301–310 of 379 posts
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Not to mention shared genes for educational attainment and interests.
Is there a proven role of genetics here or is this pseudoscientific determinism?
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I think there is a difference. As I understand the caste system, it’s inherited durably. If I’m X, not only will I always be X, but my kids and grandkids will also be X, so there’s no point in trying to become “not X”. Not so for socioeconomic class. My grandfathers milled steel and mined coal. They made sure their kids became the first generation in the family to attend college. My parents became teachers and made s…
> It still matters who your parents are, but in a significantly different (and I think more fair) way. It amazes me when people think the current socioeconomic structures are fair. You do realise that most people here, including perhaps you are, economically speaking, closer to being poor than being part of the 1% rich, right? The economic gap between those you might consider poor and yourself is a rounding error mag…
I don’t care that someone has well over 5 orders of magnitude more wealth than I have. It doesn’t materially negatively affect my life in the least and, on the contrary, their inventions make my daily life better by wildly more than any negative impacts their houses, yachts, airplanes, or rockets could possibly have.
I’m here to spend my life energy and time pursuing the things that are important to me: raising and loving my family, doing work and hobbies I find stimulating, traveling and learning about the world. Bellyaching that I’m not a literal or figurative monarch is not among the ways I choose to spend my time and energy.
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I was just going to look for data on plumbers and carpenters. One common theme to all these jobs is that they tend to be quite stable, and require a life-long set of skills. My father did metalwork before moving to an office job in the civil service. He was the son of a die pressman. Who was the son of a blacksmith. Dad taught me how to weld and cut and so on before my teens. My intellectual interests went to math an…
I went into software dev while my father was a construction worker. He is really proud of buildings he was working on and that he was able to build things with his own hands. Even though I have an engineering degree and work in totally different environment I think that something I took from him is that I am really happy with the systems I have built and ability to create things on my own. I did it with keyboard whil…
Now and again I'll see a very expensive thing I worked on on eBay for a penny on the dollar. Maybe it's time to build a Museum of Me in a spare bedroom.
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From the NYT: Working sons of working fathers are, on average, 2.7 times as likely as the rest of the population to have the same job but only two times as likely to have the same job as their working mothers, according to an analysis by The New York Times, one of the first to look at mothers and daughters in addition to fathers and sons. Daughters are 1.8 times as likely to have the same job as their mothers and 1.7…
I’d be interested to see what the rate increase is for Athletes. I think of landing a top research as the equivalent of getting a spot on an NBA team (or other major sports team). Both are extremely competitive with only a select few spots in the entire country. Additionally, starting at a very young age is a huge advantage for both athletes and aspiring academics.
Peyton and Eli Manning are the sons of Archie Manning. Ken Griffey Jr. and his dad played on the same team at one point. Jr.'s son "Trey" made it into the NFL as a wide receiver.
It does seem to matter to a degree. It's not a guarantee though.
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Another big aspect to trades is there’s often a union bureaucracy or something similar to navigate. It helps to have someone to show you the ropes.
It's a test for most union trades. To those interested, call the union hall where you live. So, it's usually a test, and a interview. The interview counts for 1/2 of the hiring process. The test is usually an 8th grade, or high school equivalency test. It's not hard, but in certain high paying markets, like San Francisco, a 1000 guys might show up to take the test, so you need to get most questions right. Once you ge…
Knowing people in the highly unionized film biz, getting your next job always seems to be the order of the day so it seems to depend. It actually sounds pretty tough compared to a 'normal' gig at a company, but you do end up with good stories to tell.
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Thats Indian Varna system right there.
An underrated comment this. For those who don't know, the Varna system, also known as the caste system has long been justified as the 'natural order' of a scholar's child being a scholar, a warrior's child being a warrior, a tradesmen child being a tradesman and the lowest class of a menial worker's child being a menial worker. The fact that so many are willing color the discussion with - observable trends seem to su…
It's hard to have an opinion without knowing the product of the system.
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I say this as an Asian person: surely black folks getting disproportionately policed and killed is a bigger manifestation of institutional racism, no?
You can only believe this if you've fallen for the spin perpetrated by media outlets. The number of unarmed Black civilians killed by police each year is so small that you can fit the entire list of names and details since 2014 (31 total) on a few pages of generously-spaced HTML table rows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ... . This is against approximately 10 million arrests per year and…
The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people [...]
This is unfair - note that the comment you are referring to didn't specially mention police unarmed shootings of blacks, the comment was about disportionate policing and killings (which presumably includes, but is not exclusive to shootings of unarmed citizens). I mention this because police shootings are not the only manifestation of institutional racism. There are also unjust arrests, accusations, beatings (remember, Rodney King wasn't shot), convictions, and general mistreatment. You might beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride.
As a relatively well-off, straight-laced black man, I'm not overly afraid of getting shot by police (although I think I got close to catching a bullet once), but I am terrified of a stop going bad in some way, not because of what I observed in the media, but because of my own personal experiences.
I live in a high-crime city in the northeast and as big component of my job is spending time in high-crime parts of cities all over the US (most recently, Chicago South Side, including Altgeld-Murray projects). The only times in my life where I thought my life or safety was in serious jeopardy involved interactions with police.
Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence
Absolutely true, and that reflects my feelings as well. But that is not the same as saying black communities trust police.
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A curiosity for me is that the Ivies are among some of the few universities where you get need-blind admission and financial aid. I have many acquaintances that did not pay a penny in tuition. But that does not fix the larger issues with the system.
How can a college that hides its selection process guarantee need-blind admission?