This. We are seeing the results of what was reported in the book Boys Adrift.

My older son just graduated high school. He has no interest in college at the moment, and has shown a gift for working with his hands. He is currently doing a carpentry apprenticeship with an acquaintance that runs a renovation and design company. He loves the work, loves the people he works with[0], and comes home and wants to build more stuff. He's making pretty decent money as an 18 year old, and is part of something that very much embodied.

[0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a metal worker, so it isn't just a bunch of dudes, which is also great.

Looking back a decade later, it would have been very beneficial if I didn't go to university but instead did an apprenticeship and developed from there, built up confidence and independence incrementally and forming my path iteratively.

Most of my friends and family actually went (are going) on such a path, from apprenticeship/trade-school to working and eventually advanced training or university later in life.

In Switzerland this model is widely appreciated and seems to be the default (I didn't look at numbers). Newly the (first) apprenticeship is called "Erstausbildung" (initial education), implying that it is the first of many steps in our education, revisited/expanded at later stages in life.

In many other (OECD) countries this seems not to be the case and college/university is regarded as the default or thing to aspire to for everyone. I personally don't agree with that notion and have become more and more convinced of a more continuous and flexible education that isn't necessarily tied to academics.

I hope some of the implicit stigma around older undergrads goes away too.

Not everyone is motivated or gifted enough at 18 to grind through 4 years while maximizing social interactions and general happiness.

I really do believe university education is very beneficial to most people but at different stages of their lives and one solution fits all is not good.

My experience sounds similar to yours. Though, when I tried to go back to school to dive in again, I found the 'system' was highly oriented towards parenting 18yo kids in all the worst ways imaginable. It was nauseating and unbearable being in that environment, and even going through the application/acceptance process (filling out pledges for conduct, right-thinking, etc). Much has changed with online learning, but I still feel the B&M universities are a very ill-fit for independently-minded adult learners.

Learning for people who have work experience is really different. We have context, clear goals and so on. Teaching other 'adult' students is really fun, because we get to figure out what suits them instead of trying to hit measurements predefined by some committee. Ultimately it is just about giving guidance and ideas, kind of like consulting to learn, what to learn and so on.

"Education is wasted on the young" - this was exactly my experience. I didn't know it then, but I first needed to build up confidence, make 'real' mistakes and learn from them. I was also completely unfit for the type of scheduled and predetermined learning that happens at universities. My mind wanders too much and I'm driven by answering my own questions that I feel matter or are interesting. Also a reason why I don't work in large/streamlined orgs.

As a son of a blue collar mechanic, I am all for this; we need more tradespeople in the US, and I suspect he'll be well on his way to financial security at least as early if not earlier than my son (if he takes care of his finances).

There's this from the .uk perspective https://www.fixradio.co.uk/fix-feed/features/post/everybody-...

I find it fascinating you needed to drop this comment in order to justify your son's work environment, implying that all male environments are inherently toxic. It's very rare to find people suggesting that an all female work environment is inherently bad.

It is a small world and I am 98% sure that your son has been in my house recently.

This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation. And most of us are already in planning on entrepreneurship because we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees. It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways I might as well drop out and use that money bootstrapping this inventory SaaS. Innovation out of desperation, I guess.

It’s no way to live. But I think we’re approaching an inflection point.

If someone's trying to talk you into quitting and giving up because no one wants you because you're black, well.. that doesn't sound like a good friend to me.

Don't get me wrong -- a few tech-billionaires dropped out of college, and apparently it worked out for some. So if you want to try that out, then that'd seem like a different issue. But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.

All that said, if you want to feel out the waters, why not apply for an internship? Internships can be awesome! -- you can get experience and money while still being a student, plus it can be fun!

Of course haha the name brand and few cool professors are keeping me at this point. But I never expected to go from the highest ranking/gpa/scores to having leaving academia even at the edge of the table.

> But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.

It’s more like “if I can make X amount anyways today, why do it Y way when I’ll be behind anyways? Might as well gain the experience and be in the same position 4-5 years from now?” if that makes sense but I understand it sounding rash through text.

> why not apply for an internship?

It seems we all have the same issue of never getting responses online. It’s very odd considering we’ve done incredibly well when the interview is direct with the person hiring (as in this is the person that makes the final decision), but situations like that are limited.

The parent commentor stated that their cohort has seen evidence of systematic rejection of their resumes. It is a well-documented fact that this happens all the time for female-sounding, black-sounding etc names and pictures.

Suggesting that "no, it's probably just some missing fine tuning on your resume" doesn't really seem like the right response here...

HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews.

It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.

I see getting hired as the last stage in the pipeline, with the first stages being your family, then your education and then employment.

The more things go wrong in the first stages, the less likely it is for one to succeed at getting to the top of the next stage.

If people from underprivileged families can only afford to go to the 50% best school in the state, then to the 75% best college, then by the time they enter the job search page, they won't be at the top of the list (again, on average).

I'll use myself as an example: I had the privilege of coding for entire weekends when I was young, while my peers had to work the land. This gave me a distinct advantage early on, which I capitalized on, so at an interview with a company I am more likely to get hired than if those same peers had hypothetically applied, again because it wouldn't make sense for a company to pass on the best candidate when they are all competing for talent, regardless of race, gender, height or other ways of splitting people into groups.

I think everyone agrees that the current situation when it comes to diversity in the workplace is not acceptable, and we should definitely fix it, but in my opinion, if companies are competing fairly for talent, then that part of the pipeline doesn't really need fixing. We can instead use it as a test to see if the attempts at fixing the earlier stages result in better numbers.

P.S. This a difficult subject and I don't intend to offend anyone. Despite my relative privilege above, compared to my peers in the US, I still grew up in a poor and underprivileged family and am behind my current peers both financially and socially, so it's a topic that hits home for me.

Truly qualified people on the margins are still getting shut out at every level, every age and stage. Mediocrity is still pushing the center ahead of everyone else. The fact that wsj/economist/HN has turned anti-woke doesn't change the facts.

How could that be? I was under the impression that a huge amount of new hires come in each year from fresh university graduates.

And it was specifically about hiring from HBU's vs other elite institutions, not about hiring black applicants in general which is how you described it.

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%...

It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31:

"Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all) did not make a statistically significant difference for black applicants"

The actual study shows that removing racial indicators from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So someone who represents themselves as the leader of their campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less likely to get a call back than someone who represented themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student Business Association". They refer to the removal of racial indicators as whitening but I think that's prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is certainly a form of whitening, since black names are being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer to the removal of racial indicators and making the experience racially neutral as a form of whitening.

Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race result in less callbacks than when that same experience doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can not be concluded strictly based off of the study's parameters. For example, if I were presented with one candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law Society" I would probably pick that person over someone who was in charge of that university's "Black Law Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing so. I would consider being in charge of an organization that is open to all races or is independent of race as a more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of an organization that is race specific.

To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I would need to pick someone who was not in charge of anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do this comparison and unfortunately the study does not present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this analysis myself.

I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact that this study is not exactly pertinent to this conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs, instead of engineering, computer science, law, or professional jobs.

Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should not read too much into many of these studies. They are not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.

Good catch, I had been thinking of another study which looked specifically at only changing names on resumes. That's:

Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination

https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

In any event, its not a single study that's looked at this. Have a look at this meta-analysis of 24 studies

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.full

Imagine you having always bought tasty tomatoes from your local farm, and someone steps in to show you studies that determined that the generally tomatoes in the US are tasteless.

I'm also not arguing that tasty tomatoes are taking shelf space away from other fruit.

Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?

Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file).

I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out.

Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution.

This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.

Have you considered that underrepresented candidates might not have the free time outside of university, family, and job responsibilities in order to compete with those whose families can support them to focus on only university and preparing for interviews?

If HR wants their diversity numbers up, maybe HR needs to consider having some diversity in the interview process itself? I wouldn't expect a cookie cutter process to result in much diversity of background or thought.

> Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate

One of the best interviewing tips I learned that has served me extremely well is to try disprove my impression of the candidate. It seems like this process entirely fails at that.

Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law. And to be fair, some companies do have good intentions with a little extra effort and money put into diversity efforts.

A truly objective hiring process would take into account that Joe and Charley who both got the same results on the coding test are not equally qualified if Joe grew up poor, with parents who never graduated high school, paid his own way through university by working full-time, and along with raising a child as a single parent. While Charley comes from a wealthy family and focused only on studying and job interview prep. With his parents passing along some of their own higher education to him as needed, connecting him to their large network for job opportunities, etc.

Joe is obviously a better candidate. His starting line was far behind Charley's and yet he crossed the finish line at the same time. Joe would be a better candidate even if he passed the finish line a little after Charley. If you want a truly objective hiring process you need to look at starting lines, not just finish lines.

Most companies are doing almost the opposite and only looking at the finish line. They want to look only at the skills and exclude the actual person in a misguided effort to be objective.

All that really does it amplify existing societal bias and privilege by rewarding those who got the most breaks in life.

> this is such a difficult problem to solve.

Agreed. And it would be more expensive. Part of why the status quo is so hard to change. You've got to spend the money and do the work. Or take shortcuts and discriminate on one side or the other.

Maybe Charley had depression and anxiety and never made any friends while Joe is outgoing and did allowing him to form study groups easier. Maybe Charley's parents insisted he become a lawyer and he never touched code until college. Maybe Charley has a speech impediment, maybe he is ugly, maybe he is on the spectrum, maybe, maybe, maybe.

We are here to judge how someone can do the job, not go through their life history trying to judge how much harder or easier they had it than someone else.

You missed the most important part of my point. Someone who crosses the finish line at the same time as someone else, but started from further back is almost always better at doing the job.

I already said it's very difficult to objectively measure. But any improvement in doing so will give you a competitive advantage in finding the best candidates.

The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma, had coping skills that protected them in deployment. When they ran the studies, they found they were completely wrong - people with childhood trauma, regardless of their military success, were multiple times (4-6x odds ratios) more likely to develop PTSD, (re-)start smoking, or misuse substances.

It's a neat narrative: go through hardship + come out the other side = better coping skills / more productivity. However, humans are complex and often fragile.

I accept the argument that a person who has experienced more hardships has accomplished more to reach that same point. That could be justified if your hiring principles are "who has earned this spot more". It doesn't necessary follow that their trajectory has a steeper slope from the point of hiring.

You've also created a strawman. I never mentioned childhood trauma or much at all of early life aside from growing up poor. Whatever trauma that may have caused certainly did not interfere with their accomplishments to date.

> The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma...

This is not war nor the battlefield. Let's see studies about people and their career success.

Any objective evidence to support this? My experience has been the opposite - people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.

Just a simple name change on a resume can result in discrimination. Lots of it.

"On average, white applicants receive 36% more callbacks than equally qualified African Americans (95% confidence interval of 25–47% more), based on random-effects meta-analysis of data since 1989, representing a substantial degree of direct discrimination"

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.full

> people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.

They really don't. It costs a lot of money to care deeply. Most companies optimize for rejecting too many candidates, looking for red flags as a time saver. This has been common practice for decades. They do it because there are usually a lot of applicants, and it's a cheap way to reduce the numbers quickly.

But it's even worse now. It's has been codified into job candidate filtering software. "Applicant Tracking System software is used by 75% of US employers to help filter job candidates".

"If an applicant's work history has a gap of more than six months, the resume is automatically screened out"

That's the opposite of caring deeply about being objective for who is the best candidate. You are making decisions based on very superficial information.

It does seem objective at first. Because it is objectively looking at one factor and making a yes or no decision. But that's exactly what I meant when I said at only a superficial level. You aren't objectively screening for the best candidates. Instead you are objectively screening for a signal, and not even a good signal. You need to screen humans, not signals.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/automated-hiring-software-rejects-...

You are judging intention based on results. Those are not the same thing.

You said that they care deeply. You are doing a lot of psychological projection on a large group of diverse people. I proved the results are concerning. Prove they simultaneously care but have somehow managed to make no improvements in decades in the results. Lacking proof on your side, we'll have to judge based on results.

40 applications and 2 resume consultations later and no interview even offered. Meanwhile, some guy you run circles around in real world programming/business experience is 8 for 10. My white classmates noticed this before I did because I’ve just accepted it as part of life.

You're right, I always fail that interview question where they ask me what my sexual preference is and I say women... ...Seriously? you are just making stuff up now.

This kind of implies that they don't actually hire diversely or the issue wouldn't be so dire ...

Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the general population they're hiring largely from universities, and you can look at those universities and see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the available job candidates.

You see this here on HN all the time, articles about "how we do hiring" that start out with "I would only hire someone who I'd want to get coffee with." Which, to me at least, makes it sound like the person is looking to hire friends/drinking buddies that also have technical skills, not employees. It's a signal that the person is looking for "their type of people."

