381–390 of 402 posts
OP might love tech, but he sure doesn’t sound like he loved the craft. Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.
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> As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was Would you mind elaborating on why that was the case? I’m super curious because I’ve considered switching careers to become a teacher.
To quote H.L. Mencken (paraphrasing), a teacher's job is miserable because they must ceaselessly try to get masses or people to think who have no real capacity to. You might be lucky to reach a small minority of your students, assuming environmental forces of poverty, dysfunctional family, and peer influence don't muzzle their gifts. But the day in day out bulk of your work isn't those "Mr. Holland's Opus" moments: i…
I am a firm believer that (lack of) parenting is the problem that most affects the other learning environments negatively. Parents are the key to any meaningful change. Parents should be responsible for all of it. Teachers are convenient scapegoats of bad parents.
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I don't understand why people, generally on both sides of the issue, just ignore the social effects of it and instead just focus on the personal. I suspect most don't intuit how rapidly fertility shifts population sizes, because it's an exponential. A fertility rate of 1 means each generation decreases by more than 50%, compounding. So after just 5 generations and your generational size is down 97% with your populati…
Western societies solve that problem by letting in immigrants. I'm not sure what SK or Japan are going to do though.
And it becomes even less realistic if you look outward to times when this becomes necessary. Japan is a good example of this issue. Migrating to Japan is not difficult. The only meaningful barrier is learning basic Japanese. Beyond that, after just 5 years of residency you can even apply for citizenship which has a very high acceptance rate. And there are a ton of 'Japanese enthusiasts', many of whom already speak basic Japanese.
And many of them have tried to migrate, but they don't last at all. They quickly realize that a Japan in decline is not the Japan in their minds. Getting paid $1500 a month to work a job with extremely high expectations and demands in a country with a median age of 50 (and increasing) isn't the Japan they thought they were moving to.
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I don't understand why people, generally on both sides of the issue, just ignore the social effects of it and instead just focus on the personal. I suspect most don't intuit how rapidly fertility shifts population sizes, because it's an exponential. A fertility rate of 1 means each generation decreases by more than 50%, compounding. So after just 5 generations and your generational size is down 97% with your populati…
Western societies solve that problem by letting in immigrants. I'm not sure what SK or Japan are going to do though.
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"liquid crap" is obviously exageration but if you take a truly random slice of population 90% will be any combination of not interesting/not a nice person/hidden agenda or want to exploit you/have crazy views/... many of them are higher class than me. in absolute numbers it's more lower class simply because there are fewer rich people than poor people but take 5 truly random people of either high or low, I think you…
In low socio-economic communities shit behaviors are more tolerated.
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> Ought we not figure out a system where we can have both freedom and equality, as well as a sustainable population? That would be great, but I never heard any realistic proposals how to make educated women with good opportunities want to birth and rear 3+ children.
Make it so that they don’t birth and rear but instead birth and then rear with a partner who will contribute equally. Also financial subsidies so that a child becomes at least neutral in terms of cost. Social help to make raising a child less exhausting. Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future. All difficult but not impossible.
Countries like Sweden and Norway have equal non-transferable paternity leaves and "free" daycare/education/healthcare. They birth rates are still nowhere near replacement levels. The hard truth seems to be that majority of women with education and opportunities don't want to spend their best years on children and bear the cost to their health from multiple child births.
> Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future.
Please. Now is objectively the best, safest time to have children. When western societies had high birth rates the expectation was basically "it is a coin toss whether a child will survive until adulthood and then they will have to deal with wars, famines and epidemics".
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Western societies solve that problem by letting in immigrants. I'm not sure what SK or Japan are going to do though.
I don't really think immigration is a long-term solution, because of the scale issue - which most greatly underestimate. We're talking about needing a never-ending stream of hundreds of millions of people. And you'd ideally want people that speak the language, have at least some basic skills, and so on. It's not particularly realistic, even before getting into the social chaos that such would cause. And it becomes ev…
Yet there are many western countries where the issue is how to prevent all the people attempting to get in from doing so.
I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run th…
Btw. this is in Central Europe, my kid can go to training by himself with tram/bus. As for the matches, I accompany him if it is in our city, but if it's outside the city then he can either join coach(es), they usually ride kids or not participate in match. We don't have car so can't drive him there. Though soon kid will have to move to higher age league, so not sure what club we will find eventually, the one they are cooperating with is outside the city with like 1+ hour commute one way by public transport, so will certainly look into something closer.
TLDR if my kids were already adult I would have also lot of spare time and teaching/helping kids it's sure more fullfiling than doomscrolling at home. Though I am lazy person, but I was in recent years thinking about helping people instead of doing my work for money, the issue is I don't like most of the people, who need help.
We are just priced out of having this type of happiness due to high cost of living in a first world urban environment.
Every single environment that has a critical mass of people will have an elementary and middle school. How could you possibly be priced out of this?
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I don't really think immigration is a long-term solution, because of the scale issue - which most greatly underestimate. We're talking about needing a never-ending stream of hundreds of millions of people. And you'd ideally want people that speak the language, have at least some basic skills, and so on. It's not particularly realistic, even before getting into the social chaos that such would cause. And it becomes ev…
Yes, of course! No one expects a bunch of western weebs to save Japan's demographics. Obviously, Japan will have to change their insular culture and work ethics, if they attempt to deal with the problem by significantly increasing immigration. Yet there are many western countries where the issue is how to prevent all the people attempting to get in from doing so.