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It's frustrating that the only suggestion the experts interviewed have here is essentially blue-washing woman-dominated jobs. "For instance, many health care jobs could be framed as roles requiring the strength to lift people. Preschools could highlight the need for teachers who serve as positive male role models." Just reads as that one SMBC comic - "how can we make math pink?" As if the only way they can understand people is through the most shallow stereotypes.

Yeah, you can totally fix the imbalance in the nursing sector by showing ads with a bunch of male nurses driving monster trucks into the ICU and crushing energy drink cans on patients' foreheads! Or have a cowboy ride his horse into the preschool, smoking a cigarette that he lights by dragging a match across his own thick stubble! This isn't a structural problem, it's just a question of marketing!

Insulting.


Isn't it only a question of marketing?

There's only so many lumberjacks needed in an economy. Sure you can depress the wages for awhile but there's still a limit.

So you need Men do to something else and the way you do that is with marketing (and also with Men being unemployed until they accept a nursing job).


Well yeah but the real problem is a lot of jobs that go to women are not considered high status jobs. That’s the source of all of the gendering and gender imbalance of those jobs. Even computer programming was low status, which coincided with it being women-dominated once upon a time. We could fix the whole problem if we just convinced people to treat the people holding nursing, teaching, and childcare positions as if they we’re important members of society. And I mean this would fix the pay gap too.

It's not a question of marketing, it's a question of progressivism.

We expanded job opportunities for women by telling them they can do anything, be anything, and he just as good as men at it. That they're built for anything, and that they aren't naturally forced to do anything one thing.

There are infinite ways to be a woman. There is one way to be a man. That's the problem. We should not be trying to convince men that nursing fits into that one way. Rather, we should be telling men that it's okay to have traditionally feminine jobs.

We've never had a progressive movement for men. We really require that if we're gonna get men, as a whole, to take these jobs seriously.


There have been some studies that show once female participation in a field/career gets past about 40%, males tend to leave (or at a minimum, fail to enter) that field/career. Historically, school teachers and secretaries were male fields. Then in WW1, there weren't enough men available, so women were encouraged to enter those jobs. After WW1, those same jobs weren't seen as "manly" enough and male participation never recovered.

Psychiatric wards certainly benefit from burly guy nurses with good social skills and nerves of steel.

One of my relatives used to be a psychologist who did work in psychiatric facilities. He told me about a woman who was rather petite with multiple personalities. One of her personalities was a bug & burly type with anger management issues. When this personality got physical, it took several orderlies of notable size to restrain her.

Creatine is probably the most well-studied nutritional supplement we have, and one of the most efficacious. You are presenting a single study to counter that. Not even a meta-analysis, but a single study of just 54 participants who did not exercise at all previously (from the study; "Apparently healthy individuals, with a body mass index of ≤30 kg/m2 and not meeting current physical activity guidelines of at least 150 min of moderate-intensity exercise were included. Individuals who undertook [resistance training] within the previous 12 months were excluded"). The general consensus is that it is absolutely helpful in muscle-building. See, for example [0] and [1]. Beware the man of one study. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-...

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12665265/ - Meta analysis results; "after intervention, the Cr group exhibited significant strength gains"

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/17/2748 - "A total of 69 studies with 1937 participants were included for analysis. Creatine plus resistance training produced small but statistically significant improvements... when compared to the placebo."


Just because a particular market is free doesn't mean it's useful to society at large.

If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it. If it indeed benefits a few individuals massively while on net reducing utility to society, an argument can be made that society has a moral imperative to ban it. Hence the limitations on gambling, on alcohol and tobacco marketing/sales, etc.


> Just because a particular market is free doesn't mean it's useful to society

Of course not.

> If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it

Then it’s not a free market.


Unfortunately, "this is a wildly successful model that prints money for us with almost no upkeep required" has historically not been a bulletproof argument when new management comes in and wants to prove themselves. Human beings are not necessarily rational and the kinds of people that tend to rise to the top of large corporations don't necessarily have the best interests of customers or the business itself in mind.

That being said, I believe that Gabe is taking his "succession planning" seriously, so I'd be fairly optimistic for the next decade at least.


Even if that were the case, wouldn't it still be an essentially net-zero pollution system (disregarding small contributions from transport etc.)?


Depends on the input into growing the biomass. If you are using industrial fertilizers, it's very far from net-zero. Besides that, from my memory there are studies analyzing this and I think they found it's never net-zero.


In the British case… it’s being chipped and shipped from Canada and there’s doubts it’s waste wood

It makes more sense to leave trees in the ground than burning them to generate energy


Sure, but it's not reasonable to call it as unpopular domestically as the Vietnam War, which had more than 12 times the casualties, spread over a group that on the whole was unwilling to fight and had to be drafted into the conflict, thereby spreading the pain of lost loved ones throughout society rather than concentrating it heavily into the poorer and less politically powerful social and economic classes. As unpopular as the Iraq war was, the American people's distaste didn't really do much to end it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...


That’s reasonable. In the context of the larger discussion here a post up thread’s implication that a graduate in 2007 would be anti-war because of Vietnam is kind of dubious. Public opinion of the war shifted quite a lot in the four years after “Mission Accomplished” and Freedom Fries.


> General Brown: So they started doing psy-research because they thought we were doing psy-research, when in fact we weren't doing psy-research?

> Brigadier General Dean Hopgood: Yes sir. But now that they are doing psy-research, we're gonna have to do psy-research, sir. We can't afford to have the Russian's leading the field in the paranormal.

Source: The Men Who Stare at Goats


Why did the author feel the need to throw in a spoiler for the end of The Conversation in the last paragraph of the article? That seems contradictory to the point of everything else she wrote and disrespectful to both the audience and the film.


She put it at the end of the article. If her premise is correct, it will remain safely unread.


The Conversation came out in 1974, 52 years ago. By any reasonable metric, the statute of limitations on spoilers has long ago elapsed. If we can't even mention that Rosebud is a sled without some sort of spoiler banner, I think we're letting our preciousness about spoilers get in the way of actually discussing film.


It was available on Humble Bundle a few months ago as part of Remedy's full lineup, along with the sequel, the Alan Wake games, and Control.


>If you were given the choice of two different dangerous roads where one road had a 30% lower chance of getting into a life-threatening car crash, you would probably think that the choice was obvious, not that the two roads were basically the same.

You could absolutely think that they were basically the same, depending on the base rate. The differece between a one-in-a-million and 0.7-in-a-million is 30%, but it wouldn't be humanly perceivable. We're all likely faced with situations like that regularly. Differing airlines probably have much greater variances in their crash statistics, but it just doesn't matter in 99.99999% of flights.


There is an xkcd for that:

https://xkcd.com/1252/


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