It's so acceptable to hire this way that people feel comfortable opening publishing that, under their own name, as something they are proud of.

I'm not even black (but I am a woman, I grew up poor, and I'm on the older side) and constantly reading about hiring procedures like that makes me feel like I'm very much not welcome.

I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on your own experience, because it can differ dramatically.

I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are being treated unfairly, etc.

I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation, maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a role - I don't know.

For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment, create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round to it.

[PDF, French]: https://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/Publications/etude_testing_discrimin...

We did something like this! But we swapped slightly reworded resumes and the response ratio leaned even further in the white classmate’s favor. We just laughed, as if we couldn’t believe that what we half-joked about actually happened. I’m long past the point of being sad. I guess that’s life.

Why do you say that? Because I can tell you as an employee of a FAANG company that you are exactly what these companies are looking for. They’ve got serious diversity issues - especially among Black men (not assuming a gender here just facts) - and they are desperate to balance themselves out.

I mean that as an encouraging statement. You ARE who is being looked for. Be confident in that and use it to your advantage.

That is cultural transition & stereotype threat first-generation college attendees face, regardless of race.

> When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation

If anything, they are probably getting introductions/doors opened for them by friends & family. It sounds like you are probably applying for some of the most competitive positions in the world, Google and many other places have less than 1% acceptance rate for interns. Harvard is an order of magnitude less selective. It sucks, but don't let struggling to get an internship get you down.

https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/132267679726609094-s...

>students who are a member of a group that is historically underrepresented in the technology industry will receive priority in the selection process. This group includes women, ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.

The companies that have to virtue-signal do so because you wouldn’t notice if they didn’t tell you. I’d prefer they skip that and hire who they want without the pretense, and if that’s not me, fine, but please be honest.

There are certainly black individuals who would pursue a career in tech, if not for the (perhaps earned) perception that tech is hostile towards black people. Things have changed, but the narrative hasn’t, and that is doing real damage.

I’m trying to say the same sort of thing applies to white men and college—just there being a perception of college campuses being hostile to them is going to prevent many of them from going. And people will be hurt by that, in one way or another.

  > I’m a black college student now and every conversation
  > with friends back home includes some mention of
  > dropping out because it’s not for us as well.

And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us" your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job prospects? At least from his perspective.

https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-business/minori...

> we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees.

You are exactly what the federal government is looking for. US contract procurement has a significant racial spoils system within it.

Avoid this line of thinking. It may be true, or it may not be. You will probably never know. What I do know is this is an unhelpful and defeatist line of thinking. Instead prove the haters wrong.

As far as I can tell, Big Tech has terrible numbers for diversity and they are tripping over themselves trying to bring the numbers up. I really, truly believe that non-white, non-male candidates are not going to suffer if they can get the resume on the table.

Stay the course. Good things await.

Your sample size of five elite companies can't be taken as a serious attempt to describe the actual experience of black CS grads applying for jobs.

So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%.

(Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google searches).

Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG. I stand by my claim that we should not be using what happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the interview experience for most candidates.

But there's more because I just started college and going to finish it.

It's the only way to innovate imo.

[email protected]

Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon).

If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife and kids.

If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you should give up on developing your skills or give up hope. Capitalism provides, man.

And highly publicized diversity efforts by tech giants does not necessarily reflect what the average company in Ohio is doing. The news is not the data, so yeah, you really do need more evidence than "it's what I heard".

I had enough EE in college to change a light switch without burning the house down.

However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.

These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college campus is an indictment, are going to trade schools and will make fat piles of cash repairing plumbing.

Hopefully, they are gracious with all the Grievance Studies majors who are standing by to condescend in their direction.

On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it is. When I ask them to do certain things to avoid inductive coupling, they give me this indulgent smile, and do what I ask, although it's clear they don't understand why.

I eventually wound up doing the low voltage wiring myself, because I simply couldn't explain to them why you don't run low voltage wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. One of them tried to run a 12VDC wire in 25 feet of conduit with a 120VAC wire.

They also simply did not understand how generators worked, and botched up the wiring for mine.

It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.

Examples:

- Taxes/Pensions - if you just rely on your accountant then they'll do the bare minimum and you'll miss out

- Energy company - we're rolling out smart gas/elec meters in the UK. There is an old type (smets1) and a new type (smets2). You don't want to be stuck with the old type but the company had no idea which type they were installing. (I ended up with the old type)

- Lawyers - We're constantly having to chase ours and highlight things to them to make progress

- Doctors - If I haven't done my research then they invariably try to fob me off (maybe this is a UK nationalised healthcare thing)

I could go on but the crux is that the average professional does the bare minimum to move you along. I'm not old enough to say if it's always been like this but it has been my observation over my decade of adulthood. If it's a new thing then maybe it is partly to blame for the anti-vax and lack of faith in experts.

1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits within which to provide a particular service. These time limits have reduced over the years and so individual doctors are capable of providing a better service but are can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to pay more for a service unless they know that the quality level will be higher. With services, it is not clear that a higher price will translate to higher quality.

2) Most services are not chosen based on quality. They are chosen based on perception, brand, reviews, pricing and a whole host of other things. Often the most profitable services are the ones who can manipulate these variables best rather than the ones who actually provide a great service. If there is a sole accountant who is fantastic at accounting but poor at marketing and review collection then they are going to struggle and may end up joining a firm who constrains their time such that can only provide the minimum viable service.

E.g. if I have a new button that’s been sewn on a jacket, or have my house painted, I can easily see if the right button was used, or if spots were missed while painting. However if I take my car in for an oil change, I don’t really know if the right grade of oil and an OEM filter was used, nor do I really care to recheck my accountants work on my taxes (as long is it roughly pencils to what I expected).

In a culture obsessed with looking for exploitation opportunities at every corner, what do we expect? Everyone is running so "lean" and "efficiently" that anything beyond the lowest cost options can hinder you. Are you getting ROI, or diminishing returns and if you are getting diminishing returns, then that's now viewed as waste and a poor path to choose.

Capitalism has been great at motivating people to innovate and create but the current state of capitalistic systems, I say, isn't healthy for humanity. We need to acknowledge this and fix perverse incentive structures across the board (that doesn't mean destroying the system, simply fixing it). Much of what you're seeing these days used to be used in arguments for capitalistic systems against socialist systems--what really seems to have happened is that we've just traded who we want to give power to. Instead of those who tower over government systems in an authoritarian manner in socialist systems, we seek business leadership who... tower over us in an authoritarian manner.

