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Without parental leave I might be dead

nytimes.com

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Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#281

Post by tiagod »

charcircuit wrote: post #270
the-smug-one wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are very special. Do you meet a lot of different people? Like, different countries, adults with parents from other socioeconomic backgrounds, people with chronic diseases, all of that stuff? Because, to me, it really seems like you don't.

Yes, I'm in a lot of discord servers. I have talked to people from many countries. I have even talked to others using their native language. I'm sure that I've encountered people from different socioeconomic backgrounds and people with chronic diseases.

And you think discord users are a good sample of the population? It's absolutely not true that not everyone could just pick a skill like programming and work on it until they're employable, especially as many people need to start working as soon as possible to be able to survive.

If you had to work 50h/week plus 3-4h commute every day, how would you study programming exactly? If you didn't have access to a computer, how would you do it? If everyone around you made it seem like it's an activity out of your reach, how would you figure out it's not?

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#282

Post by yokoprime »

endisneigh wrote: post #18

The problem with parental leave is the same problem with universal health care or any entitlement that isn’t utilized by the entire population at the same rate constantly. Things like roads (and even then there are many locales with crappy roads) are easy to justify. Things like parental leave and universal health care are hard because the percentage of those utilizing will be low and the disproportionate benefit wil…

Have you looked up what Ponzi scheme means? I agree parental leave is a forceful redistribution of wealth, but it's not a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost parents are not investors in the tax system, also how are recent "investors" paying previous investors if parental leave is a Ponzi scheme?

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#283

Post by almost_usual »

TheCapn wrote: post #70

My first child is due January. I sat down with my boss about a month or so ago and told him I'm intending to take parental leave. "No problem" he said, I told him my intention was to take the full 8 weeks I'm entitled to. He didn't say anything right away to that... eventually it was more of a "...that's not typical for the guys around here" We did a bit of back and forth. (I think he went to HR to find out he can't…

That’s bullshit your manager would even say that to you.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#284

Post by Ericson2314 »

danShumway wrote: post #227
mbesto wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its just not beneficial for anyone. I'm personally a proponent of parental leave, but I'll answer this one point. "Forcing women" back into work after pregnancy is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases. All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/motherhood...

I wonder how much this would change if parental leave was also granted to fathers at similar or equal rates. The article mentions postpartum issues -- this is stuff that isn't really mitigated by having one parent alone care for a kid. If you're struggling with depression by yourself in the house with a kid... it's nice to have more people around to help. Even if you're not struggling with depression, having people a…

Yes exactly. The only way to close gender gaps is to force men to do less work outside the home, not women more. (Men doing more work inside the home and women less follows from that more easily than in the other direction.)

Better childcare / pre-k can help too, but there musn't be a gap between when at least partial leave ends and childcare begins.

Good thing we all work to much already, so reducing total "public sphere" labor hours is not a huge issue.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#285

Post by yokoprime »

letmeinhere wrote: post #106
endisneigh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring growth is not a Ponzi scheme, requiring additional investors for the initial ones to be paid is. Do you have an actual rebuttal?

It's hard to rebut your arguments when you don't really explain them, instead relying on scarewords that don't fit at all. Who are the "additional investors"? The children? In what way would parental leave had been a horrible misstep if they do not show up? Seems like a wash. Or are the additional investors individuals and families who won't ever need paid leave, don't care about their neighbors, and don't care about…

I think the parent post is a troll, willingly or not. Leave it, he or she has made up their mind that infrastructure and services are a Ponzi schm. Sigh.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#286

Post by lordgrenville »

kingsloi wrote: post #217

I literally worked for most of my child's 8 month life, from her ICU room, I worked the morning of her 9 surgeries, I worked through the genetic diagnosis, I worked through being told my child has brain bleeds, neuroblastoma, is deaf, re-intubated, etc... if my insurance wasn't tied to my work, I would've quit in a heartbeat. I'm convinced I'll go to my grave with working that time being my biggest regret in life. I…

Heart-breaking to read this. I'm so sorry for your loss.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#287

Post by jseban »

cloudfifty wrote: post #263
jseban wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rational answer to that would be yes for anyone who is making an above average salary, and no only if you are below average. That's how all tax funded benefits work.

