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1zfpby

asksocialscience_train

What is some background history and what are the precedents of the current situation in Ukraine? (x-post /r/AskHistorians cause I wasn't sure where to post this) How does it relate to the current situation?

cftdbj6

cftl8x2

Wikipedia is not bad on this; see e.g. here. I had a short post here that you might find interesting. I'm scraping most of my knowledge on the timing from here. This article is a bit shallow but can be considered useful for orientation.

What we know as Ukraine has two main regions. If you excuse a lot of simplification, let's look at some maps. The first, the Ukraine, has been a border region for many great empires (Poland-Lithuania, Austria, Ottomans,Russia). It's population is mainly slavic, descended from the Kievan Rus. Here is a map from 1751. The second is the Crimea. It used to be populated by a group of Turkic muslims called the Crimean Tartars, who were vassals of the Ottomans. Map](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/New_Russia_on_territory_of_Ukraine.png. The Russian Empire had a long pre-occupation about being a naval power, and the Black Sea provided ports that wouldn't freeze. They also didn't like being raided by the Tartars (the Tartars had a massive slave trade in kidnapped slavs). The Russians fought a long proxy war (and many direct wars) against the Ottomans to cement Black Sea power by having their fellow Orthodox slavs, the Ukrainian Cossacks, raid the Tartars and vice-versa. The Russians also gradually assimilated the Cossacks into their Empire during this period of expansion. After finally conquering the Crimea, they opened the area to Russian and Ukrainian settlement, and built naval facilities on the peninsula. The Crimean War was fought on the peninsula as it was the seat of Russian Black Sea power, and Britain / France / the Ottomans wanted to halt Russian expansion to the Balkans. The modern borders are inherited from the [Ukrainian SSR, which eventually included both areas. Like other SSRs, it originally had some autonomy but became increasingly dominated by Moscow. It became more of a regional administrative unit, with areas added on over time. The Ukraine suffered the Holodomor famines and Chernobyl, and the aforementioned ethnic cleansing. Stalin ethnically cleansed the Tartars after many independence-minded Tartars sided with the Nazis, leaving a majority of recent settlers. If you look at modern maps of voting block and Russian speakers, you can see how the Crimean Tartar lands, now heavily settled by Russians as well as Ukrainians, lean towards Russia, and the traditional Ukrainian lands lean European. You can also see why the Crimean peninsular is where things are really going down, seeing how recently it was part of Russia.

1zfpby

asksocialscience_train

What is some background history and what are the precedents of the current situation in Ukraine? (x-post /r/AskHistorians cause I wasn't sure where to post this) How does it relate to the current situation?

cftktgk

cftl8x2

For context I recommend looking at the Russo-Georgian war.

What we know as Ukraine has two main regions. If you excuse a lot of simplification, let's look at some maps. The first, the Ukraine, has been a border region for many great empires (Poland-Lithuania, Austria, Ottomans,Russia). It's population is mainly slavic, descended from the Kievan Rus. Here is a map from 1751. The second is the Crimea. It used to be populated by a group of Turkic muslims called the Crimean Tartars, who were vassals of the Ottomans. Map](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/New_Russia_on_territory_of_Ukraine.png. The Russian Empire had a long pre-occupation about being a naval power, and the Black Sea provided ports that wouldn't freeze. They also didn't like being raided by the Tartars (the Tartars had a massive slave trade in kidnapped slavs). The Russians fought a long proxy war (and many direct wars) against the Ottomans to cement Black Sea power by having their fellow Orthodox slavs, the Ukrainian Cossacks, raid the Tartars and vice-versa. The Russians also gradually assimilated the Cossacks into their Empire during this period of expansion. After finally conquering the Crimea, they opened the area to Russian and Ukrainian settlement, and built naval facilities on the peninsula. The Crimean War was fought on the peninsula as it was the seat of Russian Black Sea power, and Britain / France / the Ottomans wanted to halt Russian expansion to the Balkans. The modern borders are inherited from the [Ukrainian SSR, which eventually included both areas. Like other SSRs, it originally had some autonomy but became increasingly dominated by Moscow. It became more of a regional administrative unit, with areas added on over time. The Ukraine suffered the Holodomor famines and Chernobyl, and the aforementioned ethnic cleansing. Stalin ethnically cleansed the Tartars after many independence-minded Tartars sided with the Nazis, leaving a majority of recent settlers. If you look at modern maps of voting block and Russian speakers, you can see how the Crimean Tartar lands, now heavily settled by Russians as well as Ukrainians, lean towards Russia, and the traditional Ukrainian lands lean European. You can also see why the Crimean peninsular is where things are really going down, seeing how recently it was part of Russia.

9112sl

askanthropology_train

Did the Aboriginal Australians (prior to any contact with the European settlers) have property norms with regard to land and natural resources? Did the Aboriginal Australians (prior to any contact with the European settlers) have property norms with regard to land and natural resources? If so, what kinds of norms were these? How did they work? I ask because I did some brief reading on their ancient practice of firestick farming. Did they ever divide land between people, families, clans, etc... such that each individual/family/clan (whatever the unit of ownership of land was - if there was such a thing at all) decided where and how much to apply the firestick farming practice?

e2v7s7i

e2vna07

https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/articles/aiatsis-map-indigenous-australia I remembered this from a class. They had some concept of land ownership as shown by these boundaries. I don't know how thus was divided on the local level though.

This is a complicated question to answer properly only in the sense that it is loaded politically and ties in with colonial notions of western racial superiority - a great deal of the sources that describe Aboriginal behaviour are tarnished by this legacy of racism - to this day this is an political issue in the media as well as in academia. The western notions of farming, land management, titles, rights and politics are not a useful lens to discuss Aboriginal culture. **The short answer to your question is of course yes**, but describing them properly and in their entirety becomes a bit more difficult for a few reasons. Terra Nullius, the law by which Aboriginals were dispossessed of their land and the "legal" basis by which the British claimed Australia, was founded on the assumption that the Aboriginals had not tended to the land and therefore had no rights to it. This law was only overturned in 1992 in a famous High Court case called the Mabo case. There is also the Frontier Wars, Genocide, Stolen Generation and disease that killed or displaced a great deal of the Aboriginal population in Australia, and therefore the cultural knowledge that they possessed. Although it is not necessarily widely known in Australia, "Blackbirding" or the taking and forced labor of slaves from Oceania occurred particularly in the Plantations to the north. The mixture of a largely (but not solely) oral transfer of history, the killing, displacement, and Christian missionary style "civilising" of Aboriginal populations had a devastating effect on cultural transfer and education. The next problem answering this question is that Australia is massive. For a perspective of size, the distance between Perth and Sydney is 3280km. The amount of cultures that make up Aboriginal Australia is enormous, as shown by the map that u/FuckYouJohnW has provided, and should be considered similar to describing the cultures that make up most of Western and inner Eastern Europe in land size (not population density). This makes talking about uniform cultural behaviours fraught, and although there are cultural similarities between different Aboriginal Tribes and language groups, I think its important to recognise the pronounced difference between culture, climate and therefore land management, agriculture, housing, tools and staple ingredients. The Fire-stick Farming that you are perhaps describing is not practiced in all parts of Australia, and customs towards land management do change drastically between climate. Managed burning of the landscape is important in parts of Australia because, particularly in areas like Victoria and NSW, large lush deposits of greenery can build up in forests after plentiful rain in winter, only to become dry and easily flammable when the summer comes and days climb above 40 degrees C. The Eucalyptus, which grows heavily in these regions, is very flammable due to its high oil content and has adapted to being periodically burnt in large bushfires. Controlled burning has many benefits, the largest of which being if bushfires do occur they can be at least reduced in their intensity or even suppressed. They also rejuvenate the landscape, promoting the growth of smaller bracken and creating better habitats for game animals that were then hunted. Australia's landscape is brutal and dominated by harsh burnt landscapes. The entire centre is desert, and even today cities hug the coastlines. The size of the challenge of wrestling control of a highly combustible landscape is an incredible achievement, and cannot be readily compared to European agriculture, where growing conditions are more predictable and weather milder in summer. Dark Emu, a great book on pre colonial land management in Australia, tells us that there was farming on an enormous scale, I'll quote Bruce Pascoe the author: *'Hunter-gatherer societies forage and hunt for food and do not employ agricultural methods or build permanent dwellings,'* 'But as I read these early journals, I came across repeated references to people building dams and wells, planting, irrigating and harvesting seed, preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds or secure vessels ... and manipulating the landscape.' \- Bruce Pascoe Bill Gammage gives a great explanation of some Aboriginal land management techniques. Gammage tells us that the land was already primed for later British sheep and cattle production due to the land management practices of the Aboriginal Australians, who periodically burnt the landscape. Black As is an excellent show, following a group of Aboriginal men as they source local delicacies using a broken down car they fix up. This is less an example of land management than just a great show. showing some very enterprising hunting. Finally, here is an article about Eel and fish traps that are dated to roughly 6000 years old. This makes them some of the earliest examples of aquaculture in the world. I've written a lot and probably need to leave it there. if you want any more information I can try and provide it, but **the best source of information about** **Aboriginal people is themselves.** Look up a region you are interested in and find local groups various foods, hunting techniques, agriculture and culture. **I have used wikipedia only for the topics that are well established in Australian History** \- I consider these topics to be not up for argument as to their existence or validity, though their are some Australians who still deny any wrongdoing or genocide occurred. I'll post some links underneath if I get the time of some more land management aspects of various Aboriginal cultures across Australia.

9112sl

askanthropology_train

Did the Aboriginal Australians (prior to any contact with the European settlers) have property norms with regard to land and natural resources? Did the Aboriginal Australians (prior to any contact with the European settlers) have property norms with regard to land and natural resources? If so, what kinds of norms were these? How did they work? I ask because I did some brief reading on their ancient practice of firestick farming. Did they ever divide land between people, families, clans, etc... such that each individual/family/clan (whatever the unit of ownership of land was - if there was such a thing at all) decided where and how much to apply the firestick farming practice?

e2v7s7i

e2xmydk

https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/articles/aiatsis-map-indigenous-australia I remembered this from a class. They had some concept of land ownership as shown by these boundaries. I don't know how thus was divided on the local level though.

/u/form_work has already provided a bunch of info/references about fire farming, about which I’m not particularly knowledgeable, so I’ll probably be more help with the first part of your Q (re: property) than the second part. The legal processes of land claims and native title claims have seen significant academic attention devoted to exactly the kinds of issues you're concerned with, so there's a lot to work with. **The short answer is yes, Aboriginal groups did have "property" norms- with a few qualifiers**. This is a bit long, so if you just want a brief and introductory overview of the division of land as property *skip down to the* **Nuts and Bolts**. **Q1, diversity:** The first qualifier is that, as form_work said, Australia is truly enormous, and local relationships to land vary significantly across its expanses and between the myriad language groups that inhabit them. The forms and expressions of these relationships to land will vary between groups on the west coast (like Payungu), through the centre (i.e. Arrente), to the east coast (i.e. Daingatti)- and Arnhem Land will be different again. I'm most familiar with Central Australia, (esp. Warlpiri areas), so I’ll focus on there. **Q2, property:** The second qualifier is more complex, and it concerns notions of property. Here I think it is useful to reflect on our own historically and culturally specific ideas of 'property'. I acknowledge that the view I’ll present is a heavily simplified view of property within our own society- I only mean to draw attention to certain important differences between Aboriginal understandings of 'property' and our own. In European (especially Anglo- and Western European) ontologies, land (as property) is commodified, and exists primarily within ‘the market’, a sphere of exchange which often takes on a kind of ‘phantom objectivity’, existing outside and independent of the separate sphere of social relations. Theoretically, anyone can buy or sell any piece of land (if they own it, of course), and there are no ‘natural’ or inextricable ties between an individual and their land that preclude them from doing so. Put another way, the market and the commodities within it (inc. land, which Karl Polanyi considered a “fictitious commodity”) are what Polanyi would term *‘disembedded’* from social relations, operating as ‘things’ in their own right and with their own logics (at least within the typical popular imaginary). At this point, anthropologist Igor Kopytoff’s definition of commodity may be helpful: “a commodity is a thing that has use value and that can be exchanged in a discrete transaction for a counterpart…” (Kopytoff 1986). For our purposes, the most important quality of a commodity is its *exchangeability*- its alienability from social relations. **Aboriginal ideas of land as property** With all of that in mind, I’ll now zero in on Aboriginal relationships to property. While trade was certainly a significant part of Aboriginal lives (there are numerous anthropological and archaeological discussions of this- I remember liking the chapter on it in Mike Smith’s 2013 *The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts*, available on libgen) and spheres of exchange did of course exist (although not in the disembedded way that the market does in our own society), land was beyond the purview of such exchange. It could not be commodified and exchanged- it was *deeply embedded* in cosmologies, kinship systems, and the constitution of the self and social group. Even continuing to refer to it with the culturally-loaded neutrality of ‘land’ might be misleading- ‘country’ (as in “so-and-so’s country”, “where’s your country?” etc.) is perhaps more accurate, and is certainly used in Central Australia. Your mother’s and your father’s country are both important, as is where you were conceived, which all impact upon the Dreamings and songs you inherit access to and responsibility for. This is important- the land is not simply yours to use, but also yours to care for (i.e. fire farming)- you are inextricably linked through obligation to your own land and to that of your relevant kin (I’ll remember the Warlpiri terms for this at some point, but Nic Peterson (2015) has a neat short paper which discusses it and its implications for modern central Australia, and there other good ones about changing attitudes and interpretations of these relationships). Your country not only situates you geographically and linguistically, but also situates you within the kinship system- all of which are essential to ideas of self and interaction in a society with a relational ontology. See Peterson (2015:57) referencing Nancy Munn, who wrote that ‘‘the country is the fundamental object system external to the conscious subject within which . . . consciousness and identity are anchored’’. **Nuts and bolts of land tenure/division** So the Aboriginal relationship to land relies upon fundamentally different logics than does our own- now to actually answer your question. Again, it’s a complex question, but chapter 3 in Leon Terrill’s 2015 book *Beyond Communal and Individual Ownership: Indigenous Land Reform in Australia* is useful. If you’re interested in this, I’d highly recommend reading the whole chapter- it’s easy to read and succinct. He recounts (and adds up-to-date information to) the five key elements of “the classical model (of land tenure) enunciated by Justice Edward Woodward in his two reports into Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory” (Terrill 2015:68). These, Terrill writes, are “estates; levels of connection; clans; family groups; and the interplay between economy and religion” (Terrill 2015:68). For this section, I’ll basically just rip small bits from his piece, because he’s got a much better understanding than I do. All from Terrill 2015: *Estates:* “An estate is a reasonably large area of country, the boundaries of which are determined by reference to key locations called ‘sites’, although the way in which sites are used to determine estate boundaries varies from region to region.” (68) *Levels of connection and rights:* “Woodward found that there was a central, fairly well-defined group with primary rights and responsibilities, and then a broader and less-defined group with lesser rights and responsibilities. In his view, the most important distinguishing feature was that the first group had not only a right to use the land but also the primary spiritual responsibility for sites.” (69) *Clans:* “Woodward found that for each estate there was a group of people called the ‘land-owning clan’ who were the primary owners, and that the membership of this group was determined by patrilineal descent. This finding is now generally considered too narrow in several respects, and over time there has been a ‘progressive expansion’ of understandings about how people establish a primary connection.” (69) *Family groups and bands:* “Woodward also found that while the land-owning clan were ‘a group of people who share the same links with the same land’, they were not the group around which daily life was organised. Daily life was instead organised around the ‘family group’, a collection of extended family members who travelled, hunted and harvested food together, at times on their own, at times as part of a larger ‘band’. A family group might contain people from several clans and the movements of family groups were not contained to any particular estate.” (70) *A religious and economic institution:* “A final element of Aboriginal land tenure is that it shares both religious and economic features. As Langton and Peterson note, there has been a tendency among non-Aboriginal Australians to focus on the religious or spiritual elements of the Aboriginal relationship to land, at times at the expense of recognising its economic features.” (70) Anyway, I feel like I’ve been writing for aeons now, so I’ll stop here and hope that makes any sense at all. If anyone has any questions or quibbles or clarifications let me know, I hope this was at all helpful. I’ll chuck the references below, if you’re not affiliated with a uni and want access to any of them and google/libgen don’t help then let me know. **References:** Kopytoff, I. 1986 Peterson, N. 2015, "Place, Personhood and Marginalization: Ontology and Community in Remote Desert Australia", Anthropologica, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 491-500. Smith, M.A. 2013, The archaeology of Australia's deserts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Terrill, L. & ProQuest Ebooks 2016, Beyond communal and individual ownership: indigenous land reform in Australia, Routledge, New York, NY;Abingdon, Oxon

dfobag

asksciencefiction_train

[MCU] Were there any other combinations of Avengers that could have gotten the soul stone?

f34wwif

f34s76l

Steve and Bucky if he was alive. Rocket and Groot if he was alive.

Blah blah Strange, blah blah future visions, blah blah **"one"**. All seriousness, I don't think so. Clint and Nat have genuine love for one another. Nat and Bruce might've had lingering affection, Tony and Steve might've had deeply-buried kinship, and Tony and Rhodes are long-time best friends. But ever since their first showing together, Clint and Nat are thick as thieves. To the point where - until the offhand gender reveal - Clint and Laura agreed to name one of their children after her. Besides, something tells me the fall wouldn't have killed Thor or Hulk, ruling their little bromance out altogether.

dfobag

asksciencefiction_train

[MCU] Were there any other combinations of Avengers that could have gotten the soul stone?

f34wwif

f34u7ea

Steve and Bucky if he was alive. Rocket and Groot if he was alive.

Mantis and Drax could be a subsistute had they not been dusted. To Drax, giving up his life to the nicest person he had ever known and willing to stand up to a sociopathic horror that wanted to turn every form of life to him.

1lpwfv

asksocialscience_train

Is the stigma against incest cultural or is there another origin?

cc1lvdn

cc1mlgs

It is largely cultural. When I took my intro level course to Cultural Anthropology my teachers comment was that it could very well be the closest thing to a cultural universal. The incest taboo is also largely defined by its culture. Some smaller communities (I believe the Inuit) just hold the taboo to immediate families while others believe that any sort of inter clan/phratry marriage would be incest (many other indigenous American groups have similar traditional kinship relations). Incest taboos also seem to be done as a way to force exogamy or outside of the group marriage. This could be done to broaden the community and make sure that kinship ties are widely spread. It also somewhat makes sense because when you look at groups who don't have incest taboos there is something being preserved that prevents the person from marriage outside the group. This is more along the lines of what the Egyptians and European royalty thought. Sorry for a lack of sources, I'm on my phone currently and recalling much of this from my lectures as an anthropology major. edit: Nanda, S., & Warms, R. L. (2009). Culture Counts: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning/Wadsworth. Pages 145-151

It has been observed that children that grow up together (even if not related) will avoid each other as sexual partners. A theory to explain this is that, since they mature in close proximity to each other, they develop similar histocompatibility complexes, which makes them undesirable to each other as sexual partners. So in this sense, there is some biological motivation for incest avoidance, and it may help inform cultural stigmas.

1lpwfv

asksocialscience_train

Is the stigma against incest cultural or is there another origin?

cc1ni24

cc1lvdn

Is it possible for a 'stigma' to be anything but cultural?

It is largely cultural. When I took my intro level course to Cultural Anthropology my teachers comment was that it could very well be the closest thing to a cultural universal. The incest taboo is also largely defined by its culture. Some smaller communities (I believe the Inuit) just hold the taboo to immediate families while others believe that any sort of inter clan/phratry marriage would be incest (many other indigenous American groups have similar traditional kinship relations). Incest taboos also seem to be done as a way to force exogamy or outside of the group marriage. This could be done to broaden the community and make sure that kinship ties are widely spread. It also somewhat makes sense because when you look at groups who don't have incest taboos there is something being preserved that prevents the person from marriage outside the group. This is more along the lines of what the Egyptians and European royalty thought. Sorry for a lack of sources, I'm on my phone currently and recalling much of this from my lectures as an anthropology major. edit: Nanda, S., & Warms, R. L. (2009). Culture Counts: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning/Wadsworth. Pages 145-151

6x8frc

asksciencefiction_train

[Captain America: The First Avenger] Howard Stark mentions that a particular prototype shield has "been fitted with electrical relays. It'll allow you to-" before been interrupted. What may have been their purpose(s)?

dmdxp9m

dmdykpi

Block electrical attacks, Make electrical attacks. Given the lvl of tech they might have been intended to let him fly, it's hard to determine.

For a while in the comics Tony put magnets in steves shield so it would return. This was later retconned as misinformation being fed to baddies. I took this to be a subtle nod that direction

6x8frc

asksciencefiction_train

[Captain America: The First Avenger] Howard Stark mentions that a particular prototype shield has "been fitted with electrical relays. It'll allow you to-" before been interrupted. What may have been their purpose(s)?

dmeqsbe

dmempfz

I do agree that part of the prototype was probably the magnets that allow the shield to return and also the stun shield but I think there's more to that or at least a continuation. Side note especially with that one scene in Iron Man where you can see a weird tech like shield with a star on it in the background. First of all we can assume that Tony "finished" the prototype his father started. I think this because cap was frozen with his original shield but gets the magnet one in age of ultron so Tony must of installed that. But also in Spiderman homecoming when Happy is moving stuff out of Stark tower, he mentions a shield prototype. So this can mean a couple of different things. 1 Tony is also building a shield prototype for cap just like his dad to be more like his dad. 2 Tony is building a new prototype shield for cap because of the vision he had of the disaster to come. 3 That Easter Egg I mentioned early could be the prototype mentioned in Spiderman. 4 The prototype mentioned in Spiderman could be the same one Tony's dad worked on and Tony has been improving it ever since both for his enjoyment and for Cap

Could have been to allow him to stun somebody, like modern riot shields. He could hit somebody with it, or protect himself from an assault by electrifying it and stunning the person. It might have been an early form of a less than lethal weapon, good for stealth missions like infiltrating a prison camp, where you don't want to just fly in there on motorcycle shooting up the place.