One reason the US had been so fantastic is that we had a government and economic system that forced capitalistic ideals to compete with socialistic ideals. We had government services inspired by socialist systems that kept capitalistic drivers from going off the rails into too competitive of states with social safety nets to protect us. Meanwhile, to avoid the stagnant systems you see in prior socialist systems, we had capitalism provide incentives to motivate people to work, to do better for themselves and improve their lives and therefor those around them. Now, we seem to have mostly swept away socialist ideals (competition in policy simply isn't there anymore), capitalistic policy has won, and we're witnessing what unconstrained capitalism looks like. It's less value creation and more wealth extraction.

If you're a capital holder, it looks pretty good. My investments that I simply threw money at have grown beyond belief--without any sort of effort on my behalf--it's astounding to think how much money I earned doing nothing. It's an interesting situation because I still work and get paid fairly well, but when I look at my investment portfolio I can't help but think I'm cheating because asset growth well beyond inflation just appear in my accounts, meanwhile, at my day job, everything has grown more and more demanding without equal compensation.

It's an interesting time and I hope we course correct this nonsense before I get too old.

Making something a "human right" doesn't make it immune to the rules of scarcity. Expert services are scarce, which is why they cost more, even in socialist/communist countries. Communism is, after all, just state-owned capitalism. :) People still get rich in communist countries, experts still get outsized reward, it's just that the opportunities to get rich are constrained to the bureaucrats, and the outsized reward will either come from the system or be facilitated by a black market.

Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.

The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.

It's vicious cycles all the way down.

Iedereen doet maar wat ( Dutch )

Loosely translated : Everybody just fucks around, wether it is car mechanics, doctors or laywers.

Would love to hear a more canonical term for the phenomenon.

edit: And if it is absolutely critical it is done right? Do it yourself.

Je doet maar wat ( You )

Ze doen maar wat ( They )

There is no doubt though that people do better work when supervised and knowing what questions to ask an expert helps sets expectations about what level of work you will settle for.

Information asymmetry is a real problem, particularly when people are selling information.

This is starting to push me in the direction of off grid/ sustainable living just to minimize these dependencies

I understand good vocational training (for example certified plumbers) in a country pays itself back very much.

A good university program teaches very few hard skills, but you learn to reason about your field essentially from first principles. On the other hand, to do a mechanical job, you really need just the job skills, and the connection to cause and effect is almost irrelevant.

This is typically why university education is held up as a better key to long term career prospects, because of the adaptability rather than rote memorization.

In real life I realize it's a lot more messy.

So I suspect it is not in the building codes. I don't think the codes say anything about about low voltage wires.

Not that vocational jobs are not important - clearly they add value and create employment.

BTW, if you ever see an EE with a card that has printed on it:

   V = I*R
   I = V/R
   R = V/I

https://testguy.net/content/266-Ohm-s-Law-Watt-s-Law-Cheat-S...

A definite no-hire :-/

P.S. Maxwell's Equations on a t-shirt are popular, I even sold one for a while.

2. The 3 versions of the formula are obvious to anyone who remembers high school freshman math. It's barely even algebra.

Carrying that cheat sheet signals you know neither electronics nor the most basic algebra.

Maxwell's Equations, however, get introduced in 2nd or 3rd year in college. You'll need a year (probably two) of calculus to even understand the notation. The equations unify the theories of electric fields and magnetic fields.

Only people who have studied Maxwell's Equations will even recognize them, so by putting them on a t-shirt you're signalling that you are an educated EE to other educated EEs. Other people won't even know what they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations

Besides, EEs usually cheat by assuming a sinusoidal solution anyway.

Physicists assume the pointless mass.

https://generalatomic.com/teil1/B.html

Proper EEs don't need a cheat sheet for it.

I had no idea there were EE's walking around who were rusty with basic electrical formulas.

Edit: Ah, come on! That's one of my best jokes and I got downvoted?!

The bigger issue is that there are tons of electricians that never went through apprenticeships and who never picked up and read a copy of the code (which has major changes every three years). The result is a lot of cargo cult installation which may or may not actually be correct.

Likewise with the machine shop a few jobs ago: although we weren’t a union shop, for some jobs we hired contractors in for the union members produced better work, especially for the safety critical stuff.

I have no experience with unions outside the skilled trades — certainly there are many horror stories.

So you built two homes, one with a well researched union labor group and one with a well researched contractor? Or is this just some BS elaboration based on comparing contractors you hired for small time shit with the big house job?

But to really get to your question: I started my 3-year home construction odyssey with a non-union contractor who had to be fired due to poor execution. The replacement was a union shop. That’s about as much A/B testing as one can get.

These are decades apart in time, too.

Maybe, they don't need to? These trades should have cheatsheets where they can check for certain scenarios - like the 2 described, and it would provide Do's and Don'ts?

The closer the low voltage wires are to the high voltage ones, and the longer the distance, the more hmmmmmmm they'll pick up.

The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction

The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.

Also the shield needs a low impedance return path to be effective.

But like everything else it depends. Is the DC feeding something like a lightbulb or a fan? Then it probably won't matter.

Does the DC feed something that has a good low pass filter or is it an expensive AC cable with good shielding? Then it might also not matter.

None of the above should be considered be professional advice and it's probably a good rule of thumb to never mix wires like that.

After university I was well equiped to do freelancer work in my field and earned well.

I don't think this "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality in the US is very beneficial to its society as a whole. Ideally you want to live in a society where everybody is well educated, healthy, happy, friendly and so on. Maybe it is a naive idea, but I think this is more achievable if there is collective investment into those goals rather than internal economical warfare where everybody is a army of one, except for the big corporations who will happily milk a atomized, divided population.

Yet I am constantly amazed by how much some of you guys endure. I just wish you wouldn't have to.

Europeans often have this opinion but I don't think it's an accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything. In the past, you could pay for college by working summers at the local restaurant. Today the average debt is $30K and you still won't get a decent job.

The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.

Good point. I did not intend to argue otherwise. To go into trade is not an irrational reaction on an individual level — quite the opposite in fact. What I did argue however, was that making it hard for people to get a higher education is not a good thing for a society. Not good in the short term, because educated societes will make more informed decisions, and at the same time not a sustainable strategy for any western society that wants to play any role in the next century.

Having an educated society should be in the national interest just like having public roads or drinkable water is.

> accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything.

That was the American dream. This is a nice model to keep big numbers of people playing the lottery and bear a ton of stress, because they have the hope that one day they might win and then everything will pay off.

But even of you are one of the few lucky ones that wins you still live in a society where 90% are struggling and crushed. There may be people that enjoy being on top while everybody else suffers, but I personally would prefer being middle class in a society where nobody is poor over being a billionaire in a society where everybody is crushed. Maybe this is empathy, but maybe it is also just egoistic: I like to walk through my city and not see suffering, I like to walk through my country without having to fear being robbed, shot or angrily screamed at. I simply prefer living in a healthy, happy society where people help each other over living in one where everybody has to kick down to stay on top.

Not that that any nation achieved that goal, but there are certainly observable differences in tone between the industrial nations.

As I said, the issue is that this hard work no longer results in progress. The system has become broken. This is easily observable via a bevy of statistical measures like inequality and college costs.

I think it leads to people drawing their distinctions, around who is superior and who is inferior, and then it leads to those people making an unnecessary logical jump and deciding that those inferior people need to be HURT or REMOVED… and we've seen all this before.

And they go from there to decide that anyone arguing, wishes to crown those inferior people as the kings, and hurt the superior ones, because that's the only way they can perceive anything anymore… and they just get hostile and paranoid we've seen all that before too.

I don't know how to convince them that seeking a civilized environment for all the people (without it being conditional on performance) produces the best societal result, through the widest possible range for SOME person of whatever description to excel.

It seems like there are a lot of people for whom, they're more than happy to throw away overall system performance because they're mad that anything lower-performing can even exist. They are PC builders so mad that RAM can't run as fast as L2 cache that they're all CPU and refuse to have any RAM installed. It's stark madness from my point of view.

Society functions THROUGH conflict and chaos. It's like brownian motion, noise in circuitry: if you're trying to define an ideology where there's no more conflict, the most direct way is to define an enemy and then rally everyone to destroy it. And that is said to work for a thousand years but actually blows up within ten, leaving enormous wreckage and shame.

Better to design the fault-tolerant system that runs through conflict and chaos.

What you are talking about is a war-based society, a fault-tolerant system, with lots of redundancy, that runs through conflict and chaos. The last two decades were an experiment in that one.

Call it toxic or not, there's a male drive toward autonomy. Joining corporations that are run by HR just isn't as attractive.

That sounds...reasonable. I can't speak for the rest of Europe but a $30k student loan would be perfectly normal after a 4-5 year of study in Sweden.

Back of the envelope, $30k for 4 years is $625 a month and that is not much for just food and rent.

The numbers aren't great, but the majority of students finish with either zero debt or a very manageable amount of debt. There is a small fraction of students taking massive loans that skew the overall picture.

And bachelor degree holders continue to earn, on average, $1 million more than high school graduates over their career.

All that said, I agree college should be affordable without loans. Summer jobs, co-ops/internships, etc.

https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-costs-...

Many young 20's somethings don't complete college, but end up with debt as well.

If the question is whether is a difficult for society to maintain college as a necessity for success, they should be included in the review.

OECD data seems to suggest so

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...

However, there should be a playground for innovation as well.

Europe makes it so damn hard to innovate because of it's many laws. Ambitious people inevitably move to the US.

(ignore the headline and go to the actual numbers)

Germany is much better at shunting people away from university who are not qualified to be there. Generally, they go to trade schools and apprenticeships.

So I don't have a problem with the MA, but the framing of "life is wonderful in Europe" is missing the fact that the only theoretical upside is you had less choice.

But if paying the full cost, there would be a choice where down one path there is more money because less resources were consumed, and one that would be roughly equivalent.

Flash forward and I start to rethink the decision. I want to go back now, but I’ve attempted multiple times to investigate it and the numbers never work. Because I didn’t play my HS years correctly, the bureaucracy will not let me in, regardless of the things I’ve accomplished in the years since. Additionally the price is just so prohibitive, combined with the fact that I would get next to no aid and even a standard State school would be ridiculously expensive. These are just a handful of the issues though. Let’s not even bring up how I would need a simultaneously drop out of the workforce, suddenly turning the financial burden into Tuition/Books/Fees + everything needed to survive.

I’m really convinced that universities in the US do not want non traditional students at all. Obviously there are some programs that target them, but are often limited. I.e. you have to be part of the right demographic, be limited in the areas you can study. A notable state university near me offers over a dozen online Bachelors programs, but not a single “useful” degree, they’re all BA’s in subjects that people in HN mock. Other seem to cobble together “made up” degrees, which are bachelors that don’t have a traditional or on-campus equivalent and seem to be not particularly useful for employment in attempt to scam poorer, non-credentialed people out of their money.

I could still probably go back, but since I can not hack my way out of the bureaucracy or financial cost, majority of the value proposition would be completely dead by the time o could manage it.

I don’t know where you live or what you want to study, but if you focus on taking the coursework you need it becomes a lot easier. I’d suggest calling admissions departments as well, not trying to piece everything together yourself online. Feel free to email me if you want to share more information and I can give more specific and better researched suggestions.

I mean, what is the goal of a good live? Extract as many resources from your surroundings as possible, kicking your competition down and then die in an slightly above average house? I want to live a good live and leave my environment in a better shape than I entered it in, because the two are not a contradiction.

This seems like a pretty good guiding principle in life.

Thanks cap, there is always this one commenter who thinks we in europe don't understand how taxes work.

Edit: Of course, if you’re very well off and live somewhere that’s relatively stable, large gaps in equality might benefit you. That’s for a select few though.

Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies (I'm assuming "Grievance Studies" falls under this category), at least in the US, have been in steady decline since 2008, and even at their peak only accounted for 0.5% of majors (now just 0.3%). Even if you want to add in humanities in general that has gone from 3% to just above 2%

The idea that college campuses are ever more filled with people studying "useless" majors is a fiction. The largest areas of major concentration are business, biology, health professions, and engineering and all of these have been more or less growing for years.

There is this pervasive myth that most students in undergrad are having trouble transitioning to industry because they wasted their time studying their non-practical passion, but the data[0] clearly shows that the trends for the last decade have been increasing focus on career oriented practical majors.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_322.10.a...

That's not to condescend on electricians, they clearly have a useful skill. And being able to certify a house pays a good few hundred pounds a day, nothing to sniff at.

But if you're used to looking at physical models, learning a few conventions and adding another model won't be terribly difficult.

I think a lot of people are actually better off doing that kind of work. There's a tangible output that is much easier to connect to purposefulness than if your job is mainly in the ideas realm. A cousin of mine that I grew up with is a carpenter and seems to cheerful all the time, now that he knows what his thing is. I grew up with him and it wasn't always so.

> all the Grievance Studies majors

So you're polite to those you find useful and insulting to people majoring in something you presumably disagree with? And assuming they will all be condescending to a plumber or electrician for some reason?

Perhaps you don't have to look quite so far away if you're looking to reduce the amount of condescending happening in the room you're standing in?

I’m a registered nurse which is a weird hybrid of university-level knowledge (understanding pharm and patho) but also it is a physical trade (turning patients, providing personal cares, mental resilience). It has roots in being vocational with a push in the last 50 years to provide an academic background to turn it into a profession.

Floor nursing is the bread and butter of the profession, but it burns you quick. Older nurses, particularly in medical-surgical nursing, tend to take on less stressful 8 hour day shifts, end up as spinsters, or have a terrible home life that they’ve resigned into accepting.

I moved into a desk position in my mid 30s and can’t possibly imagine going back to the physicality of it all.

I wore a fitness tracker then and now. I averaged about 10 km in a given shift, where as my daily total now is now closer to 5 or 6. However, now I have time and energy at the end of the day to do an actual physical activity instead of coming home like a limp noodle and taking the next day to recover.

Mentally, there is comradery that I absolutely miss. This is something really hard to explain unless you’re in it. When things got tough, the dark humour got us through. We took care of each others’ loved ones (at their family’s request). We demanded excellence from each other, and (rightfully) called out unsafe practice and supported staff as needed.

However, my home life suffered. It was fine at first as my partner is also a nurse so there was a mutual understanding. However, it started to wear on me when I had kids. I’d come home and my kids would be asleep/at school/daycare, so I’d have missed out on a day’s interaction. I realized that they’re only little once and no job in the world is worth missing out on them.

This feels very much like the "astronomy/telescope" argument.

I hate to have to mention this, but not all American men are white.

Its schrodingers privilege. the privilege was being so priveleged that you were pushed out of the traditional credentialing system.

I read somewhere that (ironocally) plumbing it the less likely thing to be "automated" via an AI or something.

Get in early. Get in a union. 25-30 years to retirement in most unions. You don't want to be 60, and still in construction.

The test is easy, but figure 1000-2000 guys are taking the test too, so you need to get most of the questions right to get in. An oral interview counts for 1/2 the hiring process.

Just say you love working with your hands--love unions, but understand the needs of the contractors too.

Remember it's construction. You're around guys all day long. It's brainless work, and you will never have to act cheery when the owner's spoiled kid comes to work.

I do not recommend non-union construction at all.

Then again---hide in school for a long time. I loved college. It was cheaper 25 years ago though, and not that fun, but much better than any job I've had.

Your interest will change as you age.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/june/ibram-x-kendi-d...

I think it's pretty clear from the full text that he's not advocating for racism against past racists or their offspring (which, intentional or not, is what your use of the quote makes it sound like).

"Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity."

The other thing is the idea that, for those of us growing up in various segments of society that are affected by the above, our very mechanism of thought was generated by this system, and that affects how we think about and perceive these systems (and everything else).

I believe he's simply advocating for being conscious of the above two facts, when examining these systems and reforming them (and of course when teaching the history of these systems). To ignore race and racism as if it never happened is to allow all of that ingrained racism to perpetuate (of systems and of thought). All of this sounds pretty reasonable to me, but that may be due to my particular experience.

That said - I'm no expert, I've only read the linked passage so far, though I've now ordered the book and will start reading it tonight. I'll refrain from commenting further here (I think we're pretty off-topic already). Thanks for the discussion!

You can't always unequivocally state that white people are privileged over non-whites in every circumstance. Obviously it's going to be true in many cases, but it can't always be just assumed.

One of the biggest issues with Kendi and similar works (of which there are many in the academic world) are they paint a false dichotomy and they frame themselves as the only legitimate response to historical racism, etc. That is, anti-racism is the only way to combat "white supremacy". It's illiberal in this regard (and in fact, the entire body of critical theory is not only skeptical to western liberalism but actively attacks it as "the tools of the oppressor") and I hope you find his remedies as totalitarian and insane as I do. For instance, I don't think a "Department of Anti-Racism" which is staffed by "formally trained anti-racists" and not appointed by elected officials with the authority to "clear" all local, state, and federal policies to ensure they are "anti-racist" is a good idea. And to be equipped with "disciplinary tools" to punish non-compliance...

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politi...

Racial discrimination is inherently racist.

I can be in support of anti-systemic-racism actions that do not act on an individual level. I can support universal healthcare, higher income equality and whatnot, without the binary race worldview that Kendi puts out.

We tend to refer to "liberals" as people on the left but in general a liberal is anyone who is consistent with liberal beliefs which include a fair amount of "conservatism" as well. However, there's quite a few folks on the right that are as illiberal as the progressives are on the left.

So this guy gets to represent himself as a spokesman for the movement and nobody really wants to contradict it under their real name.

From bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw (intersectionality) into leading theories on feminist and racial thought - this is the progressive and academic left. It is the leading thought in every elite university. And you can't run away from it and say "us silent majority progressives...." - a progressive is either this or they aren't progressive by today's standard. It is a social force that is trying to get inside of everything it can, from unrelated academic scholarship (look at what's in modern STEM curricula) as well as corporate America and now elite high schools.

My advice is to choose Liberalism without identity politics and reject this school of thought as illiberal, totalitarian, and harmful.

(For what it's worth, the entire scholarship of critical theory isn't all awful. There's good things in there and the identification of many societal problems is probably right. However, it isn't unique to them and their solutions for these problems are awful and regressive.)

I identify as a cultural moderate for that reason. This stuff is all divorced from actual politics, economics or governing, it's purely cultural.

Really, from what I can see all of current progressivism is compatible with his approach.

The silent majority of people who would have called themselves progressives a decade ago are silent because they are silenced and called racists or just right-wing if they question the new orthodoxy.

Ergo, the people you are referring to as a silent majority are no longer included as progressives.

Why is that the implied option?

