSA is insane and has the obvious effect of making it harder to access those benefits. That isn’t just happenstance.
People living off SSA benefits aren’t exactly living large. I know because I work in a field that provides income based services and is almost entirely funded with federal/state money. Preventing fraud is not the primarily objective of the SSA when it comes to benefits, it is preventing paying out at all.
Edit: On the PPP Covid loans, I agree they were made in a way that allowed them to be abused. The thing about that though is that corporate welfare is the only acceptable form of welfare based on recent history. We throw millions at telecoms companies, who are often the worst rated companies in the country. Verizon even told the federal government that more money wouldn’t help them roll out infrastructure any faster, but the government still gave them more.
The obvious difference between social welfare is that people have a major inequality of power and that leaves them in an incredibly disadvantageous position to climb over a very tall obstacle. Corporations meanwhile pay lobbyist out the ass to basically ghost write legislation to benefit them personally, as well as get government money. But hey, that’s free market capitalism, right? Sorry this is a little aggressive and I don’t mean this as a personal attack on you, just got a little angry as I watched a client struggle with the VA over benefits between the time I wrote this post and this edit.
> “The system” isn’t designed by some secret cabal of sinister tricksters who are intending it to fail specific people in specific ways.
That’s true; the elites rigging it to fail often are not at all secret about their intent, the most common of which–for the entire inadequate social safety net–is to ensure that it errs on the side of maintaining economic coercion driving people into accepting poor terms in the labor market to ensure aggregate output and low labor costs and minimize consumption of government-supplied benefits even when it would yield a palpable increase in living conditions.
> "The system" is a hodgepodge of thousands of different laws, programs, agencies and organizations under a multitude of federal, state, county and city jurisdictions and operating under rules and budgets that were approved over numerous different sets of elected and appointed individuals over decades, each of which had to strike compromises and try to work within the existing system.
Yah... the problem is, there's a critical mass where the main job of the system becomes to perpetuate the status quo. Efforts at simplification or to raise efficacy are threatening to too much of the system and attract substantial resistance.
I think a core problem facing the US is a lack of administrative capacity in government. We have excessively complicated systems collapsing under their own weight, but steadfastly defending their own existence. We have the political right thinking this is an inevitable characteristic of government, and so they create a self-fulfilling prophecy by kneecapping administrative strengths whenever they can; and we have a political left that is so excited about all the things government can do to help that they don't spend nearly enough effort considering how we can build the administrative systems necessary to reap these benefits.
To add to what you wrote: the system is also dynamic. How it works (or doesn't) today impacts how it'll look tomorrow. Interventions can be made, and they may initially improve things, and then the world at large adjusts to balance them out. It needs continuous tuning.
Conversations like this are part of it too, though I admit it's frustrating to see the same problems being highlighted over and over again, for decade or more, with no improvement in sight.
If you wanted to embed dark patterns, wouldn't such an opaque system be ideal?
I don't think "the system" such as it is is designed by a secret cabal of sinister tricksters, but they do get a seat at the table, don't they? And they're not exactly going to come out about being in the secret cabal are they? That would be a pretty poor secret cabal.
Not at all, genuinely curious at what would be a safe job. Not something I have ever had to think about, not saying that people who have seizures can't work.
Office is the safest I guess but still has risks.
For example, if someone is in the office in a cubicle and has a seizure they could hit the desk corner or go unnoticed for a while depending on how many people are in the office that day.
Think of it instead as “risks beyond staying at home”. Falling and hitting your head could happen to anyone, and I’d wager it happening at work is far safer as you are more likely to be quickly found.
Years ago my uncle got a seizure while sleeping, fell out of bed, and ended hospitalized for weeks with a skull fracture. With these kind of conditions more or less anything in "unsafe" to a degree.
Exactly - and I’ve read enough stories of this sort of thing happening to people living alone, and no one notices until things start to smell - whereas even in a practically empty office worst case you’d be found (hopefully still breathing) by janitorial or security when they make their nightly sweep.