1va3uc

asksocialscience_train

INTRODUCING ASKSOCIALSCIENCE FEATURES: Theory Wednesdays | Professional/Academic Free-for-All Like AskHistorians, we've decided to introduce a few weekly threads for open discussions with relatively light moderation. They should be posted around 10 AM Eastern Time (7 AM Pacific, 3 PM GMT, 2:00 AM on Tuesday AEDT) as we normally get a peak traffic between 12 PM and 1:00 PM Eastern. This one is up late but next week it should be all automated. TODAY: **Theory Wednesday** topics include: * Social science in academia * Famous debates * Questions about methods and data sources * Philosophy of social science * and so on. Do you wonder about choosing a dissertation topic? Finding think tank work? Want to learn about natural language processing? Have a question about the academic applications of Marxian theories or social network analysis? The history of a theory? This is the place! While this thread will be lightly moderated, it is not a total free for all--hold off those until Friday. *Previously* in this series: **Monday Reading and Research**: focusing on exactly that: the social science you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books or articles on a particular subject. *Later in the week*: **Friday Free-For-All**: It's Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. Even more than than the others, this is what you make it. We're modelling these roughly on three of AskHistorians features (Saturday Reading and Research, Theory Thursday, and Friday Free-For-All). While we're trying to adapt them to social science, you can click those links and see what the other sub has done with them. And we're always open to suggestions.

ceqcaa5

ceq6xcd

I'm trying to figure out the best way to interpret a lab experiment. Individuals are given two continuous, and one dichotomous parameters. Based on this information, they make a binary choice, and got feedback as to whether they got it right or wrong. This was repeated 20 times, and over time the choices got more accurate. I'm pretty sure that there must be something in the learning/Bayesian updating literature that would help me on interpretation how the subjects changed their estimates as they got feedback. I've been poking around that literature, and haven't found anything that was especially tractable. I also don't want to spend too much time teching up to understand this - this is for a policy paper, not a theory paper. I just would love to have one or two tables using a learning model. Can anyone point me at a paper or model to read on this?

I'll put this here to start it off. I need volunteers for a research study. I've been pissed off about a paper whose econometric model was incorrectly specificed, but yet the paper's top line result got major press in the US with regards to its findings of potential discrimination. Correctly specifying the paper's model removes alot of the finding and oomph. But I want to thoroughly deep six it. Which means I need both the correct modeling technique but also the correct data collection technique applied. How can you help? I need people who like coffee, and who won't mind ordeirng coffee at their local coffee shops, are able to record a few bits and bob about the coffee shop experience when they order, and can enter data into a google doc. You don't get anything except a list of detailed instructions, but credit to all research helpers will be specifically given on page 1 of the paper. Just reply if you are interested with your username, I will contact you later on.

1va3uc

asksocialscience_train

INTRODUCING ASKSOCIALSCIENCE FEATURES: Theory Wednesdays | Professional/Academic Free-for-All Like AskHistorians, we've decided to introduce a few weekly threads for open discussions with relatively light moderation. They should be posted around 10 AM Eastern Time (7 AM Pacific, 3 PM GMT, 2:00 AM on Tuesday AEDT) as we normally get a peak traffic between 12 PM and 1:00 PM Eastern. This one is up late but next week it should be all automated. TODAY: **Theory Wednesday** topics include: * Social science in academia * Famous debates * Questions about methods and data sources * Philosophy of social science * and so on. Do you wonder about choosing a dissertation topic? Finding think tank work? Want to learn about natural language processing? Have a question about the academic applications of Marxian theories or social network analysis? The history of a theory? This is the place! While this thread will be lightly moderated, it is not a total free for all--hold off those until Friday. *Previously* in this series: **Monday Reading and Research**: focusing on exactly that: the social science you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books or articles on a particular subject. *Later in the week*: **Friday Free-For-All**: It's Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. Even more than than the others, this is what you make it. We're modelling these roughly on three of AskHistorians features (Saturday Reading and Research, Theory Thursday, and Friday Free-For-All). While we're trying to adapt them to social science, you can click those links and see what the other sub has done with them. And we're always open to suggestions.

ceq85c4

ceqcaa5

I have been trying to find transcripts/good sources on the John Dewey/Leon Trotsky debate. I've been told by various sources in life that they recall their read of the debate being pretty interesting, but they never have the transcript available and the details are a bit muddied. Anybody familiar with this debate, how it went, what themes were represented, and possibly a link to the transcripts? A good book recommendation on the topic would be appreciated as well!

I'm trying to figure out the best way to interpret a lab experiment. Individuals are given two continuous, and one dichotomous parameters. Based on this information, they make a binary choice, and got feedback as to whether they got it right or wrong. This was repeated 20 times, and over time the choices got more accurate. I'm pretty sure that there must be something in the learning/Bayesian updating literature that would help me on interpretation how the subjects changed their estimates as they got feedback. I've been poking around that literature, and haven't found anything that was especially tractable. I also don't want to spend too much time teching up to understand this - this is for a policy paper, not a theory paper. I just would love to have one or two tables using a learning model. Can anyone point me at a paper or model to read on this?

2dlomd

asksciencefiction_train

(Winter Soldier/Avengers) Why did Captain America stop using guns? In Captain America the First Avenger, Cap is shown carrying and using guns multiple times. However in The Winter Soldier, Cap never once carries or even uses a gun, even when it would have clearly been available and helpful. Why the change?

cjqqnco

cjqqj2v

In WWII, Cap was almost always in battle with soldiers on foreign soil. In 2014, however, he's almost always fighting near civilians and his fellow citizens. I assume he's just avoiding potential friendly fire incidents. Also, given his competence with the shield, it's pretty clear he doesn't *need* guns.

Well when Cap was in WW2, he was not necessarily a veteran warrior like he is in the 2010's when he was unfrozen. Sure he's basically superhuman but he was still very new to it all, and carrying a gun would more than likely be sort of... A way to ease into combat. Later on when he is unfrozen, he has a lot more experience and know how, and I would assume is a lot more confident in himself in fighting without a gun.

2dlomd

asksciencefiction_train

(Winter Soldier/Avengers) Why did Captain America stop using guns? In Captain America the First Avenger, Cap is shown carrying and using guns multiple times. However in The Winter Soldier, Cap never once carries or even uses a gun, even when it would have clearly been available and helpful. Why the change?

cjqqj2v

cjqw2t2

Well when Cap was in WW2, he was not necessarily a veteran warrior like he is in the 2010's when he was unfrozen. Sure he's basically superhuman but he was still very new to it all, and carrying a gun would more than likely be sort of... A way to ease into combat. Later on when he is unfrozen, he has a lot more experience and know how, and I would assume is a lot more confident in himself in fighting without a gun.

Because in the war he was a soldier, fighting soldiers. Now he's a super hero, fighting super villains and thugs and occasionally hydra and soldiers. He's not fighting a war anymore he's fighting a cause. He needs to be morally above his enemies, and killing them isn't a very super hero thing to do. Plus he usually has back up from other super heroes.

zxsiam

askanthropology_train

ISO: detailed map of Pleistocene coastlines, Americas What sub do you suggest? Reading Kindred and getting into the peopling of the Americas. How good is our modeling of the west coast of N America? The Mediterranean? Should I be asking a cartography sub? - Thanks

j226zg3

j231wpb

With a sufficiently accurate sea level curve, sufficiently high resolution bathymetry of the submerged continental shelf, and GIS, you can do this. I have no idea if the West Coast of North America has a suitably precise curve, which is the key.

What sea levels are you interested in? I've been working on a project making global and detail sea level maps of various times. Here's an album that has the sea levels 200 meters lower (this is actually lower by quite a bit than the lowest sea levels, which were 120 meters lower, but the difference at even small scales is surprisingly little between the 200 meter point and the 120 meter point). I started with this as 200 meters is the continental shelf and I needed that level for another project. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/7leagueboots/albums/72157714255851533 Here’s one at 40 meters lower, which coincides to around 10,000 years ago. I haven’t done the detail maps for this yet, so this is just a high-rez global map. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/7leagueboots/52543519197/in/dateposted-public/ As an aside, none of the maps take into account things like isostatic rebound (which only plays a part after the LGM, and in other interglacial periods), and the way GIS software analyses terrain for rivers is a bit wonky at times. The west coast of North America, specifically the SE Alaska to Washington coast, is a bit difficult to model 100% accurately as it's extremely active and has gone through a lot of up and down movement due to glaciers on and off of it, not all equally. Some areas that 'should' be underwater due to sea level rises are currently above water, and other areas are not only underwater, but have eroded enormously. In any event, let me know what time-periods and sea levels you're interested in. As a final note, Beringia persists until around the -50m sea level point. After the -40m sea level point it's a water channel and much of Beringia is under water.

zxsiam

askanthropology_train

ISO: detailed map of Pleistocene coastlines, Americas What sub do you suggest? Reading Kindred and getting into the peopling of the Americas. How good is our modeling of the west coast of N America? The Mediterranean? Should I be asking a cartography sub? - Thanks

j226zg3

j2347y4

With a sufficiently accurate sea level curve, sufficiently high resolution bathymetry of the submerged continental shelf, and GIS, you can do this. I have no idea if the West Coast of North America has a suitably precise curve, which is the key.

As someone who is involved with this kind of research on the west coast of North America (focused in BC, Canada), this is unfortunately a difficult question to answer succinctly. The real answer is that we don't really have enough data to produce accurate models of Pleistocene coastlines in many areas. This is due to highly variable relative sea level histories as a result of global eustatic sea level change (which lowered sea level) combined with regional isostatic depression (which raised sea level) and associated forebulge effects (which lowered sea level) resulting from nearby glaciers. In areas where there was little or no isostasy resulting from ice, the shorelines are more predictable based on global eustatic curves (e.g. Lambeck et al. 2014) If you want an overall review of sea level histories on the west coast of North America, Shugar et al. \(2014\) is a good start. Shugar et al. do quite a bit of "lumping" of sea level information to present curves that they apply to broad areas, which may lose important variation and details that may have resulted from local glacial activity. To that end, I recommend refining Shugar's curves by looking more closely at certain areas (e.g., McLaren et al. 2014, Fedje et al. 2018, James et al. 2009, Letham et al. 2016, among others). If you want to refine this even further, you can examine the micro-scale impacts of glacial meltwater pulses and other events on local sea level histories (e.g. Fedje et al. 2021). Our research group is currently working on detailed sea level curves for northern Vancouver Island in BC, but these are not yet published. I think that in the coming years as we gather more data, it may be possible to synthesize everything into a reasonably accurate model of shoreline positions at specific time slices, but for the moment there's still a lot of handwaving when talking about things at a broader scale. There will be more to say soon! Happy to answer more questions if I can!

qri19h

asksciencefiction_train

[Captain America The First Avenger] Were the people hit by Hydra’s space stone guns teleported like Red Skull or were they just straight up vaporized?

hk7i1yt

hk7yl61

I believe so, likely to a random point. Very likely all such points wound up being in deep space. There is so much of that.

I think vaporized, similar to how Captain Marvel can shoot energy beams that do damage, even though she got her powers through the space stone. The guns are powered by the space stone, not with space stone power.

qri19h

asksciencefiction_train

[Captain America The First Avenger] Were the people hit by Hydra’s space stone guns teleported like Red Skull or were they just straight up vaporized?

hk7i1yt

hk8i2fi

I believe so, likely to a random point. Very likely all such points wound up being in deep space. There is so much of that.

The answer is in the animation. What happened to those struck by Tesseract-powered weapons is clearly different from what happened to red Skull. The remains of those shot can be see crumbling to the ground, while Red skull left nothing behind except the Tesseract itself.

u6lm0

asksocialscience_train

Economically speaking what's the justification of "Buy One Get One Free" deals? Is it just that the price of one covers the production cost for both or is is an attempt to get rid of inventory?

c4sx1lo

c4sw4ku

It's what's called a 'loss leader'. They don't make money off BOGOF deals, but the deal will entice you to come to their store and purchase other products you wouldn't have otherwise. It's also useful to think of it as a 50% discount across the board rather than getting anything free.

The Theory: Usually you don't see BOGOF on everyday use items, and these usually stick to the specialty items, i.e. scented candles, kidney beans, ice cream. When looking at specialty items you are also looking at a 20-25% cost per item, and so your goal is to match sales on the first item, and attempted to do better than cover cost on the second. This means you don't actually have to double sales, but you are cutting your profitability per item. If you are only looking at profitability per item, then you see this as taking a loss. If you look at over all week to week sales minus costs, then you are making money. This assumes that cost involves labor dollars. The Math: You make a widget for $.25, and you sell 100 in a week. it costs you $25, and you profit $75. You do a BOGOF your cost per sale is $.50, and you sell 175. Your cost is $87.5, and your profit is $87.5. While profit per item is smaller, you overall profit has gone up $12.5. In the process you have gained new fans that will now use your widget over my widget, and you weekly sales after the BOGO are now 110 per week. Was the BOGO worth it? This will show what kind of businessman you are.

u6lm0

asksocialscience_train

Economically speaking what's the justification of "Buy One Get One Free" deals? Is it just that the price of one covers the production cost for both or is is an attempt to get rid of inventory?

c4szr8m

c4sw4ku

Most retailers do this because it increases their total profit and they can get away with it (they have market power). The loss leader and other stories posted so far may be true, but one standard way of explaining this behavior is in the context of "minimum purchase obligations". From Boccard's textbook: > Suppose you'd pay up to $14 for a first pizza but only $7 for a second one. Then the BOGO package at $18 (buy one for $18, get the second one free) will appeal to you and leave a handsome profit to the restaurant. Selling pizzas at $9 apiece (same average price as BOGO) will trigger only one sale, thereby halving the profit! In other words, if the producer has sufficient control over the price (ie, market power), they can extract more money from you, the consumer, by doing such deals. In the previous example, they can either just sell pizzas one at a time for one set price, or they can sell two for another set price. You (hypothetically) are willing to pay $14 for the first and $7 for the second. So if they set a single price, you'd only buy two if the price is lower than $7. Then their total revenue would be $14. But if they offer one pizza for $14 and two for $18, they'll sell you two pizzas for $18, $4 more than if they just had one set price. Link to that textbook: Industrial Organization, by Boccard

The Theory: Usually you don't see BOGOF on everyday use items, and these usually stick to the specialty items, i.e. scented candles, kidney beans, ice cream. When looking at specialty items you are also looking at a 20-25% cost per item, and so your goal is to match sales on the first item, and attempted to do better than cover cost on the second. This means you don't actually have to double sales, but you are cutting your profitability per item. If you are only looking at profitability per item, then you see this as taking a loss. If you look at over all week to week sales minus costs, then you are making money. This assumes that cost involves labor dollars. The Math: You make a widget for $.25, and you sell 100 in a week. it costs you $25, and you profit $75. You do a BOGOF your cost per sale is $.50, and you sell 175. Your cost is $87.5, and your profit is $87.5. While profit per item is smaller, you overall profit has gone up $12.5. In the process you have gained new fans that will now use your widget over my widget, and you weekly sales after the BOGO are now 110 per week. Was the BOGO worth it? This will show what kind of businessman you are.

4infrs

asksciencefiction_train

[Captain America - The First Avenger] Did Red Skull... (spoilers, even though it's an old movie) Did Red Skull go to Asgard? Near the end of the movie he grabs the tesseract with his hands and some sort of energy thing happens to him that looks and sounds much like the bifrost from the Thor movie... What happened? If he went to Asgard, what happened there? Prison? Rapid death? Thanks in advance.

d2zkmso

d2znmsw

The Tesseract is an infinity gem, specifically the space gem. It also seemed to be malfunctioning, or at least expressing itself in an unusual way. Because it wasn't acting predictably it's hard to say what's happened. It makes sense, being the the space gem, to suppose that it transported the Red Skull somewhere else in space. It's impossible to say where-- maybe to Xandar, maybe to Asgard or Jottenheim, maybe to Argentina. Earth seems unlikely since it appears no one has heard anything from the Red Skull since.

If there's no body, he's not dead.

4infrs

asksciencefiction_train

[Captain America - The First Avenger] Did Red Skull... (spoilers, even though it's an old movie) Did Red Skull go to Asgard? Near the end of the movie he grabs the tesseract with his hands and some sort of energy thing happens to him that looks and sounds much like the bifrost from the Thor movie... What happened? If he went to Asgard, what happened there? Prison? Rapid death? Thanks in advance.

d2znmsw

d2zlkxl

If there's no body, he's not dead.

It's almost certain that direct exposure to the surface of the Tesseract while its energies were being utilized ripped the matter in his body apart as it was pulled, uncontrolled, into the vacuum of space. The film found with Steve Rogers shows pieces of him being torn apart. I believe he is dead and gone, never to be seen again. *[Additionally, Hugo Weaving has repeatedly made it clear he has no interest in reprising the role. Given that the Cap movies have moved away from the first movie quite a bit, and the original actor is uninterested, it's very unlikely we'll ever see Red Skull again.]*

gl13cq

asksciencefiction_train

[Captain America: The First Avenger] Was Heimdall keeping an eye on the Tesseract? If he was, why didn’t Asgard do anything? Centuries ago, Odin left the Tesseract in Norway, presumably because he felt it was safe there. One would imagine that he knew how important it was (regardless of whether he knew it was an infinity stone), so he most likely would have had Heimdall keep an eye on it. And if that was the case, they would have known the Tesseract was stolen by Nazis who were using its power to try to take over the world. So why didn’t Odin step in? Were they cool with letting it all happen? Or were they not aware of the situation at all?

fqulmjg

fquysj1

I think Asgard considered Earth primative and not worthy of keeping to serious of a tab on. At least during WW2. So the Tesseract was safe, even if the Nazis had it since the Nazis would never unlock its true secrets. Odin probably considered WW2 petty and barely a skirmish compared to other wars Odin fought in. Odin wanted to keep the Tesseract safe from the other realms, which it was on Earth. Flash forward and by the end of The Avengers, Earth made itself known to the Universe as a place ready for its next step as a planet and species. I think if someone found a object Asgard had hidden on Earth then Odin would have taken things much more seriously.

As the Nazis and HYDRA were using it, they really couldn't do much beyond making a few pretty lights. They were still bound to a single planet, and Odin clearly didn't much care what humans did to each other. Besides, intervention could easily have backfired. If an Asgardian strike force had made the Tesseract disappear, it would have gone much farther towards alerting the humans to the real powers out there. Perhaps Odin could have sent Loki to sneak in and get it, but I would imagine that he knew his sun well enough to know that there was like a 90% chance that Loki+ Space Stone + Nazis would end badly.

gl13cq

asksciencefiction_train

[Captain America: The First Avenger] Was Heimdall keeping an eye on the Tesseract? If he was, why didn’t Asgard do anything? Centuries ago, Odin left the Tesseract in Norway, presumably because he felt it was safe there. One would imagine that he knew how important it was (regardless of whether he knew it was an infinity stone), so he most likely would have had Heimdall keep an eye on it. And if that was the case, they would have known the Tesseract was stolen by Nazis who were using its power to try to take over the world. So why didn’t Odin step in? Were they cool with letting it all happen? Or were they not aware of the situation at all?

fquysj1

fquogza

As the Nazis and HYDRA were using it, they really couldn't do much beyond making a few pretty lights. They were still bound to a single planet, and Odin clearly didn't much care what humans did to each other. Besides, intervention could easily have backfired. If an Asgardian strike force had made the Tesseract disappear, it would have gone much farther towards alerting the humans to the real powers out there. Perhaps Odin could have sent Loki to sneak in and get it, but I would imagine that he knew his sun well enough to know that there was like a 90% chance that Loki+ Space Stone + Nazis would end badly.

Odin was playing the long game. He knew the petty squabbles of men wouldn't amount to much. He was more concerned that Ragnarok was coming. He knew that the Tesseract would play a role in the subsequent events. It needed to be free to create Captain Marvel and bring the Avengers together. That's why he sent Thor to Earth in 2011. Odin definitely kept tabs on Earth and was not above sending Asgardians to manage crises, as he did when he sent Sif to beat off a Kree agent. So he easily could have done that if he needed to.

jhs5vz

asksocialscience_train

To what extent do politicians shape public opinion rather than respond to it? To some extent, politicians have to be responsive to public opinion; their job depends on it. But I'm curious whether and to what extent people have changed their minds on political issues because of what a particular politician says or does. Is there any way to quantify this?

ga2dz1o

ga21gu4

Politicians absolutely shape public opinion! They do this in a variety of ways - from their rhetoric and the policies they advance to the actual work they do organising and taking action. However, this power does not exist in a vacuum! The effectiveness of opinion-shaping strategies is largely dependent on material social conditions - including the total 'social location' of the people they are trying to convince - along with existing cultural beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions of the political party, internal party management, and of course the efforts of other preference shapers (media, churches, social movements, trade unions, etc). When parties are in government their ability to shape preferences becomes even greater, as they tend to have greater weight given to their rhetoric and, crucially, their actions can actually alter social conditions to make people more favourable to their views. Classic examples of this include the Thatcher government selling off council houses, turning traditionally Labour-voting council tenants into homeowners who may be more inclined to support the Conservatives, or the Swedish social democrats, who after being elected by an alliance of farmers & urban workers crafted policies which more permanently tied the interests of these groups together, cementing their electoral coalition. Citations (Afraid they're mostly UK-centric): Dunleavy & Husbands, *British Democracy at the Crossroads* Evans & Tilley, *The New Politics of Class* https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_New_Politics_of_Class.html?id=Xa3_DQAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y Archer, *Leading Labour* Goodwin & Ford, *Revolt on the Right* Esping-Anderson, *Politics Against Markets*

Seems like a job for Manufacturing Consent (Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books)

jhs5vz

asksocialscience_train

To what extent do politicians shape public opinion rather than respond to it? To some extent, politicians have to be responsive to public opinion; their job depends on it. But I'm curious whether and to what extent people have changed their minds on political issues because of what a particular politician says or does. Is there any way to quantify this?

