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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

#431

Post by mbesto »

jensensbutton wrote: post #293
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...

> is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases There's a lot of evidence around wage discrepancies, but I have never heard anyone claim that it's the _mothers_ who are forcing themselves back to work. That seems like a huge stretch and doesn't align with anything I've seen before.

I should probably clarify and reword. I don't think mothers are explicitly forcing themselves out of maternal leave - I'm saying that it's not culturally acceptable to do so. The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases.

The cultural components manifest themselves different ways:

As a biz owner: Why would you give a raise to someone who hasn't contributed anything to the company in the last 2-4 months?

As an employee: how would you (man or woman) feel if your equal peer didn't contribute anything for 2-4 months and got the same raise as you?

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#432

Post by deanCommie »

echelon wrote: post #290
refurb wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thos…

> This expects that the rest of us have to work to subsidize you having children

We can obviously unpack all the ways that this is abused, but generally speaking children are necessary for the continuation of the species. Children are also absolutely a burden on the parents, physically, emotionally, and financially.

So yes, broadly speaking, I would expect the childfree to disproportionately contribute into a societal pool to offset for the fact that they are existing in human society but not contributing their part to it's ongoing propagation.

Ultimately though, you're right - no parent should expect to have the same lifestyle as their childfree counterpart. Not with free time, disposable income, or even day-to-day "happiness".

> Both of my parents had jobs when I was growing up. Why are we suddenly expecting this to change?

Mine too. Here's what I think has changed: in that era (and for much of human history), it was assumed/expected that it "took a village" to raise children. Families stayed closer together - the previous generation was around to help with childrearing. And in general, communities took care of everyone's children in a pool that would be considered completely outlandish today. Heck, the concept of a Wet Nurse [1] is something that would probably explode most people's minds today. I bet at least one person will read this comment and not realize that this was something that was completely ubiquitous and standard for much of human history. Can you imagine that existing today? It would be inconceivable. Not that we need it since the advent of formula, but the point is simply that societies helped take care of children more in the past than they do now.

Today, people move further from home from work (losing direct family access), have children later in life (less energy to contribute/harder to tradeoff career responsibilities), and build fewer local community social bonds (online relationships may be meaningful but they don't help babysit).

I don't think we have adjusted accordingly yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_nurse

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#433

Post by beaconstudios »

lucaspm98 wrote: post #407
beaconstudios wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really strange to think that the American left (AOC, Bernie) are fighting for such radical concepts as social healthcare, free education and paid maternity leave. I'm from the UK, the most capitalist European country and we had all three until we regressed on university fees thanks to our wonderful Conservative party.

There's a reason for that. The majority of countries with these socialized services have suffered from the corruption, bureaucracy, and taxation innate with government control. This is with the notable exception of a few countries with vast natural resources providing an economic baseline, and likely more importantly a relatively small and homogenous population with similar needs and opinions.

The US is one of the wealthiest MEDC countries, and "homogeneous population" is just racist drivel.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#434

Post by htrp »

moron4hire wrote: post #67
wastedhours wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most men take only a fraction of the allowed time I truly don't understand this, and each time I see the stats on it sit in even greater disbelief. Why would anyone turn down the opportunity to spend, for an awful lot of companies, fully paid time off work to spend time with their new family? Guessing I'm much less "career-minded" than of lot of these guys, but it makes zero sense to me that you wouldn't stretch th…

When I took mine, I was told it was at a particularly convenient time because I had just started at the company (Deloitte, so huge corp) so wasn't deeply embedded in any projects yet, plus my billable time ratio "doesn't count in your first year". I still got a lot of pressure from my bosses to cut it short and work part time while I was out. One of them even questioned my "loyalty to the team" at a holiday party tha…

For people who don't know... Deloitte is a literal partnership so every hour you aren't working and billing is directly impacting the income of your boss (the partner).

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#435

Post by pertymcpert »

jseban wrote: post #419
pertymcpert wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually proposing that as a solution? Are you against paid parental leave?

I'm against it. Why give people less responsibility and less freedom, as they get smarter and more educated. And why revert to a more costly and inefficient public sector to achieve this. Seems like moving in the absolute wrong direction to me. Socialism and "free stuff" is something that I'm absolutely against in every way. And people have full control over having children. I see no point whatsoever in having paid p…

Do you think that's the right thing to do from a moral standpoint? Are you aware of how callous you are?

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#436

Post by bluesummers5651 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #421
bluesummers5651 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with the point of this comment, but just as an aside, pumping is something that even mothers who are on leave do. Speaking from personal experience as the dad, I was able to feed the baby pumped milk for some of the many daily feedings instead of my wife doing the breastfeeding, which let her get a few extra minutes/hours of sleep when the baby needed to be fed. Both of us were on parental leave durin…

Sure, but pumping once or every other feed is markedly different than pumping multiple times in a row over a solid 9 or 10 hour block of time.

For sure. Certainly once she did start going back to work and pumping at the office, it was less "fun" - the pumping room wasn't the most comfortable, she had to do it a lot more and cart it back and forth in a cooler, etc.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#437

Post by VirusNewbie »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #294

From the US live in Norway now. In Norway there are a lot of political parties that can matter. All depends on the election. Some grow, some dont, new ones are added, old ones go away. That is a dynamic that is entirely missing in the US. We have parties in the European left and we have parties on the European right, parties in the middle, green party etc etc. I try to get people to understand that we do not have a s…

In terms of abortion rights, immigration, progressive taxation, and a host of other issues the US is to the left of Norway.

I think people spend more time consuming the news than becoming familiar with the actual policies and laws of countries.

In case you anyone misunderstands my claim, these are the facts: the US has more progressive taxation both on income tax and corporate tax, a minimum wage, and more liberal abortion laws (case vs planned parenthood ruling).

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#438

Post by jseban »

pertymcpert wrote: post #435
jseban wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm against it. Why give people less responsibility and less freedom, as they get smarter and more educated. And why revert to a more costly and inefficient public sector to achieve this. Seems like moving in the absolute wrong direction to me. Socialism and "free stuff" is something that I'm absolutely against in every way. And people have full control over having children. I see no point whatsoever in having paid p…

Do you think that's the right thing to do from a moral standpoint? Are you aware of how callous you are?

To educate people to take responsibility for their lives? Yes, I think that's the right thing to do from a moral standpoint. People deserve freedom and deserve empowerment. I think it's morally wrong to have forced guardianship of adults.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#439

Post by pertymcpert »

bluesquared wrote: post #161
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…

I have an 18-mo old now. My company "generously" offers 2 weeks of paid parental leave. I went through similar conversations as you, only I was merely asking to use 2 weeks of PTO after my 2 weeks of paid parental leave for a total of 1 month of time off. My management and HR refused that request, I was told that my option was take the 2 weeks of paid leave and then you can take unpaid leave (the legally mandated FML…

The US is full of psychopaths. Just look at the comments in this thread. This amount of backlash against even maternity leave would be incredible in civilized countries.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#440

Post by mjevans »

coryrc wrote: post #412
mjevans wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 politi…

You're correct except IRV is hardly better than FPTP. Please endorse any ranked voting system except IRV.

I'm using IRV as a shorthand for ANY of the instant runoff voting (ranked voting) systems.

I happen to prefer (Path Vote) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method as a method of performing an election with instant runoffs for one round of ranked ballots.

For the later proposal (where districts are replaced by a mixed bag of candidates and issues) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_STV might be a good way of determining the membership of a body.

It looks like research into proportional voter representation is still ongoing, with important new papers released even this year.

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