Comment by vectorjohn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vectorjohn | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I'm more convinced this has nothing to do with basic income. You are just repeating over and over that basic income will make it worse but with zero proposed mechanism.

Unpaid house work isn't going to get worse if women get the (new) option of leaving situations they previously were stuck in.

The problem of unpaid "emotional work" is caused by a sexist society. More social safety net either does nothing to alleviate that problem, or it helps. It makes no sense to argue it makes things worse. Unless you provide even a shred of an argument for how it could make things worse, it sounds like you're just yelling into the void of the internet. Unless by "men are impossible to talk to about this" you really mean "men don't accept my assertions on faith".

Edit: Also, it sounds like possibly you don't know what basic income is. Or you mean something different by it. This[1] sums it up neatly in the first paragraph. I'm not trying to be insulting, it just sounds like you're talking about something different.

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

No, that is not what I mean at all.

It makes it worse by making it less painful for the status quo to continue forward. Currently, women are making a great many hard choices in order to stop the pain of being poor because society does not want to hire them, promote them, etc for "men's work" while expecting us to continue to "care" without compensation. Give women what amounts to permanent welfare and a lot of them will not make the hard choices involved in questioning the status quo and trying to find another answer.

There are plenty of examples of populations given some kind of permanent welfare. They never result in some sort of golden era. They result in people who are overweight, out of shape, demoralized, with no goals or aspirations.

Hmm, I think there are actually zero or very few examples of populations given permanent welfare where something bad happened. In fact, the exact opposite. I really feel bad for the people in permanent welfare in Sweden where health care is free and standards of living are extremely high. Yeah, that's terrible.

I read a lot of that discussion on meta filter, and it was extremely unconvincing. I empathize with women who marry crappy people who expect them to stay at home and don't want to listen to their problems and want them to send birthday cards to their family. But the whole conversation was about a non issue. Basically like the argument any roommates would have about who has to do the dishes. Or who left the toilet seat up. It was complaining about personal things that they really just need to deal with themselves. And maybe they need help learning to do that, but "emotional work" isn't a thing. It isn't, it shouldn't be compensated, it doesn't exist. These aren't big societal dilemmas. Women aren't perfectly equal now but it is perfectly acceptable in most of the western world for women to get real jobs.

Or maybe it would help to hear an example (any example, you still haven't given one). What is one hard choice a woman might have to make to escape the pain of being poor? The hard choice not to have children? How is that a hard choice and how could it possibly go away in any imaginable future without the reality of biology being worked around with external wombs and robotic child care? And what, please tell me, could that have to do with a basic income?

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