ga3fejo

ga2m1m8

There are entire lines of research on the topic of public opinion formation, responsiveness, whether political elites pander to the public and/or shape public attitudes, etc. Broadly speaking, it is a complex topic: your mileage may vary depending on where, who, when, what, etc. To begin, it is important not to take for granted that politicians are responsive to the public, because their responsiveness also depends on the *public's* responsiveness. To quote Visser et al. (2007): >**The simple notion that citizens elect representatives who implement policies with which they agree is central to democratic theory** ...] >**On close inspection, however, this process is far from simple. It depends critically on a number of fairly demanding steps.** It first requires that **at least a substantial majority of citizens carefully attend to political events on the local, state, and national stages.** >Further, **citizens must consolidate the constant stream of political information provided by the news media, advocacy groups, and other individuals within the social environment, and they must store this information in memory for later use.** From this elaborate and diverse set of stored information, citizens must derive attitudes on salient issues of the day that reflect their interests and other core predispositions. >**Citizens must then discriminate among various candidates for political office**, identifying those who hold issue positions closest to their own, and they must cast ballots in support of those candidates during elections. >**This can be difficult, because candidates often do not clearly and consistently state their positions on issues** (Page, 1978), and **the media do not make special efforts to communicate candidates’ positions to the public** (Patterson & McClure, 1976; Graber, 1980; Patterson, 1980). Finally, **citizens must monitor the actions of their elected officials, holding them accountable for pursuing the appropriate policies and in other ways serving the citizens’ goals and interests.** And to quote Wliezen and Soroka (2016): >We have thus far concentrated on policy representation—the effect of public opinion on public policy. But **policy representation ultimately requires that the public notices and responds to what policymakers do. Without such responsiveness, policymakers would have little incentive to represent what the public wants in policy**—there would be no real benefit for doing so, and there would be no real cost for not doing so. Moreover, expressed preferences would be of little use even to those politicians motivated to represent the public for other reasons. As an intermediary conclusion, there *is* a relationship between opinion and policy, but there is appreciable variation. --- To provide some concrete examples, I would refer to research on criminal justice policy, regarding which there is a good amount of discussion on the relationship between policies and public attitudes. According to van Kesteren (2009), there is no clear-cut *global* relationship between penal policies and public attitudes: >**Although in many developing countries the public favours prison sentences, actual sentencing policies tend to be comparatively more lenient.** This is notably the case in countries such as Paraguay, India, Mexico, Argentina and the Philippines. **In contrast, sentencing tariffs tend to be fairly severe in several Western countries where public attitudes are comparatively lenient**, e.g. Austria, Spain, Poland, Hungary and Rumania. **In countries like the USA and New Zealand, sentencing tariffs are very severe while public attitudes are only moderately severe.** In his paper on determinants of penal policies, Tonry (2007) argues: >**The most prominent national risk factors include** conflict political systems, elected judges and prosecutors, particular forms of sensationalist journalism, Anglo-Saxon political cultures, and **a predominant view that criminal justice policy falls appropriately within the province of public opinion and partisan politics.** Concerning the US context, he relates the American political system (conflict-based, partisan-based, etc.) and the constant race to be tough(er)-on-crime, and both with the mass use of incarceration. Concerning the growth of incarceration in the US, Enns (2014) concludes: >**Although the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that political elites responded to the public’s shifting support for being tough on crime, we should not conclude that political elite rhetoric never matters.** In regard to the latter, he remarks: >We should also keep in mind that news coverage of crime is not the only factor influencing the public’s attitudes. Although the results were less consistent, **we saw some evidence that** television crime dramas and **political elite rhetoric might reinforce the public’s punitiveness.** Furthermore, **these relationships may vary over time.** In her analysis of public perceptions of whether crime is the most important problem, Beckett (1997) finds different patterns for 1964 through 1974 and 1985 through 1992. Indeed, **the changing media environment, strengthening partisan attachments, and evolving tough-on-crime rhetoric could all influence the strength of the relationships observed in this chapter.** To conclude with Pickett's (2019) review, he agrees that **public opinion matters to public officials, at least in the US.** That said: >**Aggregate support for specific criminal justice policies appears to have little effect on incarceration rates or crime spending** (Schneider 2006, Soroka & Wlezien 2010, Wlezien 2004; but see Rhodes 1990). **However, generalized punitiveness both drives policy outcomes, mainly through rational anticipation by public officials rather than electoral turnover, and mediates the effects of crime rates.** Finally: >Second, has the responsiveness of criminal justice policy and practice to public opinion changed over time? Will it change in the future? **There is some evidence in other fields suggesting that public officials’ responsiveness to public opinion has varied during different time periods and potentially has declined in recent decades** (Ansolabehere et al. 2001, Jacobs & Shapiro 2000). In the current context of increasing political polarization (Iyengar & Westwood 2015), changes in responsiveness to public mood seem especially likely. As Erikson et al. (2002b, p. 81) explained, “where policy is polarized, there is little nuance, and the signal of a bundled public opinion, such as mood, should be all the stronger.” Therefore, one priority area for future work should be to test whether the effects of public opinion on policy-relevant outcomes like execution rates, court decision-making, and prison admissions vary over time. (I would add that the topic of polarization is also complex, as there are multiple kinds, with different implications. [See here for an in-depth discussion.) --- In regard to your main question, and to cite recent examples, according to Matsubayashi's (2012) analysis of American National Election Study data between 1956 and 2004: >These findings support the view that **politicians actively seek to alter their constituents’ policy positions. However the opinion linkage between the elite and the masses is much more complicated than traditional studies of representation suggest.** Politicians have strong incentive to persuade constituents to adopt their political views in order to mitigate the electoral costs of pursuing favoured policies. Consistent with the works of Dunleavy and Ward and by Gerber and Jackson, moreover, the evidence also indicates that the assumption of fixed and exogenous voter preferences in the Downsian theory of party competition is unrealistic. **We cannot simply expect that politicians will conform to what the median voter demands. Downs himself notes that parties will ‘attempt to move voters towards their own location, thus altering it’.** This highlights the importance of modelling party competition by treating voter preferences as an endogeneous variable. According to Carlsson et al.'s (2016) study of attitudes towards the policies of small parties in Sweden: >Our paper provides some of the first causal evidence that **public attitudes are influenced by which political parties are elected to power** ...] political representation can alter citizen’s attitudes in ways that can improve (or hurt) future election success. **Additionally, our results indicate the power politicians have to alter attitudes depends at least in part on outside forces, with the media playing an important mediating role in the framing of a political party and their message.** Lastly, per [Mullinix: >**When political parties take stands on policies and endorse candidates, they provide short-cuts to help us make sense of politics. People seem quite eager to follow their party’s lead** and our willingness to follow our party can, at times, make us look foolish. And as noted above, **these effects are accentuated when parties are polarized on the issue.** >**Yet, the influence of political parties on public opinion is not without limits.** The mass public is not merely an obedient dog on a leash controlled by political parties; we seem, at times, capable of slipping our partisan collars. When people believe that a policy proposal may impact their daily lives, they can shirk their party’s endorsement and focus on the substantive merits of a policy proposal. [Reference list next comment]

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Habermas. Habermas lays out the foundation of how to understand the relationship between public opinions and how they are shaped, with political and economic structures.

4w6xsj

changemyview_train

CMV: A Stay at Home Parent Should Be Required As the title states I believe that one parent out of two should have to devote their time to raising children through early childhood and to a lesser extent until they reach adulthood. Exceptions to this are: widows and widowers, situations where a parent has abandoned the household. Divorce can't just be outlawed but if we are to continue with alimony and child support, then I believe it should be granted to a level that allows for full time stay at home care. Not having a parent at home or being raised by a single parent who works results in children more prone to crime, teen pregnancy and poor grades. These aspects have been studied. Psychological problems like depression are also more common, though I do not have exact knowledge of how much socioeconomic factors overlap. Preventing both parents from working is to the benefit of society overall as it results in better people. See K Type selection. Producing fewer children but with more effort invested should be what we push for globally as population growth at current rates will result in a progressively lower standard of living as resource allocation and economic structure lags behind said growth. The planet is capable of supporting many more people, I'm aware of that. However currently things are structured such that everyone should or must find employment (economic structure). Populations are condensed in urban environments and population growth is not evenly distributed which puts strain on infrastructure and the environment (resource allocation). Again, in the belief column: Having a parent at home in early childhood preserves culture and diversity. Instead of learning about different ways of life in school and through the Internet, growing up with a stay at home parent allows them to pass on their beliefs and knowledge more effectively. As a result, more diverse backgrounds and parenting strategies are allowed to play out to different results. Rose colored glasses off for a moment, I realize this doesn't always mean a good thing. However, getting many generalized results closer to average is worse to me than a full spectrum of individual results ranging from bad to good. Children should be the product of their parent's experience, love and knowledge. Not a mass produced day care and state schooling herd. Parallel to this, I would want all moral and social education cut from schooling and replaced with more academia. Parents should teach you subjective knowledge and schools should teach objective (or close to it) knowledge including study of history and literature which wouldn't necessarily be objective. Lastly, I believe the parents are to benefit as well. Consumerism does wonders for productivity and workforce participation, but little for our happiness or long term fulfillment. Many people believe both parents should work, that pursuing a career is paramount to their success. I don't know all motivations or at what rate. What I do know is that money is the reason in many cases. Cost of living and children are expensive for a single income now if you're at the lower end of middle class or below. My personal experience was that even on 50k a year my father fed 4 kids up until 2009 when I moved out. When I was 5 years old he made about 22k in 1995, between that period my 3 siblings were born. We weren't rich, but there was food and a home. This was in mostly suburban areas of the South and Midwest though. I think with today's economy and cost of living it is at least possible to guarantee that a single median income will support a family of 2 children comfortably. Currently, most children are being born to lower middle class families. I recalls something like 30 percent to actual poverty in America. A push to move the rate of childbirth up the economic ladder would be nice as well, but I don't think there are ethical ways of going about it. Instead, developing a culture where stay at home moms and dads are respected and honored by their peers seems more doable. In terms of occupation, no one else produces something so valuable or necessary as a decent human being.

d64laav

d64jj3t

How do you enforce the requirement? How do you monitor compliance? What do you do to violators?

A lot of people agree with the view that it is better when a child has a parent stay home to raise them. Contrary to your belief that society is setup to require both parents to work, about a third of all mothers in the US are stay-at-home mothers, and that number has been rising since the 90s. However, even if I agree that it is better that way, there is simply no possible way to enforce this requirement without a massive violation of parents' rights. You would basically be using the government to force parents to stay together against their will and forbid adults from having an income. Let me ask you about a few scenarios that quickly come to mind that might make you question if this is a good idea: * What if one parent is abusive to the other? * What if the parents are divorced and disagree about who should work? * What if someone is a parent to kids with two different mothers/fathers? * What if one parent is simply a deadbeat? Or a drug addict? Or disabled?

4w6xsj

changemyview_train

CMV: A Stay at Home Parent Should Be Required As the title states I believe that one parent out of two should have to devote their time to raising children through early childhood and to a lesser extent until they reach adulthood. Exceptions to this are: widows and widowers, situations where a parent has abandoned the household. Divorce can't just be outlawed but if we are to continue with alimony and child support, then I believe it should be granted to a level that allows for full time stay at home care. Not having a parent at home or being raised by a single parent who works results in children more prone to crime, teen pregnancy and poor grades. These aspects have been studied. Psychological problems like depression are also more common, though I do not have exact knowledge of how much socioeconomic factors overlap. Preventing both parents from working is to the benefit of society overall as it results in better people. See K Type selection. Producing fewer children but with more effort invested should be what we push for globally as population growth at current rates will result in a progressively lower standard of living as resource allocation and economic structure lags behind said growth. The planet is capable of supporting many more people, I'm aware of that. However currently things are structured such that everyone should or must find employment (economic structure). Populations are condensed in urban environments and population growth is not evenly distributed which puts strain on infrastructure and the environment (resource allocation). Again, in the belief column: Having a parent at home in early childhood preserves culture and diversity. Instead of learning about different ways of life in school and through the Internet, growing up with a stay at home parent allows them to pass on their beliefs and knowledge more effectively. As a result, more diverse backgrounds and parenting strategies are allowed to play out to different results. Rose colored glasses off for a moment, I realize this doesn't always mean a good thing. However, getting many generalized results closer to average is worse to me than a full spectrum of individual results ranging from bad to good. Children should be the product of their parent's experience, love and knowledge. Not a mass produced day care and state schooling herd. Parallel to this, I would want all moral and social education cut from schooling and replaced with more academia. Parents should teach you subjective knowledge and schools should teach objective (or close to it) knowledge including study of history and literature which wouldn't necessarily be objective. Lastly, I believe the parents are to benefit as well. Consumerism does wonders for productivity and workforce participation, but little for our happiness or long term fulfillment. Many people believe both parents should work, that pursuing a career is paramount to their success. I don't know all motivations or at what rate. What I do know is that money is the reason in many cases. Cost of living and children are expensive for a single income now if you're at the lower end of middle class or below. My personal experience was that even on 50k a year my father fed 4 kids up until 2009 when I moved out. When I was 5 years old he made about 22k in 1995, between that period my 3 siblings were born. We weren't rich, but there was food and a home. This was in mostly suburban areas of the South and Midwest though. I think with today's economy and cost of living it is at least possible to guarantee that a single median income will support a family of 2 children comfortably. Currently, most children are being born to lower middle class families. I recalls something like 30 percent to actual poverty in America. A push to move the rate of childbirth up the economic ladder would be nice as well, but I don't think there are ethical ways of going about it. Instead, developing a culture where stay at home moms and dads are respected and honored by their peers seems more doable. In terms of occupation, no one else produces something so valuable or necessary as a decent human being.

d64jlkj

d64laav

With all that in mind, do you believe that some kind of remuneration should be tied to being a stay at home parent in order to alleviate the risk of poverty, justify the policy with actual "value" as well as reducing the "earning" parent's hold on the household ?

How do you enforce the requirement? How do you monitor compliance? What do you do to violators?

tjvkq

asksocialscience_train

In all seriousness, what do you guys think of Social Darwinism? I discovered yesterday that my brother is in favor of it. I always considered it inhumane and unreasonable to think it could be done humanely but my brother disagrees. He says, in theory, it would work very well, making sure our species evolves in the "best" way to prevent something like Idiocracy from happening. I think his view of the future of humanity is myopic and doesn't consider the increasing technology that could lead to genetic engineering and/or give way to Kurweil's prediction that we'll all be digital entities. I think we should put value on cultural evolution rather than biological evolution. He also thinks that people of "good" genetics should reproduce more than people of "bad" genetics -- not forced, but people should make the choice themselves. I think it's unreasonable to assume we can determine which genes are best for the future of humanity. I think the future is far too chaotic and unpredictable to think we will know what's best for us. Our argument was inspired by watching X-men 2. He told me he would be on Magneto's side, because they favor allowing mutants to live according to their mutation, e.g., a pyro living as a pyrotechnical, whereas Professor Xavier thinks mutants should simply live side by side non-mutants. All this on the premise that mutants are the next step in human evolution. I respond that evolution is too chaotic to determine what the "next step" is. Also, my brother thinks people shouldn't be forced, but that people should do what they are genetically best at doing. I think this disregards the plasticity of the brain and our choices and skills, the social constructs that influence our social position and mobility, and the effect ecology can have on nurturing our biology. What do you think? And I realize this may not be suitable for AskSocialScience, and for that I'm sorry. Kindly direct me to a more appropriate reddit. Thank you.

c4n8xsv

c4n8ubt

Evolution does not work that way. Both Imperialist Europe and Nazi Germany used Social Darwinism as a pretext for much of their actions; Arendt analyzed the historical development from a politically indifferent scientific Darwinism via social Darwinist ethics to racist ideology, while imperialist Europe saw Africans as being "socially stunted". Additionally, Darwin did not necessarily define the fittest as the strongest, or most clever, but recognized that the fittest could be those who cooperated with each other. In many animal societies, struggle is replaced by cooperation. It's a bunk theory that is all too often used as a cover for racism, IMO.

My problem with that argument is that what is "good" isn't defined. If the only criteria for "goodness" is who can do "X" the best, then let's all just kill ourselves once we create the machines that outperform us on any task. I'm not saying we can't do that (as morbid as it may be), but I like to think that human existence consists of progress on more than measurable criteria (e.g., how much "stuff" we have or can do). Fairness, egalitarianism, and equality matter, and I think they too constitute to the "goodness" of being human. By ignoring those ideals, we might be objectively better, but what sort of people would we be then?

tjvkq

asksocialscience_train

In all seriousness, what do you guys think of Social Darwinism? I discovered yesterday that my brother is in favor of it. I always considered it inhumane and unreasonable to think it could be done humanely but my brother disagrees. He says, in theory, it would work very well, making sure our species evolves in the "best" way to prevent something like Idiocracy from happening. I think his view of the future of humanity is myopic and doesn't consider the increasing technology that could lead to genetic engineering and/or give way to Kurweil's prediction that we'll all be digital entities. I think we should put value on cultural evolution rather than biological evolution. He also thinks that people of "good" genetics should reproduce more than people of "bad" genetics -- not forced, but people should make the choice themselves. I think it's unreasonable to assume we can determine which genes are best for the future of humanity. I think the future is far too chaotic and unpredictable to think we will know what's best for us. Our argument was inspired by watching X-men 2. He told me he would be on Magneto's side, because they favor allowing mutants to live according to their mutation, e.g., a pyro living as a pyrotechnical, whereas Professor Xavier thinks mutants should simply live side by side non-mutants. All this on the premise that mutants are the next step in human evolution. I respond that evolution is too chaotic to determine what the "next step" is. Also, my brother thinks people shouldn't be forced, but that people should do what they are genetically best at doing. I think this disregards the plasticity of the brain and our choices and skills, the social constructs that influence our social position and mobility, and the effect ecology can have on nurturing our biology. What do you think? And I realize this may not be suitable for AskSocialScience, and for that I'm sorry. Kindly direct me to a more appropriate reddit. Thank you.

c4n8xsv

c4n8xre

Evolution does not work that way. Both Imperialist Europe and Nazi Germany used Social Darwinism as a pretext for much of their actions; Arendt analyzed the historical development from a politically indifferent scientific Darwinism via social Darwinist ethics to racist ideology, while imperialist Europe saw Africans as being "socially stunted". Additionally, Darwin did not necessarily define the fittest as the strongest, or most clever, but recognized that the fittest could be those who cooperated with each other. In many animal societies, struggle is replaced by cooperation. It's a bunk theory that is all too often used as a cover for racism, IMO.

The impossibility of arguing for any particular person or entity's right to administer the selection process makes Social Darwinism impossible. You can't make an *objectively* valid claim for anyone being better fit than anyone else. Or, at least I would count it practically impossible to do so. I wrote this on the topic a few days ago One might imagine a distant (dystopic) future where a super AI would calculate the "most fit" individuals according to axioms that we choose in consensus. If we could guarantee both consistency of that AI as well as that those axioms are indeed consensual then we may have a "working Social Darwinistic society". I leave coming up with the correct emotional response towards such notion as an exercise for the reader.

3mgzon

askanthropology_train

Have there been cultures that DIDN'T commodify or particularly value female virginity? Have there ever been cultures which didn't care about female virginity or try to restrict female sexuality?

cvey1hs

cvewc63

Most Indigenous cultures of the Americas. Can't find good sources right now but in a research paper posted by Elizabeth Losh of University of California, San Diego: > Young women in Indian tribes were free to experiment sexually prior to marriage and eager to do so with white as well as native men (Godbeer 109). Since virginity was basically a non-issue, most Native American women had several sexual encounters before marriage. Among most tribes, marriages tended to be very casual affairs, and women could unilaterally end them. The Maricopa are a rare ethnic group that had no formal marriage ceremony. Although most tribes had very strict rules to prevent incest or marriage within one's clan.

I believe there's a few, Ancient Egypt is probably one. >"There is no known word for virginity in ancient Egyptian and many have concluded that the concept of virginity was of little to no importance in ancient Egypt"

3mgzon

askanthropology_train

Have there been cultures that DIDN'T commodify or particularly value female virginity? Have there ever been cultures which didn't care about female virginity or try to restrict female sexuality?

cvey1hs

cvextbs

Most Indigenous cultures of the Americas. Can't find good sources right now but in a research paper posted by Elizabeth Losh of University of California, San Diego: > Young women in Indian tribes were free to experiment sexually prior to marriage and eager to do so with white as well as native men (Godbeer 109). Since virginity was basically a non-issue, most Native American women had several sexual encounters before marriage. Among most tribes, marriages tended to be very casual affairs, and women could unilaterally end them. The Maricopa are a rare ethnic group that had no formal marriage ceremony. Although most tribes had very strict rules to prevent incest or marriage within one's clan.

You may be interested in Malinowski's work on the Trobriand Islanders.

2tqj46

asksciencefiction_train

[LOTR] If one of Saurons Orcs found the one ring, would he be able to resist it and return it to him? I was wondering, would the ring affect orcs in the same way it would affect men/elves?

co1egsu

co1g3an

Yes @ the title, no @ the post. Sauron presumably designed his minions so that the obvious issue of one of his kajillon of soldiers stumbling across the very thing he sent many of them to retrieve could not result in him being overthrown (directly or indirectly).

Resist it? The Ring is actively seeking to return to Sauron, if the Orc successfully resists the Ring, then he's not going to return it to Sauron.

2tqj46

asksciencefiction_train

[LOTR] If one of Saurons Orcs found the one ring, would he be able to resist it and return it to him? I was wondering, would the ring affect orcs in the same way it would affect men/elves?

co1g3an

co1f60m

Resist it? The Ring is actively seeking to return to Sauron, if the Orc successfully resists the Ring, then he's not going to return it to Sauron.

Here's how I think it would go down: An orc, which is a corrupted elf, finds the ring. The Orc immediately succumbs to its song, as resistance from evil isn't exactly something you strive to keep around when corrupting. The Orc declares itself the Ruler of the Ring and masters its platoon. They all serve him, and her now serves the ring. Whether he knows it or not. Before long -- days at the longest -- this new Ruler of the Ring decides to enlarge his army. He heads towards Mordor and Mount Doom. As he nears it, Sauron's Eye flashes on him. Sauron now knows, and the Dark Riders are sent to get the ring. We have a fight that could be pretty awesome, but will only last a few seconds, as thousands of orcs battle the Nine. The Nine dispatch them, and recover the ring. The ring is brought back to Sauron. And he makes the elves pay.

bs0xj9

asksocialscience_train

Is 'millenial' a relevant term for science? Do sociologists and other social scientists pay attention to the term 'millenial'? Do they think it's a thing? Do they even believe that 'generations' are a thing? Or it's just a marketing word to get clicks on social media?

eoi7kfm

eoi0zmu

Hi- Sociologist here! There is a whole ‘sociology of generations’. The earliest and perhaps most prominent theorist here would be Karl Mannheim. Here is the wiki page for his work - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_generations Centrally, historical and contemporary debates on generations centre on how we can understand them (how each generation is split up) and how people experience them. In my field, we have been studying generations post- trauma I.e 9/11 and deindustrialisation. How they are used to mark experiences I.e those who lived before and after the event. Hope this is helpful as an intro and overview.

