alyeska2

And now I can't tell if you're being disingenuous, or we're just running into the problems of the modern media landscape. I haven't seen any tradwife content that suggests any of the things you're claiming it represents. Not even close.

Maybe I'm only seeing the cottagecore, homesteader end of the spectrum and you're only seeing the religious fundamentalist end of the spectrum, but both are happening under the same label on various TikToks, Instagrams and Podcasts.

I suspect the way you've framed it is very misleading, and represents only a tiny sliver of content, but, as I conceded in my first statement, I've seen a whole lot more commentary about tradwife content than the actual content itself, so there is a real possibility I am wrong and I've only seen the friendly tip of the iceberg but it's actually full of badness underneath.

The tradwife phenomenon is fascinating from so many angles.

It's a tiny niche organic thing from social media, but drew significant backlash and opposition from mainstream media because it was so opposite to the views of the writers and editors of those publications on multiple axes (urban vs rural, career focus vs family focus, independence vs partnership/community, etc). I've seen anti-tradwife content at a 100-to-1 ratio of any actual tradwife content.

It took common leftwing, anti-capitalist ideas like "working a BS job to create shareholder value while barely affording rent sucks, spend your time doing meaningful things instead" but because those meaningful things were raising kids and gardening instead of yoga, matcha brunches and ayuhuasca retreats it got conservative-coded instead of liberal-coded along culture lines.

It's a modern echo of "Tune in, turn on and drop out", but for a new generation of women raised in a post-feminist world, rejecting the default path society expects of them and who are reclaiming aspects of femininity which have been stigmatized, but because it has a veneer of similarity to pre-feminist norms it's seen as regressive rather than progressive.

If I was younger, I'd be doing a sociology thesis on it. So many fascinating bits of nuance and interaction between different groups.

Maybe this is just an agree to disagree moment, but literally no one I know would consider this unprofessional at all.

I've been in management for the past decade and interviewed a few hundred candidates in that time. Never once did I ask or care who owned the laptop they were using.

And similarly, if someone on my team used their work laptop for an interview, I wouldn't care at all.

> I struggle to come up of even the most absurd interview scenario where the tool makes the difference

I had an interview recently where I'd initially planned to use my own machine, then gave up and just used my work computer.

I'm used to the whiteboarding/UML/flowchart software I use at work, so I either needed to pay for a personal subscription so I could use it in the interview or be forced to use some other software I'm not familiar with. I also didn't have a personal paid AI code tool, so again either pay for a personal one or just use the work Claude account. Also the webcam on my work laptop is substantially nicer than my personal laptop.

Also, critically, it doesn't matter. If IT or my manager had pinged me to ask "Did you do an interview at noon yesterday?" I would have said yes and then the only follow-up would have been them asking if it was a random thing or if I was actively looking.

I think IT (and I guess, lawyers) are probably the only people who care much about separating work and personal devices, just because they're prone to being aware of how much surveillance of the device can be happening. People in marketing/sales/whatever back office stuff will be logged into their personal Facebook, Netflix, iMessages, Email and bank and never consider that their keystrokes are being logged and screenshots are being taken.

> It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose

That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.

For 99% of people, the default would be "I'm going to join this Zoom meeting from the laptop I use all day long to join Zoom meetings, and I'm going to code using the laptop I use all day long to code".

Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer. Their personal laptop might be relatively underpowered and struggle to run all the required software efficiently during an interview. The issue becomes even more significant as more of the tools used require an account - you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service, so you just use the ones you're used to using every day.

America itself brought in the <undesirable> people from the <bad> countries in Europe throughout the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s - Irish peasants, Jews, poor and uneducated Italians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians and Norwegians.

It turned out that those peoples, given opportunities and in a system with functioning institutions, actually weren't violent, stupid or culturally incompatible and in fact thrived, integrated, built communities, grew the economy and contributed to society.

Something for you to consider.

That's a definition you just made up, which has no precedent and is clearly untrue.

I can cross a dozen borders in the EU without so much as slowing down. I can sell my house in one US State and move to another without asking for permission.

It wasn't until World War 1 that passports for international travel became common in Europe.

Don't let the xenophobic posts on social media trick you. Immigrants in the US are factually less likely to commit crimes than born Americans, look it up. They've just repeated the lie so many times that people have accepted it.

Perhaps it's a problem that our supposed public servants can aptly be compared to a dangerous swarm of bees?

Like, in a non-dystopian world, they'd not be hiding their activities and not be attacking people who observe them, but would instead be behaving legally and ethically and therefor not be concerned.

I don't think having the team of PhDs with infinite resources at Anthropic holding the place of drillers in your metaphor holds very well.

Eli Lilly might be the experienced horse carriage operator to Anthropic as the Ford motor company here instead. Or Blackberry when the iPhone was announced.

The biggest advantage Eli Lilly has is in navigating the FDA regulatory process, and at present, US Federal regulations & bureacracy can be pretty easily managed by putting one of Trump's sons or friends on the board or giving a 'donation'.

