James Joyner has apparently discovered the secret to wealth: get married and live on the coast. After all, that’s what most rich people do.
A new study suggests that the “double-shift”, wherein women are expected to keep working while men eat cheet-os and watch SportsCenter, is a myth. I don’t know whether this is true or not. The devil is often in the details. I do know that some highly-touted studies showing the opposite results failed to take into account the number of hours that men and women work, reducing them both to “full time” when that can mean anywhere from 40-60 hours. Maybe this one makes similar mistakes in the other direction or maybe not. I do know that this rebuttal was entirely unconvincing. Links to better rebuttals are welcome.
The author of the above study also writes about the Beauty Bias, which has been discussed here. When the subject was brought up in a previous Linkluster, nobody really contested the point that women were affected more than men. Interestingly, there is reason to believe that men are the more unfairly targeted party. This is doubly problematic because while women are under more pressure to look better than men, their burden is also their opportunity. With the exception of weight and basic hygiene, men are more likely to be targeted on things that they cannot control (such as height).
When I was a young man, the concept of alimony seemed like a ridiculous moneygrab on the part of women who didn’t earn money from men who did. Then, of course, I married a doctor and began to appreciate the role a lesser-earning partner plays and the sacrifices they (we) often make. My views have changed. With the shoe on the other foot, some women are re-evaluating the fairness of alimony, too.
What is, or should be, the protocol for surname-changing amongst gay marrieds?
Eric Schmidt of Google warns that in the future the young will have to change their names. It’s possible, though something will have to change in the meantime. I stopped blogging under my name five years ago and while the site is still up, it barely registers if you google my real name.
Facebook has been pushing me to friend a ghost since the day I joined. I really, really wish it would stop.
$4000 for a 10mb hard disk and other old-school bargains. Back then we used to say things “nobody will ever need more space/RAM/speed than this!” and of course all of those predictions turned out wrong. Build it and they will come (ie find a use for it), so to speak. Except that we’re at the point where our hard drive spaces are bigger and our computers faster than we really need them to be.
The Tragic Death of Everything. I remember when the whole gaming console industry was dead back in the late 90’s because of computers. Then, in the early 00’s PC gaming was dead because of consoles. Nintendo in particular has died several times over the last decade or so.
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What is, or should be, the protocol for surname-changing amongst gay marrieds?
Well one way to do it is for the “woman” to take the “man”‘s name…
Back then we used to say things “nobody will ever need more space/RAM/speed than this!” and of course all of those predictions turned out wrong.
I remember when I got a 40MB hard drive. It was big. (How big was it?) Well, it was so big that DOS 3.3 couldn’t recognize a hard drive of that size. I had to partition it into a C drive and a D drive.
When I was a young man, the concept of alimony seemed like a ridiculous moneygrab on the part of women who didn’t earn money from men who did.
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how silly and naive that viewpoint is. I would say that women deserve alimony more than men because their value generally decreases more during the course of a marriage. Men still deserve it though when the circumstances are appropriate. Women tend to get VERY indignant when having to pay alimony. As much as women push for equality, old stereotypes die hard. A famous case was Roseanne Barr. BTW, did you know the article you cited is three years old? As I started to read it, I recognized it from the first time I read it, in 2007.
Regarding the first link, the best example of confusing cause and effect was given by Scott Adams. The example he gave was that wearing big pants causes men to become fat.
What is, or should be, the protocol for surname-changing amongst gay marrieds?
If there’s ever an ideal time for hyphenation, this is it. No historical baggage weighing the choice in one direction or the other.
Though rather than have a protocol, it would probably be best to let each couple decide for themselves.
And RE: name changing,
I’ve never understood the compulsion some people have to put their online lives under their real names. There’s a time and place for everything, and a lot of online forums are not it.
Amusing how you make the exact same false prediction that you just poked fun at re: computing.
Just how big do you think the file sized for, say, 3D movies will be, to pick a random future thing?
