On 7/17/2012 8:56 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
BGB <cr88...@gmail.com> writes:
but you can't really afford a house without a job, and can't have a
job without a car (so that the person can travel between their job and
their house).
Job is an invention of the Industrial era. AFAIK, our great great grand
parents had houses.
yes, but OTOH, they probably also didn't have things like utility bills
and property tax.
the only real way to eliminate some sort of need for income would
involve also eliminating the need to pay bills and taxes.
however, the big issue, is if this would be any better than, say, a
free-market capitalist system, or vs, say, the current mixed-economy system.
I don't really think it is about gender role or stereotypes, but
rather it is more basic:
people mostly operate in terms of the pursuit of their best personal
interests.
Ok.
so, typically, males work towards having a job, getting lots money,
... and will choose females based mostly how useful they are to
themselves (will they be faithful, would they make a good parent,
...).
Well it's clear that it's not their best interest to do that: only about
40% males reproduce in this setup.
it is in the best interest of those who are successful.
if a person works in their own best interests, it may benefit
themselves, but this is not to say that it necessarily benefits everyone.
I suspect though that the modern reproductive statistics are probably a
bit better than this though, given that general survival and
mate-finding are probably a bit more balanced in modern times (as well
as most westernized societies holding negative views on things like
polygamy, which were also a lot more common in past societies as well, ...).
in this case, then society works as a sort of sorting algorithm, with
"better" mates generally ending up together (rich business man with
trophy wife), and worse mates ending up together (poor looser with a
promiscuous or otherwise undesirable wife).
And this is also the problem, not only for persons, but for society: the
sorting is done on criteria that are bad. Perhaps they were good to
survive in the savanah, but they're clearly an impediment to develop a
safe technological society.
whether or not it is "good" or not is a separate issue, but this is
largely how the society seems to work from what I can tell.
similarly not everyone equal in terms of abilities, or of various
factors of desirability, ...
the result then is usually that people with higher desirability tend to
end up together, and those with lower desirability tend to end up with
whoever is left over (though, it seems to take a bit longer, as many
people also tend to try to "aim high", and will often reject those of
similar social standing).
for example, there are also many females who basically end up remaining
alone waiting for some "Mr. Right" to come along, but if the bar is set
to high, no one will ever come along who is "good enough" for them.
I don't personally believe that the genders are all that different in
terms of how they behave, nor necessarily in terms of relative ability,
but may differ more in terms of what they look for, for example, due to
things like societal expectations and similar.
but, likely, societal expectations is the hard one.
very possibly, much of the current media may actually serve to make this
problem worse.
Well, perhaps. This is not my way to learn how to program (once really)
or to learn a new programming language.
dunno, I learned originally partly by hacking on pre-existing
codebases, and by cobbling things together and seeing what all did and
did not work (and was later partly followed by looking at code and
writing functionally similar mock-ups, ...).
some years later, I started writing a lot more of my own code, which
largely displaced the use of cobbled-together code.
from what I have seen in code written by others, this sort of cobbling
seems to be a fairly common development process for newbies.
I learn programming languages basically by reading the reference, and by
exploring the construction of programs from the language rules.
this is more of an "advanced" strategy though, as-in, probably something
used by someone generally already familiar with the general topic.
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
fonc@vpri.org
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc