Where does the fact that more homeless in the U.S. are men than women fit into this for you?

Of course, that isn't something most people want to hear. I am a woman and I spent 5.7 years homeless. It helped me solve some of my intractable personal problems. I am newly off the street and recently applied for my dream job. I hope to soon have the life I always wanted and could not arrange. I got it in part by taking the whole deal involved in exercising agency like a man, a luxury many women lack.

But commenting on such things tends to not be well received. Men want to play their own victim card when it comes to that statistic and it is never acceptable to point out that there is an element of choice involved and the greater degree of agency generally exercised by men is a driving factor in higher rates of male homelessness. It sounds like victim blaming to a lot of people.

I am perfectly fine with accepting that there is an element of choice involved if that also explains why men are found in the top of society.

My experience is that many women will not agree on that but instead point to (if they are really stereotype feminists) patriarchal structures in society benefitting men.

Feminism includes criticism of the social dynamics that hurt men too. I think it's perfectly explained from a feminist framework why men can be on the bottom and also on the top of society. Most feminists support a solution to these problems as well as the ones that affect women since they are inherently connected.

There is masculinity but claiming it's toxic is an absurd form of shaming which rests on the assumption that there are masculine traits which are objectively toxic.

"Man up"

"Boys will be boys"

"You throw like a girl"/"[blank] is for girls"

"When men were men..."

"No means yes, yes means anal"

You can't deny there are some really terrible behaviours and expectations that have been normalised in our culture and they are considered as being inherent to masculinity.

I'm curious as to why you think this an "either-or" proposition? Can men make choices and benefit from a "patriarchal" society? In fact, might men have further incentive to make the choices that will convey the benefits that disproportionately await them?

I wonder still though if you agree that it also explains why men are found in the top.

I do think this is an element:

Generally speaking, women have an option men lack. They can marry well. Given this easy out, when things get challenging at work, some will walk, especially since they have vastly less reason to believe they can achieve stellar success and they also face sexual harassment to a degree that far exceeds what men face. So, with poorer odds of reward, a typically worse set of working conditions due to the element of harassment and another option on the table, this will lead a lot of women to give up where men have fewer disincentives to persist and no easy out.

Women need to "want" it a helluva lot worse for wanting it to have any hope of getting them as far as a man is likely to get. So it is a rather unfair question and it really comes across like it has a very polite facade, but dark agenda.

I will add that I have already previously indicated women make choices as well when they choose to put up with crappy situations to avoid being raped on the street. So I don't plan to engage you further.

No, I said there is an element of choice. I said this was true about both genders.

Men do not face high odds of sexual assault on the street. When their choice is between staying in a crappy situation with relatives they don't much like or being homeless, homelessness may look like the lesser evil to them. When given the same choice, but knowing that life on the street is highly likely to involve being raped, putting up with crappy relatives is likely to look like the lesser evil to a woman.

Also: Comments on HN talking about toxic masculinity and The Patriarchy should probably just be flagged/downvoted, not engaged in discussion. Talking like men are all evil pieces of shit for being born male in an overwhelmingly male forum is something I view as trollish. So I tend to downvote and/or flag them.

Regarding your last comment, what do you mean by "greater degree of agency" and how do you measure it?

We don't live in Saudi Arabia. Women can make all the same choices men can.

Like what is stopping other women from doing what you did and how does that also not stop men?

It sounds like victim blaming because it is. In our society we tend towards believing people are not deserving of help if they are in bad situations due to their own choices.

I don't believe because I understand how hard it can be to make the right choices, and also because as far as I have seen that's true of almost everyone in a bad spot. That doesn't mean we shouldn't help them, because we should help everyone who suffers.

Of course not.

As the GP pointed out, homelessness is safer for men.

How about this fact: 21% of children live in poverty. How does that fit in for you?

(The official US number is 25%, but I feel like Canada and UK surveys pairing mental illness and homelessness at up to 70% is closer to the reality.)

Mental illness isn't always a 100% sort of thing. Most people I know have been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness at some point or another, most of them either temporary or minor. Most of these people are gainfully employed, most of the time. Some of these people have had some issues retaining employment due to a mental issue getting worse.

The more demand for your labor there is, the easier it is to get back on your feet after a temporary worsening of your condition is resolved, and that's super important, I think. Also, if you have chronic issues, the degree to which your employer will tolerate those chronic issues is determined largely by demand for your labor.

I mean, certainly, there are some who are completely disabled, and I imagine that if you took one of those people I know with minor issues that periodically got worse and better, they'd have a hell of a time trying to get better if they were homeless. Certainly, mental health treatment is important and would help a lot. I'm just saying that more demand for your labor is also something that helps a lot, even when you do have some other issues.

Many “mentally ill” people were formerly considered “sane” within the bounds of social norms, but even the best prepared can fall on hard times, and being homeless and socially isolated is really hard even for the mentally strongest.

The author suggests hard working middle class people are missing out on millions unfilled job openings ripe for the picking, because we don’t have good enough matching algorithms.

One insult is suggesting desperate out of work people may not already be taking the extraordinary measures necessary to find the best positions they can get. I question even the validity of the claim, that “matching” is alone is keeping any significant number people out of work. Another insult is not mentioning a lot of these jobs may not be filled simply because the salary and opportunity for career development are not that great.

Other topics like improving the educational system are grossly oversimplified given the competing interests of students, teachers, politics, and government. The biggest problem has been explained here on HN previously: Education doesn’t lack good ideas or innovation as much as it lacks funding to develop and implement the good ideas.

Other points about how AI will remove concerns of bias seem naive, or at least not in tune with recent work like that from Facebook, that has faced an uphill battle trying to convince people its easy to create objective policy systems.

I can see the benefit of articles that look at the current practical challenges of AI, and also more speculative articles that look at what the future may bring. This argument seems to be stuck in the middle, while not doing particularly well at either.

You have a source for that? I would think that the wage gap would be a much more significant factor than cultural expectations. And I would hope that people would provide caregiving to their own children for free.

EDIT: I can't reply ("I'm posting too fast"), but I'm genuinely asking for clarity--not making a point or impugning anyone's character.

Click on the time next to the post you want to reply to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16056235

My wife was a finance director and made good coin. Given the cost of daycare and the difficulty of getting late childcare (we both have jobs where the day ends when it ends sometimes, daycare assumes your day ends at 4 everyday), it was a no brainer for her to stop working.

When she returns to the workforce, she’ll be on the bottom as an analyst or some other gig.

For people with less resources, it’s far worse.

Also daycare would be subventionized.

Even if you quit entirely, beyond straightforward maternity/paternity leave? I don't think I'd be in favor of that type of regulation. In my opinion, if you make the decision to quit (for whatever reason), you can come back to get whatever job your skills let you get. I also think "developed" isn't the adjective you're looking for, maybe "tightly-regulated".

Of course not. The point is that there shouldn't be any economical or work-related downside (other than slightly less pay during maternity/paternity leave) for having a child.

(Obviously raising a child costs money but I hope you get the idea)

Developed is quite apt for any society that values its members.

And I would hope that people would provide caregiving to their own children for free.

So would I. But why is it only women are expected to provide such care and are classified as gold digging whores if they think the father should provide for them while they do so and also provide some compensation into the future for the lost career building opportunities it costs them? Parents should both be responsible for the product of having gotten jiggy together, not just mothers.

In USA, while women are in poverty more than men, likely for the reasons you highlight, women receive more social services than men, for those same reasons. Homelessness disproportionately impacts men (by far), because woman and children have more access to social services.

Also, the American track record for alimony and child support is not great of late.

The instinct for pair-bonding--and, in humans, the cultural institution of marriage--evolved as behavioral adaptations to the unfairnesses inherent in having two sexes.

It would appear that equal outcomes demand equal commitment. As the biological commitment is a few kcal and a few minutes for one, versus years of time and many more kcal for the other, that leaves an awful lot of effort to make those scales balance.

Simple analysis suggests that females should cartelize and police each other's behavior with respect to males, embargoing reproduction from any male deemed too selfish in regard to child-rearing responsibilities. But cartels are tough to keep together, and males can counter with misogynistic and patriarchal strategies of their own.

The biological discrepancy will therefore likely never be resolved to anything even close to fairness.