And no it doesn’t mean a vote for Trump. It means not supporting candidates that parrot this type of rhetoric and to not support causes/movements that are a part of it. FWIW Trump did ban critical race theory from being brought into federal offices and Biden quickly reinstated it under the guise of “learning to be nice to each other” - which it isn’t. Biden, in this case, I believe is a useful idiot for propagating their propaganda, mistaking it for harmless “diversity training”. There’s a big difference!

Prophets, or paranoid fools? Are we looking back and saying, gosh, we should have listened to them, that damn Jane Fonda ruined America.

If you believe in the approach of Kendi and DiAngelo, they are the only game in town.

If you believe Kendi and DiAngelo’s approach is counterproductive then supporting modern progressives is acting against the very issues you care about.

You don’t have to make a choice of which foot to shoot yourself in. You can simply not fire.

There are plenty of more moderate political voices, even within the parties. You can support them and you can denounce the groups whose policies you dislike.

Modern progressives are only in the ‘game’ because people support them. If you don’t like what they represent, you can stop.

Are you saying that conservatives today are more likely to engage in "exploiting discrimination and inequality" than conservatives yesterday? Or what did you mean by "modern"?

It's easier to think people are being misled than to think people are taking different decisions because their reality is actually different.

The bigger problem to me is that with such a high cost for university education, our future electricians won't have one. Whereas in Europe they very possibly might. I know which society I prefer to live in and it's not the one where people are less educated.

What narrative about uniform privilege? Can you give some sources?

I've also never heard privilege explained as making life "just easy". I've heard just for example that life can still be hard but your skin color is not one of the things making your life hard.

I'd be interested in reading these narratives that are so different from the narratives I've read about privilege.

It is. In France college is 400€ a year.

It is unsurprising less men are finishing college in the face of that culture.

While there’s going to be many causes, the aforementioned seem more important than a message of privilege.

Is it entirely false though? What benefit does a college degree in sociology does to a person (and even broader society) when the person will likely be in over 100k+ debt?

I will also say that for all this talk about how easy Blacks and women have it, I don't buy it, and I think people spinning tales about how "My company only hires Blacks and women" aren't involved in technical hiring. We are desperate for experienced talent and are under tremendous pressure to build an effective team. We don't have the luxury to be picky about demographics. And my team isn't unique: It's the same story from my peers both inside and outside my company. Likewise, the pipeline itself doesn't have very many women or Black candidates from what I can see, so even these people got automatic interviews I doubt it would change team demographics significantly. And finally: if this is indeed "segregation in reverse" (which it's not: it would just be segregation with the roles reversed), where are these tech companies where the majority of their engineers aren't White or Asian men?

Really? I understood that it was illegal to discriminate based on gender, race, etc in the US

When "positive discrimination" makes it before a judge, it usually gets stuck down.

This is an-ex Google engineer talking about one he saw and created a video about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pizXzR7ZQ8Q

Yea, but we got no problem getting to that door. Minorities might get pulled over and get a knee on the neck. Women might get assaulted on their way. Being a white dude, I'll get a taxi there, no problem. So if I have to try harder to get the position, pretty understandable, since I got the head start.

Not saying life is easy for anyone, saying it's so much easier being a white dude with a nice hair cut. You know I used to be so broke I had to "beg" for gas money at a gas station to get to my first day at a new job, first person I asked gave me a $20. Life. is. easier.

You've been reading too much news. That doesn't happen to normal people in real life. Blacks have a huge disadvantage of poor upbringing by their own family and community and women have a huge "disadvantage" of not wanting to be a computer programmer.

> normal people

Point exactly, when you say normal, you are thinking of white dude America. And yes, this does not happen to them.

On his way to a job interview? And also for many of your other darker skinned friends on their way to job interviews? And your female friends on their way to theirs? I'm not denying it happened in some isolated cases, but that it causes normal people to not get to "the door". It didn't even happen to normal people among your "dark-skinned" friends.

Again, with the normal, who are you talking about? People are complex, all people, normal is your perception of others, check yourself.

The actual issue is they have to interview with people holding the same ignorant assumptions you do.

Good to see you creepin in homes listening to black mothers not give enough praise to their kids, thats great research for the cause.

And then "helping them" with public assistance programs that have rules that are purpose built to incentivize familial instability.

But to your weak sauce point, some folks are just going to have a hard go at life, but is it easier being white through life, no matter what? Yea, for sure. No one says it's an easy life, but it is easier being light skinned.

> unwanted, depressed

I think there used to be some organizations that helped with that. Specifically white men. You know, the kind that would give them a purpose, make them feel wanted. You got a hood and everything.

I'm mixed so I can generally wriggle out of such accusations by playing the race card. The only situation I ever feel good about doing so are ones like this.

You feel sorry for young white men because they have to deal with politics? "Ferrari owners pay an unfair amount of car insurance."

Men who fail to provide or "fit in" to their "role" in society become depressed, and then they kill themselves. :/

If you contrast to an attorney or doctor -- those firms/practices are extremely challenging to start and operate on your own. The salaries of your employees are high at best, marketing is extremely expensive, and insurance can wipe out a firm/practice.

Not withstanding restrictive licensing systems that require you to put in X years working crap jobs for crap pay under someone who already has the license to ensure that you've "paid enough dues" you're not gonna go around undercutting everyone once you get your license.

You give three examples but only tie the last to the admissions issue. Could you expand on the others and how they might be relevant to this issue?

Men still have every opportunity a woman has. In addition, they are still recognized more for leading positions. They also dominate about every trade related job.

Yet, they are 'left without a purpose', when all they need it to do is do whatever they want.

People from working class rust belt towns in the UK, for example, can't just do what they want, since there are no opportunities. But they are told that they are privileged and can do what they want, and then people wonder why support for labour/leftism has plummeted in working class communities.

What "equal right" do you mean, that "equaled opportunities in the labor market and education"?

Also you seem to miss on the fact that men get worse grades in school (which some say is because of discrimination), which makes it harder for them to enter university.

It's a big ass cool world we have going on, and starting a family effectively ties you down from being able to explore it.

Good grief.

Women don't have the same financial expectations as men do. This is true even today, despite all the push for equal pay and equal rights. Often, that's prior to even getting into a relationship. If you seek an indication, ask a bunch of guys if they would settle for a girl still living at home and then ask the inverse, both groups aged in their 20s.

Given how men are increasingly "giving up on society" because of these standards being harder to achieve every day, GP's argument isn't that improbable at all.

You sound like you have some preconceived notion of you or your friends being wronged by women or something that I'm not going to be able to shake or have a reasonable discussion about.