There isn't really such a thing as a 'generation' in any objective sense. As such, millennial is an equally scientifically vague term. https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/the-evidence-behind-generations-is-lacking.html

bs0xj9

asksocialscience_train

Is 'millenial' a relevant term for science? Do sociologists and other social scientists pay attention to the term 'millenial'? Do they think it's a thing? Do they even believe that 'generations' are a thing? Or it's just a marketing word to get clicks on social media?

eoi0zmu

eoiudic

There isn't really such a thing as a 'generation' in any objective sense. As such, millennial is an equally scientifically vague term. https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/the-evidence-behind-generations-is-lacking.html

There *are* social scientists who make use of generational theory and terms such as 'millennials' or 'generation x'. *However*, I would suggest that /u/Tnznn is correct and would not suggest that these represent the majority of social scientists, especially if one accounts for the fact these are mostly Americentric concepts and that European social scientists use it even less than Americans. In any case, there are criticisms which I would argue are warranted, at least for the idea that the label can be used meaningfully beyond a *descriptor* of "people born in these and these years". --- For example, if we measure the attitudes, behaviors and other characteristics of Americans who are supposed to represent millennials, and measure the same qualities among people born in the same years in Europe, there are noteworthy differences. See for example what the Pew Research Center found (who are Europe's millennials? and U.S. and European Millennials differ on their views of fate, future). To account for these differences, rather than to refer to 'generation', it would be more appropriate and useful to make distinctions based on, for example, age, culture, SES, etc. The heart of the issue is that the concept of 'generations' is both over generalizing and reductive. Furthermore, the contours of a generation can be murky and arbitrary: can it be affirmed that there is a substantial difference between being born *1980* and *1981*? Is there a difference whether you experienced 9/11 at age 21 rather than at age 22? --- Now, the concept of ***cohorts*** exists, is meaningful and is frequently used in scientific research. Quoting Ryder: >**A cohort may be defined as the aggregate of individuals (within some population definition) who experienced the same event within the same time interval.** In almost all cohort research to date the defining event has been birth, but this is only a special case of the more general approach. It *is* recognized that it is important to take into account history and that people born in different years are affected by macro-level (historical) events such as, say, the Vietnam War or the War on Terror to understand attitudes, beliefs, ideologies and to interpret data. But the notion that *generations* allow to validly and reliably capture the differences between groups of people is debatable. --- For example, Trzesniewski and Donnellan analyzed data of a nationally representative sample of "high-school seniors from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s": >In general, **we found little reason to conclude that the average member of Generation Me is dramatically different from members of previous generations. Today’s youth seem to be no more egotistical than previous generations, and they appear to be just as happy and satisfied as previous generations.** In fact, today’s youth seem to have psychological profiles that are remarkably similar to youth from the past 30 years. However, we did find that more recent generations have higher expectations for their educational careers and are more cynical and distrusting than previous generations. Nonetheless, using the MTF data sets, **we found little evidence to support deep concerns about the current generation of youth, especially in terms of their feelings of self-worth, egotism, and rates of misery** (see also Trzesniewski et al., 2008a). >All in all, these other findings along with the present results from the MTF data set converge to paint a much less dramatic picture of cohort-linked changes over the last 30 years. **As such, we have tentatively concluded that concerns over the characteristics of Generation Me may not be well founded. In sum, our analyses using the MTF study cast considerable doubt on the idea that there is anything singular about the generation born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, especially in light of the considerable amount of within-cohort variability.** Another example is provided by Costanza et al.'s meta-analysis of "research on generational differences in work-related attitudes": >**The results of the meta-analysis generally do not support the notion that there are systematic, substantive differences among generations in work-related outcomes.** >Overall, we found **little support for differences between groups of individuals based on generational membership**. Comparing the results obtained from the present meta-analysis and those of related primary studies and meta-analytic efforts supports this conclusion. Further, **the results for studies using generations and those using age were very similar, suggesting that chronological age, or some other variable, is likely responsible for the small effects that were observed.** The point is that it is necessary to look at more than just an age cohort, by taking into account also other characteristics (culture, gender, SES, ...). As Ryder stated, the cohort is an aggregate of individuals "within some population definition". --- Coming back to Ryder, he had some strong criticism towards generationism: >Many writers have used the succession of cohorts as the foundation for theories of sociocultural dynamics. This approach has been aptly labelled "generationism," because the **writers mistakenly transfer from the generation to the cohort a set of inappropriate associations**. Some generationists maintain that there is a periodicity to sociocultural change caused by the biological fact of the succession of generations at thirty-year (father-son) intervals. There is no such periodicity. Other generationists develop a conflict theory of change, pitched on the opposition between the younger and the older "generations" in society, as in the family. But a society reproduces itself continuously. The age gap between father and son disappears in the population at large, through the comprehensive overlapping of life cycles. The fact that social change produces intercohort differentiation and thus contributes to intergenerational conflict cannot justify a theory that social change is produced by that conflict. **Generationists have leaped from inaccurate demographic observation to inaccurate social conclusion without supplying any intervening causality**. All these works suggest arithmetical mysticism, and the worst of them, as Troeltsch said, are "reine Kabbala." The aforementioned Costanza wrote a Slate article with several criticisms that can be levied towards the concept of generation, both methodological and empirical.

xu0iu1

legaladvice_train

After hurricane Ian, my apartment complex notified me that my building is 'uninhabitable' and my lease is terminated immediately. The complex flooded before during Irma, but we weren't given evacuation notice until the flooding was many feet deep. Do I have any legal options for funding a new lease? I am a student living in an apartment complex in Orlando, FL, U.S. On Wednesday 09/28, we started to get bad rain from Hurricane Ian. For background, our apartment complex was recently taken over by new management. The 2-story buildings near the back of the complex are at a low elevation. The passthrough and sidewalks flood every time it so much as sprinkles. We are obviously in a floodplain. The complex flooded in 2017 during hurricane Irma bad enough to damage apartments and property, but not to this extent. By noon, on Thursday 09/29, the flooding was 1-2 feet deep and rising very very fast. Cars had begun to be submerged and apartments were starting to leak before we got the first email from the complex notifying us to evacuate. National Guard and fire department boats came to evacuate people both to our gym, where people slept on the floor with no blankets, pillows anything, or to a shelter that did not accept pets (the complex is pet friendly. everyone has pets here). I live in the second floor, and I opted to stay while my neighbors were evacuated. The flooding reached well above the doorknobs of the apartments on the first floor before it was received. Many residents had their cars totaled and their apartments destroyed. Saturday, Oct. 1: We got an email from management notifying us that our buildings have been deemed 'uninhabitable' and that our leases are terminated. They claimed that our deposits will be refunded to us but nothing has actually happened. In terms of aid, we were offered waived fees/deposits at complexes also managed by this company. They are far from us and way out of the budget of most people in this complex. (50% more expensive). We live near a large university and its the middle of the semester, so most of the residents here are having a nearly impossible time finding another place. Anywhere I go will cost me an extraordinary amount of money. I have been without power for 4 days now, but it suddenly got turned back on an hour ago. This is wildly confusing because our AC units have been submerged underwater for 2 straight days. The buildings have been deemed uninhabitable due to the water, but they're willing to flick the electricity back on? My roommate talked to an employee of the office who claimed that turning the power off caused a small brief fire in one of the still flooded apartments (big surprise right?) and that the power will be shut off again soon. I don't know if I'm going to be forcibly removed or under what grounds. They didn't say that a health inspector or fire department has deemed the buildings uninhabitable. They didn't have any inspection done as far as I know. They haven't offered any aid other than what I mentioned above, and I'm being told to flee my unflooded apartment which currently has power and water. I have nowhere to go, and evacuation plans could have been made if it weren't for the obvious negligence of the apartment complex. My university has legal services which I intend to seek. I'd like to get opinions on how to precede in the meantime while I'm finding another place to live. Thank you for reading if you got this far.

iqtb42i

iqtbwmf

How was the apartment complex obviously negligent in a way that caused you to not make evacuation plans?

I didn’t see any mention of you having renter’s insurance. That’s where any relocation aid would come from. What “obvious negligence” are you referring to? Your apartment complex was flooded after a hurricane. Do you think management could have prevented a hurricane?? You are entitled to exactly what you’ve been offered- a termination of your lease and a return of your security deposit.

xu0iu1

legaladvice_train

After hurricane Ian, my apartment complex notified me that my building is 'uninhabitable' and my lease is terminated immediately. The complex flooded before during Irma, but we weren't given evacuation notice until the flooding was many feet deep. Do I have any legal options for funding a new lease? I am a student living in an apartment complex in Orlando, FL, U.S. On Wednesday 09/28, we started to get bad rain from Hurricane Ian. For background, our apartment complex was recently taken over by new management. The 2-story buildings near the back of the complex are at a low elevation. The passthrough and sidewalks flood every time it so much as sprinkles. We are obviously in a floodplain. The complex flooded in 2017 during hurricane Irma bad enough to damage apartments and property, but not to this extent. By noon, on Thursday 09/29, the flooding was 1-2 feet deep and rising very very fast. Cars had begun to be submerged and apartments were starting to leak before we got the first email from the complex notifying us to evacuate. National Guard and fire department boats came to evacuate people both to our gym, where people slept on the floor with no blankets, pillows anything, or to a shelter that did not accept pets (the complex is pet friendly. everyone has pets here). I live in the second floor, and I opted to stay while my neighbors were evacuated. The flooding reached well above the doorknobs of the apartments on the first floor before it was received. Many residents had their cars totaled and their apartments destroyed. Saturday, Oct. 1: We got an email from management notifying us that our buildings have been deemed 'uninhabitable' and that our leases are terminated. They claimed that our deposits will be refunded to us but nothing has actually happened. In terms of aid, we were offered waived fees/deposits at complexes also managed by this company. They are far from us and way out of the budget of most people in this complex. (50% more expensive). We live near a large university and its the middle of the semester, so most of the residents here are having a nearly impossible time finding another place. Anywhere I go will cost me an extraordinary amount of money. I have been without power for 4 days now, but it suddenly got turned back on an hour ago. This is wildly confusing because our AC units have been submerged underwater for 2 straight days. The buildings have been deemed uninhabitable due to the water, but they're willing to flick the electricity back on? My roommate talked to an employee of the office who claimed that turning the power off caused a small brief fire in one of the still flooded apartments (big surprise right?) and that the power will be shut off again soon. I don't know if I'm going to be forcibly removed or under what grounds. They didn't say that a health inspector or fire department has deemed the buildings uninhabitable. They didn't have any inspection done as far as I know. They haven't offered any aid other than what I mentioned above, and I'm being told to flee my unflooded apartment which currently has power and water. I have nowhere to go, and evacuation plans could have been made if it weren't for the obvious negligence of the apartment complex. My university has legal services which I intend to seek. I'd like to get opinions on how to precede in the meantime while I'm finding another place to live. Thank you for reading if you got this far.

iqttx0k

iquehzs

Not a lawyer. Seconding the suggestions to contact your renter's insurance and your university. Here is the FEMA page you can also use to apply for assistance.

Yes if you continue to stay there you will be forcibly removed at some point. Why? You no longer have a valid lease. You can fight the termination of your lease but you would have to prove it is still habitable which would be hard when you yourself have heard the fire risk. Not to mention all the mold that is going to grow unless they quickly tear out all the drywall that was flooded and bring in substantial drying fans. Your unit even if not flooded is still uninhabitable due to the other units being affected.

9g6vqn

askanthropology_train

What evidence of homosexuality is there in early societies?

e62b5zl

e623lgu

Loads. Go read an ancient epic story, there's probably dudes who love each other in there. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving has Gilgamesh and Enkidu as close friends, and Gilgamesh is told he will love his friend as he would a wife. When Enikdu dies, Gilagamesh is extremely upset. It's not necessarily an easily question to answer definitively though, because what a culture thinks is erotic, what counts as platonic love, etc is difficult to define. People tended not to write about things like that, especially not in the kind of surviving texts we have. As soon as we get to Greek mythology though, things get real gay! Pretty definitively. There's even transgendered gods. So yeah, there is really loads of evidence for some form of same sex love in early societies. Outside of Europe you find it, China, Africa.

In the height of the Roman Empire taking men as sex slaves was the norm for emperor's. But you had to be the giver not the taker, otherwise that's not masculine. One of the emperors I forget which one now, was considered a little odd, because he refused to take a man like that and exclusively slept with women.

9g6vqn

askanthropology_train

What evidence of homosexuality is there in early societies?

e629ndy

e62b5zl

"Homosexuality" (and for that matter heterosexuality) is an identifier that would have been completely alien to any society prior to 19th century europe. Reading that designation into sexual behaviors of earlier societies, particularly dominating penetration, is irresponsibly ahistorical. The landmark text for this is of course the very readable *History of Sexuality* by Foucault.

Loads. Go read an ancient epic story, there's probably dudes who love each other in there. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving has Gilgamesh and Enkidu as close friends, and Gilgamesh is told he will love his friend as he would a wife. When Enikdu dies, Gilagamesh is extremely upset. It's not necessarily an easily question to answer definitively though, because what a culture thinks is erotic, what counts as platonic love, etc is difficult to define. People tended not to write about things like that, especially not in the kind of surviving texts we have. As soon as we get to Greek mythology though, things get real gay! Pretty definitively. There's even transgendered gods. So yeah, there is really loads of evidence for some form of same sex love in early societies. Outside of Europe you find it, China, Africa.

c320g5

askanthropology_train

Are "swear words" universal? Do all cultures have words that are identical in meaning to common words but are taboo or forbidden? For example "feces" and "shit" are identical in meaning but one is considered vulgar and inappropriate and one is not. Is this sort of structure universal?

erovwae

erotdxl

Having words which are taboo is a cultural universal, if I'm remembering from undergrad. Whether they always share meanings with a common word, I couldn't say.

the documentary "FUCK" from 2005 produced by ThinkFilm will answer a lot of your questions

c320g5

askanthropology_train

Are "swear words" universal? Do all cultures have words that are identical in meaning to common words but are taboo or forbidden? For example "feces" and "shit" are identical in meaning but one is considered vulgar and inappropriate and one is not. Is this sort of structure universal?

erp0kul

erp3ucg

Well in Japanese, there's "chitsu", which is "vagina", and "manko" which is "cunt", the latter of which is so filthy it has to be censored even in certain pornos.

Feces and shit are a great example of the legacy of classism in languages. "Shit" comes from the Germanic languages of the Anglo-Saxons, as does "fuck," as well as words like "clothes" or "cow." When the Normans invaded England in 1066, they brought their language with them and almost overnight the elite of England were speaking Norman French, a romance language. For the next few centuries, French was the language of the courts and thus of the elites, while the common people still spoke their Germanic language(s). So a divide occurs, where words with the same meaning in both languages seem much more aristocratic in the French. And even today the word "garment" seems much more elegant than "clothes," garment being from the old French and clothes being the plural of cloth in Old English and its origins obscure. "Fornicate" comes directly from the Latin, but "fuck" seems to be Germanic (there's a lot of debate about that word though). The more common, less aristocratic word tends to mean something less or even turn into a swear word. In my example of "cow" above, the French equivalent is "beuf" or beef. It's easy to imagine how to the subjugated class imagines an animal, which can be used for labor and milk and they work with every day, while the elite class imagines the food on their plate. Another point about curse words is that which words are taboo vary across cultures. I'm more familiar with the Western world, but within that you can see that the worst words or phrases in Old World countries tend to be blasphemies or religious oaths, whereas in the New World the worst taboos are about the human body, possibly a legacy of Puritanism. As Penn Gillette once pointed out, saying "santa vaca!" might be a way for a Spanish speaker to avoid swearing, but to a Hindu that would be blasphemy. ​ Edit: I just realized this is AskAnthropology and not /r/answers so I apologize for the lack of sources. It's just what I remember from undergrad courses, but etymologyonline.com is a great resource if you like to look up curse words or any words. Also, strictly speaking, swears, curses, cusses, etc. have different shades of meaning and I have used them interchangeably here.

atjv8j

asksciencefiction_train

[Science fiction in general] How easy would it be to get rich in a galaxy spanning empire with trillions of inhabitants? Could sell some product for only one credit and become a trillionaire?

eh1h8oz

eh1hnjl

The simplest way would be to have FTL tech that is faster than what everybody else is using. You can travel faster than news of commodity fluctuations or collapsing companies, and that's basically the same as being able to see the future compared to everybody else. Show up in a system during an emergency and be the first one to sell necessary commodities. Sell all your stock in a collapsing company before anybody in the system knows it's collapsing. Even if you can only transfer information, you could still send tips to your accomplices to sell or buy things before news changes their prices (or just upload your brain patterns and teleport over the information channel). If the empire relies on generation ships and lasering data between systems and you have a drive that lets you travel at the speed of light, you can do this (you can travel in a straight line while information has to propagate at right angles through the network). If everybody has a lightspeed drive and you can move faster than light, you can do this too. If everybody is on the portal network and you can move quickly outside the portal network, you can do this. If everybody has instantaneous communication but it takes a while to move matter around, you can do this as long as you can move faster than everyone else. The only time you can't do this is when everybody has instantaneous long-distance teleportation.

Same reason you can't sell something today for a dollar and make a billion. Cost to produce, cost to distribute, cost to advertise, markets you can't sell in, markets who don't want your product, copycats producing the same for .20c less, cost of legal settlements and fighting off patent trolls, cost of physical protection, cost of someone to manage all this... I mean, in theory it's possible, but there's a whole world out there (or several worlds in your case) full of people trying to take the same bite out of the same pie. The lucky ones pull it off, the rest are just the rest of us.

atjv8j

asksciencefiction_train

[Science fiction in general] How easy would it be to get rich in a galaxy spanning empire with trillions of inhabitants? Could sell some product for only one credit and become a trillionaire?

eh1sfal

eh1nh7a

>sell some product for only one credit and become a trillionaire Well, first, what do you have a trillion of? Nothing? Maybe cells in your body? Grains of sand? Are those worth a credit? No, I didn't think so. So, you'll buy something (like an apple) for a credit, and sell it for two, then buy two, and so on. First problem: If you're selling your apple for two credits, people will just buy apples from the same guy you bought it from, because his are only one credit. Doesn't really work, does it? Buy an item on one planet for a credit, take it to another planet, and sell it for two. OK, how much does it cost to transport it? 2000 credits. That's going to be a problem. How about buying a million of them, transporting that to another planet, and selling them? OK, where do you get the million credits to start with? How about a loan? Do you have collateral? Didn't think so. Sorry, you're pretty much going to be working in the zinc mines for the rest of your life.

If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. And if everybody does it it's going to stop being easy, because of the competition. More people means more competition. Somebody probably will be a trillionaire based on selling loads of cheap things but there's going to be millions, maybe billions, of people who tried the same thing and failed.

ljy12

asksocialscience_train

Has there ever been a true communist country? Drawing only on first year sociology it my understanding that Communism is something that would spontaneously emerge after the proleteriat would overthrow the ruling elite and a free society would follow. No class divisions or government would exist and we would live in some sort of utopian society. Looking at what a called communist counries (Soviet Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam etc.) I see what looks like an authoritarian regime ruled by an elite ruling party. Isn't that the exact thing that communism is said to replace? I dont really get it. Maybe this should be under EL5, but thats just splitting hairs if you ask me

c2ta8ut

c2tcf72

In real communism people are free, but that wasn't the case in Soviet Russia and etc... In all these countries communism was forced, it didn't appear spontaneously as you say. Maybe Yugoslavia was close? They had a pretty good standard of living and fell apart because of nationalism. I have read online that some say that Sweden is a type of communist country, but maybe that is exaggeration.

Not in the true sense. If you read what Marx wrote his hopes seemed quite high that the Paris Commune was on the right track, but that was unfortunately crushed. In the real world, no, we've never had anything except really appalling attempts that I'm certain Marx would be repulsed by.

ljy12

asksocialscience_train

Has there ever been a true communist country? Drawing only on first year sociology it my understanding that Communism is something that would spontaneously emerge after the proleteriat would overthrow the ruling elite and a free society would follow. No class divisions or government would exist and we would live in some sort of utopian society. Looking at what a called communist counries (Soviet Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam etc.) I see what looks like an authoritarian regime ruled by an elite ruling party. Isn't that the exact thing that communism is said to replace? I dont really get it. Maybe this should be under EL5, but thats just splitting hairs if you ask me

c2tcf72

c2takag

Not in the true sense. If you read what Marx wrote his hopes seemed quite high that the Paris Commune was on the right track, but that was unfortunately crushed. In the real world, no, we've never had anything except really appalling attempts that I'm certain Marx would be repulsed by.

If you look at what actually happened during the various 'revolutions' in those countries, they are not really what Marx had in mind. It was supposed to be a mass overthrow. Lenin's 1917 revolution to overthrown Kerensky (the Czar's democratic successor) was done with only about 100 people. The years that followed that were unbearably brutal and strange perversions of Marxist ideas.

y5xh4e

changemyview_train

cmv:these recent "beware on Halloween" articles are fake and are trying to make parents scared. As I said. We've all heard of the random psycho out there putting razor blades in an apple or something, but as far as I've known that's usually false. We had an undertale "fan" bring an artist cookies with needles baked in, we've seen some real screwed up stuff when idiots are passionate about idiotic things. Halloween hasn't come yet and we now see articles about parents finding "edibles" in their kid's candy haul. Why, how. I highly doubt anyone is spending hundreds of dollars to get kids high when as a parent I take some candy for myself after the trick or treating is done. I can see from the driveway if someone puts something out of the ordinary into my kid's bag. I personally think the world is a safer place than I grew up in so we still go house to house and not some of that fake "trunk or treat" experience. Please, put in some packaged edibles with a note "for mom and dad" or something so we can make these headlines true. But it's not happening at all, the democrats are not "trying to get your baby high" and I promise you, I wouldn't waste edibles on kids.

ismfa0e

ismem13

I dunno, the only part of your view that I want to challenge is that there's anything "recent" about these articles. The razor blade thing was a rumor people would throw around 30 years ago, and I don't think it was new then. It might be repackaged in a modern social media form that feels new, but it's the same old nonsense it's always been.

Counterpoint: The articles are fake and meant to generate clicks and views. Fear isn't the end goal, it's the bait used to get money.

y5xh4e

changemyview_train

cmv:these recent "beware on Halloween" articles are fake and are trying to make parents scared. As I said. We've all heard of the random psycho out there putting razor blades in an apple or something, but as far as I've known that's usually false. We had an undertale "fan" bring an artist cookies with needles baked in, we've seen some real screwed up stuff when idiots are passionate about idiotic things. Halloween hasn't come yet and we now see articles about parents finding "edibles" in their kid's candy haul. Why, how. I highly doubt anyone is spending hundreds of dollars to get kids high when as a parent I take some candy for myself after the trick or treating is done. I can see from the driveway if someone puts something out of the ordinary into my kid's bag. I personally think the world is a safer place than I grew up in so we still go house to house and not some of that fake "trunk or treat" experience. Please, put in some packaged edibles with a note "for mom and dad" or something so we can make these headlines true. But it's not happening at all, the democrats are not "trying to get your baby high" and I promise you, I wouldn't waste edibles on kids.

isn7kch

ismulb7

Idk, last year I spent upwards of $225,000 just so I could put Columbian grade cocaine in children's' Fun-Sized Tootsie Rolls©. Worth every penny and now I'm homeless.