It's never going to be free, either. There is always an opportunity cost. Providing resources to an existing child precludes using them yourself or applying them to a theoretical future child.

I'm inclined to believe this opinion runs diametrically opposite to the general consensus in Australia, insofar as legislation can be considered the general consensus.

I'll admit some men, and some women, may lean in the general direction of the opinion you've state, but I feel "gold digging whores" is overly strong.

But their opinions hardly matter as we have strong child support legislation, with a strong Child Support Agency to enforce the laws to direct an appropriate amount of money to the resident-parent to aid in funding the child. We also have a fairly well run welfare system.

In the US, full time moms tend to get viewed and treated like leeches, regardless of their socioeconomic class. I was a homemaker a long time. I have six years of college. I was a military wife and homeschooling mom. But America is pretty sucktastic about treating full-time wives like pariahs and non contributors.

If your land is more civilized than mine, I am very glad to hear it.

Edit: And I am not questioning it. I met an Australian friend for lunch/dinner with a group of friends in San Francisco years ago. He talked very differently about his full-time homemaker wife than is the cultural norm here.

How does that contribute to women being in poverty at a higher rate than men? If the parents are married, they share finances so they are either both in poverty, or neither are in poverty. If they are divorced, the primary caregiver will be compensated for their time through child support payments.

And I don't think stay at home mothers are generally classified as "gold digging whores", maybe my experience is different from yours though.

1) She got unexpectedly pregnant.

2) She got divorced.

3) Her spouse died.

Due to the fact that women live longer and men are, on average, about 4 years older than their wives, 90 percent if the time, when someone is burying their spouse it is a woman burying her husband. (for hetero couples, a stat that will change with same sex marriage)

I did the homemaker thing. I have 6 years of college. My post divorce life has been far less lush than that of my ex.

What a strange statement. This would be true if, for example, poor people were 33% men, 33% women, and 33% children.

It would also be true that "most poor people in the US are men and their children."

Did you mean to say something specific about single mothers and the children who live with them? Or was the phrasing an attempt to import that image while saying something much less meaningful?

Here's something that is specific and true: The vast majority of homeless in America are men. There are many, many centers set up to help women and children in poverty exclusively, while resources just for men are rare-to-nonexistent.

Extreme poverty is massively gendered against men, and the resources to address it are massively gendered towards helping women.

My mother cheated on my father and he left her because of that.

He was required (by Texas law) to pay child-support to my mother up until we were 18 (I am 29) to my mother who cheated on him; he still owes back pay on that and refuses to pay until they put a warrant out for his arrest.

My mother demonized him to us by crying about not knowing why he left her; she never once mentioned until 5 months ago that she cheated on him.

Dad regrets leaving us (his kids, not my mother) because it put a rift between us. We never knew the truth until recently when my mom let it slip in a conversation.

At this point I feel like he has been punished enough by the state of Texas for leaving my cheating mother.

Recently my eldest brother had a girl and my father has been in her life as much as he can and I'm incredibly happy for that (not jealous one bit) because at least my niece will have something my brother and I never had because he was soured by her behavior.

We grew up poor because of my mother's infidelity...

This may show my bias growing up in a traditionally christian environment, but for years the rub on the right has been to disregard two of those realities and handwave the other as: she got unexpectedly pregnant, because she lacks personal responsibility, and is therefore not entitled to the support of the state or society. When the Haves "get unexpectedly pregnant," it's an accident or a surprise, when the Have Nots do, it's a sin. Even some of the responses here dogwhistle the sentiment that the people in this position kind of deserve it, which disgusts me.

And to the other reply to your comment: Good thing this isn't a sympathy contest, and that humans do not have a finite capacity to care for their fellow humans, so we can feel bad for the dead people and still work for the benefit of the people left behind. "These are nice points, but wave of hand I'm not going to listen to them, honey." Of course they needed a throwaway account to say it here, too bad that attitude prevails in so many of our interactions every day.

At the societal level, attempting to hold people to a lofty standard of moral purity doesn't seem to be particularly effective considering even clergy have trouble remaining celibate.