Is it wrong that I’m still not on Facebook?
As for the “double-shift” myth, I’d like to see a study to see if women do more housework simply because they like a cleaner house.
I remember when I got a 40MB hard drive. It was big. (How big was it?) Well, it was so big that DOS 3.3 couldn’t recognize a hard drive of that size. I had to partition it into a C drive and a D drive.
My stories are not as good.
In college, I used to divide up my 20GB HD into a series of partitions not just because the OS didn’t want to go above 8, but also because the FAT16 tables didn’t perform as well on larger drives.
Also, I abandoned Windows 2000 because it wouldn’t recognize HDs above 137GB without a special BIOS patch. That wasn’t all that long ago. These days, I have 500GB drives that are gathering dust because I’ve moved on to larger sizes.
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how silly and naive that viewpoint is.
What’s sad is that it is something I really should have recognized then. My mother dropped out of school and got a job to put her first husband through college. They divorced a year or two after he graduated. To be fair, she left him (he was an alcoholic) and she never asked for alimony (she wanted nothing to do with him), but it’s pretty easy to recognize the stake that she had in his career.
As much as women push for equality, old stereotypes die hard. A famous case was Roseanne Barr. BTW, did you know the article you cited is three years old? As I started to read it, I recognized it from the first time I read it, in 2007.
I didn’t, but I totally should have because I read it years ago, too. I had thought that it was just another article on the same trend, but I would bet dollars to donuts that it is the exact same article.
Regarding the first link, the best example of confusing cause and effect was given by Scott Adams. The example he gave was that wearing big pants causes men to become fat.
My example used to be that diets made you overweight because mostly overweight people dieted. Come to find out, though, it’s actually often true! Ditto for Diet Coke, which overweight people seem to disproportionately consume, if some recent studies are any indication.
For correlation (as opposed to reverse causation), Web likes to use the example of towels causing skin cancer.
If there’s ever an ideal time for hyphenation, this is it. No historical baggage weighing the choice in one direction or the other.
It’s still a problem with children and children’s future marriages, though less so because (a) children are less likely and (b) children are more likely than not going to be straight.
Interestingly, my solution is completely ineffective with gay couples.
Amusing how you make the exact same false prediction that you just poked fun at re: computing.
Not exactly. I’m not making a prediction so much as an observation. I don’t know that tomorrow people won’t need more than is available today. I do believe that the vast majority of people today do not need more than what was affordable and available five years ago. At least as far as processor speed and hard drive space are concerned.
But as long as we’re making predictions, I think that it is actually the case that five years from now today’s hardware (processors and hard drives and maybe RAM too) will be adequate. Probably ten years, actually. It’s an interesting subject, though. I will have to write on it later this week or early next.
Is it wrong that I’m still not on Facebook?
Not if it doesn’t interest you.
As for the “double-shift” myth, I’d like to see a study to see if women do more housework simply because they like a cleaner house.
I think it is the case that it’s something that women generally care about more than men. Notably, women don’t have to care much more than men in order to do the housecleaning. If she thinks a task needs to be done every week but he is fine with it undone for two weeks, she doesn’t do it half or a third of the time. She does it every time because her threshold is always met first.
It’s an interesting question as to why women care more. There is the evo-bio-psych reason that cleanliness matters more to women because of babies and whatnot, but I think that there is a crucial cultural component: women are judged by the cleanliness of their house and men are not. So in that sense, of course it’s going to matter more to her.
It’s an interesting question as to why women care more. There is the evo-bio-psych reason that cleanliness matters more to women because of babies and whatnot, but I think that there is a crucial cultural component: women are judged by the cleanliness of their house and men are not. So in that sense, of course it’s going to matter more to her.
Interestingly enough, I’ve read that in the military, female quarters are always the dirtiest. It makes me wonder if maybe women don’t like cleaning for other women.
Those old computer ads are hysterical. My first PC was a MacSE in 1989. They were going for around 3K then, if I remember correctly.