51–60 of 83 posts
Right this is why I don't live in a community house, a lot of my kids' friend's parents suck ass. Who gets to live in the community house with the alcoholic soccer mom or the cop who got fired for threatening to kill someone at a baseball game.
One reason not stated by the author is that U.S. culture and tends to handle badly the ebb and flow of physical intimacy among co-residents and their guests, not only through the excuse of jealousy as a conduit for physical and emotional abuse, but also by applying the playground puritanical ‘cooties’ logic to (almost exclusively) women who have been ‘contaminated’ for future relations by a prior partner within the c…
People generally only live in community houses if they're poor and have no other options. "But people in Indi.." No. Wealthy Indians have fucking single-family Get Me The Fuck Away From Everyone Else compounds surrounded by high walls, gate houses, and surveillance equipment. Unless you're a lifelong career civil servant in the foreign service nearing retirement who went abroad working in consulates and embassies imm…
People who are forced to cohabit with relatives (siblings' families, with parents/grandparents as well) conform, and you don't hear them complain because they don't have a choice. But oh boy there are so, so many problems/conflicts. Harmony is usually an illusion.
They of course get the benefits when it comes to helping raise kids. But you have to pick your poison. Life isn't better - it's just different.
Much of what's in the article is fairly different from multiple (related) families having to share a house. I'm guessing for each of them, leaving is always an option, and it results in a different dynamic than "I'm stuck with these people because I can't afford to leave." If you offend someone who is not your relative, you don't have to live with the consequences forever.
My parents had to share a house with a couple when I was a small child. It was not ideal. Shared kitchen. Other shared spaces. Unless you are all on the same page about things, you are basically taking on extra parents. Other people telling you how to do such and such in raising your child which may be ideas that you're not on par with. When you have your own home, you can amicably disagree and go to the privacy of y…
My company has a cabin us employees can use. Only thing we have to do is reserve it and clean up before we leave. Cleanliness has been a huge source of frustration, as you say there's a huge chasm between what some people considers "clean enough". And that's not sharing it at the same time, like in a community home...
People generally only live in community houses if they're poor and have no other options. "But people in Indi.." No. Wealthy Indians have fucking single-family Get Me The Fuck Away From Everyone Else compounds surrounded by high walls, gate houses, and surveillance equipment. Unless you're a lifelong career civil servant in the foreign service nearing retirement who went abroad working in consulates and embassies imm…
I always appreciate it when the grumpy expert appears on HN. Are there truly no exceptions that you know of?
Like when someone says "cats are furry and fuzzy and I like petting them" and someone chimes in "Well what about hairless cats??????"
Why do you think Tata bought the brands and formed Jaguar Land Rover?
Did Ratan Tata "just like the brand" or did he see every single person around him buying Land/Range Rovers as Indians (and people in China, and Kenya, and everywhere else) got wealthier and started moving out to single family homes in suburbs and he wanted to profit off that?
Something I found was that different kids are, well, different.
For my own kids there is a huge difference in temperament. One is chilled and happy with basically anyone, another is extremely highly-strung. We raised them the same as far as we can tell, but one is very easy to look after and spend time with, the other is a fucking nightmare that no sane person would volunteer to spend time with (...or at least would not volunteer for the second time...).
So being able to "have dinner with our friends every night" I think comes down a lot to the individual kid and not the environment. You may have just got lucky and got a laid-back kid who just goes along with things and is happy hanging out with random adults. They're not all like that.
That idealism isn't how families happened. Traditoinally you split the farm when the sons (it need not be sons, but sexism generally comes in somehow as someone needs to leave home for genetic diverstiy reasons and the entire culture needs to follow the pattern in general so lets just talk about sons with the understanding that sometimes it was daughters) until the farm was too small to support the family at which po…
The anthropological term for the kind of arrangement you're talking about is "patrilocality." Matrilocality is where it's the daughters instead of the sons, and it's much more the norm in the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and somewhat more sporadically in Africa). The really fun part is that matrilocality does not imply matrilineality (let alone matriarchy), so you can have a society that is both patrilineal and matrilocal.
People generally only live in community houses if they're poor and have no other options. "But people in Indi.." No. Wealthy Indians have fucking single-family Get Me The Fuck Away From Everyone Else compounds surrounded by high walls, gate houses, and surveillance equipment. Unless you're a lifelong career civil servant in the foreign service nearing retirement who went abroad working in consulates and embassies imm…
People generally only live in community houses if they're poor and have no other options. "But people in Indi.." No. Wealthy Indians have fucking single-family Get Me The Fuck Away From Everyone Else compounds surrounded by high walls, gate houses, and surveillance equipment. Unless you're a lifelong career civil servant in the foreign service nearing retirement who went abroad working in consulates and embassies imm…
No they don't. I may not know a lot about families, but I know a thing or two about Korea, and the one thing I know is that they overwhelmingly stay in apartments. When they get money, the move to bigger, fancier apartments.
...which casts doubt on your other confident assertions.