The hope is that it prevents future unexpected pregnancies by making people pause and think before they act "Hmm, maybe if I do this unprotected thing I want to do that it will financially screw over the girl I want to do it with. Maybe I shouldn't do that thing without protection."

Personal responsibility is about incentivizing good choices, so society has to pick up the tab for fewer children born into poverty. Unfortunately, this probably doesn't work out in practice since people (particularly teenagers) are going to have unprotected sex regardless of consequences. So there is a point even if the point is broken.

There are 44 million people in poverty in the US. There are 10 million single mothers in the US, with 17 million children. Since the majority of single mothers are not in poverty, your statement is false.

https://singlemotherguide.com/single-mother-statistics/

My phrasing is fine if someone is engaging in good faith and trying to actually understand my points rather than looking for some trivial means to justify dismissing them.

You really seem to be reaching here. So I will likely not reply further.

EDIT: Others have independently expressed similar confusion as well.

EDIT2: I'm being throttled, but in response to Doreen:

Here's where you say women live longer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16055356). I don't see how that can mean anything other than "men die younger". Again, no need to resort to "bad faith" when "miscommunication" suffices. Here's the full text for convenience/posterity:

> Most poor people in the US are women and their children. Most of those women were solidly middle class until one of three things happened: 1) She got unexpectedly pregnant. 2) She got divorced. 3) Her spouse died. Due to the fact that women live longer and men are, on average, about 4 years older than their wives, 90 percent if the time, when someone is burying their spouse it is a woman burying her husband. (for hetero couples, a stat that will change with same sex marriage)

Nowhere did I say that. That framing sounds incredibly bad faith.

Those stats are not current. Given the reactions I got from working women at a Fortune 500 company over the detail that my sons took over the cooking and cleaning, I have zero reason to believe we are anywhere near achieving parity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I successfully swapped gender roles with my sons. I got a corporate job and offered them the chance to take over the women's work rather than get jobs themselves. They did not half ass it, though they also did not handle it the same way I would. If it weren't for feeling attacked in an ugly and gratuitous way, there would be good common ground to be found there.

If you are interested, the book "More work for mother" details 300 years of history of household tech. It partly agrees with you that maybe women should learn to lighten up a hair. But it also asserts the pressure for women to work so hard comes from real gains in things like child survival rates.

I like the book in part because it is a rare example of not hating on either gender and not promoting the war between the sexes.

I don't plan to engage you further because this just sounds like someone venting their spleen on a random internet stranger and I am not interested in engaging with that.

I'm also somewhat irritated when people call it "women's work", as it puts the whole conversation on a sexist basis from the start, even though that is a factually and historically accurate way to describe it.

If you can find a copy of the book "Chore Wars," maybe that would be useful.

I don't disagree with you that domestic chores need to be streamlined as part of the solution. But the subtext of your long comment is just a whole lot of anger at "women," which probably means at the state of things between you and your wife, and kicking an internet stranger is less harmful to your life than just taking it out on your wife.

But I ain't crazy about being kicked, no matter how much I can understand the dynamic likely driving it.

As a matter of fact, my spouse acts a lot like my father and I act much like my mother. He also makes every little task a needlessly complicated affair, but he largely does it to get attention and recognition, as an insufferable extrovert. And then he doesn't get it, because my mother and all their children only look at the actual results. Somehow, they're still married, even after so many decades of putting up with the other one's crap.

And my spouse and I are sorted. As I mentioned, the only way to not do any of the work yourself--including the mental/emotional effort--is to let someone else do it their own way. So if my spouse does a job in a way that I find grandiose and inefficient, that's fine. If I do a job in a way my spouse considers to be half-assed and slipshod, that's also fine. There is an equitable division of labor insofar as we can both agree on what actually needs doing.

Either of us is, of course, free to do other things that the other person does not care about, but that work will not be paid as well with the intra-family currency based on gratitude and respect. The greatest sticking point is that my spouse wants to be paid (in that currency) by the hour and I want to be paid by the job. And that mirrors in miniature all the people out there that believe in the labor theory of value, versus all those that do not.

