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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • To be clear, women’s work before World War II was more than just the dishes. If you look at the guidebooks published for housewives back then, you’ll see that they were expected to have quite a few skills that most households now generally outsourc to external businesses:

    • Feeding the family. This was more than just cooking. They were expected to process foods from a much less processed state (much more butchery of meats and cleaning and processing of vegetable products, dairy products, baked goods), and then preserve foods for out-of-season consumption (pickling, preserving in jams/jellies, home canning, drying, and in some cultures smoking). Much of this work is now done by the industrial food processing industry so that we can buy cans or jars or boxes of the stuff that’s already processed or partially processed. Even our fresh foods have been cleaned and sorted and trimmed to mainly just the edible parts.
    • Making and maintaining textiles. We see bits of this surviving into knitting and crocheting as hobbies, but back before the rise of cheap apparel it was important to be able to clean and repair clothes that we’d now just take to our local dry cleaner.
    • Maintaining the house itself. Home improvement is masculine coded today, but a lot of the stuff that qualifies as home maintenance was traditionally the work of a homemaker. Plus things like heating the house required active involvement of keeping fires burning and fuel on hand.
    • Making household consumables. Homemakers were making their own soap, their own candles, and all sorts of little tools.

    The economic shifts that come from women leaving the home for the paid workforce are all over, and some of them are pretty pronounced. But it’s important to remember that women worked hard before they ever got paid for it. Life was toil.


  • It’s not actually a clear inverse relationship on the individual level, even if the data shows a correlation at the national level.

    There are a few things happening that complicate the analysis at the individual level, too:

    • Wealth/income are correlated with age, and 40 year olds tend to have both higher incomes and lower fertility rates than 25 year olds.
    • Wealth also correlates with race, for better or for worse, and there have always been persistent differences in birth rates by race.
    • The sample sizes aren’t big enough to show whether the very rich (95th+ percentile) actually reverse the trend, to where being richer is correlated with higher birth rates, where the curve ticks back upward at very high incomes.
    • The correlation is actually the other direction when looking at the individual incomes in certain countries (Netherlands, Sweden, Norway), and the effect is stronger when looking at men and their incomes.

    Other country level data also suggest that there are big cultural factors in birth rates as well.

    All in all, the relationship between income and fertility is complicated, with lots of other factors at play.



  • Makes me wonder about the wheel’s rotational inertia, too. In theory, a hubless wheel could be lower mass overall without the need for a center axle/hub and spokes connecting the outside to the center. But that’s all weight saved in the center of the wheel with lower effect on overall rotational inertia. Visually, the picture that makes the thumbnail in this post shows that the brake disc has to be further from the center of the wheel, which I imagine adds a lot more weight (more material necessary for the overall brake disc being a larger circle) and a lot more rotational inertia (further from the center).

    Maybe the whole design itself can save weight in certain places that make up for the weight added in other places. But I just have a ton of questions, and am overall pretty skeptical of the long term potential of this design.

    Looks cool, though, I guess.



  • Today? Probably not.

    More than 2 weeks ago, when this was published? In that context, based on what was common knowledge among the public then, I understand why he erred on the side of overexplaining that the U.S. military was on the cusp of escalating to an invasion.




  • By this logic fat shaming is acceptable?

    I mean, yeah, in many contexts. For example, when a professional athlete shows up to training camp after putting on a bunch of fat in the off-season, that’s fair game. It’s literally their job to maintain their bodies and if we’re allowed to criticize their job performance then we’re certainly allowed to criticize their maintenance of their physical fitness. There’s obviously a clear parallel here between that and other public figures where their intelligence may be fair game for criticism.

    More broadly, when people are engaged in unhealthy habits of any kind (from smoking to sleep deprivation to overwork/stress to terrible relationship decisions to unhealthy eating/exercise habits), I think it’s fair game for loved ones to point that out and encourage steering their lives back towards healthier choices. I’m not advocating that we go and make fun of strangers, the range of acceptable conversation in our day to day relationships is going to be different.

    No, that’s not OK to mock people’s medical conditions, and it’s always a good idea to exercise some empathy and humility to know that things might not always be as easy for others as for yourself. But I’ve never been on board with the idea that fatness is somehow off limits, in large part that I don’t believe that most people’s fatness is inherently innate. Correlations between moving to or away from high obesity areas (most notably between countries or between significant changes of altitude, but also apparent in moves between city centers and suburban car-based communities) make that obvious that fatness is often environmental.

    TLDR: I make fun of Trump’s fat ass all the time.


  • But because intelligence is an inherited trait

    I don’t think this is true, practically speaking. Intelligence is like endurance running speed in that there are heritable components to it, but at the end of the day environmental factors dominate on who is or isn’t faster than another.

    I can make fun of someone for being dumb in the same way that I can make fun of someone for being a slow runner. It’s only problematic when their slowness is actually caused by something out of their control, like some kind of health issue.


  • The United States and the UK successfully blocked attempts to outlaw all use of incendiary weapons, and all use of incendiary weapons against personnel, and all use of incendiary weapons against forests and plant cover.

    This is an area where it’s perfectly reasonable to disagree with how the US watered down this convention, to push for stricter rules on this, and to condemn the use of thermite as an anti-personnel weapon and the use of incendiary weapons on plants that are being used for cover and concealment of military objectives.

    So pointing out that this might technically be legal isn’t enough for me to personally be OK with this. I think it’s morally reprehensible, and I’d prefer for Ukraine to keep the moral high ground in this war.