> Remaining purely apolitical was an option for them

I don't see how.

Lots of well-established, provable facts are "political" because some religious group, industry or subset of the population doesn't like them. Evolution, climate change, the Earth being more than 6,000 years old, etc are simultaneously obviously true scientifically but disputed politically by significant sections of the American public.

Lots of research is going to get pulled into "politics". Publish a paper about autism or depression or obesity, or about algae blooms from fertilizer runoff or lower test scores in schools with more air pollution or anything to do with mRNA or guns or glaciers and on and on and you'll get pulled into some sort of political dispute.

At best, a publication can avoid directly naming politicians or political parties, but it's impossible to be apolitical when publishing the temperature measurements or showing a dinosaur fossil are considered political.

Very, very few people are going to have a social network that does more than get a foot in the door.

Typically, referrals have positive impact like making sure your application gets looked at by a human and possibly tips a "maybe" into the candidate's favor for scheduling a phone screen or moving to the next round of interviews.

There are plenty of very talented people with large networks of former coworkers who will attest to their capabilities and give them referrals, who nonetheless are still struggling to find work.

"Deafening cacophony"?

Because some people said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is bad, and that our political leaders should support Ukraine?

Might be time to turn off your devices and go touch some grass. It doesn't seem like you're in a good head space to be worrying about global politics right now.

It's a system that is vulnerable to fraud, which is why it's good to have regulators who go after fraudulent actors.

It's a perfectly fine system if the egg producers are using it genuinely, it's only a problem when they start submitting fraudulent bids to accomplish illegal market manipulation.

I'm an American who's not insulted by the parent comment, but am tired of your constant weirdly racist anti-immigration posts. Aren't you an immigrant or child of immigrants from Pakistan or India? I recognize your username but forget which exact unique form of hypocritical xenophobia you hold.

The US has benefited massively from having years of the best and brightest from all around the world come to the US to research medicine, engineering and science. It's not about the one guy who's CEO of some tech company, it's about the thousands of graduate students, post docs and researchers doing the actual work to move humanity forward one lab-rat or laser measurement or petri dish at a time.

The 20th century was full of authoritarians attacking the intelligencia. A nation of uneducated peasants is easier to control and exploit. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Why aren't Small Government and Free Market Republicans more outraged at the current administration's betrayals of these core components of American conservativism?

The budget deficit is the largest in history, the federal government size has increased, taxes on imports (tariffs) have increased in politically manipulative ways and now the government is meddling with the market price of commodities.

Even if you don't care about Europe or democracy or pollution or foreign policy... this is still just bad capitalism and bad big-government manipulation preventing the free market from correctly solving problems and establishing an optimal price for goods.

Perhaps you should take a moment to understand what people on the left actually mean, instead of taking memes as sources of truth.

For instance, "men can have babies" is a simple result of politeness and observable reality. Transgender people exist, and can become pregnant and have babies. The polite, sympathetic and decent thing to do when interacting with a transgender person is to use their preferred gender terms. This is true whether you're a small-government, live-and-let-live libertarian conservative (you live your life, I'll live mine) or a Christian values social conservative (Jesus spent his entire life around lepers, beggars and prostitutes and washed their feet as an act of love and compassion).

Combine those two facts 1) you've got a person who had a baby at one point in their life and 2) who should be referred to as a man today, and the result is you get a man who had a baby. Nothing left-wing or liberal about it, just basic civility and politeness to another person, which are values we should all embrace.

> Why? Why???

To find cures for diseases faster, find new ways to produce useful chemicals, find ways to make crops resilient against changing climate, etc

> Isn't this one area you'd want extreme human intervention?

No? There are an essentially infinite number of potentially useful experiments that could be run that have no risk or downside. It's not like they're doing this in a BSL-4 lab mutating smallpox.

I tried that once.

Then when I tried to log in to my Gmail account at my destination, it flagged it as a suspicious login attempt and wouldn't let me in without entering a code they texted to my American phone number, which meant I was locked out of my email for the duration of the trip.

Plus travel day realities often require your phone and accounts - plane tickets, Uber/Lyft, hotel reservations or updates from Airbnb with check-in instructions, door codes, etc.

It's a tremendous challenge and hassle for any regular person. We really just need to push back on the government overreach. It's tragic that half of the Trump voters proclaim to be "small government" and "Don't tread on me" but then tolerate things like this. There's certainly a bipartisan group of people opposed that are large enough to effect change if we work together.

The linked site shows me two subscription options, $289/year or $29 every 4 weeks. Expensive latte.

The economics of online new seem challenging. Bloomberg is $399/year. Wall Street Journal is $715/year. NY Times is $390/year. Washington Post $140/year.

That's a couple thousand dollars a year, just to have a handful of mainstream news sites. Add in local or regional sites, or content focused on hobbies, niche interests, etc and a person is looking at a huge chunk of their income (keep in mind median individual income in USA is $40k) going to reading the news.