I will however say, in words that may appease your ideology - it's honestly never been easier to get a banging hot girlfriend than in the current climate. You literally just have to not be completely fucking weird, have a hint of how to dress in something that compliments your figure, have the smallest standards of 21st century developed country hygiene, and one ever so slightly interesting hobby. Seriously, women will throw themselves at you.

But keep telling yourself what you want to think and reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a MechE in a fairly large and well known company. The older men acted fucking disgustingly towards the female interns, when all they're trying to do is make a career in STEM.

Second, please keep your preconceived notions of me to yourself. They do not add to the discussion at all.

As for what's left worth responding to. Look up the rise of male sexlessness compared to female sexlessness if you seek further evidence of what's happening. The massive filtering and selection criteria happening in online dating. Considering your American-based view, surely you aren't blind to the increasing rates of gymgoers and even steroid use, and the men's grooming industry growing ever more. If anything, that doesn't signify a lack of men trying to maintain themselves, yet it still contradicts your idea of "just take a shower, go buy some clothes and get a girlfriend bro".

>But keep telling yourself what you want to think and reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a MechE in a fairly large and well known company.

As an aside, how can you in the same breath accuse me of wanting to form an echo chamber when you immediately cite your own anecdote as a reason to push your own view, despite the fact your anecdote does not invalidate the concerns of men at all? Surely you do not lack the capacity to feel for both the struggles of men and women, regardless of the cause? Men and women have their own troubles, and this incessant need to trivialize one over the other is exactly why we're not getting any further.

Nobody says you have to do that, but if some men and women want to do it, it will show up in the statistics.

Also even if you don't want a family and just want to explore the world alone, you don't need that much money. What exactly, do you want all the money for, that a high end career would give you? Also working 60 hour weeks would also prevent you from exploring the world, wouldn't it?

As another anecdote, I have friends that are married and both in the same science field in academia. Both work at the same university. The woman was told that she needed to prove that she wasn't just hired because of her husband. The man was not told the same.

Well, based on studies I have seen, if the family had only one computer, it waay often in boys room rather then in girls room. PC was assumed to be boys toy.

The culture emerges from there.

Anecdotally, that is patter I do see around. Parents of young girls are way more often enforcing "no screen till this or that age" while parents of young boys almost brag about boys playing games on them.

Maybe boys get more screen time in families like that because they're more interested in computers? Maybe it's assumed to be a boys toy because boys show more interest in it?

i.e, the banking situation you mention was not a barrier to employment whatsoever.

Second, as many in the west have seen here, we were all pushed towards studying, pursuing masters, etc. This was the policy in most of the western countries (some may say this was silly but this is another debate). I have seen first hand our teachers (mostly female, by the ways) pushing us to apply to Science curriculums, and my fellow female students do everything they could to avoid it.

It's extremely hard for women in these countries to get good careers in any field other than teaching or medicine especially since they are often forced to marry and leave the work force (they can't work without their husbands' permission and they almost always handle all child care). It is the norm for women to marry right after graduating from college and not doing so is seen as abnormal.

The combination of this results in women going to college and studying what they actually _like_ in their final years of "freedom." They choose STEM because they like it.

In the west, women are probably as inherently interested in STEM as in these other countries, but they also know that they need to get a job and they often choose career paths that would give them less pain due to harassment or discrimination.

Your reasoning is that in brutally sexist societies women choose to study completely male-dominated fields because they don't have to make a living after it, whereas in the most egalitarian societies in the entire world sexism pushes them towards traditionally female fields to escape discrimination?

Women in more egalitarian societies make their choices under different pressures. They need more of a long-term plan for their career choice and they don't have as many children or marry or leave the workforce as early nor as often as women in the middle east.

Do note though that as more women get into STEM, the experienced and perceived discrimination levels drop dramatically and even more women make the switch. Also, I think it's useful to note that there has been a systemic reduction in what I call the level of "generational misogyny." I can confirm from my own experience that there is a huge difference in how older vs younger (<40yo) men interact with women.

Younger folks are way more egalitarian and some of them assume that they all get the same treatment from older folks but that is just not true. A 30 years old male researcher could have entirely pleasant and productive working relationships with both female researchers in his generation and male researchers in their 60s. He might not expect or understand the degree of hostility or discrimination his female colleagues face when dealing with these very same older researchers. I believe that as time passes and the egalitarian culture actually gets to the "top of the food chain," we will see a distribution that is more representative of male and female preferences without the added discriminatory pressure.

Are you saying that "egalitarian" societies are in fact sexist, and that teaching schools/staff (largely populated by progressive left-wing women), are in fact preventing little girls from doing maths and learning C in their bedroom ?

You can flip it any way you want, you will always end up with the following conclusion which demolishes your feminists dogmas: that women and men have inherently different interests, which, big news, is not surprising, given that they are different.

The different pressures are sufficient to explain much of the different major choices, especially when considering the changing distribution in other countries with different sets of pressures.

There are indeed differences between men and women -- cis-men can't give birth, for instance. However, other than the statistical population differences, an average man and an average women with equitable socioeconomic settings are incredibly similar in many areas. Perhaps even in an ideal world there would be more female biologists and more male IT workers. That would be fine. What matters is that a human who is interested in something would have a fighting chance to get there.

Right now, cultural and societal factors are tipping different scales in different ways. For future generation, we would do well to reduce the imbalance -- encourage and support minorities, women, and, yes, white men. People face different battles and helping some does not mean others have to be ignored.

https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-gir...

Countries with lousy job prospects for women (to sum it up bluntly) see higher STEM participation from women.

It also assumed that sexism is straight line. In fact, while easter europe is overall more sexist, there are many aspects in which it is less sexist. Some aspects of American sexism are present much less.

The confusion is effectively from American assuming that every single aspect of their country must be superior.

Its just like the Ed loan program..

Many don't realize its a teaching goal tool, those that get that they need to form a business around their brand to pay off the loan win and those that do not lose and society loses.

We should not bet on society losing this time around such as the elites did in the US!

I doubt this has anything to do with it. What is the argument here? They hear this and believe it so they don't think they need school?

I grew up in a white, working class community, and in my experience nobody paid attention to liberals on Twitter calling them privelaged. Certainly not enough to decide not to go to college over it.

Like the claim that all those people that joined the extreme right wing groups because the "libs said they were Nazis so why not".

As a brown person I think the former is definitely still true. The latter is definitely not true, at least looking at the average white man's number of tinder matches compared to mine.