Public transit or taxi/ride share? Lots of people with medical conditions where you can't drive work just fine. Also if you live in a city you can probably walk to work.
Also even with seizures you can drive if you're on medication and haven't had one in a while.
Sure. But a lot of times it’s not. As a counter point, I have a relative with cerebral palsy that has a shockingly normal life for as disabled as she seems to me. In a lot of ways it’s terrifying to see her getting around but she lives a very full life. People, in spite of disabilities, need not just be warehouses until they die.
This isn't "context" this is literally the definition of an ad hominem attack. "Attacking a person's character or motivations rather than a position or argument"
If universities have a massive, bloated and overly expensive legion of administrators, does it matter if the person pointing that out is doing so because they want to reduce the burden on students who are forced to take out massive loans or to reduce the burden on the taxpayers who ultimately pay those loans when the government "forgives" them?
I don't have infinite time available. I can't read every article posted on HackerNews and carefully consider all its points. Knowing this author's affiliation is a big clue to me that this might not be a key source I want to rely on for this topic. Obviously this doesn't actually refute the author's points, but I don't care. This is enough information for me to decide to spend my time elsewhere.
I understand the need to have heuristics like this, but the hazard is that it allows bad behavior to go unchecked. If people with "good" affiliations circle the wagons, ignoring or downplaying the issue, how will bad behavior ever get corrected?
Yes. Because they aren't attacking bloated bureaucracies that have been sufficiently captured and privatised, and the offered solutions might be subtly biased. It's only an ad hominem if after using the heuristic and critically checking any hidden bullshit the personal bias of the interlocuteur you stick to your hostility even if you don't find anything. Otherwise it's just context that helps you think
Conflicts of interest are definitely important context for me. You can jam that into the definition of ad hominem, I guess, but this isn't really a debate, so I don't see how it's relevant. Maybe if they'd said "this article is wrong because they're funded by so and so". But they didn't.
logical fallacies are interesting. in logic, it doesn't matter what the objects are, just give them letters for names. a logically valid argument always holds no matter what you substitute the variables for; logically invalid arguments don't always hold no matter what you substitute the variables for; a logical fallacy is when you think an invalid argument is a valid one.
there's a tendency to fall into a fallacy of thinking an argument must be wrong because it's invalid. in real life, everyone does actually care what the objects being discussed are, and restricting yourself to logical validity would constrain your thinking to the point of uselessness. by dismissing a logically invalid argument out of hand because it's logically invalid, you're falling into your own fallacy, because to assume what's being claimed is false just because what's being claimed doesn't hold for everything itself doesn't hold for everything. for instance, if i tell you not to believe someone's claim because they cheat on their spouse, you can't assume they are lying about that claim, but you also can't assume they aren't lying about it.
so if someone tells you a person is motivated by greed to make an argument, yes, it isn't necessarily true that their argument has to be wrong--here's a cookie--but that also doesn't mean they aren't decieving you. what do you know about the subject other than what this potentially interested party just told you?
anyway, pay attention to when you fall for the fallacy fallacy, it's a window into your own ideology.
Identifying logical fallacies is a 1-pass spam removal system. Identifying and blanket dismissing arguments based on logical fallacies reduces the low-effort noise and allows the worthwhile arguments to be heard.
Ad hominem is a problem when you are arguing with people who argue in good faith & who can demonstrate unbiased willingness to engage in open discussion, who can hold & respect a broad set of interests when they argue.
But when the person you are arguing with has a permanent bent that will distort & warp every argument, it's just a defense of open society to call the person out on that bias, on their forever grinding that axe.
This mention was an excellent & valuable warning to me. That it happens to resemble an attack to some people, is, in my view, far secondary to the broad public good this post served.
> Ad hominem is a problem when you are arguing with people who argue in good faith & who can demonstrate unbiased willingness to engage in open discussion, who can hold & respect a broad set of interests when they argue.
No, this is changing your standards of logic to support intolerance. You don't get to decide people's motivations against their will, or accuse them of bad faith without an example of the display of that bad faith.