Perhaps the more accurate description would be that as a kid, you misunderstood descriptions that petroleum was from decayed organic material from long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

"Both sides" is such an absurd claim these days.

It's like saying that a murderer and a jaywalker are both criminals, so they're basically the same.

> that apparently their vast majority of eligible voters prefers

The 2024 election was 49.8% Trump vs 48.3% Harris on a turnout of 64.3%.

So essentially, only 1 in 3 eligible voters preferred Trump (the other two were split between not voting and voting for Harris).

God I hope not.

We (the collective "we" of all humanity) clearly lost massively when we let a handful of billionares get richer by saying they got to control all sharing, remixing, performing, using or expanding upon any music, art, or other media.

Not that it's any real justice for Swartz or the countless others who've had their lives ruined by copyright laws or for file-sharing, but it's a tiny step in the right direction if we drastically expand fair-use and rethink if we really want a society where the 0.01% control music, film and art.

Your bias and/or obsession are blinding you to the situation here.

There are hundreds of Standord dropouts running startups. And if they do fraud, people call it out, the media reports it as fraud, investors and customers leave, and that's the end.

But Holmes successfully marketed herself with gender as a central part of her story, so that people like you would defend her, promote her and dismiss criticism against the company or product because you're so sure that it's sexism and not legitimate criticism.

The only reason the Theranos fraud got as far as it did was because everyone calling it a fraud got silenced and cancelled as sexists. Now that it's finally over they're saying "See! We told you!" and yet you persist in "No, you're just a sexist".

You also won't find this for future female founders, because the comment you're replying to is a random internet poster imagining things. You can say "I can imagine VCs saying..." and then complete the sentence with literally anything nonsense, it doesn't mean its real.

A big part of the Theranos story is that gender was used as a shield - when people called it a fraud they were dismissed as sexists and Holmes got a lot of easy positive press coverage from media that was dying for stories of about a female visionary founder.

No women are going to have to "carry the baggage" of Elizabeth Holmes. At most, maybe they just won't have the magical protection against all criticism that she had for a number of years. But realistically, people have short memories so we'll probably have a new "The female Elon Musk" hype cycle start around someone new in a year or two.

I didn't back up my statements with numbers because I'm old enough to have lived through the times I'm talking about and it's as obvious how much things have changed in my lifetime, but here:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco... shows houses have gone from 3.5x median income to 6x median income since 1985.

Or here's a source that makes the comparisons via number of hours worked, showing that people today need to work thousands of hours more than Boomers did to afford the same things: https://dailycaller.com/2026/08/29/life-mainstays-college-ho...

Or here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/bf5814b4262c498fb73303b... showing that college tuition has gone from 8% of household income in 1968 to 20% in 2020.

The 90s wasn't a utopia, but also, look at the media landscape of the time as a reflection on society - Fight Club, Office Space and American Beauty were reflections on the unfulfilling banality of life being too easy to find purpose. Married with Children (1987) and The Simpsons (1989) center on men who are supposed to be relatable-losers in low status, low paid dead end jobs (shoe salesman and power plant worker) and yet both have two story houses and are supporting multiple kids, because that was just normal and relatable to the blue collar average Americans watching the show at the time. Rocky (1976) has a protagonist who owns a house in Philadelphia despite being "poor", if it were filmed today they'd have to make him sleeping in his car for the character to represent the same level of desperation that audiences understood him to be in at the time.

Who cares? A modern worker is on Zoom meetings for multiple hours a day, if one of those hours happens to be talking to a recruiter or hiring manager, so what? People also sometimes talk to their kids school or their dentist or the plumber at their house during the work day.

I'm a people manager, and I wouldn't bat an eye at a candidate I was interviewing joining the zoom from their work laptop and I wouldn't care if someone on my team used their work laptop rather than their personal device if they were interviewing elsewhere.

You seem to be confused about the point people are making. The point is that from about 1945 until around 2000 in the USA there really wasn't such a thing as "a job that doesn't pay enough to live on".

People owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores. A single income from any white collar job supported a stay-at-home spouse. Teenagers bought cars by working part time. College kids paid their tuition and living expenses for the full year by working summers.

That today's below-poverty-line job still leaves someone better off than being completely destitute is beside the point.

Everyone sees "AI writing style" everywhere online now. I thought it was interesting when someone linked to Reddit from like 2012-2015 and all the top-rated comments were in the same style.

It might be that the author used claude to generate or edit this. Or, they might just write like the bloggers and Redditors whose messages were trained on to create that style.

> AI doesn't make programmers 100x productive and it never will

I can't wrap my head around the AI naysayers at this point.

We've had the equivalent of watching the tech go from the Wright Brothers plane to supersonic stealth fighter jets in the span of like 4 years, and yet people keep claiming it will never do things that it clearly will do in like... 6 months.

Or in the case of 100x programmer... it's literally already there. You should try it.