Peterkin

I see now. We were responding to two related arguments along different lines, each unaware that the other had a precedent elsewhere.

"Mismatch" is the term of which I'm failing to follow the significance. In a stratified society, you either have a status - a recognized place in the hierarchy, accorded respect, worth, income, etc. - or you don't. I don't see how or why it becomes a question of matching perception to reality: an alteration to the structure either takes place or not. If it does, then the hierarchy changes in some way, and the actual position of some or many or all strata shift to some degree. Whether some people have illusions about their own status or not; whether they perceive a disproportionate shift in their own status or not, whether some strata have more or less horizontal expansion space than others, the threat does exist; they are or will be expected to make an adjustment. Even if the change is ultimately to their own benefit, any change makes some people in a vertical structure uncomfortable. Those with more secure positions, or are most adaptable, have the least potential loss; those who are already precarious may be displaced altogether.

I don't see how that contradicts what I said. Everyone in a ranked society is affected by some form of threat - direct, indirect, imminent or illusory - by any structural change. Immigration is a structural change, as is the admission of women to professions previously exclusive to men, as is the elimination of a colour-bar or the institution of universal old age benefits.

Uh-huh...

A-a-a-nd... we have a punchline!

I'm not sure what that means. Organizational structures are based on social structures and tend to reflect the mind-set of the cultures in which they exist. If they bear a resemblance to religious or other structures, that might be because humans structure things in similar ways through the ages. I see no reason to use only religious models for your observations of IT organizations, especially as one analogy regards values, while the other regards aesthetics, which are two very different entities, not comparable as structures. I don't see a topic for discussion. Even less do I see a need for giant font.

Just as well. Greg A has no ideas. He repeats nonsense he's received from various unreliable sources without bothering to verify or inform himself, because it's just so much easier to be a self-designated victim than a functional citizen. The insight he provides into such a mind-set has been interesting and somewhat entertaining, but the returns diminish very quickly. Has the Supreme Court not gotten around to that yet? Shouldn't be long! https://civilrights.org/2020/03/23/u-s-supreme-court-rolls-back-historic-civil-rights-protections-in-comcast-ruling/# https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/27/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-00042478 If you think you're protected, start thinking again!

Sorry! In a status-ranked society, everyone is affected by status threat, because everyone's interest is intimately tied up in their status. The people with the most at stake in any proposed structural alteration are the ones with the highest accustomed status. In a wealth-based patriarchal society, that would be the richest men, their first-born sons [any women who, through accomplishment, aggression or marriage had made themselves a place in the hierarchy, according to its rules] their wives, brothers, younger sons, daughters, trusty retainers and mistresses - in roughly that order. How the wealth-based hierarchy maintains its power over the the lower (wealth-producing) tiers of the society is by constantly keeping the threat in play for all of their minions, and that can best be done by making sure there is always a large pool of no-status people below everyone who has any - slaves, women, undocumented immigrants, homeless, prison populations, unemployables - doesn't matter, as you can make sure each tier knows that somebody is after their position. Let me guess! Fictional? Not exactly somebody likely to compete for your job?

There is nothing arbitrary about those directions: they are descriptions of the degree of fairness and equity of each kind of arrangement. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/nyregion/day-meyer-murray-young-warehouse-of-the-rich.html

How long a past are you considering? Within the last 6000 or so years, human selection has been no more natural than the breeding of livestock, and the environment in which humans lived was no more natural than their diets and lifestyles. And they're still complicated, and still responding to changing environmental factors. But the gene pools have also been remixed a number of time, on quite large scales, during that period. What was 'selected-for' in equatorial Africa 60,000 years ago is not the same as the traits selected-for in northern Asia in the same period. But the resulting populations, and their counterparts in Europe and Oceania, have met in various capacities since that time, exchanging DNA all over the place. No; people are still dying in famines. The wealthy populations with unfettered choice in their diet actually make up a relative insignificant portion of the human genome, though they probably account the majority of allergies, though data is obviously easier to collect in some places than other. And the number, especially of food allergies, is rising steadily. https://comfyliving.net/allergy-statistics/ And a lot more successful reproduction (i.e. offspring surviving to reproductive age) happened during times of relative plenty. Neither situation triggered a change in people's reproductive choices or behaviours - just more people died or fewer people died.