In this case I think there is some pretty significant examples linked showing exactly what kind of faith this group has. I think it's up to the reader to decide for themselves whether this group deserves positive, neutral or negative bias against them.
I have significant reservations about my statements on when ad-hominem is ok or not. I think there's more than the logic of debate that is important: that I re-affirm. But how & when & where the things beyond the logic happen is still a big question for me. In this case, I think this is pretty core & vital context that everyone is going to have to parse & interpret for themselves.
Running into an article like this online & not knowing the context isn't good. The meat of the top post here, to me, set some basics about who this group is & linked some wikipedia articles. This is obvious public benefit. The top post & I both have additional editorial things to say, that these people are actively detrimental to society for their own good & we should be careful reading this. That's a bit of an attack, but neither of us have said to reject the article or disbelieve it; we have not put to the audience logical conclusions; there is context (who the carrier is), and (designated opinioned) caution/hazard about the meta-message being delivered.
On this particular topic, I don't think it really matters who the source is, especially since the problems brought up in the article are generally accepted to be true at least from the comments I have read. Even a broken clock is right twice a day as the saying goes.
> in order to protect rent seeking that harms education
Without making any value judgements about the comment in question, it’s worth noting that it is possible to be both against rent seeking and take issue with the source.
These are not mutually exclusive, and the accusation is unnecessary.
That is essentially what I believe is the only reasonable answer, which is that some people want to be informed but they do not want to inform others (i.e. share the link) if they think the source will embarrass them. The public value would come from their work to unearth and share an alternate source.
There are also people who do not want to be informed if the source is “bad,” but they’ll never admit it so shouldn’t be asked, and I don’t think OP or most people here are that entrenched.
A source speaking contrary to its own biases is very likely to be notable, and a source speaking along with its biases is essentially information-free. This implies that understanding a source's biases is crucial context to evaluating what they have to say.
As a former student and Pell grant recipient, I never felt like conservatives had my back. I remember a Republican state legislator saying, while I was in school, that all students should be required to spend some minimum amount of money per year, regardless of aid, because “we needed skin in the game,” as if many of us we’re not perilously close to dropping out due to expenses.
This is important because many of these conservative groups focus on making education cheaper for students, and their families, who are already wealthy. This should be acknowledged when looking at their solutions because they don’t count many Americans as their stakeholders.
What we’re talking about is discouraging people from growing their skills and contributing to society.
I can’t say why that makes sense to other people. I suppose one assumption where asking individuals to pay some minimum amount would make sense is that education is perceived as a privilege that specifically benefits individuals, so individuals should not receive such benefits for free.
However, corporations require bachelors degrees for professional positions. Therefore having employees with bachelors degrees must also benefit them in some ways as well. However they would not be the ones taking out loans, risking dropping out and still needing to pay those loans, nor risking defaulting on those loans. However they will receive a pool of self trained employees for them to pick from to fill their ranks at their convenience.
We’d be shifting risk from institutions onto individuals. I don’t see a positive impact emerging from that.
> What we’re talking about is discouraging people from growing their skills and contributing to society.
We're talking about discouraging people from taking three or four years off on society's dime that won't contribute anything to society. A degree like that certainly seem plausible, and the individual is probably in a position to spot cases that higher-level oversight might miss.
> However, corporations require bachelors degrees for professional positions. Therefore having employees with bachelors degrees must also benefit them in some ways as well. However they would not be the ones taking out loans, risking dropping out and still needing to pay those loans, nor risking defaulting on those loans. However they will receive a pool of self trained employees for them to pick from to fill their ranks at their convenience.
Sure, and those corporations share in the tax burden that supports people in getting degrees.
I quit eating meat a few years ago for ethical reasons but I still like to have a burger or brat or have a meat-like product in a pasta sauce or whatnot, and Beyond meat fills that role well.
This is a good "tell me you only know life in the city, without telling me you've only lived in the city".