Little to no people actually believe this. Most everyone knows articles like this are either satire or straight up bullshit

ztxe8i

legaladvice_train

Rented House through booking.com months ago... showed up and somebody had bought and moved into the house. What are my rights here? Title pretty much says all. Rented a house through booking.com back in August. Two days ago... they sent me an email confirming my stay. I show up today, somebody has moved into the house I rented! Where should I go from here? What are my legal rights if customer service or previous owner of the rental does not cooperate?

j1fxhoe

j1hqmuv

Call booking.com and let them know. They will resolve the issue.

We had our apartment cancelled at the last minute by the host and booking.com did pay us for cost difference of having to book a hotel. The only issue was that we spent HOURS on the phone with booking.com to get them to pay. And it took nearly a week of constant phone calls and so much unnecessary talking. Good luck and so sorry this happened to you.

ztxe8i

legaladvice_train

Rented House through booking.com months ago... showed up and somebody had bought and moved into the house. What are my rights here? Title pretty much says all. Rented a house through booking.com back in August. Two days ago... they sent me an email confirming my stay. I show up today, somebody has moved into the house I rented! Where should I go from here? What are my legal rights if customer service or previous owner of the rental does not cooperate?

j1hdexw

j1hqmuv

Absolute first thing you need to do and should have done as soon as you realised is to contact booking.com and advise what has happened. The longer you wait the harder they will be to dispute with, because they may say well you should have contacted us so we could have gotten you alternate accommodation.

We had our apartment cancelled at the last minute by the host and booking.com did pay us for cost difference of having to book a hotel. The only issue was that we spent HOURS on the phone with booking.com to get them to pay. And it took nearly a week of constant phone calls and so much unnecessary talking. Good luck and so sorry this happened to you.

iuppfw

asksciencefiction_train

[Animorphs] Why did the Animorphs never try to use Andalites in some of their morphs when they confronted the Yeerks? They encountered several Andalites over the years. Heck, they could have morphed Ax and used that a few times in battles with the Yeerks. It's too often that they fought the Yeerks with their battle morphs and you gotta figure the Yeerks were wondering why only an Andalite youth didn't use a battle morph.

g5mem1h

g5melyb

I don't recall the proposal ever explicitly coming up in the books, but I would say two reasons. First, they already had their respective battle morphs before rescuing Ax in book 4, except for Rachel who didn't get the bear for a few more books, but Elephant/Bear is more her style anyway. So they were already doing those & making it work before they even had an Andalite. Second, in book 37, when they all go on an attack as polar bears, they find their lack of versatility is a weakness. So it is implied that the different species are able to work with some synergy.

They did not like to morph into sentient creatures. Especially those that they knew. They did it when they had to but a bear, wolf, gorilla and tiger are as strong or stronger than an andalite for most missions.

iuppfw

asksciencefiction_train

[Animorphs] Why did the Animorphs never try to use Andalites in some of their morphs when they confronted the Yeerks? They encountered several Andalites over the years. Heck, they could have morphed Ax and used that a few times in battles with the Yeerks. It's too often that they fought the Yeerks with their battle morphs and you gotta figure the Yeerks were wondering why only an Andalite youth didn't use a battle morph.

g5mt6iu

g5melyb

It's been mentioned already but they were opposed to morphing sentient creatures unless absolutely necessary. Even when they morphed Jake it was "frowned" upon. 2. They are more familiar with their battle morphs. 3. They liked the diversity of each of their battlemorphs as it allowed them to adapt to situations better. 4. What they really should have done was all tried to morph Howlers. It's lame the Cryotak or whatever expunged the DNA from Jake.

They did not like to morph into sentient creatures. Especially those that they knew. They did it when they had to but a bear, wolf, gorilla and tiger are as strong or stronger than an andalite for most missions.

93iico

changemyview_train

CMV: Teachers are paid enough. It's the work environment that needs to change. As a disclaimer, after I share the initial discussion, you will see my specific points on where I think a teacher's work environment is horrendous and needs revision. All of the following values are courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and with respect to the United States. To my knowledge, these figures were last verified of April 13, 2018: * The median pay for Preschool teachers is $28,990 per year and typically requires an Associate's level education. * The median pay for Kindergarten and Elementary School teachers is $56,900 per year and requires a Bachelor's level education. * The median pay for Middle School teachers is $57,720 per year and requires a Bachelor's level education. * The median pay for High School teachers is $59,170 per year and requires a Bachelor's level education. * The median pay for Special Education teachers is $58,980 per year and requires a Bachelor's level education. Job growth in all of these groups was reported to be at least as fast as average, with Preschool teacher job growth reported as faster than average. These median values, of course, are simply a pH test of the education sector, and the median does not give much attention to disturbances in the tails of the distribution. There are clearly many underfunded schools with underpaid teachers, and even some well-funded schools with underpaid teachers. But I consider the median teacher in the United States to be living pretty comfortably, considering the other benefits in the form of job security through the tenure system, and low barriers to entry to the sector (many universities have an excellent undergraduate pipeline that turns students of the college of education into educators of students). In general, I believe teachers life comfortably when it comes to financial success. I don't think it's glamorous, but that's the nature of most undergraduate degree careers. I believe teachers, like any other employee, will unionize and clamor for higher wages as often and as vocally as they can (either you get the pay raise or you get nothing, most of the time, so you have nothing to lose by fighting for a pay raise even if you don't need it). In this way, I don't think nationwide protests to increase teacher salaries *in general* is a useful discussion. I don't think teacher salaries *in general* is the problem educators are facing. I think the real problem that needs discussion is the expectations placed on teachers. It is a misnomer that they work only 10 months out of the year and get school holidays "off", as you can bet your butt they are either lesson planning, grading, or preparing for their own higher education or research. During the day, they are subject to the same bell schedule that their students are, which in many states is 50-minute intervals of instruction with a 25-minute break for lunch, a 25-minute "break" where you must hold an open homeroom, and bathroom breaks as strict as the students'. One of the few bipartisan agreements in this country is that students are shuttled from class to class like cattle and have neither the time nor the energy, and too diverse a socioeconomic background to be expected to unanimously sit and learn. They wake up sometimes as early as 6am for school and leave near 3pm, and often struggle to sleep at night. Teachers are subject to the exact same schedule. There is no place in public education for a teacher who is a night owl and struggles to teach in the morning, just like there is no place for a student who'd rather learn at 5pm. They are demeaned by the same bells, bathroom breaks, and lunch restrictions in many schools. If an executive at a private company was tasked with teaching 7 batches of employees the same task for 50 minutes per batch per day, have to go home and grade their performances, come up with ways to communicate their performances productively to them, and come up with ways to better educate and keep their focus, be forced to listen to a ringing bell tell them when they can take a pee or eat a warm-ish tuna sandwich, they would be driven mad and resign within the week. In short, I don't think the fix to our education system is to give teachers more money. I think a larger problem is that they do not have a work environment conducive to productivity. A suggested solution of mine is to increase the volume of breaks throughout the day. Another is to compel schools to adhere to block scheduling rather than identical daily schedules to reduce monotony for both students and teachers. Another is to push back the school start time. So what do you think? Is money the issue? Are my complaints non-issues? Are there other factors regarding the teacher's work environment that I'm not considering that also need attention? If you have any of these thoughts, they would count as *changing my view* and I'd be happy to hear from you! All the best.

e3dl8qr

e3dlu26

I don't think giving more money to all of the teachers we have now will fix education. The goal of giving more money to teachers is to attract more qualified teachers. There are a lot of careers that take the same amount of work and pay much better. As you point out there is a great pipeline for churning out teachers in universities. A lot of those teachers are not top of the mill material. In theory, by making wages more attractive you could make someone who would otherwise go into industry or higher level research become a teacher instead. Therefore the overall quality of our teachers improves. You could make the schedule as 'productive' as you wanted with the best bathroom schedule on earth. But when you have more football coaches teaching high school chemistry than science teachers (not a joke) not much can change.

Some important notes. While teaching jobs do not **universally** require degrees beyond a bachelor's, a number of particular school systems do. In fact in at least 8 states, while you can begin teaching with a bachelor's, you must earn a higher degree wthin a certain number of years to retain your teaching license. Many raises are also tied to advanced degrees. The median wages reflect a lot of teachers who do have those advanced degrees. More than half of US teachers have a Masters or higher. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28 So comparing average teacher's wages to careers that only require a bachelor's degree is not the most appropriate comparison. I haven't had any luck tracking down the most recent specific numbers, but as far as I'm aware, k-12 teachers on average make less than the median person with a comparable degree.

93iico

changemyview_train

CMV: Teachers are paid enough. It's the work environment that needs to change. As a disclaimer, after I share the initial discussion, you will see my specific points on where I think a teacher's work environment is horrendous and needs revision. All of the following values are courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and with respect to the United States. To my knowledge, these figures were last verified of April 13, 2018: * The median pay for Preschool teachers is $28,990 per year and typically requires an Associate's level education. * The median pay for Kindergarten and Elementary School teachers is $56,900 per year and requires a Bachelor's level education. * The median pay for Middle School teachers is $57,720 per year and requires a Bachelor's level education. * The median pay for High School teachers is $59,170 per year and requires a Bachelor's level education. * The median pay for Special Education teachers is $58,980 per year and requires a Bachelor's level education. Job growth in all of these groups was reported to be at least as fast as average, with Preschool teacher job growth reported as faster than average. These median values, of course, are simply a pH test of the education sector, and the median does not give much attention to disturbances in the tails of the distribution. There are clearly many underfunded schools with underpaid teachers, and even some well-funded schools with underpaid teachers. But I consider the median teacher in the United States to be living pretty comfortably, considering the other benefits in the form of job security through the tenure system, and low barriers to entry to the sector (many universities have an excellent undergraduate pipeline that turns students of the college of education into educators of students). In general, I believe teachers life comfortably when it comes to financial success. I don't think it's glamorous, but that's the nature of most undergraduate degree careers. I believe teachers, like any other employee, will unionize and clamor for higher wages as often and as vocally as they can (either you get the pay raise or you get nothing, most of the time, so you have nothing to lose by fighting for a pay raise even if you don't need it). In this way, I don't think nationwide protests to increase teacher salaries *in general* is a useful discussion. I don't think teacher salaries *in general* is the problem educators are facing. I think the real problem that needs discussion is the expectations placed on teachers. It is a misnomer that they work only 10 months out of the year and get school holidays "off", as you can bet your butt they are either lesson planning, grading, or preparing for their own higher education or research. During the day, they are subject to the same bell schedule that their students are, which in many states is 50-minute intervals of instruction with a 25-minute break for lunch, a 25-minute "break" where you must hold an open homeroom, and bathroom breaks as strict as the students'. One of the few bipartisan agreements in this country is that students are shuttled from class to class like cattle and have neither the time nor the energy, and too diverse a socioeconomic background to be expected to unanimously sit and learn. They wake up sometimes as early as 6am for school and leave near 3pm, and often struggle to sleep at night. Teachers are subject to the exact same schedule. There is no place in public education for a teacher who is a night owl and struggles to teach in the morning, just like there is no place for a student who'd rather learn at 5pm. They are demeaned by the same bells, bathroom breaks, and lunch restrictions in many schools. If an executive at a private company was tasked with teaching 7 batches of employees the same task for 50 minutes per batch per day, have to go home and grade their performances, come up with ways to communicate their performances productively to them, and come up with ways to better educate and keep their focus, be forced to listen to a ringing bell tell them when they can take a pee or eat a warm-ish tuna sandwich, they would be driven mad and resign within the week. In short, I don't think the fix to our education system is to give teachers more money. I think a larger problem is that they do not have a work environment conducive to productivity. A suggested solution of mine is to increase the volume of breaks throughout the day. Another is to compel schools to adhere to block scheduling rather than identical daily schedules to reduce monotony for both students and teachers. Another is to push back the school start time. So what do you think? Is money the issue? Are my complaints non-issues? Are there other factors regarding the teacher's work environment that I'm not considering that also need attention? If you have any of these thoughts, they would count as *changing my view* and I'd be happy to hear from you! All the best.

e3dtclk

e3dl8qr

While I agree with your overall point that the working environment could be improved, I think that is an even harder change to push for than raising the salaries of teachers. On top of this, there are teachers in the current system that are doing an excellent job and really should be paid more. I hope that you've had at least one teacher during your education that you felt was exceptional. Someone who really cared about the students and their education, not only getting the students through their class but also preparing them for success afterwards. These types of people who pick up the slack of the failing educational system are the types of people who we need more of. Currently because of the salaries offered to teachers, many talented and caring individuals choose not to go down that path. A lot of teachers currently are not very good, and *are* getting paid enough, but I believe the ultimate goal with increasing pay would be to replace people like that.

I don't think giving more money to all of the teachers we have now will fix education. The goal of giving more money to teachers is to attract more qualified teachers. There are a lot of careers that take the same amount of work and pay much better. As you point out there is a great pipeline for churning out teachers in universities. A lot of those teachers are not top of the mill material. In theory, by making wages more attractive you could make someone who would otherwise go into industry or higher level research become a teacher instead. Therefore the overall quality of our teachers improves. You could make the schedule as 'productive' as you wanted with the best bathroom schedule on earth. But when you have more football coaches teaching high school chemistry than science teachers (not a joke) not much can change.

rm90c

asksocialscience_train

Why does cost of living increase? The fact that the cost of living here in Sweden (and most of the world, as far as I know?) is rising instead of the opposite seems so counter-intuitive to me. The constant evolution of technology and effectivisation should make living cheaper, but it doesn't. Why is it so?

c46ynvy

c46ynhc

One problem is that *standard* of living is also increasing. The cost of living like people did 100 years ago is a hell of a lot lower than the cost of living like modern people do. (I say "problem", but I'm not exactly complaining)

I'm not an expert but I think it depends on what exactly you consider 'cost of living'. Most countries have a central bank that is in charge of many things, including controlling inflation. Most central banks can therefore control how much the cost of living rises. Currently most first world central banks try to achieve about 2% inflation yearly, they could, if they so wished, try to achieve a lower rate. I'm not sure if this is what you are referring to though.

rm90c

asksocialscience_train

Why does cost of living increase? The fact that the cost of living here in Sweden (and most of the world, as far as I know?) is rising instead of the opposite seems so counter-intuitive to me. The constant evolution of technology and effectivisation should make living cheaper, but it doesn't. Why is it so?

c46ynhc

c4715pp

I'm not an expert but I think it depends on what exactly you consider 'cost of living'. Most countries have a central bank that is in charge of many things, including controlling inflation. Most central banks can therefore control how much the cost of living rises. Currently most first world central banks try to achieve about 2% inflation yearly, they could, if they so wished, try to achieve a lower rate. I'm not sure if this is what you are referring to though.

The cost of living is actually decreasing - just as you would think. But you cannot simply look at the prices. The prices rise - which is the same as to say that the money is less worth. This is what you call inflation and it is a good thing. (A main point why it is good is because the opposite is horrible - deflation, meaning an increase in the value of the money (and that again is the same as a decrease in prices) makes people and especially firms decrease their demand. They will wait until things get cheaper for them. So we have inflation (which is around 2 %) and things get more and more expensive. But at the same time wages and incomes rise also. And they rise faster than prices in general (which are measured by the price of a fixed basket of goods). So it is just as you assumed! You just cannot look at prices but you have to look on the relation between income and prices - which is to say you have to look on real incomes. (Just checked for you in Sweden: Between 1903 and 2009 average Real income rose 8,6-fold. This is to say for the average income you can now buying 8,6 times more than your grandmother in her days of 1903)

c8npvo

asksciencefiction_train

[Animorphs] Why did Ellimist give Tobias the choice between becoming human OR retaining Animorph powers? I mean, if you already decided to intervene, why not just make him a regular human Animorph?

eso3vnm

esotrx7

As with most things regarding the Ellimist, it all comes down to his game with Crayak. Outside of certain well-defined circumstances, neither the Ellimist nor Crayak may exercise the full might of their powers. Tobias's situation was outside those circumstances. That meant that in order to intervene, the Ellimist would have had to parley with Crayak, and negotiate terms. It may be that part of Crayak's terms was that there be an impossible choice.

Me before this post: why isn’t anyone passionate about Animorphs, nobody ever gets my references Me after this post: oh okay, turns out I don’t remember anything apparently

c8npvo

asksciencefiction_train

[Animorphs] Why did Ellimist give Tobias the choice between becoming human OR retaining Animorph powers? I mean, if you already decided to intervene, why not just make him a regular human Animorph?

esolxj6

esotrx7

Crayak is the reason. The more the element intervenes the more the room he gives Crayak, returning a power he had is undoing one consequence, letting him be human again would be two, which might be the difference between victory or defeat. Letting Tobias have his power is the better move because it puts one of the Elemist's players back in the game. (I have no doubt that the Elemist was absolutely certain which rout Tobias would go)

Me before this post: why isn’t anyone passionate about Animorphs, nobody ever gets my references Me after this post: oh okay, turns out I don’t remember anything apparently

2bfoo1

changemyview_train

CMV: The Assassin's Creed Unity female character controversy has been blown completely out of proportion. Having only one character model for the protagonist is a perfectly reasonable choice especially for a game with a strict development timeline. I've read so many times that "gamers are 48% female". That may be true when including facebook and mobile gaming, but the audience of marquee console franchises is predominantly male. For example, according to "Women Still Very Much In The Minority" in Variety, only 15% of the Grand Theft Auto audience is female... meaning that the male audience is nearly 6 times larger than the female audience. An even more important observation are the choices that gamers make when it comes to male and female protagonists. Game Informer quotes Bioware's marketing director as saying, "There aren’t enough female heroes in games in general, so it’s something that people can rally around and celebrate," referring to Mass Effect's option to choose to play as a female hero. As well, it is widely agreed among critics that the female voice acting in Mass Effect is superior. But despite superior critical acclaim and the "rally" and "celebration" around the female hero option in the game, only 18% of players chose to play as the female hero. Now, Anita Sarkeesian has suggested in her video series that players are influence by the marketing materials showing this version of the character as the default. But Bioware says that only 13% picked the default male. So the actions of the market influenced the decision to not include a female assassin. I think it's worth pointing out that, in games that have a majority-female audience (like Hidden Object-type games), there are a majority of female protagonists... not unlike how there are many other genres of media (chick lit/flicks for example) where the main character is predominantly female. So now we move to the decision to not have a female assassin option... though I wish to phrase this differently. Ubisoft chose to include only one playable character model for the game. It isn't like Ubisoft offered a dozen different male assassins with different body types and move sets. The multiplayer version of the game simply reuses the assassin model/animations from the single player game. It's clear that, if they decided to make a second character model, it would have been a woman. I've seen people complain that the trailer showed "4 different men"... but this is just one male character with skin color and clothing changes. Including a second playable character model adds much development time for no benefit in terms of gameplay itself. A female assassin would be required to have all the same capabilities as a male assassin. So the "game" itself would not change with the inclusion of a second character model. The amount of work required to develop, animate, and test a second playable character model hardly seems worth it considering it would have no impact on gameplay whatsoever. Finally, people seem to forget that the animation/physics system of Assassin's Creed is much more sophisticated than, say, Goldeneye. And it is also newer, considering how the game just made the jump to next-gen consoles. As well, Assassin's Creed games have a *very* constrained timeline as the franchise is "annualized" and a delay beyond the holiday season would ruin the current release schedule for every subsequent game in the franchise. Thus, the decision to include only one character model seems perfectly reasonable when trying to put out such a complicated game in such a short timeline. Games like Mass Effect are not under such constraints. In conclusion, I will say that I think that it would be great to have a female assassin option and I have little doubt that this feature will be added back in next year once the kinks of the "next gen" engine are worked out and more development time is available. However, I think that the backlash against Ubisoft is totally unwarranted. To me the reaction seems shallow, juvenile, and entitled. If the attitude of some gamers is "I can only enjoy a game when playing a character of the same gender as me" then I call them immature. If the attitude is "I can only enjoy playing as a woman" then I say, you are statistically in the minority and not every game can cater to your personal whims... certainly not one that has to be out by black friday, ready or not. **TL;DR Summary:** 1) The audience of marquee console games is predominantly male. 2) Most gamers prefer to play as a male in these types of games. 3) Ubisoft only included one character model; not many different men. 4) The strict development schedule is a legitimate excuse. 5) The cost of including a woman assassin outweighed the benefits. _____ > *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***read through our rules***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***downvotes don't change views****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***popular topics wiki*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***message us***. *Happy CMVing!*

cj4z8ve

cj553ix

Ok, point by point: >1) The audience of marquee console games is predominantly male. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Are most protagonists male because more men are gamers? Or are more men gamers because more protagonists are male? I'm willing to bet that a larger proportion of female protagonists would lead to a larger proportion of female gamers. >2) Most gamers prefer to play as a male in these types of games. Sure. But if most gamers prefer straight white male protagonists, that doesn't mean that every protagonist should be a straight white man. It's not that "I can only enjoy a game when playing a character of the same gender as me", but rather it is "I would like some games where I'm not forced to play as a man. Games have been getting better, but there are still plenty with man-only protagonists. >3) Ubisoft only included one character model; not many different men. Even so, the question remains: why a man? There have been 8 playable characters in the AC series, I believe, only one of whom is a woman. >4) The strict development schedule is a legitimate excuse. I know next to nothing about game development, so I won't argue anything here. I'm just curious as to how far ahead of time the modeling could be done, and if it could have been accomplished well if it was a higher priority. >5) The cost of including a woman assassin outweighed the benefits. That's subjective. Obviously the time that could have been spent developing a female protagonist was spent developing something else - possibly some feature that some customers value less than a playable female protagonist. Obviously Ubisoft agreed with you, but that's kinda what the controversy is about.

