MyHypatia
Joined 12 years ago
Joined 12 years ago
Maybe, he spends a lot of time on it and doesn't have success. That seems better to me than spending time on something he doesn't really care about.
Even just fundraising for diseases yields tangible results. Some folks dismissed the viral ice bucket challenge, but it raised over $100 million dollars and funded a lot of research in ALS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Bucket_Challenge
Hopefully he accomplishes new knowledge discovery and/or fundraising for research into this disease.
I had a positive reaction to his post. The way he wants to spend his time seems more useful/meaningful/intentional than what most people choose to spend their time on. I hope he has success. While rare, others who have devoted themselves to studying the disease of a loved one have made meaningful progress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto,_Michaela,_and_Lorenzo...
If Hyundai's operations keep getting disrupted, they can't justify spending billions here. Other international companies also won't waste their time investing and building infrastructure here. They'll spend it somewhere else. What is pro-American about this? Is the Republican party now anti-money? Anti-capitalism? How is this a win for Americans or Republicans or conservatives or anyone?
I should prepare for politics that can destroy my life before it impacts me, and preparing for it means talking to other people about it.
If people don't vaccinate, and my baby gets measles before I can vaccinate her, she could die. If I have a complicated pregnancy, I could be forced to wait it out and get sepsis and die. If my friends get deported, they lose their jobs, homes, cars and I lose my connection to them. If I have to pay more for goods because of tariffs that is less money I can spend on my family.
If I wait until my baby has measles, I have sepsis, or my friends get deported to talk about these issues and convince others, then I haven't adequately prepared for politics that can destroy my life.
I get why the majority of jobs that require a lot of upper body strength (lumberjacks as you mentioned) would continue to be majority male, but in other jobs to me it seems like it's mainly networks and socialization that causes gender imbalances. There's no reason more men can't become pediatricians or school teachers. They can obviously do the job, and did in the past!
For tech jobs, I often see people saying that men are more interested in numbers and things, so it's biological that men would gravitate towards tech. I used to think that sounded like a plausible explanation, but then I read that women make up 60% of accountants, and other examples like that. Seems like accounting was just more socially accepting of women, otherwise by that argument accounting would be majority male too.
One example that I thought was quite interesting was that 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. It would be quite a stretch to come up with a biological argument for the real estate example.
In my view, a non-discriminatory hiring process is one that accounts for the very real human behaviours that 1) people feel more comfortable with people who are similar to them, and 2) when jobs skew dramatically towards one gender/race it creates a social barrier to people from outside that group getting hired and accepted by the team. If we just completely ignore how humans actually behave, we accidentally end up with a discriminatory hiring process without anyone wanting do anything bad. I have no doubt that some implementations of affirmative action are terrible and discriminatory. But I think ignoring human tendency to feel drawn to people similar to themselves, and thus inadvertently discriminate is a mistake as well.
It's like crashing someone's car and then giving them a bag of Skittles for the trouble. Sure you can't uncrash the car, but the bag of Skittles trivializes the whole thing and makes a genuine apology feel cheap.
Sometimes I forget the hat or the mask and then I just wear one.