I don't care how hard you work at something, or how long it took for you to do it. I only care what you got done. And if you did something that no one else wanted, your effort doesn't count for as much as if you had done something that everyone needed. So when I hear you say that women do N hours more work inside the household than men, I feel I must rebut:

Time is not how everyone measures the value of labor.

That, of course, raises the question of how the value of labor should be measured. The tick marks on your household yardstick might be equally useless or worse, like SLoC or story points. Anecdotally, I have found it's usually better to not have an accounting based relationship, and to avoid keeping score on everything. If you feel emotionally as though you're working too hard, and your partner not hard enough, maybe talk about it to move expectations closer to reality. But telling your other that you are working 18 more hours per week on your relationship than they are is not likely to produce the result you are hoping for.

You are correct. My error.

But I see zero justification for you starting with a venomous comment and coming back now with a high handed comment that places all the blame here on other people, their prejudices and their propensity for ad hominems.

For the record: There was zero intent to attack you. I was doing my best to be understanding in the face of a really ugly remark. Sometimes when I do that, it goes very well. Sometimes, like now, it does not.

And I will make a mental note of this incident and try to keep it in mind should I run into you again on the forum. This has been an entirely unpleasant experience for me.

I'm not a pleasant person. I don't care to explain why right now, but it isn't right for me to spread my damage to others without their consent. So I'm sorry for doing that.

I recommend against projecting that on other families you don’t know. And maybe talk to a therapist?

There is also some hyperbole involved. My spouse may take only 15 actual minutes to clean a toilet, and use one off the shelf product, specifically marketed for cleaning toilets. So in comparison to the way I do it, that is using 12 different chemicals and taking all f'in' day. When my spouse describes how I do it, it would probably be more on the order of "takes 15 seconds to rub the seat down with a moist towelette". It is a caricature, rather than a photograph.

Actually, now that I'm describing it, that does seem very strange to use insincerity so much. But as I was growing up, when sarcasm was everywhere, it made a lot more sense.

When the Welfare People Come is great read on the the way the welfare system is stacked against those who need to use it that delves into this and OP's points in greater detail.

> 1) is known

If the woman doesn't know who the father is, who's choice was that?

> 2) is able

yes

> 3) is willing

The courts routinely assess child support on both willing and unwilling fathers. It's not an option for fathers.

#2) Yes, your prison comment overwhelmingly impacts the poor, particularly minorities.

#3) The burden is on the woman, if the woman is poor she may not have the resources to force the father to pay.

He was required (by Texas law) to pay child-support to my mother up until we were 18 (I am 29) to my mother who cheated on him; he still owes back pay on that and refuses to pay until they put a warrant out for his arrest.

My mother demonized him to us by crying about not knowing why he left her; she never once mentioned until 5 months ago that she cheated on him.

Dad regrets leaving us (his kids, not my mother) because it put a rift between us. We never knew the truth until recently when my mom let it slip in a conversation.

At this point I feel like he has been punished enough by the state of Texas for leaving my cheating mother.

Recently my eldest brother had a girl and my father has been in her life as much as he can and I'm incredibly happy for that (not jealous one bit) because at least my niece will have something my brother and I never had because he was soured by her behavior.

We grew up poor because of my mother's infidelity...

If someone is using a personal story with blaming statements as a means to make commentary about a more general topic of discussion, either the appropriateness of the blaming statements given the narrative must be just as subject to challenge as it would be if the narrative were a third-party news story and the whole style of argument of using such stories in a discussion needs to be viewed as out of bounds, otherwise you've created a specially privileged argument style for which only silence or agreement is allowed.

We need this for discussion quality because challenging someone on their intimate personal details typically makes them feel wounded where it already hurt, prompting a defensive attack and a flamewar. Also, because we can't know from internet comments what was really going on in someone's life, it's more intellectually honest.

There are other things one can do to signal that someone is not being attacked. You can rephrase a statement as a neutral question. You can lead with "In my experience," making the statement about yourself. You can say "Of course I can't judge what was going on in your situation, but" and return to a general case.

I agree with you that when someone makes blaming personal statements as if they had general force in an argument, most of us immediately sense that something's off. But such statements come from pain and pain never responds to argument, only acknowledgement.

You're a fine HN commenter and I think you know all this already, but maybe the above will help clarify something for others.