Women have to adapt to the male view constantly. I can't say how often my male students (I teach high school) complain when we teach a "girly" book. And yet, I rarely have female students complain that the cast majority of books they read feature male protagonists, despite it being entirely true. This is anecdotal, but maybe it'll help your perspective. When I played lego with my brothers, before we had a lot of sets, I would search long and hard for a plain smiley face and a hat for my "lego person" and then loudly announce that it was a girl with short hair, wearing a hat. I wanted my lego person to represent me in the most basic way possible. I wouldn't consider myself a gamer, but I did play games growing up. When the pokemon gameboy games gave the gamer the option of choosing to be a girl in the second (gold/silver) generation of games, it was HUGE for me. It was an acknowledgement that I played the game too and my perspective was important. When a game developer is willing to have an option of a female player, or has a female protagonist after a whole series of male protagonists, they are saying that female players matter to them, that their experience playing the game is just as important. You're absolutely right that the cost, in time and money, is greater to include a female option and that the majority of gamers (for these types of games) are males. But the benefit is greater inclusion in the gaming community and acknowledgement of female gamers as a legitimate audience. In the short-term, that might mean little to you, but in the long-term, as more women game seriously, steps like this are very meaningful.

2bfoo1

changemyview_train

CMV: The Assassin's Creed Unity female character controversy has been blown completely out of proportion. Having only one character model for the protagonist is a perfectly reasonable choice especially for a game with a strict development timeline. I've read so many times that "gamers are 48% female". That may be true when including facebook and mobile gaming, but the audience of marquee console franchises is predominantly male. For example, according to "Women Still Very Much In The Minority" in Variety, only 15% of the Grand Theft Auto audience is female... meaning that the male audience is nearly 6 times larger than the female audience. An even more important observation are the choices that gamers make when it comes to male and female protagonists. Game Informer quotes Bioware's marketing director as saying, "There aren’t enough female heroes in games in general, so it’s something that people can rally around and celebrate," referring to Mass Effect's option to choose to play as a female hero. As well, it is widely agreed among critics that the female voice acting in Mass Effect is superior. But despite superior critical acclaim and the "rally" and "celebration" around the female hero option in the game, only 18% of players chose to play as the female hero. Now, Anita Sarkeesian has suggested in her video series that players are influence by the marketing materials showing this version of the character as the default. But Bioware says that only 13% picked the default male. So the actions of the market influenced the decision to not include a female assassin. I think it's worth pointing out that, in games that have a majority-female audience (like Hidden Object-type games), there are a majority of female protagonists... not unlike how there are many other genres of media (chick lit/flicks for example) where the main character is predominantly female. So now we move to the decision to not have a female assassin option... though I wish to phrase this differently. Ubisoft chose to include only one playable character model for the game. It isn't like Ubisoft offered a dozen different male assassins with different body types and move sets. The multiplayer version of the game simply reuses the assassin model/animations from the single player game. It's clear that, if they decided to make a second character model, it would have been a woman. I've seen people complain that the trailer showed "4 different men"... but this is just one male character with skin color and clothing changes. Including a second playable character model adds much development time for no benefit in terms of gameplay itself. A female assassin would be required to have all the same capabilities as a male assassin. So the "game" itself would not change with the inclusion of a second character model. The amount of work required to develop, animate, and test a second playable character model hardly seems worth it considering it would have no impact on gameplay whatsoever. Finally, people seem to forget that the animation/physics system of Assassin's Creed is much more sophisticated than, say, Goldeneye. And it is also newer, considering how the game just made the jump to next-gen consoles. As well, Assassin's Creed games have a *very* constrained timeline as the franchise is "annualized" and a delay beyond the holiday season would ruin the current release schedule for every subsequent game in the franchise. Thus, the decision to include only one character model seems perfectly reasonable when trying to put out such a complicated game in such a short timeline. Games like Mass Effect are not under such constraints. In conclusion, I will say that I think that it would be great to have a female assassin option and I have little doubt that this feature will be added back in next year once the kinks of the "next gen" engine are worked out and more development time is available. However, I think that the backlash against Ubisoft is totally unwarranted. To me the reaction seems shallow, juvenile, and entitled. If the attitude of some gamers is "I can only enjoy a game when playing a character of the same gender as me" then I call them immature. If the attitude is "I can only enjoy playing as a woman" then I say, you are statistically in the minority and not every game can cater to your personal whims... certainly not one that has to be out by black friday, ready or not. **TL;DR Summary:** 1) The audience of marquee console games is predominantly male. 2) Most gamers prefer to play as a male in these types of games. 3) Ubisoft only included one character model; not many different men. 4) The strict development schedule is a legitimate excuse. 5) The cost of including a woman assassin outweighed the benefits. _____ > *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***read through our rules***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***downvotes don't change views****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***popular topics wiki*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***message us***. *Happy CMVing!*

cj553ix

cj54j4g

Women have to adapt to the male view constantly. I can't say how often my male students (I teach high school) complain when we teach a "girly" book. And yet, I rarely have female students complain that the cast majority of books they read feature male protagonists, despite it being entirely true. This is anecdotal, but maybe it'll help your perspective. When I played lego with my brothers, before we had a lot of sets, I would search long and hard for a plain smiley face and a hat for my "lego person" and then loudly announce that it was a girl with short hair, wearing a hat. I wanted my lego person to represent me in the most basic way possible. I wouldn't consider myself a gamer, but I did play games growing up. When the pokemon gameboy games gave the gamer the option of choosing to be a girl in the second (gold/silver) generation of games, it was HUGE for me. It was an acknowledgement that I played the game too and my perspective was important. When a game developer is willing to have an option of a female player, or has a female protagonist after a whole series of male protagonists, they are saying that female players matter to them, that their experience playing the game is just as important. You're absolutely right that the cost, in time and money, is greater to include a female option and that the majority of gamers (for these types of games) are males. But the benefit is greater inclusion in the gaming community and acknowledgement of female gamers as a legitimate audience. In the short-term, that might mean little to you, but in the long-term, as more women game seriously, steps like this are very meaningful.

> 1) The audience of marquee console games is predominantly male. This is one of those things where it is going to be difficult to determine the exact causal nature of the relationship, because they are going to be intercausally related. On one hand: * the games industry is noting the most popular titles and demographics and generating more content that fits this mould On the other hand: * the predominance of certain game-types and protagonists socialises the acceptability of males playing games and/or what games *are*, resulting in certain demographics buying certain titles more than others. A female protagonist might not be *enough* to build a female demographic in a male-oriented market because the idea of engaging in such games is potentially seen as masculine (something that I think "responding to the market" *misses* because for those people to whom it is socialised as unaccepted or improper to play such games, they are silent). But it might begin a process of making games socially more *acceptable* as well as than socially more *appealing*, and that is the bigger point of contention, I think. Having a female protagonist might not just get more females going "I *want* to play that game", it might also make us think, "It's not a big deal if I play this game." I'm not entering into a game socialised towards men, I'm not busting through some gender-barrier into a typically male domain, because I can clearly see that the character, as a female, does awesome assassin-like things and therefore, as a female, that's something *I* can participate in. If the character is solely male, then I, as a female, am somewhat participating in things that are suggested to be male-oriented things, because I'm forced to take the persona of a male to do so.

c43sg7

asksciencefiction_train

[Marvel] The Infinity Stones have caused a lot of issues for the heroes of the universe. We know they can't be destroyed to prevent future disasters, but why hasn't someone like Reed Richards gathered them up and tossed them into a random alternate universe? We know Reed Richards has that kind of technology. Just set his multiversal bridge to shuffle and toss the stones in like he's playing craps. Wherever they land, they'll be no more useful than a set of colorful rocks and not even Reed will know where they ended up.

erux7z6

eruxsch

In End Game, thanks used the stones to destroy the stones, didn’t he?

This is essentially what the Illuminati did. Reed, Stark, Namor, Doctor Strange, Charles Xavier, Black Bolt and T’Challa had a secret group that met to fix the biggest problems facing the world/universe. At one point they acquired all of the infinity stones and Reed dispersed them throughout the group for safe keeping after unsuccessfully trying to will them out of existence. Most of the group stored them in incredibly hard to reach places like the astral plane and pocket dimensions.

c43sg7

asksciencefiction_train

[Marvel] The Infinity Stones have caused a lot of issues for the heroes of the universe. We know they can't be destroyed to prevent future disasters, but why hasn't someone like Reed Richards gathered them up and tossed them into a random alternate universe? We know Reed Richards has that kind of technology. Just set his multiversal bridge to shuffle and toss the stones in like he's playing craps. Wherever they land, they'll be no more useful than a set of colorful rocks and not even Reed will know where they ended up.

ervs7e4

ervsa5w

As ever, the real reason is that Reed Richards is useless.

Eh, I would just find the nearest crane game and dump 'em in there. Galactic powers or not, ain't NOBODY gonna be able to fish 'em out of there!

225wfn

asksocialscience_train

What has the impact of feminism been on economics? What has the impact of feminism been on economics? What I know is that there is a branch of economics called feminist economics. Also, that compared to sociology, the impact of feminism has on economics is less noticeable.

cgjpnin

cgjpx0w

Are you asking whether feminism has had any economic effect or whether feminism has influenced the discipline itself?

Labor economics has certainly been impacted by feminism, which is something that can be broken down even further into family economics and political economy (I know not quite the same). There is also feminist economics, which looks at the informal marketplace, and critiques mainstream economics of only examining and using data from the narrowly defined formal economy. Unpaid work and production that is traditional dismissed as not being "work" are encouraged to examine and to provide economic analysis on. Feminist economics can actually be easily applied to ethnic conflicts and developmental economics, and is certainly not limited to gender in any way. Since it really takes a look at what it means to have an economy, where goods and services can be produced informally (and without any transaction), it has a large ability to enrich economic understanding and create theories and models that can applied to improving the lives of people more directly. While it is considered heterodox, it is taken seriously as an academic subject. There is the Journal of Feminist Economics that is pretty prestigious. http://www.feministeconomics.org There are other ways that feminism has impacted economics, but the creation of a new discipline is something definitely worth mentioning as well. I wish some other user chimes and and contributes, I'm not as knowledgable about how it has impacted mainstream economics.

225wfn

asksocialscience_train

What has the impact of feminism been on economics? What has the impact of feminism been on economics? What I know is that there is a branch of economics called feminist economics. Also, that compared to sociology, the impact of feminism has on economics is less noticeable.

cgjtkjx

cgk0utd

The answer would seem to be: not as much as it could / should. Richmond Fed: Where are the Women?

There is a massive scope of very feminist inspired economics. And because it's economics, and has to fit within the fairly strict empirical/rationalist model of academic economics, it's some of the best feminist work out there. Fantastic intrafamily bargaining models that expand beyond the unitary household model. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268199000542 Labour supply models that compare the relative market incomes of men and women to help explain the relationship between gender and labour market participation. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/136271?uid=3739400&uid=2&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21103603231241 A look at boys "falling behind" in primary/secondary school: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/nfortin/LeavingBoysBehind.pdf And then basically anything written by Betsey Stevenson: http://users.nber.org/~bstevens/research.php Or basically anything written by Justin Wolfers. Particularly, the economics of happiness has been pioneered by feminist economics: http://users.nber.org/~jwolfers/research.php

2gohxz

askanthropology_train

Have you ever come across a people's practice that, despite your being a cultural relativist and open-minded, truly horrified or disgusted you? What was it?

ckl9d6x

ckl2n63

Poverty. I don't really know if this is what you're looking for but encountering abject poverty and starving children is just heartbreaking. Tent cities, babies with kwashiorkor, very sick people who cannot access treatments, and the despair that goes along with it are very hard to witness. In Haiti, a common practice is restavek which is when poor families give a child to a richer family who promises to educate, feed, and clothe the child in return for the kid doing chores. In some cases it turns out fine but it can be heavily abused. When I was last down there I met an adorable little girl who was about 2 1/2 and her mother. They were staying at the temple because the mother was handing off the child to another woman there. The girl had a medical condition that cost $20 USD a month to treat, which is just an astronomical sum for a poor Haitian mother. She clearly loved her child but could not afford to care for her. So she was giving her up to a woman that lived in another city which likely meant she'd almost never see her daughter. I knew the woman taking her and I'm pretty sure the child went to a good home and a safe situation. But it was still sad and difficult to watch a mother have to give up her child due to poverty. The women involved didn't horrify or disgust me. But the structural violence that led to this system and lack of options did.

Circumcision and other unnecessary genital mutilations. I'm circumcised and I'm a little bitter about the fact that I had no say in the matter.

2gohxz

askanthropology_train

Have you ever come across a people's practice that, despite your being a cultural relativist and open-minded, truly horrified or disgusted you? What was it?

ckl2n63

ckla436

Circumcision and other unnecessary genital mutilations. I'm circumcised and I'm a little bitter about the fact that I had no say in the matter.

Women being burned alive during their husband's funeral... I know it's becoming less common, but it still makes me feel so sick.

zv0w7z

askanthropology_train

What do anthropologists mean when they talk about body height/stature? I often see anthropologists talking about body morphology of different populations in their papers and their descriptions seem rather vague to me. They'll often talk about a population being massively-built or being tall in height but measurements are never included in the paper. What population are they comparing them against when describing the physiques of people? Are there specific categories (e.g. short - 5'0-5'4 medium 5'5-5'9 tall 5'10-6'2 etc.)

j1nf0pe

j1mldyp

What kid of anthropology papers are you thinking of when you say this? Forensic? Cultural? If cultural, how old are the papers you're thinking of? In the 1880s-1910s, anthropologists were very into anthropometry: a practice or measuring human bodies (height, skull circumference, etc.) in an effort to pinpoint physical difference and often to argue that people from certain (non-european) places were "less evolved" than the Europeans who funded and conducted the studies. Papers like this often had very small sample sizes, until a massive study by Franz Boas and collaborators around the world proved that the size differences between Europeans and study subjects reported had often been exaggerated/affected by a small/biased sample size. After Boas' large-scale study, anthropometry kind of fell out of fashion with cultural anthropologists. From the 20s to the 80s, you might get vague references so people being especially tall or especially short, compared to what the writer would think of as "normal" from their own culture of origin. But these are usually more descriptive, and intended to "paint a picture"--the works are interested in culture and social behavior after all, so body size is a peripheral note at best. Details about height might matter more to a biological anthropologist, but they would often be very specific and present tables with associated variables, like calorie consumption, or hormone production, etc. After the 90s, generalizations about body size by ethnic groups had contributed to so many characatures/brought difference into focus rather than shared human experiences/reeked of the history of "race science," that I personally haven't noticed many recent cultural anthropologists making generalized stature statements. Does that help? If not, names/authors of some of the papers/books you're thinking of would help.

Are you talking about gracile vs robust? If so it's just generalized characteristics that give an outline of the populations features. There is so much variation within different populations that it would be very difficult to give accurate specific categories.

zv0w7z

askanthropology_train

What do anthropologists mean when they talk about body height/stature? I often see anthropologists talking about body morphology of different populations in their papers and their descriptions seem rather vague to me. They'll often talk about a population being massively-built or being tall in height but measurements are never included in the paper. What population are they comparing them against when describing the physiques of people? Are there specific categories (e.g. short - 5'0-5'4 medium 5'5-5'9 tall 5'10-6'2 etc.)

j1mm5z3

j1nf0pe

Could you provide some examples of this? Some context would be helpful in determining what the authors mean.

What kid of anthropology papers are you thinking of when you say this? Forensic? Cultural? If cultural, how old are the papers you're thinking of? In the 1880s-1910s, anthropologists were very into anthropometry: a practice or measuring human bodies (height, skull circumference, etc.) in an effort to pinpoint physical difference and often to argue that people from certain (non-european) places were "less evolved" than the Europeans who funded and conducted the studies. Papers like this often had very small sample sizes, until a massive study by Franz Boas and collaborators around the world proved that the size differences between Europeans and study subjects reported had often been exaggerated/affected by a small/biased sample size. After Boas' large-scale study, anthropometry kind of fell out of fashion with cultural anthropologists. From the 20s to the 80s, you might get vague references so people being especially tall or especially short, compared to what the writer would think of as "normal" from their own culture of origin. But these are usually more descriptive, and intended to "paint a picture"--the works are interested in culture and social behavior after all, so body size is a peripheral note at best. Details about height might matter more to a biological anthropologist, but they would often be very specific and present tables with associated variables, like calorie consumption, or hormone production, etc. After the 90s, generalizations about body size by ethnic groups had contributed to so many characatures/brought difference into focus rather than shared human experiences/reeked of the history of "race science," that I personally haven't noticed many recent cultural anthropologists making generalized stature statements. Does that help? If not, names/authors of some of the papers/books you're thinking of would help.

xwc3y6

asksciencefiction_train

[GOT] Did Jamie ever mention the mad Kings plan to level the city with wild fire to anyone on importance. It’s seems like he just kept this to himself.

ir5l41v

ir5ny34

In the TV series it's implied that Jaime only learned of the plan moments before the king tried to order it's execution. While some within the pyromancer guild knew of the amount of wildfire being produced and stored around the city they just assumed it was part of the King's obsession with it rather than a planned act.

He likely didn't. It seems his conversation with Brienne is really the first time he's talked about that with anyone I believe it's possible that he didn't tell Ned Stark anything because he's from an "enemy" house, and after he was branded a kinslayer traitor and Ned went around telling people Jamie was sitting on the throne, it's possible Jamie felt there was no point in saying anything anymore, nobody would believe him.

xwc3y6

asksciencefiction_train

[GOT] Did Jamie ever mention the mad Kings plan to level the city with wild fire to anyone on importance. It’s seems like he just kept this to himself.

ir6476i

ir5l41v

No. It’s very likely that there is a record of it for posterity though at the end of the series. The one person he does tell is Brienne of Tarth, and she ends the series as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. It is almost certain that she would have gone into the White Book which records the acts of the Kingsguard and write that down as an act of bravery of Ser Jaime Lannister.

In the TV series it's implied that Jaime only learned of the plan moments before the king tried to order it's execution. While some within the pyromancer guild knew of the amount of wildfire being produced and stored around the city they just assumed it was part of the King's obsession with it rather than a planned act.

uxxc5g

asksciencefiction_train

[MCU] Would thanos have even been able to go through with his plan in endgame? So in Avengers: Endgame, we hear Thanos say "I will shred this universe down to its last atom, then build a new one...". But I've always wondered, would he have even been able to do this? We saw that he and the gauntlet were severely damaged just from doing the snap and destroying the stones. So, would he have even had the strength necessary to go through with this plan, or would it have killed him?

ia1vanj

ia1837d

I think he could have done it. Then just use the time stone to heal himself afterwards. The gauntlet only seems to exert massive damage when Thanos is actually using all 6 stones. And Tony's gauntlet was nano tech, while Thanos' was made out of Uru specifically to channel the power of the stones. It's why Stormbreaker which is also made out of Uru managed to cut through a blast powered by all 6 stones.

Yes. We know Thanos is strong enough to do 2 Snaps. 1) Destroy the universe (except Thanos) 2) Rebuild the universe with Thanos' goal in mind.

uxxc5g

asksciencefiction_train

[MCU] Would thanos have even been able to go through with his plan in endgame? So in Avengers: Endgame, we hear Thanos say "I will shred this universe down to its last atom, then build a new one...". But I've always wondered, would he have even been able to do this? We saw that he and the gauntlet were severely damaged just from doing the snap and destroying the stones. So, would he have even had the strength necessary to go through with this plan, or would it have killed him?

ia2ic9o

ia1837d

My understanding was that he was fine using the gauntlet but ONLY harmed himself and the gauntlet by attempting to destroy the stones. So if he doesn't do that he's fine.....

Yes. We know Thanos is strong enough to do 2 Snaps. 1) Destroy the universe (except Thanos) 2) Rebuild the universe with Thanos' goal in mind.

f1fbfk

changemyview_train

CMV: popular science journalism either needs to change completely or stop entirely. Popular science jorunalism as I'm defining it is the content that makes reference to science being done or scientific papers, and then translates that into a smaller, broader article. Take for instance all the news about health (X leads to cancer), space, the environment (usually ocean currents). My problem has three parts: 1) these are almost always massive oversimplifications. Unlike the Sith, scientists don't speak in absolutes. Science isn't designed to be definitive except in extreme cases. I get it that that makes terrible content, but that's the reality 2) people that don't study science aren't practised in scientific language, methodology, or intent. How many people actually can understand what the variance means? Correlations? Why human based studies need to be done in one way and not another? 3) science is treated like a monolith with absolute authority. "Scientists said X". That shouldn't be a closing statement. Sure some people said one thing... Did other people say another thing? Why did they say so? To what are they comparing these statements? Scientists who let their statements get extrapolated as fact are part of a huge problem. These all suck. They give people a false sense of familiarity with a process that isn't for everyone. It also makes people feel like they have expertise they don't have by using an authority that doesn't exist even among scientists. That's why I feel like we should just either stop having it, or change it fundamentally.

fh522v4

fh55xfi

What's the outcome that you want to achieve? If you don't want the popular culture to be aware of science or scientific findings, we can just not talk about them. But, I think that'd be worse - so now the question is how to you reform a media that loves clickbait articles on all topics? This isn't about science - its about general issues with media coverage on any topic that involves expertise.

This isn’t just the fault of science journalism, it’s also the fault of many scientists. People are strongly motivated to exaggerate their results for funding. This hilarious twitter account draws attention to scientists who fail to qualify that their work shows an effect *in mice*.

f1fbfk

changemyview_train

CMV: popular science journalism either needs to change completely or stop entirely. Popular science jorunalism as I'm defining it is the content that makes reference to science being done or scientific papers, and then translates that into a smaller, broader article. Take for instance all the news about health (X leads to cancer), space, the environment (usually ocean currents). My problem has three parts: 1) these are almost always massive oversimplifications. Unlike the Sith, scientists don't speak in absolutes. Science isn't designed to be definitive except in extreme cases. I get it that that makes terrible content, but that's the reality 2) people that don't study science aren't practised in scientific language, methodology, or intent. How many people actually can understand what the variance means? Correlations? Why human based studies need to be done in one way and not another? 3) science is treated like a monolith with absolute authority. "Scientists said X". That shouldn't be a closing statement. Sure some people said one thing... Did other people say another thing? Why did they say so? To what are they comparing these statements? Scientists who let their statements get extrapolated as fact are part of a huge problem. These all suck. They give people a false sense of familiarity with a process that isn't for everyone. It also makes people feel like they have expertise they don't have by using an authority that doesn't exist even among scientists. That's why I feel like we should just either stop having it, or change it fundamentally.

fh5amb9

fh56ao9

1 and 2 are contrary opinions 1 says that they dumb things down too much while 2 says that things should be dumbed down more because people don't understand scientific terminology

I think we can all agree that popular science journalism has a negative impact when it is done poorly. However, popular science journalism also has an enormous impact on how most people understand the world and is sometimes done very well. For example, this recent NPR story about bat viruses. Even though the average reader will not have the expertise or scientific background to understand the specific biological basis for why bats carry more viruses than humans, the main idea is fairly straightforward: bats carry more viruses than humans and should be treated with due caution. Similarly, the fact that vaccines prevent disease and the fact that driving cars causes climate change are simple enough for everyone to understand. It's important that people learn about these ideas because the ordinary person's perception of reality will motivate their behavior. Even if you don't understand most of the details, a rough idea of what is occuring is often preferable to a complete lack of information. In a world without popular science journalism, how do you suppose people would learn about the new coronavirus?

quehii

asksciencefiction_train

[Bioshock] I'm just a normal 10 year old boy who's parents haven't come home from some stupid new year's eve party at the Kashmir restaurant. Is there any chance of me surviving without them? How screwed am I exactly?

hkq5eib

hkpx8jl

Realistically, it doesn't even matter that you're 10 years old or have lost your parents - even adults with an intact social group are majorly screwed.