Every word in that quote corresponds to my experience of group activities in a very general way. I'd like to add only two things. I have been in a mixed group that worked very well, because the men involved had a broader vision than the question of who's in charge. Every member of the team, male and female, was goal-oriented: more intent on the success of the project, and finding the most effective means of achieving that, then their own status. Of course, it's helpful if the members are all secure in their own competence and worth. On the same premise, I take a slightly different view of the last statement. A 'rearrangement of possibilities' is perhaps the greatest threat of all to people who hold unearned privilege - as well as the only hope of mankind.

Because real men, tough men, strong men never complain; they just suffer and suffer and suffer in silence. You can hear them doing it every Saturday night after the after-football pub-crawl. Poor things, wraith-like in the dark shadows, floating homeward to abusive wives, preparing to bear the kicks and blows without a whimper of protest... One's heart goes out to them!

If it only prevents one in ten successful offspring, it would take a very long time to disappear. Over that period, any number of natural catastrophes, plagues and wars may have decimated the population, so that it's impossible to tell which factor accounts for which 10% loss. Some - the more serious - genetic anomalies do get bred out. How long it takes depends on how much human interference there is in the process: whether a society exposes its defective infants or saves them at all cost; whether the anomaly is prevalent in a class that gets more or less protection; whether intermarriage of castes and clans is encouraged or forbidden; whether birth control and reproductive choice of are practiced, etc. Some harmful genetic anomalies do not present until later in life, when reproduction has already taken, often without the carrier being aware that he or she has already passed it on. Hence DNA testing before a planned conception. Some uncomfortable but not disabling anomalies may be associated with traits that are valued by a culture. Domestic evolution is subject to many of the same, but also some very different influences from natural evolution.

Even a broken clock is correct twice a day. Let's hope this is one. On afterthought, it all depends on how - and whether at all - you define your terms. Conservatism: everything you wish were true that the rule of capital hasn't made happen, so you want government to do it, only without interfering with capitalism, but only restricting individual freedom. Expanding the economy: Wait till the liberal parties have built up a level of harvestable prosperity, then start a war - doesn't matter if you've already got three on the simmer; the armaments and fossil-fuel industries can always use a boost, and cannon-fodder is a kind of employment that tends not to rise to the level of sending their kids to private school or getting decent medical care for their injuries, but so what? Activity: incitement to violence, death, rape, arson, disfigurement and child-murder threats against anyone who disagrees with the extreme far-right agenda, election fraud and subversion, armed insurrection,

That was also common practice when I was very young. The thinking went: They're all going to catch it anyway; we'll have to nurse them through it; let's get it over with in one big mess instead of three or four little messes with the added burden of trying to isolate a sick child in a house already not big enough for all the people who live in it, and then they'll all be immune and we'll never have to deal with this again. Nobody's mentioned vaccines. How odd!

It's always a bit more complicated than the one-dimensional thinkers are prepared to deal with, innit? And often a bit more complicated than even the most convoluted brains are aware of.

But...but... he's got a suit on! Who thinks children haven't seen the other picture?

I might, if I had a gender-specific illness that got less attention and funding than another gender-specific cancer. I might not know the reasons why. I would probably ask why, but one-track thinkers usually don't. They go directly to the most obvious single difference: M/F In fact, like that tee-shirt (of which I also want one for my birthday), says: it's more complicated. Breast cancer was more deadly in the 80's and much harder to treat than prostate cancer. (I was there.) Promising new diagnostic techniques were being developed and the equipment coming along was far more costly for mammography than the blood-test that's the most common early indicator of prostate cancer, as were the available treatment options. At the time, funds were allocated according to need, and scientific interest was directed to the novel and promising. It had nothing to do with the sex of the patients.