Would you be interested in essentially a mirror of HN's front page, but where you're free to say most things?

The mod criteria would be "If you get personal, or you're destructive to conversation, you're out." But conversely, uncomfortable ideas will be allowed.

I'm thinking we could also set up a Slack community for the site. If people have problems with the moderation, they can come chat about it openly.

The moderation here has been getting a bit stuffy, and maybe other people feel the same way. I don't know. If you're interested, shoot me an email and we can start hammering out a plan.

Unfortunately, I have no way of contacting you other than to post this here.

If my father had cheated on my mother I'm assuming it would still be his fault if she left him; that seems to be the gist of what you're getting at.

Once a cheater, always a cheater. We grew up poor because my mother cheated, not because of my father leaving.

And we grew up poor because my mother relied entirely upon my father for financial support and negated that benefit by cheating.

No, independently of your mother cheating on him, it's his fault for refusing to uphold his legal obligation to materially support his children.

Leaving the spouse is not the issue. (Leaving the children may be an issue, but to the extent it is it is at a minimum mitigated by fulfilling the legal support obligations a parent who is not raising their children has to those children.)

> If my father had cheated on my mother I'm assuming it would still be his fault if she left him

Whoever's fault leaving is, it would be his fault if he chose to refuse to meet his legal obligation to support his children.

> We grew up poor because my mother cheated, not because of my father leaving.

From your own description, the poverty was at least in large part because your father refused to pay legally-required child support after leaving you and your mother. Assuming that there was not a custody contest that you omitted in which your mother was awarded full custody, leaving children is not necessary with leaving their mother, however justified the latter is, and in any case, neither requires being a deadbeat on child support.

Accidents are only accidental in intent, not in results.

In some cases, the man who raped her.

At least historically, what society gave in return was keeping women (for the most part) out of harms way when it came to wars.

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

"On the average, half of the deaths caused by war happened to civilians, only some of whom were killed by famine associated with war...The civilian percentage share of war-related deaths remained at about 50% from century to century."

That implies roughly 3/4 of the deaths are men.

UNICEF et al cover this at length. https://www.unicef.org/graca/patterns.htm

https://www.iraqbodycount.org

Edit: Intersting discussion here, suggesting much of the difference comes down to how you measure and when you stop measuring. The longer you measure, the worse it is for civilians and in particular, women. https://files.prio.org/Publication_files/Prio/Armed%20Confli....

Not does that alone justify keeping them in poverty.

The mainstream opinion today seems to be that the current "mix" is less favorable to women (I happen to disagree with this), but I think it is a good basis for a civil discussion, more so than the insistence on equality at all levels which seems unattainable to me. (EDIT: last few words added)

Furthermore, women are probably more likely to get an offer (and accept an offer) for welfare assistance than men. Parents with children are probably far more likely to receive assistance than individuals.

I don't see how it cancels my argument other than highlighting even bigger wealth distribution imbalance in favor of women.

2 minutes of googling seems to show that adult women’s poverty rate is around 20-30% higher than men’s.

http://federalsafetynet.com/us-poverty-statistics.html

Courts favour giving custody to Women. The men who do get custody generally have to have more of their affairs in order (job, housing, stability). So its not surprise when a man gets custody he is in a better financial position.

She also demonized him to us as if it was his fault for leaving her.

Her cheating also made a head while she was both dating my current step-dad and another man who could also have ended up as my step-dad.

Needless to say, I have a hard time with relationships because my mother's have been extremely out of the norm.

I am very sorry for what you suffered.

For some years, I read as much scholarly info as I could on infidelity.

In a nutshell: Infidelity doesn't destroy a relationship. Instead, it grows out of serious problems within the relationship.

I hope you find a means to heal.

Sometimes the "serious problems" are simply that one partner is a cheater. An ex of mine (who cheated on me) went on to cheat in their next relationship, and the one after that, and based on mutual friends' comments, a few more since. Some people just aren't wired for monogamy.

Yup, she was co-dependent on him and he was a workaholic mechanic.

There is more to the story than I have said:

My father had a serious cocaine addiction (he is clean now); that combined with his workaholic nature (at the time) caused him to not be around my mother as much as he should have.