To anyone living in a rural area or working in agriculture, conservation, timber/lumber, mining, ranching, hunting, etc, the idea of a finding a random stranger walking across their property would be as alarming as finding that stranger in their living room. The tourists may unintentionally cause damage, disrupt operations or create an unsafe condition even if they were well-meaning. And of course, many people will not be the ideal "leave no trace" expert and many will cause problems- they'll leave litter, they'll gather sticks for firewood, they'll clear areas for campsites, they'll walk on wet grass, they'll leave human waste, they'll leave fire rings with charred remains, they'll pick flowers or fruit, they'll take fossils, they'll carve their names in trees and paint on rocks, etc.
Ethically, if we're going to start taking away people's property rights, I'd rather we force vacant urban housing to be made available to rent before we start forcing farmers to clean up rogue campsites on their fallow fields.
"Freedom to roam" laws are an archaic notion that only sort of work in very specific locations like the Nordic countries.
Even with a large staff of park rangers and a budget for trail maintenance, trash bins, toilet facilities and informational signs about "leave no trace" ethics, it's still hard to minimize the damage tourists do in parks. And even within parks, we don't let people freely roam, we ask them to stay to trails to prevent erosion and we shut down areas seasonally to protect critical nesting, feeding or migration paths. To ask private citizens to deal with such damage to their property is unfair and unreasonable.
Further, the average city dweller has no ability to assess what land is safe for them to hike on in America. Again, for parks we have dedicated staff to put up signs and set clear rules about closures and access, but agricultural lands are far more complex. What looks like "unused" land may be grazing for cattle, flowers for bees or habit for wildlife (whether for conservation or hunting). It may have been recently sprayed with chemicals which are harmful if humans come into contact with them or it may have recently been planted and footsteps will trample early crops.
"Freedom to roam" is like suggesting that the solution to homelessness is to just let homeless people choose to sleep on anyone's couch who wasn't using it. The millions of acres of managed public lands in the US, which can have appropriate usage policies depending on environmental impact, historical significance, number of visitors, etc and which can be properly managed for the long-term balance of many diverse stakeholders needs is a far better system.
I think you’re missing the point. The right to roam is about the public having access to public land. Public land is paid for and supported by taxpayers, and is therefore theirs to enjoy.
Surrounding public land by privately held land, with no rights for the public to freely access it is just not right. It essentially becomes the domain of the land owner that controls access, which then becomes a form of market intervention by the government.
This is often a direct subsidisation of a private enterprise and should be opposed by the left because it denies equality and freedom of movement to the people that own the land. It should be opposed by the right as government intervention and interference. It only benefits the individual landowner.
Of course, this issue is magnified by the colonial concept of land ownership and ignores any preceding title or use of the land. This also prevents traditional owners from accessing sites of significance.
This is not a Nordic idea. Ideas similar the right to roam built many of the economies of new world countries. Cowboys and cattle drives in the US, Drovers in Australia relied on the free movement of men and stock over public and private land.
Finally, the land belongs to the people. Laws exist in many jurisdictions for governments to reclaim any land for any reason. Private ownership should be considered long term, but temporary. Denying access to something that the people own is undemocratic, unfair, and unnecessary. Access and maintenance shouldn’t be reduced to the cost of stewardship.
It looks like there's a disconnect here on what we're talking about for "freedom to roam". If you read through the Wikipedia article linked in the comment I was responding to, you'll see that it's about private property, not public parks.
The issue of land being inaccessible by virtue of being surrounded by private land without roads is solved by the unrelated, separate legal notion of an "easement" to allow access. Easements are used regardless of if the landlocked plot of land is publicly or privately owned.
I agree with you in the general notion of "It's bad that this public land is inaccessible and that should be fixed". But just clarifying on the terms.
I enjoy gardening and cooking as hobbies, but I don't want to work a job as a landscaper or line chef. After 20+ years of coding, I absolutely hate it despite having started out loving it, but I recognize that my cushy job is less hours for more pay than I could get doing anything else.