Probably pretty screwed; assuming your parents aren't coming back (and even then). Rapture is about to descend into a civil war that will tear it apart. If you avoid the crossfire of Ryan and Atlas' splicers, don't run afoul of a Big Daddy, and avoid getting shot by automated defences while scavenging food, you still have the city itself falling apart to worry about. Anyone still alive by the time Jack gets to Rapture is likely insane or worse.

quehii

asksciencefiction_train

[Bioshock] I'm just a normal 10 year old boy who's parents haven't come home from some stupid new year's eve party at the Kashmir restaurant. Is there any chance of me surviving without them? How screwed am I exactly?

hkr3uni

hkqueob

Little sisters are being attacked left and right, so we know for a fact that no one is going to think twice about murdering a 10-year-old boy. Your best bet would be crawling into one of those little-sister vents. As far as I know, neither the splicers or big daddies have access to the Orphanage, so you would be relatively safe there. Failing that, your only chance of survival will be through scrounging or joining a 'gang'. In either case, it's only a matter of time before you find yourself on the wrong end of a pipe wrench. Plasmids will help, but not by much. Errr. Sorry, I guess. Andrew Ryan would say that isn't a calamity, it's merely an opportunity to pull yourself up by your bootstraps!

100% Screwed. Rapture is many things but chief among them is a prison - an incredibly well designed one. Even assuming you somehow bypass all the threats within the environment and the hazards of the environment itself to make it to a minisub, you're going to escape to the surface and....be in the middle of the Atlantic ocean with no means of signaling for a rescue. In a spot that is specifically off the trade lanes or any other likely reason for ship traffic to pass nearby.

u6oqdm

askanthropology_train

What are the evolutionary advantages to have epicanthic folds? I ask because both San peoples (formerly known as Bushmen), and Eastern Eurasians (formerly known as Mongoloids) (that include Amerindians, Siberians, Manchus, Mongols, Japanese people, Koreans, Chinese people, and South-East Asians) have epicanthic folds. There are even North-West Europeans, East Europeans, and Central Asians that have epicanthic folds (like most Uzbeks and Kazakhs, some Finnish people and Scandinavians, and occasionally Celts and Slavs), but, their close relatives, South Europeans, South-West Asians, North-Africans, and South Asians (like Italians, Greeks, Albanians, Berbers, Egyptians, Arabs, Jews, Syrians, Lebanese people, and Pakistanis) do not tend to have this facial feature.

i59luye

i59jlhg

have you heard of the founder effect? It's where a population of individuals can show a larger amount of a specific trait, simply because one of the few individuals to come there and establish that population had that trait. evolution is not a process of fine-tuning an organism into being ever more efficient. evolution is just the tendency for those whose differences mean they can have slightly more children survive to start making up more of the population over time. there are plenty of genes and thus traits in every organism that do not confer an advantage or disadvantage.

Why does there need to be an advantage? It could simply be a random preserved trait that isn't harmful or selected for. Perhaps a founder effect from the ancestral population.

u6oqdm

askanthropology_train

What are the evolutionary advantages to have epicanthic folds? I ask because both San peoples (formerly known as Bushmen), and Eastern Eurasians (formerly known as Mongoloids) (that include Amerindians, Siberians, Manchus, Mongols, Japanese people, Koreans, Chinese people, and South-East Asians) have epicanthic folds. There are even North-West Europeans, East Europeans, and Central Asians that have epicanthic folds (like most Uzbeks and Kazakhs, some Finnish people and Scandinavians, and occasionally Celts and Slavs), but, their close relatives, South Europeans, South-West Asians, North-Africans, and South Asians (like Italians, Greeks, Albanians, Berbers, Egyptians, Arabs, Jews, Syrians, Lebanese people, and Pakistanis) do not tend to have this facial feature.

i5bxq6g

i5cl5gl

While stressing that it is difficult to test, Daniel G. Blackburn theorizes among East Asians it may be an adaptation to cold and snow brightness. Amongst the Khoisan it may have been an adaptation to desert brightness. Source (see page 10).

From Wikipedia: The epicanthic fold is often associated with greater levels of fat deposition around the eyeball. The adipose tissue is thought to provide greater insulation for the eye and sinuses from the effects of cold, especially from freezing winds, and to represent an adaptation to cold climates. It has also been postulated that the fold itself may provide a level of protection from snow blindness. Though its appearance in peoples of Southeast Asia can be linked to possible descent from cold-adapted ancestors, its occurrence in various African peoples precludes a cold-adaptive explanation for it appearing in the latter groups. The epicanthic fold found in many African people has been tentatively linked to protection for the eye from the high levels of ultraviolet light found in desert and semi-desert areas.[21] The exact evolutionary function and origin of epicanthic folds remains unknown. Scientific explanations include either random variation and selection (presumably sexual selection), or possible adaption to desert environment and/or high levels of ultraviolet light found in high-altitude environments, such as the Himalayas. A cold-adaptive explanation for the epicanthic fold is today seen as outdated by some, as epicanthic folds appear in some African populations. Dr. Frank Poirier, a physical anthropologist at Ohio State University, concluded that the epicanthic fold in fact may be an adaptation for Tropical regions, protecting the eyes from overexposure to ultraviolet radiation, and was already part of the natural diversity found among early modern humans.[22][23] Further evidence for a tropical, random or sexual selection as opposed to cold adapted one, is that East Asian-related populations originated in Mainland Southeast Asia rather than Siberia. Paleolithic Siberia was populated by a European- and Native American-related Ancient North Eurasian population, which was subsequently partially-replaced by several northwards migrations of Ancestral East Asians during the late Paleolithic and early Neolithic period.[24][25]

zrhqm0

legaladvice_train

Trying to breakup with my bf and he says he’s going to take my child and career My (26f) bf (28m) told me he has stuff on his phone that “multiple people sent him” that can get my child (6m) taken from me and make me lose my career. I was trying to break up with him which would involve him also leaving my home. He said it was being I was taking everything from him, and he wanted to show me what it feels like. He gave me an ultimatum that if I gave us a “blank slate,” and put in effort towards our relationship, he would delete the documents/screenshots. I recorded some of this but not all. I have already paid for a certified 30 day notice to be given to him. I’m not sure what to do. I’m also not sure what this evidence would be, but I have a career that easily fires people with little reason. Help.

j13lk6v

j13j8bk

This is classic manipulation on his part and you need to stand your ground. Legally you’ve given him notice. He doesn’t have recourse except to lie to and threaten his landlord. You need to follow through and evict him, delete and block.

You should reach out to thehotline.org. Be proactive and retain an attorney to create and pursue a court ordered custody arrangement that suits your child’s needs.

zrhqm0

legaladvice_train

Trying to breakup with my bf and he says he’s going to take my child and career My (26f) bf (28m) told me he has stuff on his phone that “multiple people sent him” that can get my child (6m) taken from me and make me lose my career. I was trying to break up with him which would involve him also leaving my home. He said it was being I was taking everything from him, and he wanted to show me what it feels like. He gave me an ultimatum that if I gave us a “blank slate,” and put in effort towards our relationship, he would delete the documents/screenshots. I recorded some of this but not all. I have already paid for a certified 30 day notice to be given to him. I’m not sure what to do. I’m also not sure what this evidence would be, but I have a career that easily fires people with little reason. Help.

j13j8bk

j142uex

You should reach out to thehotline.org. Be proactive and retain an attorney to create and pursue a court ordered custody arrangement that suits your child’s needs.

You're scared, of course. BF said these things to scare you. It sounds like you're doing everything right by following your lawyer's instructions. At this point, take a deep breath. Don't let the threats get to you. Listen to your lawyer, take care of you and your child. Record everything he says to you, in writing. Dates, times, specific threats. Your lawyer will thank you for that.

3oawgb

asksciencefiction_train

[Pacific Rim] Other than the Jaegers, did the Shitterdome possess any other defences against a direct Kaiju attack on itself? We have seen that it takes several valuable minutes to deploy a Jaeger into combat. This being the case, if the Shatterdome came under direct attack does it have the capacity to hold off an assault long enough to get a Jaeger into the field?

cvvkhqe

cvvkso8

It depends. The Shatterdome was built to withstand a multiple CAT I/II Kaiju assault long enough to allow the deployment of multiple Jaegars for defense. A single CAT IV Kaiju would have annihilated the Shatterdome in a surprise assault.

I'd just like to say, I'm not sure if that was a mistype or a commentary on the Dome's usefulness - but it was great.

3oawgb

asksciencefiction_train

[Pacific Rim] Other than the Jaegers, did the Shitterdome possess any other defences against a direct Kaiju attack on itself? We have seen that it takes several valuable minutes to deploy a Jaeger into combat. This being the case, if the Shatterdome came under direct attack does it have the capacity to hold off an assault long enough to get a Jaeger into the field?

cvvwz2y

cvvr5ux

At the very least there appears to be some type of battleship-class cannon emplacements used as part of the defences (as can be seen here, above the helipads).

From what we've seen, nothing, save for a few helicopters. Though if I had to speculate, maybe a few missiles or so.

6j2a13

askanthropology_train

Do we have any idea what the first words humans used were? I was wondering if there's any evidence or theories as to what the first vocabulary early humans used was? Is it similar to the vocabular a modern baby would first learn growing up?

djb9818

djb7jtw

Linguist here. No, no one knows the first words. As one commenter pointed out, it is also likely that humans started with gestures. Chimpanzees have been observed to use symbolic gestures in the wild. When did language evolve? Estimates range from around 60 kya (thousand years ago), claimed by people like Chomsky, to maybe 2-4 million years ago (think Dan Everett). Both hypotheses have some evidence, but there is not quite enough evidence to fully endorse either theory. Did language innovate multiple times in humans? Even though we can't know for sure, probably not. We have some evidence to consider. First of all, there are 7 human genome types. 6 are still in central Africa and everyone that left Africa is the 7th. There has been no observed difference in ability to aqcuire language between groups of modern humans. As Chomsky says, if you take a baby from New Guinea and one from the Amazon and raise them in Boston, both will grow to speak English with a Boston accent. This quite securely suggests that the language capacity was present in humans before exodus from Africa.It seems unlikely that humans had a fully developed language capacity before leaving Africa and then independently developed language multiple times. One piece of evidence is that there is no record of a culture ever discovered which did not have language (only individuals who have been denied adequate human contact). Additionally, genesis of language has been observed in songle generations among deaf communities that lacked a sign language. Scholars such as Everett actually propose that humans inherited language from our evolutionary ancestors. Heck, maybe even homoerectus had language! tl;dr We dont know Edit: cant see comment preview on mobile so need to fix a few typos and words

Two places I would look. One would be "The Singing Neanderthal". The other I do not have a great search reference for however the idea was that because hominids drink mothers milk the sound produced from releasing from a mothers teat is a foundation for creating speech for infants. Yes I know this is far fetched and I learnt it from a professor who was still trapped in structuralist theory however I hope this gives you a couple spots to look

6j2a13

askanthropology_train

Do we have any idea what the first words humans used were? I was wondering if there's any evidence or theories as to what the first vocabulary early humans used was? Is it similar to the vocabular a modern baby would first learn growing up?

djb7jtw

djbwi21

Two places I would look. One would be "The Singing Neanderthal". The other I do not have a great search reference for however the idea was that because hominids drink mothers milk the sound produced from releasing from a mothers teat is a foundation for creating speech for infants. Yes I know this is far fetched and I learnt it from a professor who was still trapped in structuralist theory however I hope this gives you a couple spots to look

Anthropologists look at words in two ways (meaning and sound, to be brief). There are certain meanings that appear in all languages, so it seems likely they are in the oldest languages as well. For example, "Water" (or another sound sequence meaning water or to drink...sometimes a verb is used to a noun-like concept and often, it's only water to drink anyway). Using the index finger and a sound to indicate "that" or "there" is universal. I think Merritt Ruhlen goes into the literature around this issue in his *The Origin of Language.*. Steven Pinkard has opined on this in his language books (and his bibliography is a good start at the academic literature). Something to mean "okay," "yes," "assent," "I'm not opposed to that" is both verbal and spoken for chimps. It's in every human language. Something to mean, "No," "Cut it out," "Stop," "Not in agreement" is also common to all human languages and chimp signs/sounds. So, by studying the some 100-200 lexemes (Units of meaning) in chimps, we get some clues. Then, by looking at the 6000 or so known languages for words that are in all of them helps. Many languages (like English) use the same sound sequence for related meanings, and sometimes for opposite meanings, humans who have the syntax protein easily use context to tell what is meant (mostly). So, for example, a word that indicates what English speakers call "moon" can often mean a number of other things (like a month or a monthly cycle or the opposite of the Sun or a lesser source of light or night time). Yes No Moon Sun Mother Father There/that Me You Eat Water ...seem to be popular with linguists as potential first words. 'Kwa (for example) means "water" in Kwakiutl, water in English, aqua in several Latin-based languages, maji in Swahili, Shui in Mandarin...these are just a few. If you look across language families (like, for example, the Sino-Tibetan family) you'll find they *all* have a word for water (just as all Indo-European languages do and all Amerindian languages do, etc.) Language will never its past be physically observable in the sense that a bone or rock is. But we can have good guesses.

570uza

askanthropology_train

Were the ancestors of humans really frugivores? Hopefully this doesn't become too political. Vegans often argue that our ancestors were frugivores. To what extent is this true? If this is the case, when did humans become omnivores?

d8obfdq

d8ogxz0

I assume you're asking this because of my comment in tomc :) I'm studying archaeology, so most of this is just what I remember from the intro to bio anth class I had to take, but: Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, are frugivores. So are bonobos. We have the same dentition as other old world monkeys and apes, who are all herbivores or frugivores, and in fact have smaller canines because we don't use them for fighting and display. Some people will argue that humans hunted long before we had tools to do so through persistence hunting, but that's only based on ethnographic data collected from modern persistence hunters in Sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, it's not something that we'd really be able to find evidence for in the physical record. But the oldest definitive proof that we have of hunting as an established practice are the Schöningen spears, which are around 400,000 years old and were found in Germany. Notable that they were found in a cold Northern climate, where people would have been less able to subsist primarily on fruits, veggies, nuts, insects, and scavenged meat. Even in modern populations we can see that while meat is a staple in Northern regions, in more tropical regions like Papua New Guinea the diet is still primarily vegetarian (struggling to find a written source I'd consider trustworthy with a quick google, but I cannot recommend the film *Ongka's Big Moka* enough, and it touches on the subject.) Although we have evidence of a shift toward *eating* more meat 2.6 million ya, we don't have definitive evidence that it was intentionally hunted rather than scavenged, and it was likely still a very small proportion of our overall diet. Since any tools they could have used were probably wood, and wood doesn't hold up very well, we'll probably never know for sure. We also only have evidence of regular consumption of shellfish from 35,000 to 20,000 years ago. Around the same time Cro-Magnons in Europe may have had as much as 50% of their diet consisting of meat, though again notable that they are in Ice Age Europe; not a great place to try to live primarily off of fruits. With the advent of agriculture, however, this ratio likely shifted closer to 90%/10% in favor of plants. There are also plenty of health issues associated with this shift to agriculture, but again keep in mind that these crops were largely starches and grains, not the abundance of fruits and fair amount of leafy greens in a frugivorous diet.

Yes and No. Hominids are mostly Ominvores and we have a lot of specific adaptations and tool usage that is directly related to hunting behaviors. More so than other Apes we'd consider Frugivores. Stone hand axes for example were made by H.Erectus and H.Ergaster for more than a few million years. These were specifically used to butcher meat and kill animals. Fruther advances to Lithic tools ended up in Spear points and a particularly interesting method called the Levallois technique, something used by Neanderthals that produced an incredibly sharp and useful butchering knife. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levallois_technique Further more Spears were extensively used, and it's been hypothesized that Spear throwing and other throwing tool usage by Erectus/Ergaster changed our shoulder anatomy. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v498/n7455/full/nature12267.html Another serious aspect is the shape of our jaws as compared to our ancestors. Over time we see the jaw and teeth become smaller and sligthly more oriented towards handling meat. Most of this is attributed to hunting animals with tools and cooked food. In respect to anatomy, we have a few telling factors in our anatomy that points again towards hunting behaviors that show up long before Homo Sapiens were around. First off is the Nuchel ligament. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuchal_ligament In hominids this ligament is used to keep yor head balanced when running, and it's absent in Australopiths, but is found in the recently discovered Homo Naledi, and its been present in humans ever scence Homo Erectus. If you flex your head downwards you can actually feel this ligament down the back of your neck. 2nd is the pinch in the waist. This little detail is also absent in Austrailopiths, but again shows up pretty prominently in Ergaster and more modern. This little pinch in the waist allows our bodies to alternate, or "wiggle" as we run. allowing an incredibly effecient stride that allows the muscles of the body to counter-pull and balance as we run. 3rd is our butt. Humans have a huge butt, and specifically referring to the gluteal muscles. These muscles barely if at all activate when walking, but again just like the 2 previous features, once we start running these muscles kick into gear to keep us running balanced and efficiently. http://jeb.biologists.org/content/209/11/2143 4th. Our Teeth. According at least Paeloanthropologist Lee Burger, the classification of Homo was applied to Naledi due to its Jaws and teeth which was more similar in function and appearance to Hominids like Us and Erectus as compared to previous Australopiths.(See Lee Burger's appearance in Dawn of Humanity via PBS Nova.) If we look at our modern teeth compared to an Austrailopith, our teeth are tiny, and we have more sheering action in our teeth compared to them. Compared side by side, Modern Human teeth are better at chewing and cutting meat than even Erectus Teeth. Compared to austrailopiths our teeth especially molars have become very small and muchless useful and infact at this point in time many people are in the process of shedding their 3rd molar set(wisdom teeth) simply because we don't need them anymore. They're not useful to us biologically. Much of the tooth changes that we see is the reduction of Molars from the austrailopiths to the Hominins. 5th, Bare skin and Sweating. Humans Sweat to cooldown, which is incredibly useful for being a daylight hunter. This follows into the persistence hunting hypothesis, but this sort of cooling system again serves little use to an animal that's walking around searching for it's plant based diet. Proactive sweating is directly beneficial to an active daylight hunter. And there are people to this day that are capable of showing how this persistence hunting behavior worked. On a notable side note, it's been identified in people that some are partially capable of digesting insect and arachnids http://www.bio.unipd.it/agroecology/download/pdf/papers/2009/Chitin-Chitinases-Paoletti-From-Binomium-Chitnchitinase-Recent-Issues-Fp-Version.pdf In a sense for Hominins as Frugivores, the answer is not in particular, but is more an answer Leaning towards towards Omnivorous behavior. Humans didn't have as much access to fruits as much as we did roots, tubers, and other starchy foods. Which is why we have Amylase genes. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/star.201000150/pdf However when talking about Austrailopiths, most were extensive and dedicated vegetarians, especially considering species like Paranthropus boisei, which had a Huge set of chewing teeth and Jaw muscles. Infact P.Boisei had a crest on the top of it's skull that was a connector for large chewing muscles. Many of the austrailopiths had long arms, and poor running ability if at all, and we'rent particularly large brained. As we progress from the Austrailopiths to the Hominins we see adaptations for hunting, meat consumption and just regular omnivorous behavior. I would say that our bodies are a testament to just how strong and how adaptable an omnivore can be when given the chance to be an opportunist.

570uza

askanthropology_train

Were the ancestors of humans really frugivores? Hopefully this doesn't become too political. Vegans often argue that our ancestors were frugivores. To what extent is this true? If this is the case, when did humans become omnivores?

d8ogxz0

d8odl2p

Yes and No. Hominids are mostly Ominvores and we have a lot of specific adaptations and tool usage that is directly related to hunting behaviors. More so than other Apes we'd consider Frugivores. Stone hand axes for example were made by H.Erectus and H.Ergaster for more than a few million years. These were specifically used to butcher meat and kill animals. Fruther advances to Lithic tools ended up in Spear points and a particularly interesting method called the Levallois technique, something used by Neanderthals that produced an incredibly sharp and useful butchering knife. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levallois_technique Further more Spears were extensively used, and it's been hypothesized that Spear throwing and other throwing tool usage by Erectus/Ergaster changed our shoulder anatomy. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v498/n7455/full/nature12267.html Another serious aspect is the shape of our jaws as compared to our ancestors. Over time we see the jaw and teeth become smaller and sligthly more oriented towards handling meat. Most of this is attributed to hunting animals with tools and cooked food. In respect to anatomy, we have a few telling factors in our anatomy that points again towards hunting behaviors that show up long before Homo Sapiens were around. First off is the Nuchel ligament. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuchal_ligament In hominids this ligament is used to keep yor head balanced when running, and it's absent in Australopiths, but is found in the recently discovered Homo Naledi, and its been present in humans ever scence Homo Erectus. If you flex your head downwards you can actually feel this ligament down the back of your neck. 2nd is the pinch in the waist. This little detail is also absent in Austrailopiths, but again shows up pretty prominently in Ergaster and more modern. This little pinch in the waist allows our bodies to alternate, or "wiggle" as we run. allowing an incredibly effecient stride that allows the muscles of the body to counter-pull and balance as we run. 3rd is our butt. Humans have a huge butt, and specifically referring to the gluteal muscles. These muscles barely if at all activate when walking, but again just like the 2 previous features, once we start running these muscles kick into gear to keep us running balanced and efficiently. http://jeb.biologists.org/content/209/11/2143 4th. Our Teeth. According at least Paeloanthropologist Lee Burger, the classification of Homo was applied to Naledi due to its Jaws and teeth which was more similar in function and appearance to Hominids like Us and Erectus as compared to previous Australopiths.(See Lee Burger's appearance in Dawn of Humanity via PBS Nova.) If we look at our modern teeth compared to an Austrailopith, our teeth are tiny, and we have more sheering action in our teeth compared to them. Compared side by side, Modern Human teeth are better at chewing and cutting meat than even Erectus Teeth. Compared to austrailopiths our teeth especially molars have become very small and muchless useful and infact at this point in time many people are in the process of shedding their 3rd molar set(wisdom teeth) simply because we don't need them anymore. They're not useful to us biologically. Much of the tooth changes that we see is the reduction of Molars from the austrailopiths to the Hominins. 5th, Bare skin and Sweating. Humans Sweat to cooldown, which is incredibly useful for being a daylight hunter. This follows into the persistence hunting hypothesis, but this sort of cooling system again serves little use to an animal that's walking around searching for it's plant based diet. Proactive sweating is directly beneficial to an active daylight hunter. And there are people to this day that are capable of showing how this persistence hunting behavior worked. On a notable side note, it's been identified in people that some are partially capable of digesting insect and arachnids http://www.bio.unipd.it/agroecology/download/pdf/papers/2009/Chitin-Chitinases-Paoletti-From-Binomium-Chitnchitinase-Recent-Issues-Fp-Version.pdf In a sense for Hominins as Frugivores, the answer is not in particular, but is more an answer Leaning towards towards Omnivorous behavior. Humans didn't have as much access to fruits as much as we did roots, tubers, and other starchy foods. Which is why we have Amylase genes. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/star.201000150/pdf However when talking about Austrailopiths, most were extensive and dedicated vegetarians, especially considering species like Paranthropus boisei, which had a Huge set of chewing teeth and Jaw muscles. Infact P.Boisei had a crest on the top of it's skull that was a connector for large chewing muscles. Many of the austrailopiths had long arms, and poor running ability if at all, and we'rent particularly large brained. As we progress from the Austrailopiths to the Hominins we see adaptations for hunting, meat consumption and just regular omnivorous behavior. I would say that our bodies are a testament to just how strong and how adaptable an omnivore can be when given the chance to be an opportunist.