Why's that? You're still not getting those benefits with an above average salary.

You would be better off financing your own "benefits" if you're above average. And everyone would theoretically also be better off without the benefits, because of how much money you would save in all the bureaucracy needed. It's only the people who are not able to take responsibility for having their own money, that are the ones that are really better off.

Any tax financed benefits for everyone like this, pensions, maternal leave, unemployment, health care etc are really just an institution forcibly saving money for you, on your behalf. So that you don't have to be responsible for saving money yourself, and don't have to take the risk of over spending or mismanaging. And for that service you will pay the price of salaries for all the people working in these institutions.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#288

Post by mjevans »

bradleyjg wrote: post #247
lifeformed wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean there's a choice?! Cool, I'd be happy if we simply just fixed all the massive, complex problems of the entire economy over just having parental leave.

We haven’t even tried. For healthcare, the last time I heard about bending the cost curve was during the Obama administration. For education, I’ve never seen any politician suggests we try to reign in cost growth—-just proposals around who should eat the costs. For housing, governments at all levels have been pulling every policy lever they can find to increase costs. Falling costs are wildly considered a national em…

Free Money is popular with voters; be that in the form of cut / "no new taxes" or handouts.

Want to fix that? A true multiparty system, IRV, and eliminating gerrymandering as possibilities. The last one would mostly be by eliminating geographic boundaries generally; instead representation would be decided by proportionally voting in representatives from the IRV list, which might be preferenced by area specific politicians first and could then fall back to those who represent other types of interest focus.

Similarly the relative representation power of each voter in a body such as the senate should be resolved by merging similarly leaning smaller bodies until each voter is within relatively the same representation strength as other voters.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_pop...

This is an issue for E.G. California (~20M/senator) and Texas (~15M/senator) compared to Vermont (~310K/senator) and Wyoming (~240K/senator).

In the past the senate started out FAR more balanced by state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

For example in 1820 the top three most populace states were all around 1 million each. A core belle-curve hump ranges from around 600K down to 150K, and about 5 states have less than 100K. Senators representing roughly ~500K, ~250K, and 50K respectively, a weight difference of only a factor of 10 rather than a number approaching almost a factor of 100.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#289

Post by [deleted] »

familyemta123 wrote: post #254
commandlinefan wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ask for an extended leave of absence? Many employers are a lot more humane than a lot of employees give them credit for, whether they're bound by law or not.

I created a throw away for this, but during a recent family emergency, my small 100 person company decided to fire me rather than allow my request for 3 months off without pay. They could easily have supported it, and I was a good employee, but instead I heard now they've replaced me with an Eastern European contractor for cheap. So rather than help me in my time of need, after I had saved their ass from some other c…

[deleted]

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#290

Post by echelon »

refurb wrote: post #150
KaiserPro wrote: post #28

I really cant understand the logic of forcing women back into work after 2-4 weeks. Its just not beneficial for anyone. The mum is utterly frazzled. The employer gets half an employee back Society is conditioned to think that the only practical way to raise a baby is to give up on work/get live in care. now, to look at it from a "my mum managed, I don't want to undermine the american nuclear family" point of view: Ye…

As a parent who got 6 months that barely fucking scratches the surface of the time it take to raise a human. Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you.

> Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you.

I know this is an exaggeration, but it drew my interest. This expects that the rest of us have to work to subsidize you having children for five to six years.

I'm wholly on board with helping parents raise children. Children are our future. But at some threshold of subsidization this equation tips and actively offloads the entire burden onto those without children.

Both of my parents had jobs when I was growing up. Why are we suddenly expecting this to change? Childcare can be paid for at rates under minimum wage in aggregate. Look at our school system and daycare businesses. Just because you think your child deserves only the best does not make it economical, and lots of people make this work. Thousands of years of child rearing has happened in suboptimal conditions.

Raising children has been an incredible chore more often than not throughout history. It's only been briefly punctuated by moments of ease, and even then, it wasn't evenly distributed. Children are not easy.

I think modern parents are seeing their childfree peers and remarking on the delta in quality of life.

I honestly don't mean this as an attack. I'm just interested in the varying perspectives on this.

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