She wished he would be around more with her and the cheating on him seems to be the side-effect of that issue.

Those were the starting points of the relationship problems and they only worsened from there.

My mother's mother ragged on her a lot about every mistake (big or small) she happened to make. I believe this caused her to have a hard time trusting her decisions and lowered her self-esteem.

The codependency with my father and his lack of being around due to working (to help provide for us) was definitely a factor in her cheating on him; it seems to be a common problem of those whose significant other isn't around as much as they should (or would like them) to be.

Thanks for the thoughts on healing, it's definitely a struggle.

It sucks that they did divorce however my brothers and I turned out just fine by her raising us.

I see a psychiatrist and have talked plenty with her about my childhood and growing up.

From my posts it may come off that my mother is a terrible person and that's so far from the truth. I love my mother and would do anything for her.

She had to play the role of mother and father (something any parent would struggle with). Sacrifices she made to raise us still amaze me to this day.

Mom involved us in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts to be around male mentors (and it helped a lot). We had the support of Big Brother & Big Sisters for one-on-one interaction with male figures.

We never went without under the care of my mother, however we were in poverty and she constantly was trying to make ends meet every month. While we weren't homeless like in your situation, it was still very much a struggle.

I learned very early on the difference between wants and needs.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/05/31/187551135...

He's such a kind, caring and eloquent man despite his upbringing.

I'm watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi_27bpIb30 now to learn more about his life.

I'm a free market person and I believe if the government tried to legislate this, it would screw it up. Rather it should try to open the way for the private industry to create AI based health care solutions.

I'd also like to see character based communities with minimal basic income. Ie, your economic output is not relevant, but rather your character. How kind you are to others, how passionate you are about your talents, how independent you are about looking after yourself. I think this is the real solution to poverty in a world of increased automation.

I know some people want UBI without strings attached, but my feeling is that without some kind of purpose (even a non economic one) mental health issues will increase.

Datamining is likely to help detect and clarify negative patterns in large groups (like when stents don't actually reduce angina). But doing the same to find positive patterns to shape policy seems to be much harder due to the wild variation inherent in individual patient response to each therapy.

Existing therapy is refined via specific experiments which are not amenable to aggregation into large groups that can be 'mined' using AI or DM, thereby adding further value. It's not clear to me what AI can add to existing stat/prob methods here.

Inversely, when trying to characterize patients using their raw data, I've found individual patient data to be so horribly noisy and so often mislabeled as to be useless for more than trivial purposes of individual trend summary. This becomes especially woeful when aggregating digital health records, and is likely to remain so for decades to come (given their current glacial rate of improvement).

When it comes to the prospect of mining medical data to improve treatment, I can only say, "GIGO".

Agreed.

>Rather, [the government] should try to open the way for the private industry ...

Disagree, at least in part.

One source of personal frustration is the perception that rich techies who made their fortunes by writing programs without explicit government approval/legislation seem to spend a lot of time begging for government solutions (like UBI) or approvals for these problems without first attempting to use their money, brains, and tech with a little creativity to generate extra-governmental solutions.

I have been saying something similar for a long time! The wage gap, in my opinion, is a result of choices made by women in a society that expects them to be primary caregivers.

I think that people should be paid to be caregivers for their own families. In fact, many new programs do exactly this. Still it is not reliably spread throughout the US federation.

However, my concern is that subsidizing child care actually leads to overpopulation. I am worried about the Malthusian trap.

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286

But I agree with you that when the real problem is a rising fundamental scarcity, a better breadcrumb detector is not the ultimate solution.

Utterly bizarre.

And that's not a crazy thing to be wrapped around the axle about, though it doesn't generally make for good debate.

To be fair, I stopped reading that post at that point and moved on to the discussion chains. Only afterwards did I come back to it.

It is an overwhelmingly male forum. So not surprising that men generally are more aware of male reality than of female reality.

There have also been rebuttals of the worst and most inaccurate pro male comments.

Most people here seem to genuinely be interested in understanding and not merely looking to shoot me down.

It used to be a great deal more onesided and challenging, to the point where you couldn't say anything about the reality of women's lives without it being a flamewar or beatdown.