I agree we should avoid politics if possible. The issue is that our 'ancestors' were potentially eaters of anything, depending on how far back you go. From fruit to other amoebas (going back thru time). None of our ancestors are THE ancestor, in the sense they hold a special place in our ancestry. However our last common ancestor with any other species appears to have been primarily or solely a herbivore/frugivore (based on the limited fossil record). However its clear that meat eating of some kind has been going on for millions of years and become more prevalent as we became more proficient at using tools to do it or as the climate and environment dictated. The theory that we 'needed' meat to fuel our bodies, brains and lifestyles is an interesting one but somewhat contentious and not yet proven. From a purely scientific perspective though any argument that states that as an animal did THIS THING 4 million years ago that therefore its wrong or faulty that it is now doing THAT THING THAT IS DIFFERENT NOW is inherently faulty. Animals evolve to suit their circumstances and requirements. From another viewpoint I dont believe that dentition can dictate a creatures diet, once that creature has evolved to alter the world around it. That is, an animal (human in this case) may have the teeth of a frugivore, but it has developed knives and cooking too and thus its dentition might not alter but its diet could. An animal with dentition type A might 'need' to evolve new teeth to cope with a change in diet, but once technology comes into effect the environmental pressure to change can drop dramatically. Thus humans havent had many changes to a carnivore/omnivore form (from their current one) as we developed technologies to do that for us. As is well known these days even our frugivore cousins can happily engage in meat eating at times.

a0c24e

askanthropology_train

When And why did humans start drinking cow milk? This is something that I’ve always wondered

eahdyd5

eagnhzz

We have evidence of milk proteins being used from Catalhoyuk eight or nine thousand years ago https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06335-6#ref-CR1 and the LBK six to seven thousand years ago https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5563807/ The lactase persistence allele that 95% of (edit: british Isles, Ireland and Scandinavia) ~~Europeans~~ have perhaps started being selected for around 4000-6000 years ago. We start seeing it a great frequency in the Bell Beakers (the same group that possibly entirely replaced the stone henge building neolithic farmers in Britain) But you can be lactose intolerant and still eat dairy if you have the gut flora to digest the lactose for you, or you use microbes in the processing by making cheese or yoghurt. Or you just have some mild discomfort. There may also be lactase persistence alleles that we know nothing about. It's possible dairying was invented with the domestication of ruminants. There's some evidence to suggest this, which the second link asserts, but I don't know what it is sorry

Not sure exactly when, but I read once that the ancient peoples who lived in cloudy/less-sunny geography started drinking it to help make up for the vitamin D deficiency in their diets

a0c24e

askanthropology_train

When And why did humans start drinking cow milk? This is something that I’ve always wondered

eah84me

eahdyd5

Probably as soon as civilizations started domesticating cows. Humans have always learned from animals and how they lived to find fresh water etc. And if a calf can drink it and doesn’t die, it should be safe. It turned out to be a source of fresh clean ‘water’ with calories and calcium.

We have evidence of milk proteins being used from Catalhoyuk eight or nine thousand years ago https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06335-6#ref-CR1 and the LBK six to seven thousand years ago https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5563807/ The lactase persistence allele that 95% of (edit: british Isles, Ireland and Scandinavia) ~~Europeans~~ have perhaps started being selected for around 4000-6000 years ago. We start seeing it a great frequency in the Bell Beakers (the same group that possibly entirely replaced the stone henge building neolithic farmers in Britain) But you can be lactose intolerant and still eat dairy if you have the gut flora to digest the lactose for you, or you use microbes in the processing by making cheese or yoghurt. Or you just have some mild discomfort. There may also be lactase persistence alleles that we know nothing about. It's possible dairying was invented with the domestication of ruminants. There's some evidence to suggest this, which the second link asserts, but I don't know what it is sorry

1q83r2

asksciencefiction_train

[Pacific Rim] How did Hannibal Chau survive being eaten by the Kaiju baby? Before he gets eaten we see a group of smugglers going into the poisonous body of a Kaiju that's covered with Kaiju Blu. So how did Hannibal manage to survive?

cda5gbc

cda5lhh

He survived? I thought he was eaten and that was the last we saw of him.

Kaiju was dead **pant gasp** Didn't chew. Umbilical cord **wheeze** wrapped round it's neck, couldn't swallow. **Breathes heavily** Spent like...an hour stuck in it's throat **one last gasp** Cut my way out with a butterfly knife. **looks around** Now where is my goddanm shoe?

1q83r2

asksciencefiction_train

[Pacific Rim] How did Hannibal Chau survive being eaten by the Kaiju baby? Before he gets eaten we see a group of smugglers going into the poisonous body of a Kaiju that's covered with Kaiju Blu. So how did Hannibal manage to survive?

cda5gbc

cda5mkh

He survived? I thought he was eaten and that was the last we saw of him.

There are two factors that allowed Hannibal's seemingly miraculous survival: 1. While the Kaiju appear biological, we know them now to be weapons. This means that there are elements of their physiology and anatomy that appear to have functions like ours (for example a mouth, which for us serves as a way to reduce food so that we can digest it), but instead serves a purely battle function (for Kaiju, that's biting). I have no doubt that Kaiju do not need to feed, existing off some sort of internal power supply. How long it lasts I can't say. For someone outside of a Kaiju, these biological systems optimized for combat are a nightmare. For someone INSIDE a Kaiju, however, it is a blessing. I imagine that in order to save energy and space, many functions which are purely physiological are reduced or eliminated. For example, an immune system past immediate response to pathogen (since Kaiju aren't staying long enough to develop memory T cells or their xeno equivalent), or stomach acid, since again they don't need to eat and digest to serve their function. As a result, I suspect that it was far safer for Hannibal to be eaten by a baby Kaiju than it would have been for him to have been eaten by, say, a human of equivalent size. 2. He was inside what we have termed a "baby" Kaiju. Since we know that these creatures are cloned, it makes very little sense to me that the invaders would encourage or even permit the existence of a Kaiju INSIDE a battle-ready Kaiju, since that means that the bigger Kaiju is wasting energy and mass on something that won't help it win fights or do damage, which makes me think that the "baby" Kaiju was more of a mistake than some sort of awesome "hidden Kaiju inside a Kaiju" battle plan. Even assuming that the baby Kaiju's existence was intentional, I am sure that it was so young that it had not developed all the typical "Kaiju" systems yet, among them the mechanism that manufactures Kaiju blue's toxicity. Either that stuff is made as a by product of some metabolic system that keeps it going, or it is made intentionally as the creature lives and moves in order to increase collateral damage, but either way, the Kaiju "baby" had not lived long enough outside the womb to develop that system enough to make it lethal (and the thing was incompatible with life anyway, since it couldn't breath and was underdeveloped). This is, of course, assuming that the baby Kaiju could have lived much longer outside the womb. If, like I suspect, that it was more of an accident or a cloning failure, perhaps resulting in a germ-cell cancer that developed so far that it created a full other Kaiju, then there is no reason to suspect that it was compatible with life enough to develop the Kaiju blue toxin system.

2e6oim

askanthropology_train

What was the penis size of a Neandertal? This is a serious question. Lately I've read a lot of news about Neandertal and Human interbreeding and in the comment section of one of those texts (I don't remember which) someone said that that shouldn't be possible since the human penis would be too large for a neandertal woman. I went to google and got a lot of controversy about that, some texts said europeans should be thankful to neandertals for their big penises, other said they were probably small, since in other primates it is really small in comparison to the humans. So, I come to you, so you can solve this weird question. :D

cjwnipo

cjworgi

hmmm....well, it'd probably be easier and more reliable to consider their testicles (T). Let's use apes - gorillas tend to smaller T's because of their social hierarchy. The silver-back big daddy doesn't tend to have reproductive competition until someone is trying to remove him from power, so to speak. Gorillas have harems - one male has reproductive access to all the females = no need for big ol' T's. Chimps, on the other hand, have big nuts. They run in a group - more like a democracy than a dictatorship (like gorillas). So, if you want to reproduce like a good little biological creature - you're going to need to compete. Massive T's = massive loads = best chance at the offspring being yours. Even further to that in chimps is the sperm plug, where the sperm will create a barrier inside the female that makes it impossible/difficult for other males sperm to break through. As far as wangs go...probably just like everyone else - large continuum. They're shorter and stockier, which would suggest - inferring from recent studies - that Neanderthals weren't working with a very impressive piece. I wouldn't hang my hat on that guess, but considering how little Neanderthal DNA comprises our own, I don't think it had a huge influence on us now. Interesting question though. Fun to think about (PSA: I am not a homo-paleo-necrophiliac).

We have no idea. Penises didn't fossilize. By the time Neanderthals came on the scene our ancestors had lost their penile spines (we know this from DNA) so they had smooth penises like modern humans. But we don't know anything about size.

2e6oim

askanthropology_train

What was the penis size of a Neandertal? This is a serious question. Lately I've read a lot of news about Neandertal and Human interbreeding and in the comment section of one of those texts (I don't remember which) someone said that that shouldn't be possible since the human penis would be too large for a neandertal woman. I went to google and got a lot of controversy about that, some texts said europeans should be thankful to neandertals for their big penises, other said they were probably small, since in other primates it is really small in comparison to the humans. So, I come to you, so you can solve this weird question. :D

cjx5sa1

cjxa8ji

Somewhat related: The reason so many old statues of naked men have small penises was because large penises were considered barbaric.

>I went to google and got a lot of controversy about that, some texts said europeans should be thankful to neandertals for their big penises East Asians have more Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans, so by that logic East Asians should have larger penises than Europeans. But they don't.

14hggs

asksocialscience_train

What exactly is the fiscal cliff? What does it mean that we are approaching it? How are we approaching it? I hear all the political pundits discussing it, and honestly, it doesn't sound like anyone knows what they are talking about. Economists, help me out here. I just need to be educated before I have to go home for Christmas and have to hear my family rant about something they don't understand either.

c7d34ut

c7d3cpy

Short version: Congress passed legislation that mandates across the board budget cuts and tax rate increases in the event that they fail to come to a consensus on a fiscal policy for the upcoming year. The goal of past-congress was to provide then-future-congress, now-present-congress a strong incentive to work toward a solution.

It refers to an agreement by Congress to pass deficit reduction measures or certain cuts, mostly to defense, and tax increases, mostly to payroll, will automatically kick in next year. If you just realized this means the fiscal cliff is the stipulation that "Congress must agree to tax increases and spending cuts or else there are going to be tax increases and spending cuts," congratulations, you're paying attention. "Fiscal cliff" is a journalistic term designed to lower your political IQ and create the notion there is something worth discussing. There have been three or four other "fiscal cliff" type deals reached in the last half-century (1996, 1994 and 1982) and in each case the general solution by Congress was to ignore them. This is almost entirely an ordinary budget discussion rendered artificially riveting by certain rhetorical choices, nothing else.

14hggs

asksocialscience_train

What exactly is the fiscal cliff? What does it mean that we are approaching it? How are we approaching it? I hear all the political pundits discussing it, and honestly, it doesn't sound like anyone knows what they are talking about. Economists, help me out here. I just need to be educated before I have to go home for Christmas and have to hear my family rant about something they don't understand either.

c7d34ut

c7d3ith

Short version: Congress passed legislation that mandates across the board budget cuts and tax rate increases in the event that they fail to come to a consensus on a fiscal policy for the upcoming year. The goal of past-congress was to provide then-future-congress, now-present-congress a strong incentive to work toward a solution.

The fiscal cliff is several things: * $180 billion in tax increases from the Bush tax cuts expiring * $120 billion in tax increases from Obama's payroll tax cut from the stimulus expiring * $160 billion in spending cuts, like a 27% cut in Medicare payments to doctors and expiration of long-term unemployment insurance * $110 billion in spending cuts in defense and domestic spending The first three points are all problems Congress had to deal with anyways since they were programs that were expiring, often with Congress punting for several months to a year so it didn't have to offer a permanent fix. The last point is what is called the "sequester", where Congress agreed to automatic spending cuts in programs that both sides liked (defense for Republicans and social programs for the Democrats) to make them agree to a (slightly more) balanced budget. Since they never passed a budget for this fiscal year, the cuts remain. No one likes them, but it is too difficult for them to find a way to agree to a budget. These budget cuts will happen gradually as the government spends less throughout next year, but the first three points happen immediately. The result? A slow austerity crisis in which unemployment will go up over 9% and GDP shrinks 0.5% in the next 4 quarters, with at least two quarters of negative growth (the definition of a recession). On top of that, all three credit rating companies are threatening to downgrade the country's credit rating, which S&P already did once in 2011. Fitch says even resolving the fiscal cliff problem may not save the US credit rating. A lower credit rating can mean higher interest rates on US debt, which have been at all-time lows for a long time now. The good news is that the economy would be expected to recover in 2014 and unemployment would be down to 5.7% by 2018! Sources: Bank of America estimates, CBO estimates, Reuters

19h456

asksocialscience_train

I would like to know about keynesian economics and Austrian economics right from the basics I recently watched a video of Glenn Jacobs and Gary on keynesian vs Austrian Economics. It sounded interesting and intelligent, but I don't quite get them completely. Can someone please explain it from scratch

c8nz5qk

c8nz0v4

Let's start with the very basics. 1. *Where do business cycles come from?* * Keynesians think that business cycles are the result of swings in investor and consumer confidence, manifested in financial / stock market booms and busts. When investor confidence falters, for whatever reason, the economy plunges into recession. * Austrians think that erratic Federal Reserve interest rate policy causes recessions. The Fed will reduce interest rates to spark a boom, but this leads investors to over-commit capital to risky projects in their chase for yield. Austrians call this phenomenon "malinvestment." These malinvestments then go bad, leading to recession. The boom contains the seeds of its own destruction. 2. *What should we do about it?* * Keynesians think that active government policy can manage aggregate demand. In the simplest story, when investor confidence falters, the government can step in and fill the demand gap. When investor spirits are high, the government cuts back. This leads to stability in overall expenditure, thus smoothing out the business cycle. * Austrians think we need tight restrictions on the Federal Reserve, because it's the Fed's fault to begin with for trying to engineer a boom. Thus we need to put restrictions in place, such as some kind of commodity standard to "tie the Fed's hands" and make sure it can't do anything too awful to the economy. * Austrians also believe that countercyclical policy is wrongheaded: if the government steps in to prop up demand, then those malinvestments won't be liquidated, and one just prolongs the imbalance. If the Fed does screw up and plunge us into recession, the best course of action is to let the recession ride out and clear up any malinvestment. Engaging in countercyclical policy just prolongs the bleeding. There's an intro. Let me know if you want more information. Neither of these schools of thought is right, in my estimation. :)

The Keynesian school believes in something called "active, counter-cyclical stabilization policy." Basically this means that when the economy is doing poorly, the government should take steps to improve the economy. Likewise, when the economy is growing too quickly, the government should take steps to slow it down. Steps that the government takes include raising or lowering taxes, or raising or lowering government spending. The reason government do this is because the main economic indicator of a country is its Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. GDP is made up of four components: * C - Consumer spending * I - Investment * G - Government spending * (X - M) - Net exports (exports minus imports) You can write this algebraically as GDP = C + I + G + (X - M) When taxes are raised or lowered, consumer spending decreases or increases ('C' goes down or up) respectively. When government spending is raised or lowered, 'G' goes up or down, respectively. That's the basis of the Keynesian school of thought (in terms of fiscal policy; monetary policy is an entirely different demon to tackle). Austrians, on the other hand, believe that economies are largely subject to causes and effects that are outside the control of those in the economy. In other words, the Austrian school maintains that the economy will self-correct. Moreover, any interference in the free market only serves to hinder it further.

19h456

asksocialscience_train

I would like to know about keynesian economics and Austrian economics right from the basics I recently watched a video of Glenn Jacobs and Gary on keynesian vs Austrian Economics. It sounded interesting and intelligent, but I don't quite get them completely. Can someone please explain it from scratch

c8occew

c8nz0v4

Almost everyone is a Keynesian, they just don't know it. At it's most basic, Keynesianism is the idea that large changes in demand affect macroeconomic activity in a country. Does it should probable to you that if a large company (IBM let's say) decides to build a lot of new buildings in several states, this increases economic activity in the nation as a whole? What if the US government decides to build a bunch of new bridges in several states? If you think that the above is likely to increase production and employment (at least for this year), then you're a Keynesian. For more details, see the entry on Keynesian Economics in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/KeynesianEconomics.html

The Keynesian school believes in something called "active, counter-cyclical stabilization policy." Basically this means that when the economy is doing poorly, the government should take steps to improve the economy. Likewise, when the economy is growing too quickly, the government should take steps to slow it down. Steps that the government takes include raising or lowering taxes, or raising or lowering government spending. The reason government do this is because the main economic indicator of a country is its Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. GDP is made up of four components: * C - Consumer spending * I - Investment * G - Government spending * (X - M) - Net exports (exports minus imports) You can write this algebraically as GDP = C + I + G + (X - M) When taxes are raised or lowered, consumer spending decreases or increases ('C' goes down or up) respectively. When government spending is raised or lowered, 'G' goes up or down, respectively. That's the basis of the Keynesian school of thought (in terms of fiscal policy; monetary policy is an entirely different demon to tackle). Austrians, on the other hand, believe that economies are largely subject to causes and effects that are outside the control of those in the economy. In other words, the Austrian school maintains that the economy will self-correct. Moreover, any interference in the free market only serves to hinder it further.

q7nonn

legaladvice_train

(TX) My package containing a very expensive item I bought was stolen from my apartment door. Who is responsible for this? The apartment complex? Me? The item cost $150. Should I call the police on this?

hgjrw4o

hgjs99m

The person who stole it is responsible. How do you know it was delivered to your apartment door, rather than never delivered and stolen some other way (or misplaced)?

The thief. Your apartment complex has no duty to your safety or property outside something like a dead bolt or window locks.

q7nonn

legaladvice_train

(TX) My package containing a very expensive item I bought was stolen from my apartment door. Who is responsible for this? The apartment complex? Me? The item cost $150. Should I call the police on this?

hgnqmcn

hgnxgs6

1) See if shipper will refund you. 2) Call police.

This would be the thief, the apartment complex has no duty of care in this respect, and porch pirates are very much a thing in apartment complexes. Likely a neighbor if it was not delivered to the correct door. Luckily $150 is a low cost so the shipper/seller would likely be inclined to issue you a replacement as they should have insured the shipment. I would contact them and let them know so they can begin a carrier investigation and start the replacement process. Not an attorney.

ysx9vz

asksciencefiction_train

[Harry Potter] Would it be possible to make a living portrait for Cedric Digory, or any other deceased person? If possible, what kind of limitations would that portrait have?

iw1hem5

iw1twdo

You could, but it wouldn't act like Cedric. Headmaster portraits spend years being allowed to observe their subject to learn to talk and think like them.

The knowlege and personality of portraits are based on how the painter perceived the person, which is why most are stuck with really superficial traits. It would need to be made by someone who knew Cedric really well like his father or Cho, but even then it would most certainly be missing aspects. The self awareness and ability of a portrait to interact with the enviroment is also dependent on the magical ability of the person painted. So it's not that interactive for everyone, though as Cedric was a gifted wizard, portraits of him should be workable enough. Though it is possible for a painted person to interact with their portraits and teach them to be more like them. We know that the Hogwarts Headmasters do this, privately teaching portraits of themselves and sharing their memories with them, so there is a representation of themselves advising all future headmasters. It helps that the Hogwarts headmasters are likely some of the most powerful wizards in the world. source: Hogwarts Portraits By J.K. Rowling

ysx9vz

asksciencefiction_train

[Harry Potter] Would it be possible to make a living portrait for Cedric Digory, or any other deceased person? If possible, what kind of limitations would that portrait have?

iw1twdo

iw1t9hb

The knowlege and personality of portraits are based on how the painter perceived the person, which is why most are stuck with really superficial traits. It would need to be made by someone who knew Cedric really well like his father or Cho, but even then it would most certainly be missing aspects. The self awareness and ability of a portrait to interact with the enviroment is also dependent on the magical ability of the person painted. So it's not that interactive for everyone, though as Cedric was a gifted wizard, portraits of him should be workable enough. Though it is possible for a painted person to interact with their portraits and teach them to be more like them. We know that the Hogwarts Headmasters do this, privately teaching portraits of themselves and sharing their memories with them, so there is a representation of themselves advising all future headmasters. It helps that the Hogwarts headmasters are likely some of the most powerful wizards in the world. source: Hogwarts Portraits By J.K. Rowling

The headmaster portraits have to observe the human for a while to adopt their mannerisms, but I doubt that's strictly necessary. A magical being similar to Cedric Digory was created after his death. It was just some kind of apparition instead of a portrait. I'm sure a portrait would be possible too.