The tangentially related matter that momentarily held my attention https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/prost.html prostate cancer statistics https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html breast cancer statistics Obviously, prostate cancer is less dangerous than breast cancer, but both are way overfunded, compared to the more deadly lung, pancreatic and liver cancers. https://www.cancerhealth.com/article/cancers-better-funded-others This is not altogether a matter of government or medical community policies; a great deal of funding comes from well organized charities. Maybe women just organize better...? Or maybe not. The causes of a single phenomenon in a particular time-frame tells us very little about the priorities and prejudices of an entire society. In order for that one datum to be meaningful, you'd have to incorporate it into quite a large body of work. His brother was correct about the official funding: https://www.cancer.gov/about-nci/budget/fact-book/data/research-funding Sometimes a broken watch tells the correct time. The poster could have supported his statement with a few keystrokes - and didn't bother, even when challenged.

Indeed. It's a self-springing trap: it admits of no reflection or testing or doubt; it can readily accommodate a premise and its direct opposite; e.g. denying government the power to regulate and demanding that it regulate in favour of their ideology; demanding the legal right to overturn laws... ) The danger in both modes of thought - and at the present scale, it's an existential threat - is that it also empowers the holder of The True Faith: it transcends law, the public weal, ethics, standards of behaviour, and all constituted authority but their own: it gives them license to trample opposition and rivals in the name of whatever is emblazoned on their banner.

I should probably mention that there is something more serious and pervasive at the foundation of such belief-systems: the overwhelming desire for simplicity, for the one-dimensional cause and single all purpose fix to all problems. The screwdriver approach to life. (Or sledgehammer, for the even more simple-minded.) It's seductive. It fits into a four-letter acronym and can be worn on tractor hat. It's popular.

Well, yeah! That's how they went extinct.

Couple of ways. One is how evolution works: by trial and error. Most of the allergic people didn't die before they could reproduce. Many others were saved from a much worse threat of infection or poisoning by a related system of immune responses. The other is how humans change their own environment and breeding practices. Some of the foods to which people are allergic didn't exist in the same form in the environment in which humans evolved. Further, some of the waste products of our industries also affect cellular function. As exchemist pointed out, we do adapt to new environmental factors, but it takes many generations, and human regeneration has a long turnover cycle. You can't "tell the body" anything, though you can modify its activity with chemical interventions. The immune system of humans is complex; when you try to shut down a reaction you consider inappropriate or inconvenient, you risk shutting down a vital function along with it. Thus the need to be exceptionally careful in the application of immunosuppressant drugs, in e.g. transplant situations. Suppression of minor, superficial manifestations can be temporarily controlled by antihistamines.

Taking the load off a dead donkey doesn't help the load or the donkey. The ones from whom you want to take away even the little power they still have to redistribute wealth through taxation and regulation. If. This guy sounds like the innumerate twenty-year-old boys of my generation who read Atlas Shrugged and had their eyes suddenly opened as to why they were not wildly successful in school, work or dating: Because they themselves were exceptionally wonderful and all the lesser people were holding them back. If they were in charge, everything would be just fiiinnnee.

Expanding to.... where? You do know the planet is.. um... are you sitting down? ... round... yes. Do you know why? Are you aware of all the factors that have contributed to the availability and cost of housing over the past 5 years? In which provinces? In which parts of which provinces? Once you have a totalitarian government, not hard at all. As long as there are several parties and a number of different interests and considerations in play, not quite so easy. Right. Just put all the kids to work in the fields, mines and sweatshops at age 7 and they don't need to read or count at all, because they owe their souls to the company store. No, you don't complain. You whine, scream, rail, rant, howl and gnash your teeth. You'd gnash someone else's, a lackey's or servant girl's, if you could subjugate one enough to borrow their teeth.